Free Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper Page B

truck, the silver-gray; you know it. Look out for it. He wants to help you, he’s worried about you. I told him I’m not worried, not like that, and that if I’m not then he shouldn’t be, but still, he was. He got excited. More than I’ve seen him be in years. So, he’s out there, now, east, looking for you. I don’t know what you’ll make of that, but I thought you should know. I know he won’t stop you if you don’t want him to.
    I am fine. Still here. I made the most beautiful Saskatoon-berry pie the other day. Sugar-glazed the pastry, flour-thickened the filling, everything. Will have to go to town tomorrow as we’re out of flour and butter.
    I am waking up earlier and earlier. The sun comes up at five and I’m up to greet it. I sit in our kitchen with a decaf and wait for it to come up. And going to bed later and later. My eyes don’t like being closed when it’s dark out, I guess. My body aches with tiredness through the day, so I nap, sometimes, when things are in the oven. Sometimes even in the kitchen, with my head on the table where the sunlight hits. I know it’s not hygienic, but I always wipe it down before eating off that spot.
    Okay. I’m going to check on the weeds. We’ve got thistles this year that pop up to your knees whenever you’re not looking.
    I hope you’re well. Keep to the shade. Write when you have time. I read your letters out loud so there’s a voice in the house.
    Yours, remember,
    Otto.
    Otto folded the letter into thirds and put it into an envelope, even though he had no address to send it to. He wrote his wife’s name on the front and put it with the others, in a neat stack on the corner of the table, beside the letters that came in from her.

T hey started spending a lot of time at Russell’s aunt and uncle’s, on the floor, in the middle of the blue and white living room, whenever they had breaks between school, chores, sleep. They would both sit facing the same direction, toward the radio, as if it were a person. After half an hour or so, Russell’s uncle or aunt, or sometimes both, together, would knock gently on the door and slip in with a tray of coffee and buttered brown bread. Then they would all sit listening. One by one they drew in and soaked up the reports, the predictions, the analyses, the lists and lists and lists of sometimes-foreign and-sometimes-familiar-names, and the interviews. All of these in the steady, reassuring voice of the radio announcer, the vowels long and consonants precise, the strong, solid inflection leaning more toward England than home, all of these except the interviews, where, suddenly, starkly, they heard voices like their own. Sometimes the interviewer, calm, measured, would interject with questions or little comments, like breaths, between phrases: No? Yes, I see, Ah, Oh, oh, oh, but usually, mostly, they receded and let the interviewees tell their first- or second- or thirdhand stories in voices that could have been their cousins’, their neighbors’, their own.
    They heard one story about prisoners who had been taken from their homes and jobs, pulled away from cash registers, books, stoves, cats, bosses, friends, and put all together in a very small room with no windows except one, extremely tiny and high up, higher than anyone could jump or anyone could reach even when three went on each other’s shoulders like a totem pole, teetering, with a crowd of hands reaching, waiting for the top to fall. There was no foodand no toilet and everyone was so close to everyone else that they’d sleep standing up, supported by bodies on every side, with blankets of their neighbors’ clothes and hair and breath. They were like this for three days, taking turns standing in the corner that they’d designated for their waste, the smell of it choking and repulsive at first, but hardly noticeable by the end of your three-hour turn, counted out loud in seconds, as everyone had their watches taken off them, craning their necks higher and