by Amy Sorrells
“Is he home?” Nel asked as they passed dried-up fields of corn, and others with the skeletons of sunflower stalks, their brown faces hanging lank. As they approached South Haven, Nel noticed how many storefronts had changed hands, new strip malls had been built, and everything felt bigger and yet smaller than she had remembered. She pushed her glasses up on her nose to get a better look as Mattie drove past the homes of her high school friends and others she’d hoped never to see again. Strange cars were parked in the driveways of old friends’ homes. Young mothers stood talking on front-porch stoops where older mothers used to, and watched as toddlers pedaled trikes and Big Wheels and pink motorized miniature cars.
“Billy Esposito offered to drive him to the funeral home for an appointment around noon to finalize service plans. You remember Billy; his father, Frank, worked for your father for years at the plant. You should have the house to yourself for an hour or two.”
Mattie steered the car east past Huron Street and Clementine’s restaurant on the corner, over the Dyckman Bridge, which crossed the Black River, and on until the road through town came to a head at North Shore; then she turned the car north toward Nel’s childhood home. A single row of houses rested between the road and the lake to the west now, and Nel strained to glimpse the steely gray water beyond the neatly trimmed grass and shrubs between them. On the east side of the street, abbreviated side roads passed and eventually turned from paved to gravel, until finally Mattie flicked on the turn signal, slowed the car, and turned left into her driveway. The drive, with a lawn mower’s width of grass along the outside border, ran parallel to the one leading to Jakob and Catherine’s home. Nel’s childhood home. There’d been no need for the two families to build a fence between their properties, even though the rest of the people who lived on the street had, especially since many of the original owners had sold to people who bought for summer and vacation rental homes. The Stewarts had never quarreled with Mattie, or her husband when he was still around, as far as Nel was aware, and they had even shared the costs of building and maintaining a seawall and the steep set of stairs leading to the beach.
“I should warn you,” Mattie said. “The house, when you see it … well, I don’t think either one of your parents were up to realizing how much work it was beginning to need.”
The gravel driveway crunched beneath the tires, and Nel noticed a man balancing on a ladder set precariously against a high eave of Mattie’s house. “What’s going on at your place?”
“Gutter cleaning. He’s replacing some rotten trim and painting some too.”
Nel squinted to get a better view of the man and felt her face redden as she gasped, “Is that David Butler? I thought he’d moved to Florida.”
Mattie studied Nel for a moment. “Ohhhh, yes. He was your date to the senior prom, wasn’t he?”
Nel whipped her head toward Mattie. “How’d you remember that?”
“Who could forget? All the hullabaloo about pictures, the bonfire your parents set up on the beach for you all afterward. That was quite an evening, as I recall.”
“And I recall him driving home with someone else.”
“You’re not still holding a grudge now, are you?”
“No …” Nel looked at David again. “No, of course not.”
“Good. Because he’ll be spending plenty of time here the next week or two. Maybe you can both come for dinner one night before you leave. For old times’ sake.”
“Don’t be trying to fix me up already, Mattie.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.” She winked, then put the car in park and pulled Nel toward her in an embrace. “Your mother wouldn’t have thought of it either.”
Nel allowed herself to relax into the fur collar of Mattie’s mink, to inhale the scent of perfume lingering on the sagging skin of her neck. Mattie and Mom had been trying together unsuccessfully to marry her off for nearly two decades now. She couldn’t blame Mattie for still trying.
“Thanks, Mattie, for picking me up. It’s good to see you. Good to be home.”
“Of course.” Mattie patted Nel’s knee. “The house is unlocked. Like always.”
Nel pulled her bags from the trunk and made her way toward the front door. The glossy black paint gleamed against the slant of the early afternoon sun. At a glance, the house was beautiful in an all-American, lakeside sort of way, like the houses featured in the background of magazine ads. An exquisite original slate roof topped off the white clapboard siding and sixteen-paned, double-hung windows framed by black shutters and spaced evenly across the second story. A set of the same windows flanked both sides of the ebony door, and a matching set of bay windows flanked those. But as she neared the threshold, Nel began to notice flaking paint, and the gray stains under the windows indicated mold, perhaps even rot. Moss and clover, oxalis and chickweed crept over the edges of the brick sidewalk, and ivy grew over the sides of the front steps. The yard was overgrown with the broad leaves of dandelions and clover, and enormous thistles grew up through the center of untrimmed yews and boxwood.
Tears threatened to form as Nel recalled Mom and Dad giving her a set of her very own gardening gloves, and the three of them spending hours trimming and pulling weeds, identifying and planting new perennials, and collecting various species of daylilies and hostas, astilbe and sedum to plant. Where there hadn’t been flower beds they made new ones, and their yard had been featured in many town garden tours over the years. Few of the plantings, besides weeds, remained, but of course it was October, Nel reminded herself, and many of them would not be adequately visible until spring.
