The Things We Cherished

by Pam Jenoff

  I should walk away, she thought. Whatever is going on between them is none of my business. But her curiosity grew: What was it that was still such a bone of contention between them? Unable to resist, she leaned in closer.

  “Leave her alone, Brian,” she heard Jack warn in a terse voice.

  They’re talking about me, Charlotte realized. She slipped back farther behind the doorframe.

  “Why do you care, anyway?” Brian demanded. “Is there something going on between the two of you?”

  “Not at all,” Jack replied quickly, as though the question was a ridiculous one. Charlotte stifled a gasp, stung by his dismissive tone. “I’m just saying that you shouldn’t be toying with her like this. Dragging her into the case and then—”

  Brian’s voice rose in protest. “I’m not—”

  Charlotte stepped back, her eyes burning. It was more than just Jack’s denial of what had taken place between them that hurt; she thought that they had become equals these past few days, that they worked well together. But to hear him now, he thought her unworthy of his brother’s time—or his own.

  Jack spoke again, “And now, with Danielle pregnant …”

  A rock slammed into Charlotte’s chest. Though she’d known about Brian and Danielle’s marriage for nearly a decade, the idea of a child legitimizing it all was more than she could bear. She spun and sped back down the corridor of the train, banging her elbow against a half-open compartment door but scarcely feeling the throb. She ran as fast as she could, dodging passengers and suitcases, as though she were outdoors back home and burning off some steam after a particularly grueling day in court by running the eight-mile loop on Kelly Drive.

  A minute later Charlotte reached the café at the end of the moving train once more. She slowed, walking to the cracked window at the back of the car, watching the hills retreat. She stood motionless for several minutes, still breathing hard. What am I doing here, she wondered? Suddenly the full magnitude of it all slammed down upon her. Europe, Brian, these were feelings she had tucked away nearly a decade ago, and the pain, while still there, had at least scarred over, muted by time. How could she have been so foolish as to let them in again?

  The tears flowed now in a way they hadn’t for years, maybe not ever, even when Winnie died and she stood at the edge of the desolate cemetery, realizing for the first time how alone in the world she really was. Then she had gone into a functioning mode: there was the house to sell, a job to be secured. Afterward, when things had settled down and there might have been time to mourn, she had simply not chosen to reopen that door and let the feelings in. They were irrelevant, like a textbook for a course she had taken and would never use again. But now the grief burst forth and she wept openly, not caring who heard, her sobs echoing around the empty café car.

  What was it about the Warringtons anyway? The fabric of her life was rich, filled with people and places and experiences. Yet she had let Brian—and now Jack—get under her skin, affect her in ways that no one else quite had.

  “Hey.” Charlotte spun around. Brian stood behind her, juggling two cups of coffee. She stared at him, as if she had forgotten for a moment that he was here or had not expected him to find her on the train. He held one out to her wordlessly and she took it, sinking to the seat at one of the tables he indicated. He had not, she realized gratefully, asked if she was all right. Had he seen her outside the compartment when she fled?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, fumbling with a sudden need to explain. “It’s just that—”

  “Being here, after so many years,” he finished for her. “It brings back a lot of memories, doesn’t it?”

  She hesitated, caught off guard by his seeming comprehension. This was the man she had forgotten about, stripped of all his bravado, empathetic and real. This was Brian at his most dangerous. “I overheard you and Jack talking,” she confessed. She studied his expression, but if he was angry he gave no indication. “Congratulations, about the baby and all.”

  His face brightened. “Thanks so much. I’m thrilled.”

  She noticed he did not say we. “Danielle must be excited, too.”

  A flicker of something passed over his face. “She is, I think. It’s just the timing.”

  Charlotte nodded, understanding. Danielle, already an income partner, would be up for the more senior equity partnership at her firm about now and maternity leave, time away from client development and billable hours, would surely hurt her chances. “I’m not sure she’s ready,” Brian added, “to put someone else first.”

