My mother on the patio, cigarette in her mouth, like the movie star she was not. One evening, waking up uneasy, aware of something happening just outside my reach-moving out of bed with the inevitability of a dream. But here, instead, I sat on the foldout chair in the kitchen of the cavernous short-term-rental apartment and watched as my mother stuffed the soiled single sheet into the too-small washing machine and turned to me with her index finger to her lips, lifting her coal-dark eyebrows, and I thought about how I was being asked to keep a secret all the time now. He who could do nothing wrong, he who had been everyone’s favorite, my mother’s particular pet. Back at home, I might have let myself enjoy it, even gloat a little. Not every night, no, but once and then again and then again. He would turn 13 that summer but had started wetting his bed like a much younger boy. It was my brother, Philip, 18 months older, who had a hard time of it. I lived for those smiles, the rare exception of them we all did. I had been made for the habit of missing, living out of a single suitcase with the same four T-shirts and two pairs of soccer shorts, the one jean dress, which I wore only because it made my mother smile, the same way she smiled when she looked at herself in the mirror, a smile equal measures modesty and conceit. And even when I missed her, I liked it, my missing, this nothing the same anymore, this everything suddenly in the past tense.
By August I’d stopped wishing for the rec center and its too-chlorinated pool, for the park near our house and the counselors who brought us there, those miraculously stoned 14-year-olds, letting us climb on the monkey bars and making us necklaces out of marigolds and calling it “camp.” I missed my best friend Eva, but not as much as I’d thought. The flight home to Toronto was a year away, a lifetime in our little lives. We knew we had moved to Berlin earlier that summer and turned a page we could no longer turn back. We knew far away we knew war-torn we knew 10 days, maybe two weeks, maybe more. My mother, Philip, and I: three bodies stuck inside the bright-yellow cage of a phone booth. German on the streets, my mother and my father on the phone. Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Sara Freeman about her writing process.Įverything overheard in those days.
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