If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black Page B

her not about the future, but about how it had felt to be there with those men. To be taken from her family, not knowing if she would ever be returned. She told me stories that I believed, stories in which she never shed a tear, and never spoke, but only stared at the people around her—not just the bandits, but the strange women who cooked her food, the other children there who pulled her hair and tore at her clothes.
    “I wouldn’t let them see me cry,” she said. “They wanted me to. But I wouldn’t do it.”
    I nodded, aware of my classmates’ occasional looks our way.
    “I was very brave,” she said. “I still am. I have never been afraid.”
    I didn’t tell her how very afraid I was, every day. Every night. I watched her, instead, wondering how to be brave like that. In profile, beside me on the bench, Harriet Elliot’s chin stayed slightly raised, as though she were always on alert, her eyes seeming to see past whatever was in her path.

    T HE CO-OP WAS CLOSED for Veterans Day, though we called it Resolution Day and passed the week before constructing peace signs out of popsicle sticks and out of tiny pinecones and out of mismatched buttons and even out of the lima beans with which we learned our math.
    It was Harriet’s father who called that morning, inviting me over, and it was her father, the man from the newspaper, who came to the door and waved my mother away, who took my coat off my shoulders, hung it up, told me my friend was upstairs in her room, then asked if I would please take off my shoes.
    “It’s the carpet,” he said, smiling broadly, as though he had never stopped smiling since his daughter was returned. “We try our best to keep it white.”
    His hair was short, like a soldier’s, and mostly gray. I thought he looked too old to be anyone’s father. I thought there was something vaguely wrong with a father who answered the door and took your coat, who spoke to you as though you were interesting. Like a mother would do. “Overalls, huh?” He picked my boots up off the floor, setting them on a small bench. “Maybe we should buy Harriet a pair of overalls. Though I don’t think she’d wear them.”
    I didn’t know what to say. Of course she wouldn’t wear them. And by then I didn’t think she should. “Probably not,” I said.
    “No. Probably not.” Then he told me to run on upstairs. He said he would call when it was lunch.
    My stocking feet were silent on the carpet. As I padded through their home, I wondered what it would be like to walk on such softness every day. The floors of my own house were wood, battered oak, and bare except for a few scattered rugs from my father’s travels, all too often sliding underfoot. I wondered what it would be like never to hear footsteps, so never to listen for them.
    “I have been making plans,” she said.
    We sat on pale yellow chairs, at a pale yellow table, in her fairy-tale room, a room in which all of the colors were pastel, all of the surfaces softened, all of the light bulbs shaded, the three tall windows covered with lace, the sun diffused. Even the canopy bed cushioned the air, as though the atmosphere itself might be too harsh.
    Harriet’s chin was slightly raised as always, her eyes focused just above my head, and she was dressed like herself. Only the shoes were gone, so the white legs below her green velvet hem dwindled unexpectedly, seeming to melt into the carpet. “I have been working on de t ails,” she said.
    “What details?”
    “You’ll see. There are things I have never shown anyone. But I think I will show them to you. Today.”
    I didn’t speak, afraid that if I did she would change her mind about whatever exceptional quality she thought she had detected in me. I only tried to look special.
    Harriet stood and walked toward a closet door, then opened it, revealing a row of dresses pressed together so tightly I decided she had to wear one every day, because the closet couldn’t hold any more. She reached