The Life She Was Given Read online

  Outstanding praise for Ellen Marie Wiseman!

  WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

  “A real page-turner.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “The author has again delved into the lives of teenage girls, albeit in different circumstances than her first work, yet with the same insight, nuance, and raw emotion readers can appreciate and enjoy.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  THE PLUM TREE

  “Wiseman eschews the genre’s usual military conflicts in favor of the slow, inexorable pressure of daily life during wartime, lending an intimate and compelling poignancy to this intriguing debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Plum Tree is a touching story of heroism and loss, a testament to the strength of the human spirit and power of love to transcend the most unthinkable circumstances. Deft storytelling and rich characters make this a highly memorable read and worthy addition to the narratives of the Holocaust and Second World War.”

  —Pam Jenoff, author of The Ambassador’s Daughter

  “Ellen Marie Wiseman’s provocative and realistic images of a small German village are exquisite. The Plum Tree will find good company on the shelves of those who appreciated Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian, Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.”

  —NY Journal of Books

  “In The Plum Tree, Ellen Marie Wiseman boldly explores the complexities of the Holocaust. This novel is at times painful, but it is also a satisfying love story set against the backdrop of one of the most difficult times in human history.”

  —T. Greenwood, author of Two Rivers

  Books by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  THE PLUM TREE

  WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

  COAL RIVER

  THE LIFE SHE WAS GIVEN

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  THE LIFE SHE WAS GIVEN

  ELLEN MARIE WISEMAN

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding praise for Ellen Marie Wiseman!

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 2 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 3 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 4 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 5 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 6 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 7 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 8 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 9 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 10 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 11 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 12 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 13 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 14 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 15 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 16 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 17 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 18 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 19 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 20 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 21 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 22 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 23 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 24 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 25 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 26 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 27 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 28 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 29 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 30 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 31 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 32 - JULIA

  CHAPTER 33 - LILLY

  CHAPTER 34 - JULIA

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Teaser chapter

  THE LIFE SHE WAS GIVEN

  Discussion Questions

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-450-2

  eISBN-10: 1-61773-450-0

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-6177-3449-6

  ISBN-10: 1-61773-449-7

  For Benjamin and Jessica—

  You are my greatest accomplishment

  and

  I love you beyond words.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, it is with great joy and true amazement that I express my appreciation for the people who helped, supported, and believed in me during the writing of this, my fourth novel. To my readers far and wide, my online supporters and friends, and the people who live in and around my community, thank you for your continued enthusiasm and warm encouragement. Thank you for the cards and letters and e-mails, and for the many invitations to visit and speak at your book clubs, libraries, and meetings. Thank you also to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules, and in some cases drove through winter storms, to attend my events. Seeing your smiling faces and hearing your kind words means more than you know.

  To my friends and family, thank you for understanding that writing a novel takes considerable time and effort, for cheering me on, for believing in me every time I lost faith in myself, for celebrating my victories, and for always being there when I needed a break.

  To my mentor, William Kowalski, thank you for giving me the tools to make a career out of writing. This book, along with the others, would not exist if it weren’t for your brilliant advice, gentle guidance, and confidence in me. When we were working together a hundred years ago, I never dreamed it would turn into this!

  Thank you to my BP author family for keeping me sane. I’m not sure I would have made it this far without you.

  A thousand thanks and heaps of love to Debra Battista, Beth Massey, and Barbara Titterington for reading the first three chapters of the manuscript and for reassuring me that I was on the right track. You have no idea what your uplifting words mean to me.

  Again my sincere appreciation goes out to my wonderful editor, John Scognamiglio, for your continued faith in me, for your enthusiasm about my work, and for coming up with the title of this book. Thank you also to Kristine Mills for another amazing cover, and to the rest of the Kensington team for your dedication and hard work behind the scenes. You rock!

  I will never find adequate words to thank my trusted friend and brilliant agent, Michael Carr, for everything you do for me. From your always-reliable advice about my career to your spot-on feedback on every manuscript, you continue to be everything I could ask for in an agent. To say I appreciate your wisdom, guidance, and friendship would be an understatement.

  As always, I can never thank my beloved family enough for always supporting and believing in me. To my parents, my brother and his wife, your unconditional love is the foundation on which I’ve built my life. To my wonderful mother, Sigrid, there are no words to express how much I love, appreciate, and cherish you. Thank you for being my biggest fan, and for helping me believe in myself. The best part of this journey has been making you proud. If I’m half the wife, mother, grandmother, and Oma you are, I will consider my life a success. To my husband, Bill, thank you for riding this roller coaster with me, for being my biggest champion and best friend, and for always, always being there when I need you. I can’t imagine sharing this crazy ride with anyone else.

