I know that in the movie, the children called Maria "Mother" after she married their father. But that just made it too difficult to word this chapter, so in this story, the children are just calling her Maria (which I believe is what they called her after she became their stepmother in the play). I'm not entirely pleased with this chapter, mainly because I feel that Liesl is a bit OOC by being more aware of current events than she ever seemed to be in the movie. Still, I hope you'll enjoy it.

The leaves have come to turning, and the goose has gone to fly
And bridges are for burning, so don't you let that yearning pass you by
—James Taylor, Walking Man

Maria had told them to pack, to get ready as quickly as they could, but Brigitta was standing perfectly still in front of the mirror atop her bureau, blinking at her reflection. She knew that she was wasting time, but she couldn't help it. Likely she would never see her reflection in this mirror again, and she wanted her last look to be a good one.

Brigitta could remember being so small that the top of her head didn't even clear the bottom of this mirror. Gradually, over the years, she grew tall enough to see her eyes, then her nose and mouth, and standing before it now, she could see her entire head and shoulders. It was a fine, expensive mirror, with an ornate silver frame. But that wasn't why Brigitta felt so attached to it.

She still didn't know exactly how Liesl had gotten a lock of their mother's hair. She only knew that Liesl had always had it, for as long as Brigitta could remember – a small lock of dark brown hair, tied with a faded pink ribbon. Liesl used to keep it in the jewelry box atop her vanity table, but Louisa and Brigitta had asked her to see it so often that a few years ago, she took it out and fastened it very carefully in the corner of this mirror, where all three of them could see it every day.

Since then, Brigitta had treasured the mirror and stood before it every morning, her eyes always darting to the corner to rest on that lock of her mother's hair – the exact same shade of dark-brown as hers.

Brigitta had only a few vague memories of her mother, and in one of them, she was lying in bed, pale and moaning from the scarlet fever that would soon kill her. Brigitta had tried to move to her mother's bedside, but a pair of men's legs in dark pants (her father's, probably) blocked her way, and another pair of hands (Frau Schmidt's, probaly) shooed her away.

Liesl and Louisa were older, of course, and they had proper memories of their mother as a happy, healthy woman who read them stories and sang them lullabies and did all the things that a mother was supposed to do. And though they were almost always happy to share these memories with Brigitta, she felt cheated, somehow, that her two older sisters could remember pleasant times with their mother, and her two younger sisters couldn't remember her at all, while Brigitta was stuck in the middle, stuck with that haunting image of her mother in her sickbed.

When she was Marta's age, she'd had a recurring dream in which she was sad and crying about something, and her mother picked her up and held her close and kissed her – all the things that her father never did. Her father had barely even looked at her in the long, lonely years before Fraulein Maria arrived.

If Maria was her new mother, what did that make the mother who had given birth to her and who was still watching over her from heaven? Brigitta supposed that she had two mothers now.

Brigitta was distracted from her thoughts when she saw Liesl standing behind her in the mirror. She expected her oldest sister to scold her for wasting precious time when she should've been packing, but instead, Liesl simply followed her gaze to the lock of their mother's hair in the corner of the mirror.

"I know," she said quietly. "I don't want to leave it behind, either." With that, she reached into the pocket of her skirt, and Brigitta gasped when she saw what she pulled from it – a tube of lipstick. Lipstick! Their father didn't allow his daughters to wear any makeup; it was one of his strictest rules. Of course, they'd all broken their father's rules quite often. What shocked Brigitta wasn't that Liesl had broken this one, but that she'd managed to keep it secret from her and Louisa.

"Where did you get that?" Brigitta asked in an astonished whisper.

Liesl glared at her. "None of your business," she snipped. She uncapped the tube and dumped out the lipstick, so that only the empty silver case remained. Then she reached past Brigitta and carefully unfastened their mother's hair from the mirror. She paused, looking down at the dark hair in her hand.

"It was just this time of year – the summer over, and school starting," she said in a soft, far-away voice. Brigitta and Louisa, who'd joined them from across the room when she saw Liesl taking their mother's hair off the mirror, both froze, listening in rapt silence, as they always did when Liesl talked about their mother. "My hair had grown very long over the summer, and Father wanted it trimmed before I went back to school. I must've been... six or seven, I think. I didn't want to have my hair cut. For some reason, I thought they would cut it all off, and it would be as short as Friedrich's. Mother explained to me that they were just going to trim it. She said, 'Here, I'll show you,' and she found a pair of scissors and cut off a little snippet of her own hair, right then and there."

She slipped the lock of hair safely inside her empty lipstick case, snapped the cap back on, and tucked it inside her pocket. "There," she said, "now we don't have to leave it behind. I hate the thought of Nazis in here, going through our things."

Brigitta hated the thought, too – big, rough soldiers with guns in her own room, pawing through her things. "Will they?" she asked Liesl.

Liesl titled her head, thinking. "Probably. They've been doing it in Germany, I think, when people flee their homes, like we're doing. Or sometimes, they'll even evict families from their homes, for no good reason at all. Our house is so nice that once we're gone, they'll probably confiscate all our property and set up a base here. Or some important official will get to live here." She added bitterly, "It'll be like a consolation prize for helping them invade Austria."

Louisa was practically shaking with fury at this. "Nazis in our house," she spat out. "Well, I know a way to make them sorry. I've still got some spiders. I was planning to put them in a jar and set them loose in Maria's bed, but then I never did, of course. You remember?"

Brigitta nodded. Louisa kept spiders in an empty fish-tank in their room and cared for them like pets. At one point, she'd tried keeping snakes in a different tank, but they were cold-blooded and keeping them heated had been too difficult, so she'd set them free in the western part of the garden, near the lake.

"But what are you going to do with them?" Brigitta asked. "Don't tell me you're going to bring them with us."

Louisa shook her head and grinned wickedly. "No, of course not. Last thing before we leave, I'm going to turn them loose in our room, for the Nazis to find later."

Brigitta felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was still very hard to leave everything behind, but it made her smile to know that their mother's hair would be coming with them – and it made her grin to picture Nazis uncovering a nest of spiders as they plundered their home.