The bronze door latch stuck a bit so that she had to pull the door toward her and shake it slightly before it opened. As it did, the smell of oil soap and aged wood caused another pang of regret in Nel’s heart. Of course she had wept at the news of her mother’s passing. But now, with the smells and the sights—needlepoint pillows Catherine had labored over tossed on couches, her handmade afghans draped over the arms of chairs, collections of baskets and old buoys and sea glass—everywhere she looked, she saw her mother, and it was almost too much for her to bear.
She set her bags down and made her way to the straight wooden staircase, flanked on one side by the living room and on the other by the library. Tears fell freely now, settling on the lenses of her glasses. She rubbed her hands up and down the nearly threadbare knees of her jeans, as if trying to console herself in the foyer where her mother had sent her to school, on dates, to work and had welcomed her home again with a hug and the smell of pot roast or fried perch or snickerdoodles.
“I’m so sorry, Mom.” The sound of her audible apology startled her as it echoed across the emptiness of the house. She pulled off her glasses and wiped her face with the arm of her olive-green army-surplus jacket, then hauled her belongings upstairs to her old bedroom, which, except for the few things she’d added or moved when she’d been home for holidays, remained exactly as she had left it back in 1975.
CHAPTER 3
I should’ve treated her to a new one for her birthday, Jakob thought, his head bent as if in prayer, and his great weathered hands resting on the faded-purple, vinyl makeup bag centered on his lap. The undertaker, Mike Wisowaty, had asked him to bring a nice outfit—something Catherine might wear to church, he’d suggested—and her favorite makeup to prepare her body for the viewing the next day. He’d left Mike with the makeup—a shimmery pink lipstick (he figured this was the one she used most often, since it was much more worn than the others), rosy-red rouge, brown liquid eyeliner, and black mascara—and he kept the blush and powder brushes and sponge applicators from the compacts for himself. Along with dozens of others like them in old coffee cans, cigar boxes, and cottage-cheese containers back in his lapidary workroom, they would come in handy for brushing the dust off rocks and minerals as he polished and shaped them into gemstones.
He’d asked Wisowaty for Catherine’s wedding band too. The hospital had r
emoved one ring and the gold cross necklace that rested daily in the soft place between her collarbones, but they’d left the wedding ring on her finger. Mike had placed the band gently into Jakob’s outstretched palm, and Jakob ran his finger along the thin edge of gold before pressing it into the inner crease of a gray velvet ring box, shutting the lid, and tucking the box between a half-empty bottle of Catherine’s prescription blood-pressure pills and an unused tube of travel toothpaste in the bottom of the purple makeup bag.
“You all right, Mr. Stewart?” Billy Esposito’s voice reminded Jakob so much of Billy’s father, Frank, that the similarity caused Jakob to shiver. He glanced at the middle-aged man beside him to make sure it was Frank’s son driving and not his old friend, somehow resurrected.
“Fine.”
Of course he wasn’t fine, losing his wife, his best friend, the one he counted on to take care of things. He’d been afraid for a while now that she’d go first, the way her blood pressure had been so out of control. She’d been having episodes of staring into space, jumbled words and phrases, and forgetfulness too. Transient ischemic attacks, Dr. Benson had called them. Besides the fact that she was his better half, the one for whom the phone rang, the one to whom the longhand, slanted script of personal envelopes was addressed, the one to whom neighbors brought meals when joints were replaced, she was also the one who baked for new neighbors when he’d preferred to watch the tube or fiddle with his rocks, the one who volunteered at the food pantry when he preferred to hoard cans of Spam and tuna “just in case,” the first to pray when he’d preferred to gripe, the one for whom life was the book of Psalms when all of his was Lamentations. These were the characteristics that had first attracted them to each other, but as with most marriages, they were also the characteristics that pushed them apart. They’d spent the past fifty years together, years full of emotional tides roiling and pulling, falling and careening into each other, but neither of them—he was certain of this—would have traded those years for anything, or anyone.
Over the past year or so, it was Catherine who had been covering for him. The lines between past and present, real and not real blurred more and more frequently in his mind. One morning at three o’clock, she’d found him wandering in his boxer shorts in the middle of North Shore Drive. Thank God it was the off-season, and the only evidence of life was the bugs zapping themselves against fluorescent street lamps. Later, once they were home safe, he’d attributed it to sleepwalking, like the other times she’d found him in odd places at odd times. The next day, Catherine begged him to see a neurologist.
“Why? For what? So he can give me a pill and tell me my brain is shrinking?” he’d argued.
“I worry about your safety. He might know something that can help.”
He’d tried to brush her off, annoyed that she was right. She was always right. Yet in the end he’d acquiesced and gone to see a doctor, but only because his greatest fear was becoming a burden to her. Dr. Steve Sandler, whom he actually enjoyed talking with, was on staff at a center for memory loss in Grand Rapids. Jakob’s memory lapses, occasional falls and bumps on the head, and not knowing where he was had been happening more frequently. Before the incident on North Shore Drive, he’d gotten lost while driving home from the grocery store they’d shopped at twice weekly since it’d opened in 1953. A policeman had pulled him over for a burned-out taillight, and Jakob had been able to reorient himself from the street name the officer had written on the warning ticket. Dr. Sandler suggested a couple of newer medications that might help slow the process, but Jakob adamantly refused pills. Overall, however, he and Catherine both had felt some comfort in the doctor’s encouragement about the strength of Jakob’s long-term memory and the options available to them if things worsened.
