The First Day of the Rest of My Life

by Cathy Lamb

  Good Lord.

  I sank back against the bench again, that horrific scene blistering my mind. Annie leaned forward over her knees and coughed. I knew she was feeling nauseated—and emotionally sick.

  Madeline hastened her death to save her husband, her sister, and her daughter, who was my momma. . . .

  “She knew that Ismael wouldn’t make it,” Granddad said. “He was in a coma, hardly breathing. Our doctor friend told us that our sweet child was dying, there was no hope, he had minutes to live. He urged us to leave. But I wouldn’t go, I would not leave my son. But then we saw—” He put a cupped hand to his forehead, as if he could hold captive those tragic memories. “We saw the Nazis coming, at the end of the street, they were going door to door, we heard screams. . . .”

  “Granddad—”

  “My wife’s blood was on the floor, my son wasn’t moving, his breath was hardly there, his sunken chest.” He sobbed. “His chest was rising, but only slightly, hardly at all, he was bloody, all over there was blood, his wounds were so bad. He was dying, we all knew it. The doctor, my old friend, implored us to leave. ‘Save yourselves, save your daughter, your son’s soul is already gone, I am sorry, but go go go. Your wife would not want all of you to die, she wouldn’t want that. Go, go!’”

  That scene branded itself onto my brain. My granddad, a young man; my grandma, a young woman; my momma, a girl in blue, in the midst of two dying people, the blood everywhere, the hopelessness, the desperation, and the Nazis beating their way down the street.

  “I . . .” He choked on his own tears. “I leaned down, and I kissed Madeline, and I got blood on my hands, my mouth. Your momma, she didn’t make a sound, and she hugged her mother close. Your grandma hugged her sister, pushed her hair back, caressed her face, then the three of us went to Ismael, hugged him, kissed him. I held him close, rocked him back and forth, I thought I would die of pain. His head was back, the blood . . . so much blood, he was so pale, not moving. Dying.”

  I was crying freely now. Annie’s face had completely stilled. It was the mask she always wore when the pain was too much.

  “I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to, but the doctor grabbed me, pulled me away, and he and his wife, they had risked their lives for us, they pushed us out the door. I grabbed your grandma, but a teenager, and your mother, who picked up Madeline’s violin, and we left.”

  “Oh, Granddad,” I said.

  He moaned, from the top of his soul. “My son died without us. He died without his family.” He wailed, long and hoarse, wretched. “He died alone. I am ashamed. I left him, left my son in his last minutes. I was not there. His father was not there.”

  “Granddad, please,” Annie begged. “You didn’t have a choice. He was in a coma, he was dying . . .”

  “If you hadn’t left, you all would have ended up in the camps. All of you, Momma, Grandma, you . . . Annie and I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Logically, I know this. It has never, it will never make it better. My son died without me holding him, talking to him, praying for him. As a father, I was not there.”

  We patted him, we soothed him. It did nothing to help him. Nothing could heal that pain. It is foolhardy to think it ever could.

  The hawk dove down to stab another mouse as the trees swayed and the leaves rustled, and Annie and I and Granddad were in France, in a ruthless, dangerous world.

  “We barely made the train,” he whispered. “I showed those bastards, those Nazis, our forged papers, but we were questioned, anyhow. They liked that, liked to scare people, liked to strut. They were criminals, brutal, conscienceless, merciless. But your mother, your sweet mother, in her blue coat and blue dress, she whipped out her momma’s violin and played one of the pieces she had made up herself. Even at that age, your mother loved to compose her own music. She had an ear . . .

  “She had them convinced that, indeed, we were going to a violin competition in Vienna, as I had told them. Those stupid men, monsters, all of them, they listened, and they believed us, even though the violin was far too big for her. They were too ignorant, too drunk on their own power, to know it.”

  “A girl, at a train station,” I whispered. “Playing a violin for Nazis after kissing her dead momma good-bye, her dead brother . . . how did she do that . . . how did she not fall apart . . .” But that was our momma. Indomitable. Brave. Headstrong. Talented. I sobbed, thinking of her, of all my momma had endured, from the time she was a tiny child.

