Through the Looking Window

Alba really woke up halfway through the window.
It started simply enough... as these things will. She half-rolled out of bed expecting to find the floor, and then presumably the wash room. She'd just gone down to rest her eyes. She'd had a strange dream... there were voices somewhere that she couldn't quite hear, and a train. A very horrible train headed into a fire, and there was a rainbow of milk and castles made of ice.

Boy had been playing with Olaf's window again, which Jacob had found in the remains of the burned out barn as they got ready to rebuild it.
“It's magic, like the lady on the front of the Argo,” Boy had told her when she wondered aloud why it wasn't burnt like everything else. Boy had been reading a lot lately. He was allowed to read these books because he was so much older than Alba he told her, having been planted before she was born. Alba asked what he thought of Homer and the rest, and he told her, “I don't know... I'm only seven.”

She didn't think the window would be talking to her anytime soon, and she said as much.
“I do,” he responded. That made her stop. He was cut from a tree, and he talked to her... but is that what he'd meant? She was glad his arm was grafting – it was amazing what Ethel and Frau Holda had been able to do... his new hand looked so much like his first. Each time they changed the burlap tied around it he seemed to be able to use it more.

Alba tucked the window away when he was distracted. She didn't get cross with him for playing with it like she did before... she just, she didn't want him getting into anything.

Alba asked him if he wanted to play a game. Irenka had brought over one that was new. It was a money game, and you tried to buy real estate and then charge other people rent. Boy said he didn't enjoy it much. “If things happen over and over, I'd rather live it then pretend it. That's more fun,” he shrugged. “Besides,” he said wistfully, “You can change when you live.”

Alba took the window and headed upstairs.

“You should close it first,” Boy warned her very seriously, “...before your nap.”

Alba trudged up the stairs and into her room. “She never listens, Cadejo” Boy said, “And I don't like where she's going. I hope she's ok.” Cadejo whined, flipping the bone he'd been trying to gnaw on to one side and laying his chin on it, yawning.

Alba wasn't taking a nap. She just dropped the window frame against the bed, and then looked at her pillow and decided maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all... Just to close her eyes for a second. Her foot knocked the square wooden frame, but she let it hit the ground as she fell onto cool sheets and a goose feathered oblivion.

Her eyelids fluttered and she was in a fog. It was cold, and she pulled her blanket up around herself. It looked like a bright red overcoat. It was night and the stars were out, but it was really early afternoon, she knew that. She heard water, something calling to her. She felt something watching her.

“Be careful, Alba,” her father told her.
“I will, dad,” She promised him sleepily as she got up to go to the wash room. That's when it happened - Alba saw the floor of her room rush up and pass her. Wind caught her hair. Her feet kicked through a nothingness that was bright, sunny and blue.
Alba landed none too comfortably in an empty field of grass with sun in her eyes. Above her she could see a square in the sky that looked like a patch of her ceiling.

She had no idea where she was.

Things We Lost in the Fire

Alba had gone out.

She went to the Houselands, looking through the sticks for Olaf. She didn't feel comfortable around some of the new neighbors. Some distant relatives, but mostly strangers were coming over from the Old Country more and more frequently. Most of them were average, really. To tell the truth it was just Mrs. Pithiviers. Everyone liked her but she made Alba feel like she was being cut up into little nasty bits every time Mrs. Pithiviers looked at her with that smile full of teeth.

“I don't like her,” the New Boy had agreed.

Alba suspected he was just saying it out of solidarity, but then he said, “Her house isn't really candy, no matter what she tells them, and she knows that. She is bad.”

So Alba had gone out... She'd invited the New Boy, even invited him to Mr Schonberg's store for ices, but he said he had something important to do that day. Lately that meant elaborate constructions of bed frame parts, tin cans and pillows attached together with colored yarn in the basement.

So Alba had gone out.

She wished she hadn't. She cried when she thought about it that night in the basement. But she had, and she couldn't change that, and there it was.

When she came back there was screaming.

You could see the smoke for miles... Frau Holda and Kacper were struggling with something, dragging it away from the barn on the far side and beating a fire out with blankets. Jacob was yelling orders to everyone, directing buckets of water to the barn. Irenka and the children were helping to carry water. The Cats were everywhere, jumping underfoot and looking scared, lost. One had lost some hair.

Alba ran up to the barn but the heat was too intense and she fell back... “Where is Muselon?” she yelled to Jacob, but he didn't know.

Someone was running across the yard with a full bucket of water and their foot kicked a wooden toy car. Alba froze...

“Where is Boy?” she said, mostly to herself. Alba turned around looking for him but couldn't see him and she screamed it again. Ethel, the nice lady from down the road was there with a sudden hand on her shoulder. She pointed and Alba followed her gesture to Kacper, as Alba realized with horror what he and Holda had been dragging from the barn.

She ran up to them and at first Boy seemed right... he was talking, but he was covered in soot and his skin looked dry as kindling.

“I saved Cadejo for you,” Boy said, talking about a bundle of rags he clutched against himself. As Alba knelt down, something wriggled out of the rags and barked. It was a dog, and it licked Alba's face.

