The First Day of the Rest of My Life

by Cathy Lamb

  “Meow!” we all declared. “Meow!”

  We gave a lot of those uptight businesspeople a shock, but no one was more shocked than Makeesha when we presented her with plane tickets, cruise line tickets, and a thousand dollars for spending money. Twelve days, the Bahamas. First class.

  She burst into tears.

  The uptight businesspeople cried, too.

  Meow!

  Honestly, I heard a violinist in my head.

  Yep. It was “Memory.” From Cats.

  That night, around eleven p.m., I sat on the deck at The Lavender Farm and watched the lights of farmhouses tucked into the hills shine on and off.

  I am swamped in work, buried under an avalanche of Things To Do.

  I work to blind myself from realities I don’t like. I get it. I need the oblivion that work brings. I need the recognition so I can prove to myself that I am Someone Important, that I am not a bad girl, a dirty girl, a slutty girl, but someone who deserves respect and does not belong in a shack that smells like smoke and looks like a dying armadillo.

  I have fought since the click, click, click part of my life to believe that I am someone worthy. I still fight for it.

  I have surrounded myself with expensive “stuff” to prove it to myself, too. It hasn’t worked.

  But now, someone else, some stranger with ambition named Marlene, had control over my life and what was going to happen in it. I have a visceral, instinctive reaction when I feel anyone is trying to control any part of my life.

  The most personal, destructive disaster of my life, of Annie’s life, was in someone else’s hands.

  I could not have that.

  I heard again Annie’s words. What she’d told me to do.

  I heard Momma next, so clear it was as if I were back in the pink beauty parlor with hair spray, pink nail polish, glittering chandeliers, and cookies with pink icing and Red Hots.

  Take control.

  You can’t take control of anyone else, or anything else, in this world besides yourself, sugar, but you can take control of you. So do it, then sit down and make sure your nails are polished, your heels on, your hair styled. There is no excuse for frumpiness.

  I thought of my suits. My momma would not have liked my suits.

  She would like it, however, if I took control.

  Yes, I was done.

  Early evening the next day, Annie and I climbed into Granddad’s black pickup truck and he drove us to the top of the hill. As usual, we sat on the same wrought iron bench we’d sat on for years to admire the land quilt in front of us, the golden lollipop to the west heading down over the mountains.

  “How are you feeling, Granddad?” I asked.

  “I’m fine, dammit.” He took a deep but ragged breath. “Fine, dammit.”

  “Dammit,” I said. “I’m glad you’re damn fine.”

  He glanced at me. I interpreted the glance. Exasperated, but he loved me.

  “It’s good to be damn fine,” Annie said. “For example, Fiji was damn fine.”

  Granddad rolled his eyes. “Fiji was fine,” he muttered. He was a law-abiding man, but he was a realist and knew he could not stop that particular granddaughter. I chuckled.

  We watched the leaves ruffle, the trees sway, a hawk glide, and I heard the faintest notes of Haydn’s Symphony no. 39 in G Minor in the back of my head.

  We waited Granddad out, as was our plan.

  “I believe I owe you girls more information,” he said.

  “That’d be good,” Annie said.

  “Please,” I said.

  “It’s not pleasant, and I know it will hurt you girls.” He brought a hand up and pressed on his eyelids. “I tried to put my past, our past, behind us. I didn’t want to think about it. It hurt too much and it wasn’t anyone’s damn business. Plus, you girls went through so much as children, why add more pain to your lives? More confusion? More secrets? I wanted to protect you. I wanted you to start your lives over, here, at The Lavender Farm, with us, and to heal. What good would it do to tell you things you didn’t need to know? I wanted it all buried.”

  I don’t like that word, buried.

  “Buried pasts have a way of sneaking out of their coffins, don’t they?” Annie said.

  “Yes. And it’s coming out of that coffin now. I can’t protect you anymore from my history.” He dropped his hand, and said in French, “I am cornered. This reporter has cornered me. And, perhaps, it is all best, anyhow. Best for you to know.”

  “Know what, Granddad?” Annie leaned forward.

