31. Berlin #2
She nodded and took a sip of wine. “I was wondering, Jack, if you might help me with something.”
Emmi was so pretty, her hair hanging over her shoulders, her eyes bright. In the face of betrayal, she seemed so strong. “Sure. What do you need?”
Emmi pulled her legs up so she was sitting cross-legged. She was at home here, of course she was.
He felt stupid, but he said, “Do you want to stay here tonight? You can sleep in my mom’s room—or I mean in your mom’s room.”
“I hope that’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t exactly think this trip through.”
“It’s your apartment,” he said. “But aren’t you supposed to be in New York?”
“Yeah, about that,” she said. “Is there any chance your little sisters can keep a secret?”
“God no,” Jack said. “Definitely not. Especially Alice. Why?”
“My parents don’t know I’m here,” Emmi said. “I blew my whole savings on a plane ticket yesterday.”
“Why?”
She put her glass down and faced him. “Jack,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever been to the Baltic?”
They stayed up until two in the morning talking and scheming and laughing.
They finished the bottle of wine and then opened another.
She’d asked him how he could tolerate an entire summer sleeping on the couch.
She’d reached up and placed her hand on the top of his head. “But you’re so tall,” she’d said.
As Jack fell asleep, he smiled, knowing she was right down the hall.
Alice was tapping his foot. “Wake up,” she said.
“Ucchhhh.” Jack was a lightweight, and the alcohol had utterly wrecked him. “Go watch a movie.”
“We’re hungry,” she said. “And you were drinking wine last night.”
Kids , he thought, are relentless . He rolled over and blinked his eyes open.
“You’re not old enough,” she said. Her arms were crossed.
“I am in Germany,” he said. “So there.”
“Emmi wants to take us to the bakery,” Zoe said as she ran into the room. “Do we have permission?”
Emmi! He remembered the plan they’d concocted while drinking glass after glass of red wine. A truly insane plan that would land him in serious hot water if he got caught. His mom would ground him for the rest of his life. He’d never been grounded before.
In the light of day, Emmi would know better than to go forward with it.
And if not, he hoped he could talk some sense into her now that they were mostly sober.
Heiligenhafen. Holy Harbor . A chance to confront Monika and Karl about the truth.
“Subjectivity is truth,” he’d told her, slurring Kierkegaard’s words.
“Subjectivity is untruth.” He still didn’t know what it meant.
“Emmi says we can get any pastries we want,” Alice said, “as long as we don’t tell Mommy she was here.”
“Yeah,” he said, noticing the gross taste in his mouth. He needed water. “Emmi’s on a top-secret mission, like a spy, okay? We can’t tell anyone.”
Zoe’s hair was tangled. He would help her brush the knots out before she left the house.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll go with you guys.”
The four of them sat at the dining room table with boxes of pastries and cookies from the bakery. Jack’s head hurt. Emmi, who he was sure had drunk as much wine as he had, looked wide awake and beautiful as she sipped her coffee and talked to his sisters.
“I have a really fun idea,” she said, leaning on her elbows. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” Alice said.
Zoe reached into the box for a chocolate croissant.
“I was thinking,” Emmi said, “that we could go to the beach today.”
Zoe’s eyes flew open, and she smiled. But Alice put down her cookie.
“There’s no ocean in Berlin,” said Alice. “There’s a river.”
“Yes, but the ocean isn’t far away,” Emmi said. “We could drive there.”
“How far?” said Zoe, who got carsick on longer trips. She was licking chocolate off her fingers.
“Three hours or so,” said Emmi. “Four tops. It’s very pretty there.”
“That’s too far,” said Alice.
She was right, and the thing to do was to tell Emmi this was a bad idea, that he could not take his sisters away from Berlin without permission, that he could not drive her parents’ car without permission.
But watching her—this girl who was from here after all, and a year older than he was, who seemed to know exactly what she was doing—made Jack think maybe it wasn’t such a big deal.
How could a day at the beach be wrong? And they would be back before anyone could find out.
Alice was watching him. “Do you want to go to the beach?”
“Sure,” he said, like she was asking about the playground a block away, “just for the day.”
“Or,” Emmi said lightly, “we could spend the night if we want. My grandmother has a cottage there.” She held up the key she’d shown Jack the night before, the key she said she’d pinched from her grandmother’s purse in New York City.
“I don’t know about staying over,” Jack said, thinking it would be a whole thing to get the girls to sleep in some strange place.
“We could bring our stuff along, just in case,” Emmi said.
She looked at him, and then for no reason, they started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Alice said.
“Can Fred come?” Zoe said.
“Of course,” said Jack. “We wouldn’t go to the beach without Fred.”
“Did Mommy say we can go?” said Alice.
Jack glanced at Emmi. “Definitely,” Jack said, lying to his sisters as easily as he might about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. “Mom loves the beach.”
Half an hour later they were in the courtyard behind the building, piled into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. The girls were buckled up in the back seat, and Jack was behind the wheel of the coolest car he’d ever seen in his life. Even his dad’s car wasn’t this awesome or this clean.
“Is this, like, a collector’s item?” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Emmi, riding shotgun as his granddad called it. “The weather is perfect, and we’re in no particular hurry.”
He looked down, and that’s when he saw the manual gearshift. “ Stick? ” he said. “It’s stick shift ? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can’t drive it?” Emmi said. She sounded crushed.
“I mean, I can ,” he said. “My grandfather taught me, but I’m terrible at it.”
“You should drive,” Alice said to Emmi.
“I can’t,” said Emmi. “I don’t have a license. I bet Jack’s a great driver though, right?” She patted his shoulder. “You’ve got this.”
“You should know,” Alice said, “that Jack is not a great driver.”
Jack pushed in the clutch and started the car.
“Why do you say that?” Emmi said.
“He goes too slow,” said Zoe, “and he bumps into things.”
Jack did not contradict his sisters. And his first act was to stall out with the car in reverse, causing it to lurch backward into a tree. He and Emmi got out to assess the damage. There was a small dent in the bumper.
“I think that was there before,” she said.
Jack knew this could not possibly be true.
She looked at him with what seemed like affection, or exhilaration maybe, and then she opened her arms and hugged him. “Thanks for doing this, Jack,” she said. “You’re a really good guy.”
He smiled over her shoulder as he hugged her back. Emmi was great.
When they got back in the car, she turned on the music, put on her sunglasses, and they took off for Germany’s northern coast.