Then
I remember the way water sluiced down the windows facing the street, turning the familiar scene blurry and indistinct. The rooms were empty. Few of our belongings had been packed. Most had been given away. Some had been burned, despite Ilse’s incessant wails.
The holy book makes clear the importance of charity, my mother said.
Stories with magic are the devil’s work, my father told me as I stood beside him in the backyard one night, watching my illustrated books go up in smoke. They’re a gateway to hell.
We won’t need any of this where we’re going was the refrain that echoed through the house in the weeks preceding the move.
I hadn’t argued. I learned very quickly to make myself quiet. To watch. To learn. To commit tiny things to memory, just in case I needed them later. I told Ilse to stop crying, and eventually she did. She had always been too good at listening. I should’ve known then that it would become a problem.
By dusk my father’s car was idling at the end of the laneway, belching smoke into the air.
My father himself sat in the driver’s seat, brimmed hat shadowing his brow, barking instructions to my mother, who hovered on the threshold with Ilse and me.
In that tiny fraction of a moment, I swore I’d seen her hesitate.
Her eyes snapped down to mine, and years later I still wonder whether I’d seen indecision in their depths.
But then they hardened, and she shoved me to the front steps with a touch that, over the years, had become increasingly more aggressive.
Even at twelve, it was clear to me that as my father’s actions toward my mother grew harsher, so too did her actions toward us.
She locked the door then. I wondered why she bothered. There was nothing left inside the house worth stealing.
We drove to a forest a few hours east. My parents never spoke except to argue over directions.
Ilse’s lower lip trembled much of the way, and I held her hand in my lap, staring blankly out the window.
I would realize later that I’d already been hardening myself.
Erecting a wall, a shield, that nobody else could see.
As if I’d known what was coming and that I’d need protection.
When we arrived at the edge of the forest, my father set the car on fire.
I stood too close to the blaze, letting the heat singe my eyelashes, thinking of the books and toys and dresses that had burned in our debris-strewn wasteland of a backyard. The air smelled like flames and foliage, smoke and petrichor.
We won’t need any of this where we’re going.
I remember thinking that perhaps I should have cried after all. That if I did, then maybe everything we’d burned had meant something.
I didn’t though. I had already donned the armor of a soldier resigned to hell.
We turned away from the fire and walked into the trees.