  “There are three tiny dents, on the right side of your violin, Madeline,” Granddad said.

  I nodded. I knew of those dents.

  “After she played the piece, she swung her violin and, three times, it hit the train. It dented the violin. We smiled at the Nazis, your grandma and I, while I hid my hands in the pockets of my coat, which still had the blood from Madeline and my son on them, and your grandma held her coat tight over her dress, because her dress was soaked with Madeline’s and Ismael’s blood, from hugging them. Even the inside of the violin had blood in it—that’s the butterfly stain you see, Madeline.”

  So that was where the butterfly had come from. Blood from my family.

  “Within an hour of those bloody hugs, your mother was playing a song for Nazi officers to convince them we were a happy French family, not Jews trying to get out, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler. I had my Heil Hitler down. We were leaving for a violin competition, Heil Hitler. I had not even asked her to play.”

  “And you got on the train.”

  “We got on the train, your grandma wearing her sister’s wedding ring, posing as my wife, as our papers indicated. Your momma, as soon as we were settled in the train, went numb from shock. She had lost her mother and her brother and grandparents. They were all gone and she was on a train, leaving with nothing, going who knew where. We got off the train, within the hour, in case the Nazis were somehow following, then we were helped by a loose connection of people the doctor knew. We hid in barns and a church, abandoned buildings, but we were betrayed. The Nazis came for us and we had to defend ourselves once again; your mother saw everything. . . .”

  He stopped, his jaw tightened, and I remembered what Grandma had said about Granddad killing three people with a knife, how she had kicked one of them until he wasn’t moving.

  “We walked over the Pyrenees Mountains. We walked to Spain, then left Spain, after months in abject poverty, for New York. Damn near killed all of us. We tried to start over, but every step I took, I knew I was unworthy of God. Unworthy of speaking to Him, unworthy of any relationship with Him, so I told Him that I would do everything I could to help others, to atone for what I had done.”

  “But Granddad, God knows why you had to leave them.”

  He moaned again. “That is only one of my sins, child. There are more. I committed a heinous crime, heinous, but I cannot tell you now. Not now. Not today. This is enough.” His voice cracked, the tears streaming down that proud man’s face before his hand rose abruptly to his chest. “This is enough.”

  “Granddad! Are you all right?” The volume of Haydn’s Symphony no. 39 in G Minor rose about ten notches.

  His face went pale, white and silky, he swayed, his eyes lost focus, and he would have tumbled forward had we not caught him.

  Annie is trained in CPR, as am I.

  We used our training and ignored the screaming in our heads.

  24

  Sherwinn’s, Pauly’s, and Gavin’s trial opened to a jammed courtroom. Everyone we knew was there, plus a number of journalists. Annie and I were . . . well, how does one accurately describe it? We were humiliated, scared to death, deeply traumatized, and numb. Our emotions soared and dipped.

  I won’t detail the whole trial, or the part when the jury was handed the graphic photos of Annie and me, or the testimony of the police officers and the doctors at the hospital, or how the three monsters refused to be put on the witness stand, but I will share Annie’s testimony.

  Annie hadn’t spoken for months. She would whimper, cry, and climb
so hard back into herself we couldn’t find or reach her, her words at the bottom of an emotional black hole. The defense insisted that Annie take the stand, even though they knew all about her debilitated emotional state.

  “Your honor,” our attorney, Arthur Benning, protested, tall and rigid, “Annie O’Shea no longer speaks. Defense council knows this, knows she can’t be put on the stand. It’s a detriment to her fragile health. This will set her back—”

  “Your honor,” Bing Hicks, one of the three defense attorneys argued, a sneer on his fleshy face, “my clients have the right to hear their accuser. The jury needs to hear her, to ascertain her truthfulness and honesty, to make sure she’s not making this up. . . .”

  The attorneys went back and forth heatedly arguing, the crowd getting increasingly noisy, but Annie ended up on that stand.