  From anyone else, Charlotte reflected, the confession about his wife’s lack of maternal instinct, made to an ex-girlfriend, might have sounded disloyal. But Brian’s tone was nonjudgmental, matter of fact. He was not conveying regret, or suggesting that he would have preferred Charlotte in his wife’s place, but rather reporting on the status quo as it now existed. “It’s a lifestyle change for sure,” she agreed. “Do you know what you’re having?”

  “Not yet, and I’m not sure we’re finding out. Danielle wants to know so we can decorate the nursery. But I think it’s one of life’s true mysteries. I wouldn’t mind a daughter, though.”

  Charlotte looked at him, surprised. She would have thought for sure that Brian wanted a son, for the football games and such. Suddenly she was aware of the strangeness of the conversation, not just the fact that she was sitting here with her ex-boyfriend, discussing his child with the woman he left her for—but the fact that it didn’t seem to bother her that much at all. Her mind reeled back to the earlier exchange she’d heard between the two brothers. It wasn’t the idea of Danielle and Brian having a child together that had upset her so much as the fact that Jack seemed to regard her as irrelevant.

  The sky had grown dark; thick clouds clustered around the mountaintops. “Did you want to go back?” she asked. “I mean, it was good of you to come after me, but I’m sure you have work to do.”

  “Nah,” he said, smiling. “Jack’s probably sleeping by now. There’s no way to work through that kind of snoring anyway.”

  She faltered, unsure how to react to the comment, which was amusing and true, but at the same time a bit too intimate for comfort. You actually snore far worse than he does, she wanted to tell Brian. Jack’s was more of a gentle whistling, the wind through a narrow passageway, not the freight train his brother seemed to channel.

  “I’m sorry,” Brian said abruptly. Something hard slammed into her stomach. It was the first time she heard Brian apologize for anything. Maybe if he had said as much a decade ago, things would have been easier to take.

  “For what?” she asked, wondering if she shouldn’t ask, if her assumptions about his apology were better than anything he might actually have to say.

  “About the way things ended between us back then.” No, he wasn’t sorry for what he had done, or for hurting her so. It was the messiness he regretted, the inconvenience of leaving behind a situation he couldn’t feel good about. “That we couldn’t have been like you and Jack are now,” he added.

  Charlotte’s heart seemed to stop. Did Brian know what had transpired between her and his brother? Had Jack said something to him? “Friends, I mean,” he added.

  She exhaled silently, relieved. Brian was envious that his brother had gotten close to Charlotte in a way that he could not, but he didn’t suspect more. Not that it mattered anyway. It was clear from the comments she had overheard that Jack did not regard her as significant.

  We couldn’t have stayed friends, she thought, because we never really were in the first place. “Friends,” she said finally. “I don’t know if Jack would agree.”

  “My brother’s a hard guy to get to know,” Brian observed. “He’s just so melancholy.”

  Charlotte was surprised by the remark. Years earlier, she might have agreed. But now she saw Jack as something else, not sad, but pensive and deep where Brian was not. The comment about his brother seemed unfair, and she wanted to remind him of the admonition they’d received in law scho
ol—personal attacks on your opponent undermine your credibility with the court.

  They stared out the window, neither speaking, as the snowcapped peaks of the Obersalzberg unfolded before them in the mist and raindrops began to fall. “Do you remember the Jefferson at night?” Brian asked, pulling her from her thoughts.

  Charlotte nodded, the memory instantly coming into focus. It was a trip they had taken to Washington in late winter, an attempt on his part to take her mind off her dying mother, back when he still cared, before things went bad. Late at night after the Georgetown bars they’d caroused had closed, he roused her from half sleep, coaxing her from their hotel room. “Where are we going?” she asked as he led her through the frigid night air, around Washington Harbor and the Kennedy Center toward the Mall, their breath rising in puffs above them. The streets were eerily silent and she worried that perhaps it was not safe to be out walking. They climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, staring up in awed silence. Then they’d pressed on. She had no idea how much time had passed, and if the long walk seemed tiring she never noticed as they strolled along the reflecting pool to the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin, which seemed illuminated under the pale gray night sky.

