Chapter 12
After Dávid and Maher leave, Inge has me label each of the letters with locations and dates.
It feels wrong to add my writing to Diavola’s.
Every contact leaves a trace, and we’ve already left so much evidence on each other.
My bloody handprint on her skirt, her voice in my mind, my presence in her thoughts, her visits in my dreams.
Plus, writing on top of her letters feels like taking them from something personal and private and mine and turning them into evidence. Which is what they are. Which is what they should have been the whole time. I repeat that to myself internally over and over with every stroke of the pen.
Inge frowns thoughtfully when I’ve finished, sorting the collection into an order that makes sense only to her.
“I need my maps,” she says.
I drag the stack of local maps over, but she shakes her head. “No, my maps. I have my own that I use to make sense of things when you’re all sleeping.” She stands and walks out of the room without further explanation, taking my letters with her.
Though I want to go with her—both because I want to help, and because I don’t like being separated from Diavola’s words—I go downstairs to the kitchen.
I’ve always felt more at home here than in any other room of the house.
The floors are large white marble tiles, the walls finished with smaller polished white tile with hand-painted blue flowers on each.
Over the massive iron stove and oven there’s a cheerful selection of copper pots hanging.
Because the kitchen was allowed to have a functional design rather than a French symmetrical sensibility, there are shelves displaying dishes and bowls and spices.
All the signs of life my ancestors tried to hide elsewhere.
But my favorite feature is the ceiling. Unlike the soaring ceilings above us eating up so much space as a show of power, they’re much lower down here because it’s a space never meant to impress.
But care was still taken. Between beams painted navy blue are gently curved sections, covered in plain, shiny white tile, creating a scalloped effect that feels almost like sitting in a giant seashell.
A window to the garden runs from halfway up the far wall to the ceiling and lets in enough light during the day to work by.
But the best feature of the kitchen is Mama.
I sit on the edge of the table while she bustles about, already hard at work on supper though it’s midmorning.
Any other woman with her means would have a staff, but Mama insists she prefers doing everything herself.
I run most of the errands, though, and I always worry about her when I’m gone.
She has a few vendors who deliver. Milk, bread, vegetables, cheese, a few other basics.
And our neighbors help where she lets them.
“If you’re still here on Saturday,” she says, “would you go to the Jordaan market? Georgios isn’t due to visit me until next week and I’m running low on olive oil.”
“Mama,” I say, and something in the tone of my voice must alert her. She sets down the spoon and turns, giving me her full attention. I blink, trying to hold back tears. “I think I’m failing him.”
“Georgios?” she asks, brows drawing close in confusion.
“What? No. Papa.”
“Oh.” She lets out a dismissive huff of air between her lips, then guides me into a chair so she can sit close, with us knee-to-knee, face-to-face. “You know I love you, my Anneke.”
“Of course I know that.”
She pats my cheek and nods. “Good. I understand that I’m strange, and that my…problems have been hard on you.” She glances to the side, looking out the window.
“I love you,” I say, “and I’ve never cared about that.
I just worry about you, is all.” Every time I leave, I’m afraid I’ll return to the anchors fallen, the interior house posts rotting, my mother’s family home slumping to the side and dancing its way to ruin with her unwilling to leave.
Or my neighbors and support system having forgotten about her, leaving her to starve here alone.
I know they won’t—our community is filled with good people, and Joren checks on her often, and Mama has plenty of contact with the outside world through her infinite letters sent and received—but the fear is ever-present.
Her being trapped and dying here is the only nightmare I have nearly as often as dreaming of Diavola.
“You shouldn’t have to. I’m sorry. I never meant to be a burden.”
“You aren’t a burden!”
“I know you don’t think of me that way. But he did.”
“Georgios?” I ask, trying to tease and stop her from wherever this conversation is going.
She doesn’t take the bait. “Your father once had a friend over, some doctor. Upsetting young British man, about to start running an asylum. There was a coldness to his gaze I didn’t care for.
