When We Were Young

by Jaclyn Goldis

  Joey felt her sister’s heartbeat against her arm. It was such an un-Lily-like question. “I guess I did a little,” she finally said. “I’m really sorry, Lil. It just came as such a shock. None of it was your fault, but I realized it had changed my whole life. Leo broke up with me, and we stopped going to Corfu, and—”

  “So it ruined your life,” Lily said softly. “My existence ruined your life.”

  “That’s the thing, Lil. I’ve learned something. I think I only learned it now. No one can ruin your life without your permission. I’ve been so angry with Mom since Leo told me, and now there’s this whole thing with Dad. Maybe it’s just—he did what he did. She did what she did. They made mistakes, you know?”

  “So what do we do?” asked Lily. A crackle of lightning shook the beach. Blankets started being gathered, beach bags packed.

  “I don’t know,” said Joey. “But right now we go. It’s going to rain.”

  “I don’t care. I’m already wet. I’m going to stay.”

  “Are you sure? I have to get back to Edith’s.” Joey hugged her sister.

  “See you at home then.”

  “Okay.” Joey started to walk.

  “Hey, Joey.”

  She turned. “Yeah?”

  “You really loved Leo back then, huh?”

  “Yeah, Lil. I did.” Water streamed down Joey’s face. It was just rain, she thought.

  She made it to the edge of the sand and knelt to put on her sandals. It was drizzling now, her arms riddled in goose bumps. As she fastened her sandals, her hand went to the damp sand. It started to write.

  It wrote JOEY.

  She added an ampersand.

  She went to write Grant, but she hesitated. Very quickly, she erased the ampersand with a rub of her hand. Then she erased the Joey too. Now she wrote her name even bigger, so she had to walk from letter to letter to craft them. JOEY.

  She finished decisively, with a period on the end. As the rain picked up, she surveyed her handiwork. Some place deep inside her smiled.

  * * *

  Joey smelled coffee as she climbed down the ladder. She set her charcoal stick on the floor.

  “It’s magnificent.” Edith was leaning on her cane by the coffee lid installation.

  “Thank you.”

  “I did question if you’d pull it off.” Edith started toward Joey. She wore pale-blue silk pajamas. Strands of sapphire necklaces hung atop. Joey had never known a person who wore sapphires while lounging around her house.

  Joey’s legs buckled. She sank to the floor. She removed her apron.

  “You should rest, dear. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  “I didn’t.” Joey couldn’t stop looking at the wall. Couldn’t stop marveling that she had created this remarkable thing.

  “Well, you should go home.” Edith handed her a stack of bills. “Thank you, my dear.”

  Joey put the money in her bag. She packed up her oils. “Thank you so much for the opportunity.” She hovered at the door. She didn’t want to leave her wall. She dug for her phone and snapped a couple of photos.

  “Vogue is going to have a field day. Did Lily tell you they’re sending a photographer over tonight? I’ll make sure this lands in the article. Prepare for an onslaught. A well-deserved one.”

  “Wow.” Joey’s stomach rumbled. She couldn’t remember when she last ate. “So…when do you think the article will come out?”

  “Not for some time, I assume.”

  “Right.” Joey reached for the door handle. “I’m really appreciative that you took a chance on me.”

  “A chance well taken. My instincts never lie, my dear. And congratulations are in order. I nearly forgot to wish you luck!”

  “Luck?”

  “You’re getting married in a couple of days, no? One does need luck for such things.”

  Joey remembered reading somewhere that Edith had been married four times. “I am,” she said. A couple of days. Gosh.

  “He’s a fortunate guy,” said Edith.

  “Oh?”

  Edith pointed to the wall. “That’s love. That is love if I’ve ever seen it.”

  Joey felt her cheeks go hot. “Thank you,” she said, and opened the door.