  The memory, one she had not allowed herself for years, was as vivid as though it had just happened. But why was he bringing it up now?

  “That’s what it reminds me of here,” he said. She opened her mouth to tell him that the bustling Washington metropolis, even at night, was the furthest thing from this alpine haven. Then she decided against it. Brian was, in his own clumsy way, trying to connect the two moments of solitude and retreat. And this was, she realized, the closest they might ever come to friendship. She wasn’t going to ruin it by correcting him.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it, to imagine the war here,” she offered instead. The snow-capped mountains looked tranquil, as though undisturbed for a thousand years. It was almost impossible to picture the tanks and other machinery of war that had rolled through here, causing such unbearable suffering just sixty-odd years ago.

  Jack appeared in the door of the café car then. “We’re almost there,” he announced abruptly. Charlotte peered out the window, unable to discern any signs of civilization among the unbroken hills. But it was less than a few hundred kilometers between the two cities and he spoke with the confidence of a man who had traveled this route many times. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a church steeple came into view, nestled between two of the peaks, and then the mountains broke to reveal a sea of spires and red rooftops below.

  Charlotte turned away. She could still feel the puffy redness around her eyes, giving away the fact that she had been crying. Jack did not seem to notice, but looked from the window to his watch, then back again with impatience. As she remembered his tone when he disavowed to Brian that there was anything between them, her anger grew. The man she had glimpsed last night at the hotel, gentle and open, was nowhere to be found. Had it been an act or had something changed afterward?

  A few minutes later when the train had screeched to a halt, they stepped off onto the platform and made their way to the front of the station. The e-mail from Alicja, she remembered suddenly. She felt as though she should have said something earlier, but it had not felt right to tell Brian without Jack. “Um, wait a second,” she said. They turned and looked at her expectantly. “I have some news. After Roger told us about Magda, I did some checking with one of my contacts from years ago when I was researching in Poland.” She glanced up at Jack’s face to see if he was angry that she’d done this without telling him. But his expression remained impassive. “I just received an e-mail: it turns out that Magda died in the camps in 1943.”

  “That’s pretty much what we expected, isn’t it?” Brian asked. “That Magda died, I mean.”

  She nodded. “But knowing—well, I think that’s going to be harder on Roger than anything.”

  “If we tell him,” Jack interjected.

  “If?” she repeated in disbelief. “How can we not?”

  “I’m just saying that the timing isn’t great. Maybe we wait.” She opened her mouth to protest. Wasn’t knowing always better? But he raised his hand. “We can argue about that on the way back. Right now, we need to get to the clock shop.”

  Outside the storm had stopped, leaving behind small puddles at the curb. They navigated around the bike racks and a short queue of waiting taxis, walked in the direction of the city center without speaking. As they reached the heart of the baroque Old Town, a light rain began to fall once more. Brian produced an umbrella and opened it over her.

  They paused for a moment near the Salzburger Dom, huddling in the shadow of the cathedral as Jack consulted a map, then walked to a nearby shop to ask directions. Charlotte gazed from the now-vacant outdoor cafés up to the Hohensalzburg Castle, a massive fortress sitting on a hilltop overlooking the town. On her few earlier visits, she had always been indifferent to Salzburg. It seemed, like the rest of Austria, too perfect, a movie-set idea of what Europe was supposed to look like. And the pristine, untroubled environs gave no hint of the barbarism that had taken place there just over half a century ago.

  She looked back down again. Across the street she saw Jack, watching her through the shop window. She expected him to once again look away, but he caught her gaze, held it. A shiver passed through her. In that moment, she knew that the feelings were not hers alone. But then she remembered his comments about her to Brian on the train. How could she reconcile the man who seemed so dismissive when discussing her with his brother with the one who gazed at her with such longing now?