  My momma stood up seething, shaking with rage. “Your honor, please, you can’t do this to Annie—”

  The judge, a man with thick curly hair and a stolid expression named Marvin Bonds, hit that gavel with a smack; the defense attorneys were up and preening and protesting; Arthur and a couple of his assistant attorneys stood and added to the screaming, too; the gavel smacked again and again, with the judge yelling at my momma to “Sit down this minute, Marie Elise”; and we lost. Annie had to testify.

  “What’s your name?” Fleshy-face Bing Hicks asked Annie after she sat in the witness chair.

  Annie didn’t speak, only rocked back and forth, her arms wrapped around her pink sweater, her pink bow holding back her curls. The red seemed to glow brighter that day. I figured it was my dad, somewhere near.

  “Do you understand what’s going on here today?”

  Her eyes had that lost, I am gone look to them. Not here.

  “Who are these men?”

  Annie made a muffled sound, like a crushed bird, but didn’t look at them.

  “Did they do anything to you?”

  Annie shook, made an odd sound with her mouth.

  I could hear the people in court whispering, shifting. They were getting angry.

  “Did they ever touch you?”

  Annie started humming Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. I played it for her at night before she went to sleep because it seemed to soothe her.

  “Are you lying, Annie?”

  My momma about choked on her rage. Granddad put an arm around her and held her down as she tried to stand up. A bunch of people in the courtroom protested.

  “Are you lying, Annie?” Hicks asked again.

  My granddad made a growling sound in his throat.

  “You can’t lie, do you understand, Annie? You can’t. You could go to jail for lying.” Hicks tapped a pen on his palm. “To jail.”

  Our attorneys objected, objected again. “Badgering . . . intimidating . . . she’s a child . . .”

  The people in court were barely controlled. Shell Dee’s husband was so mad, he yelled out, “There’s a liar in here, and it’s not Annie, you superprick,” and was pulled up and out the door by the bailiffs. Trudy Jo’s husband yelled, “You should be in jail, not Annie!” and was yanked out next.

  My grandma gripped my hand so hard I thought it would break, then she swore in German, her preferred language for swearing.

  Hicks smirked. “Don’t be a liar, Annie.”

  That did it.

  Boom. Chaos in the courtroom. Grandma, Granddad, Momma, our friends, all were up and on their feet, a mass of outraged voices banging together, the gavel coming down again and again. The judge yelled at Hicks that he had “no more room at all. I will throw you out.”

  And Annie? She didn’t say a word, not a word. She rocked and hummed in her pink sweater.

  Finally, when things settled after the bailiffs and other policemen filled the aisles and yelled threats to evict everyone else, Hicks was at it again, facing the jury, pompous, arrogant. “Annie O’Shea won’t talk because she doesn’t want to say anything bad against my clients. This is a wild young woman, out of control, a rebel. Don’t be fooled by her age. She participated fully in what happened here.”

  My momma yelled, her voice, hoarse, teary, “That is a lie. A lie!”

  The gavel came down, etc., etc.

  “She liked what happened,” Hicks went on. “She liked the photos, she liked the attention. She encouraged it. Encouraged it. Who doesn’t like their photos taken? She wanted to be famous !”

  We had not liked the attention. We had not encouraged it. We did not want to be famous.

  My granddad said, in French, “Dammit, I will kill him or have him killed.”

  Grandma said, in German, “I will stab his heart, twist the knife. . . .”

  “Annie O’Shea is involved with all of these men.”

  Fleshy Face’s next words could not be heard over the loud denials in the courtroom. One man yelled, “She isn’t involved with anyone, but I’d like your face involved with my fist.” That man, the assistant principal at my school, was led out, and the gavel pounded everyone into submission.

  “These girls get caught,” Fleshy Face pontificated, arms outstretched, “and lo and behold! They say they’re victims. Victims !”

  The judge yelled when chaos threatened again. “Sit down, shut up, or you’ll be evicted from this courtroom, all of you! Order. Order!”

  My grandma muttered, “You bastard, you utter, contemptible bastard.”

  “These girls aren’t victims!” Hicks shouted. “They’re part of it. They were going to be paid a huge amount of money. They agreed to it for the money. They sold their bodies, for the money. Willingly! By choice!”

