The Truth About Us

by Tia Souders

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The scraping of silverware against the porcelain plates grated Abby’s nerves. She swallowed a bite of food, then grit her teeth. Like she needed one more thing to set her on edge.

  Though her parents made small talk throughout the meal, supper dragged on—seconds turning to minutes, minutes seeming to turn into hours. Abby glanced over at the clock on the dining room wall, noting only twenty minutes had passed. She wondered if that was an appropriate amount of time to endure the painstaking process of eating despite the churning in her stomach and pretending everything was okay.

  Her gaze flicked from her plate to her grandfather. He ate, his expression placid, unreadable. Everything had changed in the last twenty-four hours, starting with their conversation last night and ending with her discovery this morning.

  The same crinkles webbed around his blue eyes. The same deep parentheses ensconced his mouth. Tufts of downy white hair still ringed his balding head, and he still carried himself with confidence and the contentedness of the aged, having lived a lifetime and many storms. Only, Abby knew he was the storm and not the ships tossed at sea. He hadn’t survived anything. He had been the thing to survive. And many didn’t. Not the countless Jews he killed, Yoel, Lawson, or McBride.

  Abby took another bite of chicken and chewed, trying to swallow it over the growing lump. Boring a hole through the side of her grandfather’s face, she wondered what would happen in the next twenty-four hours—how things would play out.

  “Abby, is everything okay?” her mother asked.

  With a start, Abby shifted her gaze. “Yeah. Just tired.” She flashed her a half-hearted smile, then returned to her food before deciding it was a lost cause and excusing herself from the table for the evening.

  She made her way up to her bedroom on wooden legs, like a person headed to the guillotine. The clock was ticking. Any time now, Levine could arrive with his warrant.

  Settling down on her bed, exhaustion blanketed her. Stress sunk into every pore of her body until she blinked her sleepy eyes up at the ceiling.

  As her thoughts slowed with the lull of oncoming sleep, they drifted to Kaden. She pictured his pained expression. She felt the warmth of his touch on her arm, and his words reverberated in her head, echoing in her cavernous thoughts.

  You taught me it’s okay to disagree with my dad and that it’s okay to have a life. You taught me that we need to take risks and make our own choices. And even if we screw up, that’s okay, too. You taught me to live for myself instead of everyone else around me. You showed me what it’s like to put myself out there, even if it’s scary, to open my heart to someone. You taught me that love is worth fighting for. And maybe we’re young and I sound foolish because we’ve only gotten to know each other these last couple weeks, but it’s how I feel. It’s my truth.

  Her eyes closed, her last thought a wish before sleep—for another way out of this. One in which justice was served, but her family was spared. One where her grandfather suddenly became the hero instead of the villain. One in which Kaden wouldn’t discover the truth, and she could go on living her life as is. One where Mr. Oliver approved of her.

  She wished for a perfect world in which her family wouldn’t be torn in two, and she and Kaden could be together. But those wishes were merely dreams.

  MORE STRESS ADDED TO her life was not something Abby needed. Of all the days to sleep in and be late, it had to be this morning. Never had she wanted to be out of the house more. Since Levine and his men hadn’t come busting into their house in the middle of the night, she assumed it would be any minute now.

  She tried to ignore the sinking in the pit of her stomach and the way her lungs constricted with the thought she’d probably never share another meal with her grandfather. Their games of chess were over. No more summer swims in the pool or late-night barbecues. Worse than having no new memories to share was the knowledge the old ones were sullied. So, she focused on the anger inside of her, preferring it to the pain.

  She bounded down the stairs, her dark hair hastily thrown back into a ponytail, make-up free, wearing a pair of jean shorts and a tank. But the moment her sandaled feet hit the landing, she knew it wouldn’t be a normal morning.

  Her mother stood in front of the door, her hip cocked, arms folded tightly over her chest with a face twisted in anger. Abby bit her lip and continued to the door in the hopes she’d somehow slip past and save the lecture for another day. After all, as her mother would soon see, there were worse things than being late for school. Bigger issues to deal with.

