Life Will Have Its Way by Angie Myers Lewtschuk Page B

on earth would you tell them that? Why on earth would you tell them anything?” Her nostrils flared as her breathing became slow and labored.
    My jaw felt as though it had been clamped shut. “I thought they already knew,” I whispered through my teeth, “I didn’t think it would matter to tell them something they already knew.”
    “What else did you tell them?”
    “I just told them that she was waiting for her grandma, that’s it, I promise.”
    Anja placed her elbows at the edge of the table and let her head fall into her hands. After several minutes, she finally looked back toward me and offered a weak, strained smile. “Well, I guess what’s done is done,” she said, “and hopefully it won’t make a difference.”  
    I offered to make up something to eat and went to work flipping mindlessly through one of the cookbooks on the counter, eventually managing to put together something loosely based on one of the casserole recipes. We sat at the table in silence, I could tell Anja was still upset about my revelation to the police. I hoped she would get over it. I wanted her to talk. I wanted to talk to her. I had so many questions I wasn’t sure where to even begin.
    “Okay then,” Anja finally said during an especially long lull, “remember last night after Peter left?”
    I nodded.
    “Remember when I told you that you’d think I was crazy if I told you where we thought Evie came from?”
    I nodded again.
    “Well, the good news is… I’m not crazy.”
    I told her I was glad to hear it, since I was seriously beginning to wonder. She swatted at me with the back of her hand. “Oh come on now,” she laughed and offered to start at the beginning. 
    I correctly guessed that the beginning would have something to do with the armoire in her guest room. As for the actual hiding place, everyone had certainly heard of them, of course we all knew they’d existed, but no one wanted to talk about stuff like that anymore. Everyone just wished it would go away. But it didn’t go away, it couldn’t. The ghosts of the past were stubborn. They lingered in every apartment, in every house, in every building, uninvited and unable to leave.
    In the years leading up to the war when people were being arrested, Anja said her mother nearly had a breakdown watching people being taken away, that she absolutely hated the idea of sitting idly while all around them, entire families were disappearing. “Of course you wanted to hope they were going off to maybe a better place, you know, but deep down we all knew that wasn’t the case,” Anja said. One day her mother announced that something had to be done, soon after that Anja noticed an increase in the number of houseguests, some were people they already knew, many were not. “If I sat quietly and acted like I wasn’t paying attention, they would forget about me. But thinking back now, that was actually very dangerous of them. They put a lot of trust in the fact that I wouldn’t go off and say something at school that I had overheard at home.”
    She moved her fork mindlessly across her plate, rearranging the food she hadn’t yet eaten, “When they started building the closet, no one really took notice. The neighbors weren’t preoccupied with one another like they are now days.”
    Of course Anja’s parents were no fools, even though things were fairly sedate when they started their efforts, they had seen the writing on the wall. They became more withdrawn, more paranoid, more serious. Anja said her life got very different, very fast during that time. And although it felt like she’d lost her parents, there was something about the tense new environment that she found very exciting.
    Not long after the closet was built. A friend of Anja’s mother began staying in the apartment. Her parents didn’t tell the children anything about the reason for their new houseguest and the kids didn’t question her presence. “Her name was Rebekah,” Anja said, “she was already