I was bringing drinks up to them, and I overheard your father say that he was well within his rights to divorce me and have me put away forever because I was crazy with grief.
But he had resigned himself to taking care of me out of duty. ”
I reach for her hand, aghast. “You’re not crazy.”
She smiles patiently. “I’m not sane, either.
But the real reason he didn’t pursue divorce was that it would be too inconvenient, and he wasn’t confident he could keep his hold on my inheritance.
He wouldn’t have been able to,” she says, leaning forward conspiratorially.
“I often wished he would try and discover that in cutting me out of his life he also cut himself off from his funding. His version of ‘taking care’ of me was spending my money for his own studies. The last few years before he died, he was worse than ever, chasing stories of monsters all over Europe.”
His notebooks rise like specters in my memory, filled with sketches and stories of creatures that belonged in ghost stories and fairy tales. Not in a serious doctor’s research.
“He suffered from grief, too,” I say, feeling defensive.
I’ve never heard her speak of him like this.
I sensed that there were conflicts between them, but I was away at school so often and when I was home my father rarely was, so I saw very little of their relationship.
I don’t want to know this. It feels like she’s deliberately rewriting a beloved story I’ve been telling all wrong for years.
“Tell me how you met,” I prod, wanting to hear the tale of my mother writing to a rising star in the medical community about her theories of infectious diseases, him writing excitedly back to start up a correspondence of two great minds meeting each other, and then his utter shock when he at last tracked down the dazzling, brilliant mind behind his pen pal only to discover a woman.
He proposed the day he met her in this very house.
My stomach sinks. She’s already tainted the story with this new information.
No one who saw this house could be unaware of who my mother was, or how much her family name was worth.
I’d never thought about that part. Perhaps it was not her mind alone my father was enamored of.
He saw an opportunity, and he took it. But surely he also admired her, surely he also appreciated her education and insight.
No. I can’t even tell myself that. I was never invited into his study, but neither was my mother. And she had far more to offer.
Mama ignores my request. “Your father didn’t suffer from grief, he was devoured by it.
I miss Pieter. I will always miss Pieter.
But I have you, and you fill up my heart and soul.
I wouldn’t trade you for anything in the world.
He—Anneke, I don’t want to hurt you, but letting you hold your father in a place of esteem has already done that.
You shouldn’t idolize him. He doesn’t even deserve your love. ”
“He—”
“When he was drunk, which was often after your brother died, he’d scream and wail that he wasn’t a father anymore. He never even saw you. He was so fixated on what wasn’t here, he couldn’t appreciate who was.”
I want her to take it back. To have never said it at all. But how many times did I knock on his study, desperate for his attention, only to be shooed away with a wave of his hand?
“It’s not his fault. He wasn’t well. In his journals, I saw—”
Mama’s eyes narrow and her voice takes on a hard edge that hints at steel beneath all her gentle curves.
“Whatever else he was, your father was not crazy. He was not unwell. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he chose to do it at the expense of everything else, including his relationship with you. Don’t make excuses for him. ”
Then she softens again and squeezes my fingers.
“I see you. You’re smart and fierce and capable.
You’ve done with our money what I wish I could have—carved out a life of curious, fearless independence.
But the last few years I’ve watched you disappear into this hunt.
I’ve tried to help, in hopes that if you could solve some mysteries, you’d give up on the one you assigned to your father.
But we both know you have it in your blood to become fixated on a problem.
No, don’t interrupt. This is important. You matter.
However your father felt about us, he’s gone.
I don’t care if he killed himself or was murdered.
He doesn’t deserve your life being sacrificed on the altar of his memory. I won’t lose you because of it.”
I can’t stay in this conversation. I can’t keep talking to my mother, whom I love but learned long ago I couldn’t depend on, about my father, whom I was certain was about to at last be proud of me.
I went into his study that night to tell him I had been accepted at the university. I was going to be a doctor, like him.
Now Mama is insisting it wouldn’t have mattered. And that thing inside me that looks at tiny pieces of evidence and intuits whole truths from them can feel that she’s right.