  Jack returned a moment later and led them wordlessly from the square. They turned off the main thoroughfare into a narrow cobblestone alley. “This should be it,” he said, stopping in front of a window cluttered with cheaply made cuckoo clocks.

  An unseen bell jangled faintly as they opened the door. The shop was equally unimpressive inside. Rows of nearly identical cuckoo clocks intended for the tourists mingled indiscriminately with porcelain figurines clad in traditional Austrian garb. On the wall a faded poster advertised the Sound of Music tour in English. The shop was covered with a fine coat of dust, Charlotte noticed, as though nothing had been disturbed—or sold—in years. How could one possibly make a living with a business such as this?

  She looked up, exchanging uncertain glances with Jack. But Brian pressed forward, undeterred. “Hello,” he called loudly at the counter, his American bluster a cliché. Charlotte cringed.

  From a doorway behind the counter, a man appeared. Wizened and bald, he had to be close to ninety. Almost the same age as Roger, Charlotte calculated, though the man looked twenty years older than their client. He blinked, as though surprised to actually have visitors in the store. “Can I help you?” His English, while broken, was comprehensible, a baseline knowledge of the language that she guessed was necessitated by his tourist clientele.

  “We’re here about a clock,” Brian announced abruptly.

  “Of course. If you don’t see anything you like here on the floor, I have some lovely larger cuckoos I can show you.”

  “Excuse me,” Jack said, stepping forward. “I’m afraid we may have misspoken.” Even without looking, Charlotte could feel the daggers Brian was shooting at his brother, furious at being corrected. She bit her lip, praying he would not say anything to interrupt what Jack was trying to do. “We’re looking for a very specific clock. Are you Herr Beamer?” Charlotte did not recall Roger giving them the clockmaker’s name, but the man nodded slightly. “We were sent by Roger Dykmans.”

  The clockmaker hesitated, a strange look crossing his face. Clearly he had heard of Roger, but how much did he know, or care, about the case? It would have been impossible to avoid unless one had no source of news, no contact with the outside world. “You know Herr Dykmans?” Jack prompted.

  The clockmaker did not answer but led them with a gesture through a second doorway at the back of the shop. Suddenly, it was as if they were transported to another worl
d, a century earlier perhaps, far removed from the bustle of the touristy thoroughfare. It was a workshop, simply lit, the smell of sawdust and turpentine thick in the air. Clocks of every size and description covered the walls, the workbench, and the counter, in various states of composition and repair. From all around came the ticking of the endlessly moving timepieces.

  The man cleared a space on one of the benches and indicated that it was for Charlotte. She started to sit down, then leapt up again, suppressing a yelp. There on the bench lay a dead bird, stiff and motionless. The man reached down and picked it up. It was then that she noticed it was not dead but fake, as he returned it to its place inside one of the clocks on the table. It had only looked real.

  She perched awkwardly on the edge of the bench, scanning the room. There were clocks of every shape and size, but none resembled the one in the photo. “So about Herr Dykmans,” she tried again.

  The old man wrinkled his brow. “I’ve never met Herr Dykmans personally, but he contacted me a few months ago about a matter.” The man spoke cryptically as though he were guarding state secrets and not an inquiry about a timepiece. “I haven’t heard from him again, though.”

  “He was, um, unexpectedly detained,” Charlotte replied, glad that the man had not linked Roger with the accused war criminal in the headlines. Though perhaps, she thought cynically, he would not have minded. Austria had sided readily with the Nazis and had seemed to do little to atone for the war in the years since. “But we’re here on his behalf. Do you have the clock he was looking for?”

  Herr Beamer eyed them warily, as though unsure whether they could be trusted. Then he walked to the shelf and rummaged among the clocks, packed so tightly she was not sure how he could tell one from the next. But he reached to the back and pulled out a burlap bag. He carried it over and set it on the table, gingerly removing the covering to reveal a small tabletop clock set under a dome of glass.