Going Over by Beth Kephart Page B

sound of kids singing pop English—German kids and Turkish ones, the wrong words and the right ones, Markus out in front, trailing patchouli instead of his shawl. Savas, I think, should be leading the band. Savas should be here, but he’s not, and I shouldn’t have let him go last night. I should have run after his mother, forced her to explain, with her hands, maybe, with Savas’s help:
Who hit you? What’s happened? Where are you taking him?
    â€œThey live by their own rules,” Henni says now. “By their own customs.”
    â€œBut Savas is our responsibility.”
    â€œI know,” she says. “I know. I’m thinking.”

Mutti is waiting. I don’t see her at first, pitch my bag to the floor, scrape out a chair, unwrap my vendor-cart sandwich. I close my eyes and lift the sausage to my face, give my nose a little steam bath. I try to think, but my head’s all cloudy, my bones are hurting, the atmosphere of me is clammy.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I hear her now.
    She’s thin as she is. She leans against the open door that connects her room to the kitchen. Her tight jeans are too loose. Her red socks are fuzzy. Music bangs in from the flat above—that red balloon song with the war words, Captain Kirk and fireworks. The singer’s voice is high and sweet. The drums are full of echoes. Now from downstairs someone turns the Beatles on. We’re caught in between.
    â€œNothing’s going on,” I say.
    â€œYou didn’t come home,” she says, “until dawn.”
    I lift my shoulders, drop them, think of Arabelle in the kitchen, explaining again:
She was down by the canal
. Thinkof how we laid her in her bed, the sweet sickness of drink on her breath, the blankets to her chin, her heart all broken again. Sebastien. A painter from France, Omi has said. And now a part of my mother’s ever-tragic history. She’ll get better, everyone says. But I don’t know what better is.
    â€œThe art was bitching last night, Mutti,” I say. “I stayed out late to finish a graff.”
    â€œIs that the truth, Ada?”
    â€œMostly.”
Mostly
itself is a word that doesn’t lie.
    My little finger throbs where the cuticle ripped. There’s a strip of burn on the roof of my mouth. If I tell Mutti about Savas, she’ll flame out like the end of a match. “Protect your mother,” Omi says. My job, since the day I was born.
    Mutti leans away from the door and pulls a kitchen chair toward her. It hardly creaks under her weight. The purple question mark on her white T-shirt sits crooked on the small shelf of her breasts. The polish on her nails is chipped. The line of silver-pink scar across her inner wrist glistens like half a bracelet. It’s nothing, she says, when people ask her about it. She’s lying again. That scar is proof that Mutti has what it takes to survive herself.
    â€œYou don’t think there will be trouble,” she asks, “living like this?”
    I don’t answer; how can I answer? This is Mutti, sad Mutti, who spends half her time not even living. I force my sandwich down, fist up the silver wrap. Downstairs the Beatles are turning over to Bob Dylan, and upstairs the balloons aregone, and I’m here with my secrets and Mutti with hers and Omi behind the brass lock of her hollow-core door.
    â€œCan’t you talk to me?” Mutti says. “Please?” She lifts a hand to my right cheek and then presses it to my forehead and suddenly I’m so extremely tired and much too dizzy and stupid helpless and I’m slipping, wanting to tell her everything. About how it felt to push Savas through the snow at night. About the monster bird that was the kid’s mother. About how much I miss Stefan, how I don’t know for sure what he’ll choose to do, how I’m not really a Professor of Escape, just a girl in love who will not let her own heart break in family