I take the chew toy and, with Eva still dancing at my heels, head back to the car where Leo is waiting. With the dog on my lap, gnawing at the ragged cuffs of my shorts, we drive to my house.
“He said he knew my mother,” I tell Leo.
Leo glances at me. “What?”
I explain to him what Josef told me. “What would he have done if he knew my grandmother was alive?”
For a moment, Leo is quiet. “How do you know he doesn’t?”
“What are you saying?”
“He could be playing you. He’s lied to you before. Hell, he lied to the whole world for well over half a century. Maybe he figured out who Minka was, and is feeling you out to see if she remembers what he did.”
“Do you really think after all these years he’d be trying to clear his name against a theft charge?”
“No,” Leo says, “but after all these years, he might still want to silence anyone who could identify him as a Nazi.”
“That’s a little unrealistic, don’t you think?”
“So was the Final Solution, but it got pretty far,” Leo points out.
“Maybe I would believe you if Josef hadn’t asked me to kill him.”
“Because he knows you’re not capable of it. So instead, he strings you along. He can snow you, the way he can’t snow your grandmother,” Leo says. “She was there. She’s never met the new and improved Josef Weber. She knows an animal, a beast. Eventually, if he can get to her through you, he can kill her, or he can get you to convince her he’s a changed man who deserves forgiveness. Either way, he wins.”
I stare at him, a little hurt that he would think this of me. “You really believe I would do that?”
He pulls into my driveway, but there is already a car waiting there. Adam gets out of the driver’s seat, holding a bouquet of lilies. “People need forgiveness for all sorts of reasons,” Leo says flatly. “I think you, of all people, understand that. And I think Josef Weber’s got your number.”
He puts both hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. In my lap, Eva starts to bark at the stranger outside who holds up a hand in an awkward wave. “I’ll be in touch,” Leo says.
For the first time in two days, he doesn’t look me in the eye.
“Be careful,” Leo adds, a good-bye that I know has nothing to do with Josef.
• • •
The lilies would be nice, if not for the fact that I know Adam gets a deep discount with a local florist—something he told us while we were making my mother’s funeral arrangements. In fact for all I know, this bouquet was just a leftover from the morning service.
“I don’t really feel like talking,” I say, pushing past him, but he catches my arm and pulls me close and kisses me. I wonder if Leo is far enough down the street yet, or if he sees us.
I wonder why I care.
“There she is,” Adam murmurs against my lips. “I knew the girl I’m crazy about was in there somewhere.”
“Actually, she’s across town, roasting a chicken for your dinner tonight. I can understand that it’s hard to keep track.”
“I deserve that,” Adam says, following me into my house. “But that’s why I’m here, Sage. You’ve gotta hear me out.”
He leads me into the living room. I realize that we do not spend a lot of time in there. When he comes over, we mostly go right to the bedroom.
He sits me down on the couch and holds my hand. “I love you, Sage Singer. I love the way you have to sleep with one foot uncovered and the fact that you hog the popcorn when we watch a movie. I love your smile, and your widow’s peak. It’s a cliché, I know, but seeing you with that guy yesterday made me realize how much I have to lose. I don’t want someone else to snatch you away while I’m dragging my feet over a decision. Pure and simple, I love you, and I want to be with you forever.”
Adam drops to one knee, still holding my hand. “Sage . . . marry me?”
I stare at him, stunned. And then I burst out laughing, which I’m pretty sure is not the reaction he was hoping for. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“The ring—I know, but—”
“Not the ring. The fact that you have a wife.”
“Well, of course not,” Adam says, sitting down on the couch again. “That’s why I came here. I’m filing for divorce.”
I sink back against the cushions, shell-shocked.
There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.
I lost my mother and father, I pushed my sisters away. My grandmother had her parents torn from her. We have spent decades patching up the holes. And yet here is Adam, cavalierly throwing away his loved ones so that he can start over. I am ashamed at myself, for the role I had in bringing him to this point. I only hope it’s not too late for him to realize what I’m just beginning to see myself: having a family means you’re never alone.
“Adam,” I say softly. “Go home.”
• • •
This time, it’s for real.
I’ve told Adam that it’s over, but now I mean it. And I know it’s different because I cannot breathe, I cannot stop sobbing. It’s as if I am grieving over someone I loved, which I guess is entirely true.
Adam had not wanted to leave. “You don’t mean it,” he told me. “You’re not thinking clearly.” But I was, possibly for the first time in three years. I was seeing myself the way Mary had seen me, and Leo, and I was embarrassed. “I love you enough to marry you,” he said. “What more could you possibly want?”
There were so many ways to answer that question.
I wanted to walk down the street on the arm of a handsome guy and not have other women wonder why he was with someone who looked like me.
I wanted to be happy, but not if it meant someone else would be devastated.
I wanted to feel beautiful, instead of just lucky.
The only reason Adam left was because I convinced him, through my tears, that he was only making this even harder for me. That if he really cared about me, he’d go. “You do not want to do this,” he insisted.
