Chapter 12: Christmas Eve

Zora's POV

The Moravia Lodge hall at nine o'clock on Christmas Eve smells of cinnamon, wet wool and two hundred people who have been dancing since six.

I stood in the open door in my mother's green wool dress, let out at the seams.

My braid was pinned up and my coat was over my arm.

Anton stood at my left.

I had my hand on his sleeve, over the scar, and he had not moved it once in the whole drive.

The band was in the middle of a polka.

A bread woman saw me first, from the long table, with a tray of kolaches in her hands.

She said, "Marie's girl," in a small voice, and dropped the tray.

The clarinet squealed and stopped, and then the whole band stopped.

Two hundred faces turned toward the door.

I have walked into hundreds of kitchens with the mail in my hands, and I know how to cross a room.

I crossed that one slowly, with my husband beside me and a dead woman's name on every tongue.

Frank was at the foot of the stage.

He had on his Sunday suit and a red bolo tie.

For six weeks he had been telling the Lodge he would bring me home on his arm.

He saw me come in on Anton's arm, and for half a breath his face was nothing at all.

Then it opened wide and warm, and he threw out both hands.

"Friends!" Frank cried. "Lodge! A miracle! Our Zora is home!"

Nobody clapped.

He came down the aisle toward me with his eyes wet and his hat in his hand.

"Found downriver," he said to the hall, "hurt and out of her mind, and four months in a hospital in the Valley without her own name."

"The Chair and I, we never stopped looking. Come, honey, come here to Frank."

"No," I said.

My voice was loud in the quiet.

"I wasn't found," I said. "Nobody found me."

Frank stopped.

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