  Chapter Forty

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  Joey drove fast. Thick morning air bisected the car from all four windows ratcheted down, still not ridding the Jeep of its indelible scent courtesy of Doris, its prior owner. Joey found the smell peculiarly nostalgic, like eucalyptus air fresheners and barbells that had seen their heyday in the era of Jane Fonda workout videos.

  Her phone rang. There was pretty much no one to whom she wanted to speak. She glanced at the screen: G. Well, sweet G wasn’t on any shit lists. In fact, G was probably calling to check on things after Joey had filled her in on the dysfunction with a capital D that was their family. G had been subdued on the phone before. Perhaps now the whole vacation affair had sunk in, and G was ready to rage about everything Bea and Scott had done.

  “Hi, G.”

  “I need you to come over,” came a whisper. It was flat and lifeless—not the voice of her lively grandmother.

  “G? Are you okay?”

  “No,” said the strange voice. “I am not.”

  Joey jerked onto the shoulder. “G, tell me what’s wrong.” The call evaporated. She dialed G back—nothing.

  Joey made a U-turn toward her grandmother’s.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Dear Mrs. Bezas,

  My name is Elena Kallas, and I am the daughter of Milos Christakos. I do not know how to tell you this so I am just going to come out with it. Two weeks ago, a day before you sent your first message to my father, my father was in an accident. He was walking to the fishing wharf on our island. At ninety-four, he still walked that route every day. He liked to have a coffee and watch the boats coming back from sea. But as he was crossing a street, he was struck by a car. He was admitted to the General Hospital of Lefkada, and by the time I rushed over, he was in a coma.

  Oh, Mrs. Bezas. I am so sorry to say it. My father is very loved. We were all there. I have three grown children, and my brother, Adelphos, has four. The doctor said my father wouldn’t make it, that it would be a matter of hours.

  Two days later, my father still hung on. I signed into his email. I was trying to reconstruct his life. He’d lived alone for so many years. My mother died when I was young, and he’d never had a partner since. I figured there would be bills to pay. Friends to contact. I saw an email fresh in his box notifying him of a Facebook message from you.

  I instantly knew who you were. You see, fifteen years ago, my father asked me to accompany him to a reunion of Holocaust survivors on the island of Corfu. He told me that, when he was a teenager, he fell in love with a Jewish girl. That he didn’t want to be disloyal to the memory of my mother, but that he’d loved this girl with all his soul. He wanted to know she was okay. He wanted one more chance to see her. This girl was you, of course. We went to the reunion and met your daughter. I’m sure she’s told you. I translated as my father told your daughter that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of you. Your daughter said you were happily married. She said she would give you my father’s contact information.

  If there is one thing in life you should not doubt, please know how my father loved you. I watched the tears run down his face as we took the ferry back to Igoumenitsa. He told me you had once taken the ferry together.

  When I saw your message, I did not know what to do. I hadn’t realized my father had reached out to you. Of course, why would I know such a thing? He was a person with his own thoughts and desires. I was heartbroken when I read your letter because I knew how my father would have longed to receive it. I printed out the message, and I went to the hospital. I want you to know, Mrs. Bezas, that there had been no response from my father since he was brought to the hospital. But I held his hand as I read the letter, and you know what he did? What he did was a mi
racle. He squeezed my hand.

  I hope you will forgive me. I couldn’t bear to tell you the truth then. It seemed to me that you needed to say some things, and that my father needed to hear them. So I sent you one of those emoticons. I went along with your assumption that my father couldn’t respond in English, even though my English is quite fine. And I continued to read your letters to him. And he continued to live. The doctors were surprised. They expected him to pass on quickly.

  Yesterday, I sobbed as I read him your last letter. What happened to your family was truly horrific. And how that tore you and my father apart—well, I felt both your pain. None of it was your fault, but both of you took on that blame.