  Her mother guffawed. “No explanation for why you’re just now leaving for school?”

  No such luck.

  Abby pivoted. Knowing she was on thin ice already for refusing to explain the letter her mother found from GG, then fleeing her room to escape an explanation. She didn’t have much ground for an argument.

  “I’m sorry. I slept in. My alarm didn’t go off,” she said, hoping the simple, yet truthful, explanation was enough.

  “I got a phone call from the school. Apparently, you’ve missed quite a few days lately. Days I wasn’t aware of, including yesterday. I was also informed several of your teachers have expressed their concern over missing homework, flunked tests, and dropping grades. What in the world is going on?”

  At Abby’s lack of response, her mother’s eyes hardened, and her spine turned to steel as the vein in her forehead pulsed with her anger. “I want an answer. A real one.”

  Why now? Why, of all days, did she have to deal with this now?

  “I’m sorry. I’ve had a hard time, okay? I don’t know what else to say.” Abby hugged her arms to her chest at the same time she spotted her grandfather appear at the end of the hallway. He shuffled closer to them, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he came out of concern for her or self-preservation. Like she might reveal to her mother all she knew.

  The thought twisted her stomach, and for a moment, Abby wanted to say something, to shift the blame from herself to him, but she glanced back to her mother and the worry lines creasing her milky skin. The fear flickering in her mother’s gaze stopped her. Not now. Especially when he would be held accountable soon enough.

  The front door opened, interrupting them. Her father flung it shut, hands on hips, lifting the sides of his suit coat as he stood in the doorway with narrowed eyes. “Your mother called me. I had to leave work—”

  A thunderous knock on the door interrupted him.

  “Who...” Her father spun around, his hand on the knob as knowing washed over Abby.

  Oh, no.

  “For goodness sakes!” her mother yelled, throwing her arms up in exasperation. “Who is it now?” She stopped speaking the second her father opened the door to reveal several uniformed officers, along with a cluster of men dressed in suits. One of them Abby recognized as Kenneth Levine.

  “Ma’am.” The officer tipped his hat, his gaze zeroing in on her grandfather behind them. “We’re here for the man who goes by Yoel Gutman.”

  Her mother stood motionless, mouth agape before stuttering her assent and motioning them in. Time blurred as an officer stepped inside and turned her grandfather around as he cuffed his wrists. Next to him, another officer read his Miranda Rights, while her mother demanded an explanation.

  “What is going on?” her mother yelled. “Someone please tell me.”

  “I’m calling our lawyer!” Her father pulled out his phone, his voice edged with panic.

  All the noise drifted to the background as her grandfather’s eyes locked with hers. Abby barely heard Levine’s explanation. The officer reading her grandfather’s rights buzzed, a low hum in the background. All she could do was stare as everything else faded away. Anger and accusation mingling with sorrow, snapped between them like an electric current. The metal of the cuffs cut into his flesh, pressing into his brittle bones as they began to haul him toward the door while her mother sobbed.

  In those moments, Abby saw the death of a man she had known. Her c
hildhood flickered like a faulty lightbulb before her eyes: him pushing her on the old tree swing, afternoons spent under the hot sun in the pool, GG and him taking her out for ice cream, presents on Christmas morning.

  Like most things in life, the reality of this moment was far worse than the one she had envisioned in her mind. Watching nearly broke her, but she straightened her shoulders and steeled her resolve.

  Words she stored for safe-keeping flowed from her heart. Bravery is a choice, Miss Bridges. It’s not inherent or given. It’s a choice we make. And real courage is tested not by those who simply make hard choices but by those who stand by them. Even in the face of fear and recrimination.