“Where did this come from?” she asked.

The Boy looked at her with something like relief ... maybe a little pride, “You can really see him?”

“Don't talk, just rest” Kacper told him, still propping him up as he lay in the grass and making sure he was getting enough sun.

“What happened?” She asked Holda.

“She did it,” Boy tried to point to the barn but the hand which had held Cadejo was burnt black. As he raised his hand it snapped off at the wrist and the arm split, groaning, cracking. Ethel screamed, Cadejo barked, Holda whispered to her dead mother and Alba stared in shock. Kacper pulled him up, wrapping a rag tightly around the arm. He said they needed to get inside the house. Alba saw him step on the hand, crushing it into cinder and ash in the grass. She screamed insensibly for him to stop. She tried to gather the parts together but as she touched each piece it burst into ashes, staining her fingers black with soot.

“No, dear...” said Holda, taking her shoulders, “It's all right.” her voice was uncertain, as if talking through her thoughts, “He's not a real boy yet. We have some of the cedar left... It could be fresh enough, we can make him another hand...”

“Yes,” Ethel nodded in appraisal, “His craft is old, but I should be able to help... I may have something back at the house.” She left to get supplies.
Mrs. Pithiviers was in the distance, talking through her grief in circles to Jacob, something about filling her lantern oil. No one was really listening. Alba locked gaze with her red, tear-stained eyes and saw the concern fall away like a mask, “...if only someone had been watching him... maybe then...” She was an image of piety and sorrow as she put a hand back to Jacob's shoulder and commanded his attention anew.

"She hates me because I know it's not candy,” Boy said as they carried him in a blanket.
“Shush” Holda told him, “no one hates you.” He said he was thirsty.

Holda and Ethel worked on him into the night. Jacob brought some tools from the shed after the barn was put out. They never did find Muselon or any part of her. “She went through the window, ” Boy had said, but he had been in and out of consciousness since the sun went down. Alba went down into the basement with Cadejo, and discovered Boy had taken the legs from her old brass baby bed, making it into a dog bed. Cans of food were attached by bits of colored yarn. A note read, “Blue is for Tuesdays.”

“Oh! I want a lobster claw!” she heard Boy holler upstairs. The others alternated between telling him he was being very brave and listing things that a five fingered hand could do better than a claw.

Alba had checked on him, but couldn't bring herself to stay up there right now. She sat down, fed Cadejo, and cried a little while brushing soot from her dress.

The Ardennes

Alba had found the New Boy playing with Olaf's window a few times after she'd brought it back.
She was very stern with him, and told him that it belonged to a friend of hers, and it wasn't a toy, while hiding it as best she could in a variety of places.

"I know that," the New Boy said. He was busy with something very important, and besides it was his window too. She corrected him and resolutely declared that she would hear nothing else on the topic.

A few mornings later she had been milking Muselon, and was getting ready to take a bucket of milk inside before tending to the chickens for the Egg Money.
The New Boy burst into the barn, which was strange enough, yelling, "It's time! It's time - Hurry! You have to help him!"

Alba stared at him.
The New Boy was frantic. Hardly rational. He ran up to her grabbing her wrist, "I'll help, hurry! Time is different there..." The Boy plunged her hand into the bucket.

Alba gasped. The bottom of the bucket was freezing cold and dry -maybe even windy. She felt something. "Grab him!" The New Boy yelled at her.
Alba's hand came back up pulling a rough green fabric attached to something heavy. There was the sound of an explosion and she screamed, knocking the pail over.

The milk drained into the hay... The New Boy said, "That's ok. I think it's ok." He looked up at her and said it was nearly lunchtime, asking if they could make some sandwiches.
The bucket was empty.

Alba changed her clothes and they ate at the stump, and she asked him about everything but he pretended not to know what she was talking about. "We didn't have any water," he said, "but I think it was ok."

**********

Years later when Alba was married, while sitting on their porch and watching their children play with Azeban in the yard, Mitch would turn to her and ask if he had ever told her that story about Belgium. He wouldn't have. He'd mention how this one time, under fire, he'd found himself crouching over a bit of melted snow near what had been the cooking fire before shells started falling. He'd tell her a little about the war, about ghost stories, about being sure he'd seen guys from his battalion with some woman looking back at him. He'd say he found out later that they'd all already been hit. He'd have a strange expression and mention the archer's bow he thought she'd been aiming at him.
He'd tell her he got distracted. That he heard, well he thought he heard, Alba's voice, and for just a moment he thought a hand came up out of that puddle, soft and smooth, pulling him down into it - which was crazy. He'd say how he was pretty sore at getting his jacket wet in the cold, how he must have slipped, been delusional from lack of sleep and stress and the chaos. He'd mention being mad until he'd noticed a chunk of shrapnel which had punched a hole in his helmet the size of a quarter and knocked it off his head at probably just about the same time. He'd imagine that was the closest shave he'd had.

In her lifetime, Alba would never really put the two together.