  Last but certainly not least, I want to express my endless love and gratitude to my children, Ben,
Jessica, Shanae, and Andrew, and my precious grandchildren, Rylee, Harper, and Lincoln. Thank you for loving and believing in me, and for making me the proudest mother and grandmother on earth. You are my reason for living, and my greatest accomplishment. I love you with everything that I am.

  CHAPTER 1

  LILLY

  July 1931

  Blackwood Manor Horse Farm

  Dobbin’s Corner, New York

  Nine-year-old Lilly Blackwood stood in the attic dormer of Blackwood Manor for what felt like the thousandth time, wishing the window would open so she could smell the outdoors. Tomorrow was her birthday and she couldn’t think of a better present. Sure, Daddy would bring her a new dress and another book when he came home from Pennsylvania, but it had rained earlier and she wanted to know if the outside air felt different than the inside air. She wondered if raindrops made everything feel soft and cool, the way water did when she took a sponge bath. Or did the outside feel warm and sticky, like the air inside her room? She had asked Momma a hundred times to change the window so it would open, and to take the swirly metal off the outside so it would be easier to see out, but as usual, Momma wouldn’t listen. If Momma knew Daddy let her play in another part of the attic when she was at church, Daddy would be in big trouble. Even bigger trouble than for teaching her how to read and for giving her a cat on her third birthday. Lilly sighed, picked up her telescope off the sill, and put it to her eye. At least it was summertime and she didn’t have to scrape ice off the glass.

  Daddy called this time of day twilight, and the outside looked painted in only two colors—green and blue. The row of pine trees on the other side of the barn, past the fields where the horses played, looked like the felt Lilly used for doll blankets. Shadows were everywhere, growing darker by the minute.

  Lilly skimmed the edge of the woods, looking for the deer she saw yesterday. There was the crooked willow tree. There was the rock next to the bush that turned red in the winter. There was the broken log next to the stone fence. There was the—She stopped and swung the telescope back to the fence. Something looked different on the other side of the woods, near the train tracks that cut through the faraway meadow. She took the telescope away from her eye, blinked, then looked through it again and gasped. Air squeaked in her chest, like it always did when she got excited or upset.

  A string of blue, red, yellow, and green lights—like the ones Daddy put above her bed at Christmastime—hung above a giant glowing house made out of something that looked like cloth. More lights surrounded other houses that looked like fat, little ghosts. Lilly couldn’t make out the words, but there were signs too, with letters lit up by colored bulbs. Flags hung from tall poles, and a line of square yellow lights floated above the railroad tracks. It looked like the windows of a stopped train. A really long one.

  Lilly put down the telescope, waited for her lungs to stop whistling, then went over to her bookcase and pulled out her favorite picture book. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for—a colorful drawing of a striped tent surrounded by wagons, horses, elephants, and clowns. She hurried back to the window to compare the shape of the tent in the book to the glowing house on the other side of the trees.

  She was right.

  It was a circus.

  And she could see it.

  Normally, the only things outside her window were horses and fields, and Daddy and his helper working on the white fences or yellow horse barn. Sometimes, Momma walked across the grass to the barn, her long blond hair trailing behind her like a veil. Other times, trucks pulled into the barn driveway and Daddy’s helper put horses in and out of trailers or unloaded bags and hay bales. Once, two men in baggy clothes—Daddy called them bums—walked up the driveway and Daddy’s helper came out of the barn with a shotgun. If Lilly was lucky, deer came out of the woods, or raccoons scurried along the fence toward the feed shed, or a train zoomed along the tracks. And if she put her ear to the window, the chug of the train’s engine or the shriek of the whistle came through the glass.

  But now there was a circus outside her window. A real, live circus! For the first time in her life, she was seeing something different that wasn’t in a picture book. It made her happy, but a little bit mad at herself too. If she hadn’t been reading all afternoon, she might have seen the train stop to unload. She could have watched the tents go up and caught sight of the elephants and zebras and clowns. Now it was too dark to see anything but lights.