  On this note, I must tell you, there is a story I know, that it appears you do not. On our ferry back from Corfu after the reunion, my father kept mumbling that he’d tried to save them. I asked him what he meant. He didn’t want to say it, but eventually he told me, not all the contours of the story, but just this one part. That he’d joined with a man named Costas, who led the Greek Resistance on Lefkada. At night, he snuck to the place where the Jews were being held and searched frantically for your family—but was unable to find them. It was dark, he said, with the Germans on guard. They had to move quickly. There was nothing he could do. He helped others escape instead, and you cannot fathom his guilt, Mrs. Bezas. Trust me, for I saw it ooze from his pores. He didn’t tell you this story because he was ashamed. It was your family he wanted to save, and he felt that he failed. Even though he risked his life to try.

  Well, Mrs. Bezas, I thought you would want to know.

  In any event, when I finished your letter to my father, I thought I saw him smile. I could have invented it, but I like to think I did not. I left the room to see about his medication, and when I came back, he was gone.

  I think—no, I know, Mrs. Bezas—I know he hung on for you. I know he hung on for your last words. I know he left this world in peace, and for that and to you I am very grateful.

  My father cannot be here to say it, so I will. He loved you until the day he died. On that I would stake my life. That kind of love is rare indeed. He was kind and good to my mother, but as I look back now, I’m not sure those things add up to love. We were his light. Once my mother was gone and his children grown, we urged my father to date. He was young and handsome. He had those gorgeous green eyes. But he said he’d had his love, and that was the end of it. Until the day of the Corfu reunion, I thought he meant my mother. But then I understood it. He meant you. He had his love with you, and that was enough for a lifetime.

  I am sorry to send such a terrible message. I wish all the best to you and your family. I hope you feel my father’s love from up above, and that it can provide you with some small comfort now.

  Sincerely, Elena Kallas

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Joey

  Florida

  2019

  The door was open.

  “G?” Joey walked past the photo of her grandfather as a boy, past the cabinet stuffed with miniature Greek statues. She knocked on her grandmother’s bedroom door.

  No answer.

  Joey slowly opened the door. Sun had invaded the rest of the condo, but here it was the dead of night, with daylight only filtering in from one narrow window that had escaped the installation of a blackout shade. When Joey’s eyes oriented, she saw her grandmother sitting up in her bed.

  “G, are you okay? Are you sick?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  Joey sat on the edge of the bed and flicked on the nightstand lamp. Her grandmother was wig-less, her tiny head matted in white cotton-candy hair. G’s eyes didn’t shift from the reproduction of Monet’s water lilies that hung across the room.

  “You’re scaring me, G. Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I can’t tell you, Joey. If you want, you’ll have to read my messages on the Facebook.”

  Surely her grandmother was joking. But when G kept staring ahead, Joey realized she was serious. “Okay, G. Sure. Facebook messages with who?”

  “You’ll see. There’s only one person. Start at the beginning.”

  “Okay.” Joey’s heart settled back into its cavity. She was relieved this was about Facebook messages. That this wasn’t a heart attack or cancer or something equally unfixable. “What’s your password?”

  “My password? Benjamin. My password is always Benjamin.”

  Benjamin. Her grandmother’s little brother. Joey had almost never heard G speak of him.

  “Okay, I’ll be back after I read them.” Joey walked to the door.

  “Joey?” said her grandmother. “Can you please turn off the light?”

  * * *

  For a long time after she finished reading G’s Facebook messages, Joey sat very still in her grandmother’s swivel desk chair. Every time the chair shifted, it jerked Joey to another terrible thought.

  Finally, she called her mother. Bea said hello. She didn’t launch into a game of Fifty Questions: Wedding Edition. Just hello.

  Joey told her she had to read some Facebook messages of G’s. Her mother said okay. Joey said, Once you finish, can you meet me at G’s? Another okay.

  Joey ended the call. She read the last message again. Then the last one her grandmother wrote. By the time she finished, her cheeks were smothered in tears.

  * * *

  It was some time before Joey got up the nerve to venture back into her grandmother’s bedroom.