The same words Josef had said to me during our chess game. But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices.
When my eyes are so red I cannot see clearly and my nose is stuffed from crying, I curl up on the sofa and hug Eva to my chest. My cell phone starts buzzing in my pocket, and Adam’s number flashes on the screen; I shut it off. My home phone starts ringing, too, and before I hear Adam’s voice on the message machine, I unplug it and disconnect the phone. Right now, what I need is to be by myself.
I swallow half a sleeping pill left over from after my mom’s funeral, and fall asleep fitfully on the couch. I dream that I am in a concentration camp, wearing my grandmother’s striped prisoner’s dress, when Josef comes for me in his officer’s uniform. Although he is an old man, his grip is a vise. He doesn’t smile, and he speaks only in German, and I cannot understand what he’s asking of me. He drags me outside to a courtyard as I stumble, my knees bruising on rocks. There, Adam stands beside a coffin. He lifts me into it. It’s about time, he says. When he reaches to shut the lid I realize his intentions, and I start to fight him. But even when I am able to scratch and draw blood, he is stronger than I am. He closes the lid, although I am gasping for air.
Please, I yell out, pounding my fists against the satin lining. Can you hear me?
But no one comes. I keep beating, hammering.
Are you there? I hear, and I think maybe it’s Leo, but I am afraid to shout because it will use up too much oxygen. I struggle to breathe in, and my lungs fill with the scent of my grandmother’s talcum powder.
I wake up to find Adam shaking me, and daylight streaming through the windows. I’ve been asleep for hours. “Sage. Are you all right?”
I am still groggy, sleepy, dry-mouthed. “Adam,” I slur. “I told you to go away.”
“I was worri
ed about you, since you weren’t picking up your phone.”
Reaching down into the folds of the couch, I find my iPhone and turn it on. There are dozens of messages. One from Leo, three from my grandmother. A handful from Adam. And, oddly, a half dozen from each of my sisters.
“Pepper called me about the arrangements,” he says. “God, Sage, I know how close you were to her. And I want you to know: I’m here for you.”
I start to shake my head, because even as fuzzy as it feels, everything is starting to fall into place. I take a deep breath, and all I can smell is talcum.
• • •
What Daisy tells me and my sisters is that Nana was feeling tired and lay down for a nap at about two o’clock that afternoon. When she didn’t wake up in time for dinner, Daisy was afraid she’d have trouble sleeping through the night, so she went into the bedroom and turned on the lights. She tried to wake my grandmother, but couldn’t. “It happened in her sleep,” Daisy tells us, tearful. “I know she wasn’t in any pain.”
Me, I can’t be certain.
What if the stress Leo and I subjected her to was what had finally taken its toll on her? What if the memories we brought flooding back had swept her away?
What if she was thinking of him in the moments before she died?
I can’t help but believe this is my fault; and because of that, I am a mess.
But I can’t confide in Pepper and Saffron, because I already feel like they blame me for my mother’s death, even though they said it was not my fault. I cannot let them blame me for my grandmother’s death, too. So mostly, I stay out of their way, grieving in private, and they leave me alone. I think they are a little afraid at how much of a zombie I have become in the wake of Nana’s death. I don’t mind when they invade my home and rearrange the furniture so that we can sit shivah; I don’t complain when they go through my refrigerator throwing out yogurt that is out of date or griping because I don’t have any decaf. I stop eating, even when Mary comes by with a basket full of fresh-baked pastries and condolences; when she tells me she has lit a candle for my grandmother before every Mass since hearing of her passing. I don’t tell my sisters about Leo, or Reiner Hartmann. I don’t try to call Josef, in the hospital. I just say that I’ve been spending a lot of time with Nana lately, and that’s why I’d like a private moment with her at the funeral home, before the ceremony.
My grandmother lived a remarkable life. She watched her nation fall to pieces; and even when she became collateral damage, she believed in the power of the human spirit. She gave when she had nothing; she fought when she could barely stand; she clung to tomorrow when she couldn’t find footing on the rock ledge of yesterday. She was a chameleon, slipping into the personae of a privileged young girl, a frightened teen, a dreamy novelist, a proud prisoner, an army wife, a mother hen. She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.
By anyone’s account, her existence had been full, rich, important—even if she chose not to shout about her past, but rather to keep it hidden. It had been nobody’s business but her own; it was still nobody’s business.
I would make sure of that. After everything I’d done, by involving Leo and having him interview her, it was the least I could do.
Light-headed with hunger and heat and grief, I move woodenly from Pepper’s rental car to the lobby of the funeral home, where Adam is waiting in his dark suit. He greets Pepper first. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he says smoothly.
Does it even mean anything to him anymore? If you say the same words over and over, do they become so bleached that there’s no color left in them?
“Thank you,” Pepper says, taking the hand he offers.
Then he turns to me. “I understand you’d like a moment alone with your loved one?”
Adam, it’s me, I think, and then I remember that I am the one who pushed him away.
