Read What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories for Free Online Page B

the rest of the morning. With each swing, she thought of the boy’s curse, and the boy’s threat, and wondered, if she felled the tree that day, if he’d really come for her that night. But that tree was a dense tree. And her ax needed sharpening. And as strong as she was, her arms would need strengthening, or at least a night of rest, to get the job done. When she knew she could not finish, Rena went back into the shack. She cleared her mug and plate from the table and tipped it onto its side. She then flipped it up against the window to act as a shutter, and turned her chair around to face the other side of the room. Rena sat with her back to the window, the gun in her lap, and her eyes set on a door so flimsy that when night came, she was able to see the stars through the gaps in its boards.
    Deep into that night, there was a banging at the door that Rena was sure was the boy from the village come to get her. Cloudy with sleep, she was up in an instant, the gun at her shoulder, her finger on the trigger, and squeezing so hard in her fright that there was no way to stop it, when she remembered it might be her husband or her sons coming home. In that very same instant, for it was too small to split, she pitched up the barrel and shot a tile from her roof.
    Rena heard her neighbor Yehudit scream on the other side of that door. She ran to open it, saying a dozen prayers at once, thankful she had not killed her friend. When Yehudit was safely inside with her baby, and the bolt slid back into place, Rena set the hive of a lantern to glowing and held it out to the woman before her. And she saw that the baby Yehudit carried did not sit right in her arms. From the way she held it, Rena assumed that the child was already dead.
    “Is she—” Rena said.
    “Sick,” Yehudit said. “A thousand degrees. I tried every remedy, said every prayer.” And then, in the middle of her panic, she said, “Why did we move to this place? By whose call does it fall on us to rebuild this nation? Two families alone among olives and enemies. I said to Skote before all of this, ‘What if there is an emergency, and us cut off, no phones, no roads, only hills around? What if something happens after the baby is born?’ ”
    “Do you want me to hike down with you?” Rena said, looking for a clock. “We can be at the crossing before the sun comes up.”
    “It’s too far and too dangerous. And you can see already, the decision about this child’s life will be made tonight.”
    “Let me hold her,” Rena said. And she took the child, who was hot as white coal. Her lips were cracked deep and peeling like parchment, her little eyes dry and dead. Rena did not think this child could be saved. She handed the baby back to its mother, and took up the blanket that was folded on her cot.
    “What are you doing?” Yehudit said.
    “Making you a place to rest, so that I can care for the baby while you sleep. We will take turns nursing her through the night.”
    “I didn’t come for company. I didn’t come to stay.”
    “Well, what can I do that you haven’t already done?”
    “You can buy the child.”
    “What?” Rena said.
    “In the way of the old country—to outsmart what’s coming. It’s how my own grandmother was saved from the Angel of Death.”
    “I’ll recite psalms with you until the pages turn to dust,” Rena said, “but superstition and magic?”
    Yehudit put a hand to the back of the baby’s head and turned away the shoulder on which the child rested, as if Rena herself were possibly Death in another guise.
    “You don’t see it?” Yehudit said. “Why else, on Yom Kippur, would God call my husband away to war? To do that, and then reach into my home to take back the blessing He’d just sent me? And this after I’ve left behind my whole family. This after I moved up to a forgotten hilltop, after I sacrificed happiness to make Israel whole. No, there has been a sin. There has been some evil of which I’m unaware. But it is