  Her grandfather did this to them. The consequences of his choices had finally caught up with him. She’d like to say she was powerless to stop it, but she knew otherwise. Because she made a choice, too. The right one. She only wished that knowledge made the fallout easier.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Three weeks. The amount of time it took to change a life.

  One month. The amount of time it took to strip a Nazi war criminal of his citizenship and set the ball rolling on extradition.

  Abby waited inside the dingy confines of a room inside the federal prison where she waited to see her grandfather for the first time since his arrest, courtesy of Mr. Levine. In the three-hour drive there, she had a lot of time to think. It seemed time for contemplation was in abundance lately. Hours upon hours, with her thoughts spinning ‘round-and-‘round.

  She stood, staring at the metal bars as she waited. Her grandfather was officially no longer a U.S. citizen. She wondered how it felt for him even as the war inside her continued to rage, torn between not caring and being unable to help herself.

  A part of her still had trouble comprehending it all. There were moments where she’d wake in the morning or get lost in a movie and all of it vanished from her mind as though it never happened in the first place. Then, she’d blink and all the events of the last month and a half would start trickling back, seeming like it happened ages ago rather than only a few weeks. And then it would hit her—the reality of it all. GG was gone and so was her grandfather. Not only was he gone, but life looked very different than it had prior to her grandmother’s death.

  After her grandfather’s arrest, a media storm ensued. Several news stations camped outside their home, hoping to interview the family of the infamous “Butcher of Auschwitz”. Her mother was let go from the law firm she practiced at, and her father’s firm had suggested he take a break until the “storm died down”.

  Needing a soft place to fall, for the first time Abby could remember, they took an extended vacation. The school was kind enough to allow Abby to finish her coursework remotely, either that or they didn’t want the media attention to trickle on to school grounds. Her mother started taking her to a church on Sunday. Maybe it was the comfort of a community she sought, ones who weren’t supposed to judge them. Or maybe she needed something to believe in, something to give her faith since all hers had been torn to shreds. Whatever the reason, it soothed Abby.

  Despite the havoc in their lives, in many ways, shedding their family secret brought them even closer together while expanding their social circle. Among the headlines, Abby’s favorite had been the article giving Mr. Oliver credit for questioning Lawson’s death and spurring an investigation which led to her grandfather’s arrest. Though thinly veiled, the lie worked.

  The telltale sound of footsteps approached, bringing her back to the present. Her pulse twitched at the clanging of something metal as she willed herself to remain calm.

  The guard came into view first. He opened the door to the room while two officers held onto her grandfather’s arms, guiding him inside, then motioning for him to take a seat in the empty chair across from her.

  Chains tethered his legs while cuffs adorned his wrists. They made no move to remove them.

  “You have ten minutes,” the guard said. Turning to Abby, he added, “We’ll be just outside.” He motioned to a large glass window overlooking the room, and Abby nodded.

  She focused on her grandfather and swallowed. A cut on the corner of his lip drew her eye, and she wondered how he got it. Did someone hurt him? Did he cause trouble?

  Her stomach clenched as his hollow eyes blinked over at her in their assessment. Sitting across from him, she in shorts and a ratty t-shirt, and he in his prison-ordered uniform spoke of some twilight universe she had been unprepared for. Apparently, there was no set time for healing and acceptance. No timeframe for the human brain to ascertain reality because as she sat there, taking him in, Abby had trouble wrapping her head around what she saw, despite her knowledge of all that he had done.

  All the things she had wanted to say escaped her.

  “I had hoped your mother would come.” His voice rasped in the silence.

  “She’s not ready.”

  “But you were?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She wanted to say she wasn’t sure if she’d ever be ready, but she was there, wasn’t she?

  “I’m surprised you came at all.” His voice echoed off the walls. “But I’m glad you did.” He smiled, but for reasons she couldn’t explain, the gesture ignited something inside her.