He steers me through a doorway into the back of the funeral home, while Pepper takes a seat and starts texting—maybe the florist, the caterer, or her husband and kids, who will be landing at the airport any minute now. It isn’t until the door to the room is closed behind us that Adam folds me into an embrace. I stiffen at first, and then just give in. It’s easier than putting up a fight.
“You look like hell,” he sighs into my hair. “Have you slept at all in the past two days?”
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” I say, tearing up. “I’m all alone, now.”
“You could have me . . .”
Really? Now? I bite my lip, and take a step away from him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I nod.
Adam takes me to the anteroom where my grandmother’s casket is waiting, ready to be transferred to the sanctuary in time for the service. The small space smells like the inside of a refrigerator, cold and faintly antiseptic. My head spins, and I have to hold on to the wall for support. “Could I have a minute alone with her?”
Adam nods and gently opens the upper half of the casket so that I am looking down at my grandmother. The door closes behind him as he steps outside.
She is wearing a red wool skirt with black piping. The blouse that is tied at her neck blooms like a flower against her throat. Her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, which look lightly flushed. Her silver hair is swept and styled, the way she has had it done twice a week at the salon for as long as I can remember. Adam and his staff have outdone themselves. Looking at her, I find myself thinking of Sleeping Beauty, of Snow White, of women who woke from their nightmares and began to live again.
If that happened to my grandmother, it would not be the first time.
When my mother died, I did not want to touch her. I knew my sisters would lean down and kiss her cheek, embrace her one last time. But for me, the moment of physical contact with a dead body was terrifying. It would feel different from all the other times I’d turned to her for comfort, because she couldn’t hug me back. And if she couldn’t hug me back, I had to stop pretending it was possible.
Now, though, I don’t have a choice.
I reach into the casket and lift my grandmother’s left hand. It is cold and oddly firm, like the dolls I had when I was a little girl that were advertised for their lifelike feel, which was never really lifelike at all. I unbutton her cuff so that the sleeve slides backward, exposing the flesh of her forearm.
The casket will be closed at the funeral. No one will see the tattoo she was given at Auschwitz. And even if someone were to look inside, like I did, her silk blouse would cover the evidence. But my grandmother went to such great pains to keep from being defined by her experience as a survivor that I feel like it’s my duty to make sure this continues, whatever comes next.
From my purse I pull a small tube of concealer, and carefully blot it onto my grandmother’s skin. I wait for it to dry, making sure the numbers have been obliterated. Then I button her cuff again, and folding my hands around hers, press a kiss into her palm like a marble to carry with her. “Nana,” I say, “when I grow up, I’m going to be as brave as you.”
I close the casket and wipe beneath my eyes with my fingers, trying not to mess up my mascara. Then I take a few deep breaths and walk unsteadily into the hallway that leads to the lobby of the funeral home.
Adam is not waiting for me outside the anteroom. It doesn’t matter, though, because I know my way around here. I walk down the hallway, my ankles wobbling in the black pumps I am not accustomed to wearing.
In the foyer, I see Adam and Pepper bent in quiet conversation with a third party, whose body is blocked by their own. I assume it’s Saffron, arriving before the rest of the guests. When they hear my footsteps, Adam turns, and suddenly I can see that the person they’re talking to is not Saffron at all.
The room spins like a carousel. “Leo?” I whisper, certain I have imagined him, until he catches me the moment before I hit the floor.
For a long time, I simply cried.
Every day, at noon, Aleks was brought to the
village square and punished for what his brother had done. It would have killed an ordinary man. Instead, for Aleks, it was just a new circle of hell.
I stopped baking. The village, without bread, grew bitter. There was nothing to break at the table with family, to digest over conversation. There were no pastries to pass to a lover. People felt empty inside, no matter how much other food they ate.
One day I left the cottage and traveled by foot to the nearest city. It was the one Aleks and his brother had last come from, where the buildings were so tall it hurt to try to see the tops of them. There was a special building there full of books, as many books as there were grains in a flour sack. I told the woman at the desk in the front what I needed, and she led me down a curved set of iron stairs to a place where leather tomes were nestled into the walls.
I learned that there is more than one way to kill an upiór.
You could bury a body deep in the ground, weighted down in the belly with rich soil.
You could drive a nail into his brain.
You could grind up a caul, like the one Casimir had been born with, and feed it to him.
Or you could find the original corpse and slice open its heart. The blood of its victims would pour out.
Some of these may have been old wives’ tales, but this last one, I knew, was true: because if Aleks cut open his heart, I was certain that I would be the one to bleed to death.
LEO
She looks like a raccoon.
An exhausted, dazed, beautiful raccoon.
There are black circles under her eyes—from her makeup, and a lack of sleep, I’m guessing—and two high spots of color on her cheeks. The funeral director (who also happens to be the same married boyfriend I met a few nights ago, as if this town weren’t small enough already) gave me a compress to put on her forehead, which has matted her bangs and dripped a damp ring around the collar of her black dress. “Hey,” I say, as Sage opens her eyes. “I hear you have a habit of doing this.”
The Storyteller Page 43
