Chapter 18

The train from New York carried them west through a country that seemed, to Anna, to unfold in a different register than anything she had known in Germany — towns spaced farther apart, fields stretching wider and flatter than Bavaria’s careful, terraced patchwork, the whole vast expanse of it untouched by the visible scars of war that had marked every mile of her homeland these past two years. She sat with Heidi asleep against her shoulder through the long Pennsylvania stretches, watching the landscape change by degrees, and found herself, more than once, reaching for Larry’s hand simply to steady herself against the strangeness of so much undamaged ground.

They had spent two nights already crossing the country by rail, the journey longer than Anna had anticipated given the maps she’d studied in preparation, and she had passed the hours partly in conversation with Larry, who seemed to grow more animated the further west they traveled, pointing out landmarks and telling small stories of his boyhood that she suspected he’d been saving for exactly this moment, and partly in a private, watchful silence, cataloguing the strange new country sliding past the window as though committing it to memory might somehow make it feel less foreign by the time they arrived.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Larry observed, somewhere past Pittsburgh, watching her watch the hills roll by.

“I am trying to imagine it,” Anna admitted. “The farm. Your parents. All of it. I have built a picture in my mind from your letters, these past two years, and I find myself wondering how much of that picture will survive contact with the actual place.” She smiled slightly, self-deprecating. “I did much the same with you, before I ever properly knew you — built a picture from small kindnesses at a camp gate, and found, in the end, that the real man exceeded whatever I had imagined. I hope Ohio proves as generous.”

“Getting close now,” Larry said, as the train began to slow through the outskirts of a town he named with evident fondness, the Ohio countryside beyond the window rolling gently past in early June’s full green. “Another twenty minutes, and you’ll see the farm. Same fields I grew up running through. Same house I was born in, matter of fact, though my folks have added onto it some since.”

Anna smoothed her dress with hands that were not quite steady, the same blue dress she had worn to their October reunion and to their wedding, mended now at a second seam and grown, in her mind, into something closer to armor than mere clothing — the garment she reached for whenever the occasion demanded she present her best and steadiest self to a world still deciding what to make of her. She had dressed Heidi with equal care that morning, the child’s strawberry-blonde curls brushed until they shone, her good pinafore pressed, the wooden horse tucked firmly under one arm despite Anna’s gentle suggestion that perhaps, for this one morning, the toy might stay in the traveling bag.

“She will want him for courage,” Larry had said, when Anna raised the question. “Same as the rest of us.”

They came off the train into a station smaller than any Anna had seen since Erding, a single platform beneath a modest wooden awning, and Anna’s breath caught at the sight of the two people waiting there — a tall, weathered man with Larry’s same light brown hair gone gray at the temples, and a woman beside him, shorter and rounder, her hands twisted anxiously in her apron in a gesture Anna recognized instantly as the universal posture of a mother trying not to appear as nervous as she plainly felt.

“Mom. Dad.” Larry’s voice caught slightly on the words, and he crossed the platform in three long strides, folding his mother into an embrace that lifted her briefly off her feet, before turning to his father and gripping his hand with both of his own, a formality that broke, after a moment, into an embrace neither man seemed entirely prepared for but neither seemed inclined to cut short either.

Anna hung back with Heidi, uncertain of her place in the reunion’s first raw moment, until Larry’s mother, disentangling herself from her son, turned toward them with an expression Anna could not immediately read — searching, careful, and beneath both, something that looked almost like relief.