  “The truth may explain things for you, offer you clarity about your mother, about Grandma and me. You’ll know what Grandma is talking about now. It won’t make things easier when you listen to her—in fact, I think it will cause you great pain—but you’ll understand the context. You will, however, probably not wish to speak to me again, and I understand.”

  I felt the breath in my body still, stuck again, holding on to itself. “That would never happen, Granddad.”

  “Never,” Annie said. “We love you.”

  “The Nazis marched into a quiet Paris,” my granddad said, his voice so weary, as if he hadn’t heard our reassurances. “People had fled, or were fleeing, or hiding, hunkered down. We needed to flee, too.” He took a deep breath. “It would be more accurate to say that we needed to escape.”

  Escape. They needed to escape because they were being hunted.

  “Doctors, mothers, musicians, artists, scientists, grandparents. We all had to escape, or die.” His bitterness was not lost on me. “Hitler was a psychopath, but he could not have done what he did without the help and agreement of millions of people, all of whom did nothing, nothing, save for a fraction of them, to help us. So we Jews were on the run. We were fighting to exist.”

  His fists clenched, then he sagged, as if the anger rose, then dissipated again, too exhausted to hold on to after so many decades of futility.

  “But we were late getting out. We stayed far longer in Paris than we should have. We had to. Your grandma’s mother, Frieda, was terminally ill. Her liver was failing. She was yellow. Her husband, Eli, was ill, too. He had had polio as a child, and a different form of it had returned. He was in a wheelchair, and moving him would have been almost impossible. Like I told you before, they begged us to go without them. I didn’t want to leave them, neither did Madeline or your grandma. I loved them, but I was desperate. Desperate to get my family out, to get the ones out who might live to see the next year.”

  “Madeline?” I asked. “Who was Madeline?”

  Granddad took a deep, trembly breath, his whole chest shaking. He reached out his hands, hands that never seemed to stop trembling anymore, and said, “My dear granddaughters. Madeline was your grandma.”

  No, she wasn’t. That was my first thought. No, she wasn’t. Grandma is our grandma. Emmanuelle Laurent is our Grandma.

  “What?” Annie asked. “What do you mean?”

  Granddad held his eyes shut tight for a second. “Your grandma, Emmanuelle Laurent, is the grandma of your heart. She is the grandma whom you love and who loves you. She cared for you, she would give her life for you, that I know for sure. But she is not your direct, biological grandma.”

  Neither Annie nor I could speak for long, long seconds.

  “What—what are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Your biological grandma’s name was Madeline. You, my dear”—he nodded at me—“you were named by your mother for your grandma. Your mother named you after her mother. Madeline is the sister of your grandma Emmanuelle.”

  “I’m lost,” Annie said, her face pale.

  “This is too confusing,” I said. Too much.

  “Your grandma, your beautiful grandma, is my second wife.”

  “Your second wife?” I asked.

  “Yes. I was married to her sister, Madeline, when we were barely twenty.”

  He was married to Grandma’s sister?

  “But . . . what happened to her? What happened to your . . .” I co
uld barely see it. “What happened to your first wife? To Madeline?”

  His eyes closed, like he’d been hit, then opened to focus on the ruffling leaves, the swaying trees, the hawk that was back up after stabbing the mouse....

  “She died. . . .” Granddad’s jaw clenched and his eyes swam in tears. Amidst my utter confusion, I was struck that after all this time, Granddad still cried for a woman he had loved and lost decades ago.

  “She died right before we were to escape.”

  Oh, my God. “Granddad, I am so sorry,” I whispered.

  “Shit,” Annie said. “And hell.”

  He wiped his face and sunk back on the bench, exhausted already, overwhelmed.

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  He coughed, cleared his throat. “She died a few hours after she jumped.”

  She jumped? “She jumped from where?”

  “She jumped from the second story of her parents’ home in Paris.”

  I felt like I’d been slugged in the chest with a hammer.

  Annie stilled, tight, tense.

  “Why . . .” I envisioned a woman leaping from a second-story window. “Why did she jump?”