“We’re still learning so much about the brain,” said Dr. Sandler. “And with age-related dementia, the progress is unpredictable. It can worsen and improve depending on your overall health. Infections, falls, those sorts of things, can wreak havoc and cause acute flare-ups, deliriums that can be frightening both for the patient and family members. But I’ve seen plenty of folks around your age—some even older—return to a relative baseline of where you are now after those scenarios. We can’t say for sure what your prognosis is.”
Jakob sighed and tried to straighten his blockish frame in the front seat of Billy’s Chrysler LeBaron. Billy’s short Italian stature (acquired honestly from his father) required him to move the single bench seat annoyingly close to the dash, forcing Jakob to sit with his knees bent into his chest. Ninety-four years had done little to diminish Jakob’s size—six foot four and still over 200 pounds—which, in his youth when he weighed in at nearly 250, had garnered attention from football coaches across the Midwest. He never played, though, after tearing his knee up in one of the last games of his senior year of high school. Instead, he’d found a job at the Brake-All factory near South Haven, where his size had also proved helpful. Brake-All manufactured brake parts for many of the major auto factories and some government accounts, and as a floor supervisor, he was responsible for keeping disgruntled workers in line.
Jakob removed his glasses, then pulled a yellow-edged handkerchief from the inside pocket of his zippered, navy windbreaker, the one with the Brake-All logo embroidered over the heart, and cleaned both lenses.
“Mattie said Nel will be there by the time we get back,” Billy said.
Nel.
His baby bird.
He hadn’t wanted children, and he’d told Catherine as much when they were dating. And yet, as the years passed, he couldn’t help noticing how she couldn’t take her eyes off of mothers pushing baby buggies past the house, or children flying kites and skipping beach pebbles across the lake. He eventually realized the hole in the heart of a woman who longs for children is not something he—nor any man—could fill. Besides that, she had given up a lot by choosing to marry him. Her father had been so disappointed in their union since Jakob was not only an older man, but also lacked a genuine pedigree, even though his hard and established work provided her with anything material she wanted. Surely he could set aside his own misgivings to give Catherine that one desire.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like children. It was more that the world was too wretched a place in which to bring them up. Eleanor Louise had been conceived in 1951, and he had watched soldiers returning from two world wars now as half men, physically or psychologically or both. Details of the Holocaust had only recently been fully realized, and reports and confirmations of Stalin’s forced famines during the previous decade—Holodomor—were rippling through the Eastern European immigrant communities of Chicago.1 Reports told of up to eleven million dead from starvation in a land more—or at least as—fertile than America. Of course, the Soviets had denied it all, as they had everything else, and anyone else who dared speak of Holodomor specifically suffered severe, if not deadly, persecution.
But as bad a place as the world was to bring up a child then, the real reason Jakob didn’t want children was because of the shame he carried with him, an accusing shadow in his heart reminding him of events far worse than wars and starvation for him personally—events that if discovered would reveal the worst truth of all: that Jakob should never again be trusted with caring for a human being, especially one so fragile as an infant. And yet one look at Eleanor as the nurse lay her in his arms for the first time, and Jakob had pushed the shame and fear deep inside him. Her tiny mouth shaped like a rosebud and pink like rhodochrosite, or maybe a shade lighter, like rose quartz. Jakob was immediately smitten, and yet the coos and aahs that came so naturally for other fathers lodged in his throat. His eyes had stung with tears and his chest had swelled with the ferocious certainty that he would do whatever was necessary to care for his baby girl, to make sure she was safe and loved. If God gave second chances, Jakob knew Eleanor was that for him, and he would not, could not, fail again.
“It was my fault,” he mumbled as Billy Esp
osito’s car whirred past the homes and businesses of South Haven.
Billy reached over and squeezed Jakob’s shoulder. “It couldn’t have been helped, a stroke that massive. You can’t blame yourself.”
Jakob didn’t bother to tell Billy that he wasn’t talking about Catherine. Or Nel, for that matter.
The fault he felt ran too deep for words, and only one other person in the world had ever known his secret.
1904–1906
Rotterdam, Netherlands – New York City – Chicago
CHAPTER 4
The Statendam chugged so slowly out of the harbor in Rotterdam that the only way Jakob knew it was even moving was because he stood at the stern and could see the milky trail of bubbles from the giant engines rumbling under the deck beneath his feet. He lifted his head and watched as the busy port grew smaller and eventually faded into the fog, along with the rest of the Netherlands and everything he and Peter had ever known.
Jakob felt the outline of the large aquamarine in his coat against his chest as he braced himself against the harsh sea air. The stone was one of the few objects that had calmed the trembling within him ever since Peter had—against Tato’s instructions—returned to Chudniv. Peter had found Jakob, and only Jakob, left alive. Their journey since then, from that place of nightmare to the sea, had been miraculous, or so Peter said.