  Next to me my momma was being physically restrained by Granddad and one of the assistant attorneys, who had turned around and grabbed my momma before she could leap at Hicks’s throat.

  “I will not have my clients, innocent men, going to jail for this. Annie O’Shea won’t talk because she feels guilty that my clients are here in the first place. She and Madeline weren’t hurt, they liked it!”

  I burst into tears. We had not liked it.

  That’s when Annie started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, her eyes suddenly with us, as if she’d woken up in the middle of the crime itself, in the middle of hell, and she had decided to fight. She opened her mouth and a scream came out, let loose, a wail from the center of her heart, the same place where her raw, open, seeping pain lived.

  My momma and I were both restrained from going to her, me by Trudy Jo and Grandma, my momma by Granddad and Arthur.

  I shouted, “It’s okay, Annie, I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  My momma yelled, her voice throbbing, primal, “Stop it, stop it! Stop hurting her! Stop it! Let me go to her, let me go to my daughter!”

  It took all they had to restrain both of us as I kicked and struggled, but to this day, I know our attorneys and my grandparents did right by us. They wanted the jury to see Annie, see her reaction.

  Annie continued to scream, then she stood up, her body rattling from head to foot, and pointed to those three evil, demented men, tears racing down her face as if her eyes were leaking. She pointed her finger right at them, and in that tense, quaking courtroom, she spoke for the first time in months. “They made me! They forced us! They hit us! They took off our clothes! They ripped my sweater! They ripped our pink dresses! They hurt us! I’m not lying!”

  A communal roar of disgust rose up.

  “I didn’t like it! We didn’t like it! We didn’t want to be famous ! But they said they’d kill Momma if we told! He killed Mickey! He killed Teresa! They took pictures! I said no no nooooo, and Madeline pushed them away. We tried to fight, but they’re bigger, they hit us! They said bad things, mean things to us. I said no no no! All the time, we had to go to Pauly’s house. I hate it there! It’s cold, it’s bad. They’re bad and they made us do bad things.”

  As soon as Annie had joined us, though, she was gone again, I saw it. Her eyes were back at the shack, that ugly, violent place, as if a new movie had replaced the old. “Do
n’t kill Momma,” she rasped, staring straight at Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin. “No, I’ll do it, I’ll do it, say you won’t hurt Momma! Don’t throw her at the wall, Pauly! You don’t kick her, stop kicking her! She’s bleeding! I’ll help you, Madeline! Not that again! It hurts! Get off of me! No camera, no cameras.... I won’t smile. I don’t want to be on my back. Please let us go home!”

  We all froze then, struck, shocked, horrified, as Annie went on and on, gone but with us, lost but there. “Is she dead?” Annie called. “Madeline, Madeline! Is she dead? Wake up! She’s not moving! You killed her! Is she breathing? I don’t think she’s breathing! Granddad, help me!”

  The defense attorneys tried to get her to stop. “Your honor, she’s not answering the questions . . . your honor, she’s insane . . . your honor, this is prejudicing the jury . . . your honor,” but Annie screamed over them, and the judge pounded his gavel and told the defense attorneys to “Sit down and shut up!” and still Annie screamed.

  The courtroom was in a full-throttle uproar.

  My momma hit Arthur so hard he let go of her and she straddled the bench to run to Annie, but was caught by a bailiff, her heels flying in the air.

  “Let go of me! Get off of me, Sherwinn!” Annie sobbed. “I don’t like that cage. I don’t want to go in it again. I don’t want to wear that! No, I won’t! No, don’t touch me!”

  Grandma was done. She was in the aisle in a flash and called out in French, “I am coming. I am here, my darling,” but was caught by a policeman.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” Annie sobbed, her voice pitched high over the wreckage of that courtroom. “No, I don’t want to do that again. No cameras! Stop! Don’t you hurt Momma!”

  Granddad was done, too. He swung himself over the bench, but his attorneys, a bailiff, and a friend held him back. “I’m coming, Annie! I’m coming!”