  Granddad sighed, his shoulders slumping. “She jumped because she was trying to escape.”

  “From . . . ,” Annie asked, but she knew, and I knew, too.

  “The Nazis were coming.” Granddad’s voice crackled.

  Like locusts, like hate on feet, like death. He and his family were human targets. Human Jewish targets.

  “Granddad,” I said, then stopped, fighting back a rush of despair.

  “Oh, my God.” Annie didn’t cry because she never did, but I knew she felt this pain. “Oh, my God.”

  “Madeline and Emmanuelle’s parents had been tipped off by a neighbor. He was a bookseller, and he learned from someone else who was passing notes back and forth to him through the books that the Nazis were coming to arrest all of us in our homes. When, we didn’t know, but it would be soon, so we packed and tried to prepare.”

  Granddad put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “It is like yesterday,” he whispered. “As if these other years, these decades, have not happened. I can see everything. I can hear their boots, the screams, that guttural shouting, the smell of fear. It was rampant, it invaded every corner of Paris. I wasn’t there at your grandma’s parents’ house that evening when the Nazis came, shouting, demanding, threatening. Their parents, Madeline and Emmanuelle’s parents, how shall I say it? They stalled them.” He laughed, so bitterly. “They stalled them so she could escape.”

  “How did they stall the Nazis? I thought they were sick?”

  “Their father had a gun. Eli could barely stand. He spent most of his time in that wheelchair, but he stood when the Nazis came in, five of them, and he shot off his old rifle before he himself was shot dead. They turned on your great-grandma, on Frieda, and she had a gun, too. She was so ill, but she raised that gun in shaking hands and pulled the trigger. She was killed instantly by returning gunfire.”

  I envisioned that—a man, a real man, protecting his family, barely able to stand, but stand he did, knowing it was the end of him, the end of his wife, and his wife, a real woman, dying, still fighting, a gun in her hands, shooting to kill to protect her family.

  “My first wife, you look so much like her, Madeline. That’s another reason why your grandma gets confused on who you are. Your grandma Madeline was hiding behind an armoire. She told me what happened later. The Nazis who were still alive, and not hurt from the gunshots, immediately searched the house, and she waited, waited with Ismael—”

  Ismael—that name again, always that name. It had darted in and out of my childhood.

  “Wait,” Annie interrupted. “Who is Ismael?”

  “Ismael . . . oh, Ismael,” Granddad moaned.

  I drew in my breath, so did Annie.

  “Ismael . . .” Granddad patted his heart and we both put an arm around his shoulder. “Oh, Ismael.”

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to talk anymore, Granddad,” I said, worried about his health, his weakening, sliding health. I pictured his life draining out of his body, inch by inch until he was no longer there.

  “No. I must speak of this now, before it’s too late.”

  “Rest, Granddad, your heart,” Annie said.

  “Please, breathe, Granddad,” I said.

  He breathed, in and out. “Ismael is . . .”

  Behind Granddad’s back, I held Annie’s hand as Granddad took one more rattling breath, as if he was sucking in air to drown the pain.

  “Ismael is my son.”

  I felt Annie gripping my hand tight, on reflex.

  “Your son?” I asked.

  “Yes, your mother had a brother.”

  “Our momma had a brother?” Annie and I said together. I remembered, again, when I was a girl, how Momma had said, “Ismael and I used to play together, now you and I can play together, Pink Girl.” I had asked her to tell me more and she’d said, “Some stories are not to be told for years, until the listener is ready and the storyteller can tell it properly . . . so that no one forgets who we are, who we were.”

  Here was the story, told properly, the secret, the mystery that had been wrapped up in French, English, and German and carried through three generations.

  “Madeline and I had a son, a beautiful son, a wonderful, wonderful son.” My granddad did not bother to wipe the tears from his wrinkled cheeks. “We loved him so much, as we loved your mother. Ismael loved sports, loved his microscope, loved being outdoors. He loved animals, like you, Annie, and he loved helping people, like you, Madeline. He had a stamp collection.” Granddad’s voice broke. “Who did he love most of all, though? He loved your mother, his little sister. Everywhere he went, he took her by the hand. It was he she turned to when she hurt a knee, or needed a hug, or help finding her lost stuffed elephant. It was he who read her stories at night and tucked her in. It was an uncommon bond, strong as steel.”