  She put down the book and counted the boards around the window. Sometimes counting made her feel better. One, two, three, four, five. It didn’t help. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d missed. She pressed her ear against the glass. Maybe she could hear the ringleader’s cries or the circus music. The only thing she heard was air squeaking in her chest and her heartbeat going fast.

  On the windowsill, her cat, Abby, woke up and blinked. Lilly wrapped an arm around the orange tabby and pulled her close, burying her nose in the animal’s soft fur. Abby was her best friend and the smartest cat in the world. She could stand on her hind legs to give kisses and lift her front paw to shake. She even jumped up on Lilly’s bed and got down when told.

  “I bet Momma will go to the circus,” Lilly said. “She doesn’t have to worry about people being afraid of her.”

  The cat purred.

  What would it be like to see an elephant in person? Lilly wondered. What would it feel like to touch its wrinkly skin and look into its big brown eyes? What about riding a pink and white horse on a carousel? Or walking among other people, eating peanuts and cotton candy? What about watching a real, live lion perform?

  As far back as Lilly could remember, there had been times at night after her light was out when she snuggled in her bed, her mind racing with thoughts of leaving her room and going downstairs. She’d read enough books to know there was more than one floor in a house, and she imagined sneaking across the attic, finding a staircase, making her way through the bottom floors of Blackwood Manor, and walking out the front door. She imagined standing with her feet on the earth, taking a deep breath, and for the first time in her life, smelling something besides old wood, cobwebs, and warm dust.

  One of her favorite games during Daddy’s weekly visits was guessing the different smells on his clothes. Sometimes he smelled like horses and hay, sometimes shoe polish or smoke, sometimes baking bread or—what did he call that stuff that was supposed to be a mix of lemons and cedar trees? Cologne? Whatever it was, it smelled good.

  Daddy had told her about the outside world and she had read about it in books, but she had no idea how grass felt between her toes, or how tree bark felt in her hand. She knew what flowers smelled like because Daddy brought her a bouquet every spring, but she wanted to walk through a field of dandelions and daisies, to feel dirt and dew on her bare feet. She wanted to hear birds singing and the sound of the wind. She wanted to feel a breeze and the sun on her skin. She’d read everything she could on plants and animals, and could name them all if given the chance. But besides Abby and the mice she saw running along the baseboard in the winter, she’d never seen a real animal up close.

  Her other favorite game was picking a place in her book of maps and reading everything she could about it, then planning a trip while she fell asleep, deciding what she would do and see when she got there. Her favorite place was Africa, where she pictured herself running with the lions and elephants and giraffes. Sometimes she imagined breaking the dormer window, crawling out on the roof, climbing down the side of the house, and sneaking over to the barn to see the horses. Because from everything she had seen and read, they were her favorite animals. Besides cats, of course. Not only were horses strong and beautiful, but they pulled wagons and sleighs and plows. They let people ride on their backs and could find their way home if they got lost. Daddy said Blackwood Manor’s horses were too far away from the attic window to tell who was who, so Lilly made up her own names for them—Gypsy, Eagle, Cinnamon, Magic, Chester, Samantha, Molly, and Candy
. How she would have loved to get close to them, to touch their manes and ride through the fields on their backs. If only it weren’t for those stupid swirly bars outside her window that Momma said were there for her own good. Then she remembered Momma’s warning, and as quickly as they started, her dreams turned to nightmares.

  “The bars are there to protect you,” Momma said. “If someone got in, they’d be afraid of you and they’d try to hurt you.”

  When Lilly asked why anyone would be afraid of her, Momma said it was because she was a monster, an abomination. Lilly didn’t know what an abomination was, but it sounded bad. Her shoulders dropped and she sighed in the stillness of her room. There would be no circus for her. Not now, not ever. There would be no getting out of the attic either. The only way she would see the world was through her books. Daddy said the outside world was not as wonderful as she thought, and Lilly should be happy she had a warm bed and food to eat. A lot of people didn’t have a house or a job, and they had to stand in line for bread and soup. He told her a story about banks and money and some kind of crash, but she didn’t understand it. And it didn’t make her feel better anyway.

  She gathered Abby in her arms and sat on her iron bed tucked beneath a wallpapered nook with a rounded ceiling. Her bedside lamp cast long shadows across the plank floor, meaning it would be dark soon and it was time to turn off the light. She didn’t want to forget again and have Momma teach her another lesson. Momma had warned her a hundred times if anyone saw her light and found her up there they would take her away and she’d never see her or Daddy or Abby again. But one night last week, Lilly started a new book and forgot.