  “I came for me, Grandpa. Not you. Me.” Abby looked away, swallowing over the lump in her throat. “Mom sat, staring at nothing for two weeks. She barely moved, not even to eat and sleep. Did you know she was fired? Because of all of this? Finally, she’s doing better.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Abby raised her hand. “Don’t. Just don’t try to act like you care because if you did, none of this would be happening. You can’t sit there and act like the loving grandfather now.”

  “But I do love you.”

  Abby shook her head. “It was all a lie. Our lives, everything. It was all built on a pocket of air. None of it was ever real, and this entire time all of us were just waiting for the bubble to burst, the pocket to collapse. Only, we didn’t know it, which was the worst part.”

  Her grandfather turned his gaze away from her, staring at the far wall, his mind in a distant place. “What do you want me to say?” he asked, his tone dead.

  “Nothing.”

  She swallowed. After a beat, she asked, “Would you have killed me? If you had known I was going to turn you in, would you have stopped me?”

  His blue eyes turned to ice. “I would never.”

  “It’s not that farfetched. It seems you shut everyone else up. It would’ve been easy.” Abby shrugged. “A small car accident. Loosening my brakes is all it would’ve taken.”

  “You can hate me. You can say what you want. Call me a monster, but you’re family. I did it for all of you. I couldn’t bear for you to find out. For you to look at me the way you’re looking at me now. Like you don’t know me. Like I hadn’t just devoted most of my life to loving all of you, to taking care of you—"

  “But some things can’t be erased, Grandpa. I shouldn’t have to explain that to you. It’s like talking to a child.”

  “Maybe not. But I just thought...” His voice cracked. “I thought, what’s two more deaths when tens of thousands already rest on my shoulders?”

  Abby’s mind reeled. She stared at him with wide eyes. Maybe if she looked hard enough, the person in front of her might change because she couldn’t reconcile this man and the one she grew up with were one and the same.

  “Do you even hear yourself? What’s one more death? It’s a life. Let me tell you. Lawson had a daughter. She’s lonely. She spends her days rescuing cats because it’s the only way she can cope. McBride, I don’t know much about him, but he had a wife somewhere. And, yeah, maybe he wasn’t the best husband, but he was still a person who deserved the chance to either fess up to his mistakes or reconcile. They had lives, people who loved them.”

  No longer able to look at him, she shifted her gaze to a crack in the cement floor.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

&
nbsp; “I don’t want anything,” she said. “I needed to see you one last time. To...I don’t know why.”

  Closure was such a tricky concept. Such a trivial word for such an insurmountable task, unable to adequately describe her situation. She had exchanged the only words she needed to with him prior to his arrest. Regardless, things felt unfinished. Like there was something left unsaid.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said.

  The words sunk to her stomach like a rock, and she knew. This is why she came. Because even though she had done the right thing, she somehow needed his absolution. Because the little girl inside her still loved him. No matter how much time passed or how many days she spent contemplating the heinous things he did in his lifetime, she couldn’t erase eighteen years of loving the grandfather who had been there for her.

  Something lifted from her shoulders as she recognized her grandfather’s words for what they were. A peace offering. Despite the monster inside, he was human. He loved. And he wanted to offer Abby something she hadn’t even known she needed.

  Abby’s gaze slid to her grandfather, and her eyes filled. She nodded, unable to say anything else, unsure if there was even anything left. She was empty. Drained.

  She stood and reached out to him, grasping his fingers one last time, then let go. “Bye, Grandpa.”

  “Go to the house.” His voice echoed off the walls, and she turned, curious and afraid of what he might say. “In my hiding place, in the floor in the den. You know the one?”

  Abby nodded. As a kid, her grandfather hid things there: the pipe he hadn’t wanted her to know he smoked, an antique pocket watch, valuable collectors’ coins, cash, and even some of GG’s more expensive jewelry. What she hadn’t known until years later was that her grandfather had discovered she knew where it was and took to storing little gifts for Abby there, knowing she would check on her visits. A bag of candy, a stuffed toy, special crayons, or coloring books.