  I thought of our momma with an older brother, tucking her in, reading to her, and overnight, he was . . . gone.

  “Not a day, not a day has gone by when I have not missed my son, and my daughter. Every day I am tortured by the loss of my children.”

  I closed my eyes as a torrent of pain shook me. Two children. He had lost two children. I had seen firsthand my grandparents’ unending, raw grief after losing my momma. It had been horrendous, that would be the word for it, horrendous. The wailing, how they muffled their cries, shut doors, screamed at the ocean when they didn’t think we were within earshot, screamed into the fir trees on The Lavender Farm. Those memories had scorched my mind for years.

  “And, and what happened to that son?” I said, my voice wobbling. “Your son, Ismael?”

  “He died.”

  “But . . .” Dare I open that pain, that endless, eternal pain? Did I have that right? Would he want to talk about it? Would it help, finally, after all these years?

  “How? How did he die?” Annie asked.

  There was, again, a long pause while the leaves ruffled, the trees swayed, the hawk dove again to stab another mouse.

  “Your grandma, your grandma Madeline, she held him in her arms and jumped from the second floor as the Nazis were pounding up the stairs. We don’t know how she survived. She landed first, cushioning Ismael. Her injuries were so extensive. She was bleeding internally, she’d shattered ribs, hit her head, broke a bone in her leg. Ismael’s wounds were equally bad. She crawled, Ismael in her arms, and hid under a rowboat in their yard near their pond.”

  “Granddad,” Annie interrupted. “The pond with the swans, right? The one that Grandma talks about, paints in her books?”

  “Yes, it is those swans that your grandma drew hundreds of times for her books. It is why we named the stores Swans. That night the swans strutted around the rowboat, which was partially in bushes. They had never done that. When the Nazis came outside, they tried to peck them, they chased them. But miraculously, as
your grandma always told me, the Nazis did not see the boat where Madeline and Ismael were hiding.”

  I had that image in my head. A black night, a panicked mother with her son, jumping from the second story to escape from morally indefensible vermin who wanted to take her life.

  “Madeline carried Ismael, limping and bleeding and broken, to the house of a friend of ours, a doctor who was not Jewish. She had to hide, to dart here and there. Luckily it was dark. The doctor sent his son to find me, then he sent him to get your grandma Emmanuelle and your mother, who were hiding at his friend’s house, a librarian, in her basement, with a suitcase and Madeline’s violin. I had been frantic with worry, but by the time your grandma and your mother—” He stopped to pinch his nose, but the pinching did not stop the tears. “Your mother, so young, she was wearing a blue coat that day . . . blue shoes . . .”

  I rubbed his back, devastated for him, for us, for our whole family in that awful time.

  “By the time I got to the doctor’s house, Madeline was dying. It was hopeless. Only a hospital could have stopped it, and we couldn’t go there. I held her on one side, your grandma on the other. She told us about jumping from the second story, the rowboat and the swans and . . . before she died . . .”

  He stopped, his lips trembling.

  “Before she died . . .”

  His lips trembled again, his body shuddering.

  “Before Madeline died she took off her wedding ring and put it on her sister’s ring finger, your grandma’s ring finger, and said, ‘Go . . . go . . . you must go now. Use the papers. She can be your wife.’ She was so brave. Even when she was dying, her last thoughts were for us, how to save us. I refused to leave, so did your grandma, but Madeline was insistent. We refused again. She said, ‘Save my daughter, save yourselves.’ We wouldn’t leave her, we refused, and she . . . she . . .”

  Granddad choked on his misery, his loss.

  “Madeline knew we would not leave her, so she grabbed a knife on the table . . . grabbed a knife and stabbed herself in the neck. I have no idea how she had the strength to do that, I don’t know, I don’t understand, she was critically injured, already bleeding out, but with that . . . it pooled, it rushed out as she died. Her blood drained, her life drained.”