  “So, you read?” The room still hung in darkness. Joey went for the light switch. G said sharply, “No.”

  Joey climbed onto the bed so she was flush against the headboard beside her grandmother. “I don’t know what to say.” She listened to the hum of the humidifier. “I didn’t know any of that. I’m so, so sorry, G.”

  “He’s dead. I can’t believe it. He’s dead. He tried to save my family, and I didn’t even know it. And now he’s dead, just like the rest of them.”

  “I know,” Joey said, more tears spilling out her eyes. Why was she crying and her grandmother perfectly still? It was beginning to frighten her, her grandmother with her back so erect.

  They sat side by side for what seemed like hours. Joey stared at the blue light on the TV monitor. She began to shiver. She was still wearing her dress from the ocean with Lily. It was maybe even still damp.

  “G, can I ask you something? Or do you not want to talk about it?”

  “You can ask me,” said this new, eerie G voice.

  “Well…how did you survive it? How did you survive the deaths of your whole family? And then losing Milos?”

  There was a choking sound. A rustling on the bed. The shadow of her grandmother lifted a throw pillow from behind her back and clutched it to her chest.

  “By the skin of my teeth,” whispered G. “That’s how. At first, I was preoccupied, Joey. I met your grandfather, and we got to America. We had to get jobs. We worked very hard, you know. He wanted to have children. He was desperate to have children. But I couldn’t fathom bringing children into a world where such evil existed. Your grandfather took me to psychologists. He went to great efforts to convince me. I wanted to make him happy—oh I did, Joey—but something inside me was too hardened.

  “Your grandfather accepted it at last, or pretended that he had. Then one day, he said something so innocuous, that it would have been nice to have someone to carry on our family names. And that is what turned the light on inside me. Suddenly I desperately wanted a baby to carry on my family’s legacy. By then, we were older though. It was harder. It wasn’t working. We went to fertility specialists. No baby. I began to resign myself, I suppose.”

  How had Joey never known any of this? How had she never asked?

  “Then I became pregnant. It was a miracle, Joey. And when your mother came into this world and cried, I got parts of myself back that I hadn’t even known were missing. I had something to live for. I had some piece of my parents. I named her—”

  “Beatrice,” said Joey. “For Benjamin.”


  “Yes. For Benjamin.”

  “So much makes sense. Like why you wanted me to marry a Jewish man.”

  There was a long empty hallway’s worth of silence. “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you one more thing though, G? About Milos?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just wonder…do you think, if you’d gotten to see him in person after all these years, you would have loved him just the same as when you were younger?”

  For a while, there was only the brrrr of a lawn mower outside. At last, her grandmother said, “I do. I do think I would have loved him as much. But maybe it’s just been a fantasy all these years. A fantasy that kept me going. Perhaps a fantasy that kept me back too, if I admit it to myself. You know, Joey, maybe my longing for what once was held me back from the life that was in front of me. Who can say now? But I suppose I think that love doesn’t ever die once you’ve felt it. Maybe it only changes shape. Or maybe that’s just a fantasy too.”

  Joey was quiet for a long time. “I wish more than anything that I could make it different, what happened to you.”

  “Joey, you asked me about my past the other day, and I was too cowardly to give you answers.”

  “You don’t have to explain it. I—”

  “I do need to explain because I’m afraid I’ve done you a disservice all these years, keeping it inside. Every year on Passover, at the Seder, I dip my celery into the salt water. We all do. Do you know why we do that?”

  Joey grasped for an answer, but nothing. What she remembered of once-a-week Hebrew school was the sprinkle cookies they served during break. “Not really.”

  “We do it to remember the tears of our ancestors. So every year, I dip my celery into salt water, and I remember them. The only family I knew, before there was all of you. It’s not fair to say it’s restricted to Passover. My cells remember them, in every moment.” G bit her lip. “But herein lies the business of living.”