“Give it to me,” I said. She did. I held the journal upside down, shook it. Now I was the one acting stupid—as if Anna had left some hidden entry that would only appear seventy-five years later, when her adopted great-granddaughter shook it loose from the spine. But I refused to concede that the journal would end there, that she’d give up hope now, on such a random day, on such a depressing thought. All the strings were just hanging there, disconnected.
“There’s nothing,” Madeline said with a sigh. “That’s the end.”
“Maybe there’s another diary,” I tried desperately. “One that picks up right after this.”
“Maybe.”
Madeline was just being nice. She was probably afraid to upset me again. But clearly there was no other diary. It wasn’t like Anna had run out of space here. There were a decent number of pages to go; she chose to leave them blank. There wasn’t some big change that would warrant a fresh journal, either. The new year had come and gone. Her birthday was over.
“There’s just . . .” I spluttered. My hands were full-on shaking now. It took all my resolve not to throw the diary across the room. “It’s not . . . Why didn’t . . .” I closed my eyes, opened them again, placed the diary gently on the floor. Once it was safe from me, I gripped my hair and screamed.
Madeline made me sit down on the couch. “It was her real life, Imani,” she said apologetically. “It’s not some book we read in school with, like, symbols and themes. She didn’t have to end with any closure.”
I could have killed Madeline and her sensible reasoning. “I know,” I said angrily.
“I hate it too,” she insisted. “But Anna was writing for Belle, and she lost faith that Belle would ever read it. She said so herself. She was never writing for us. She wrote this long before you were even born.”
“I know,” I said again. But did I? Grandma Anna had left me her books. It was as though she wanted me to find this, to read it at this exact moment in my life. It felt like she had written it precisely for me.
I expected, when it ended, to be sad.
I hadn’t expected to feel abandoned.
CHAPTER 32
Parker turned to a new page in her speech. “I’d like to thank the rabbi and the cantor for helping me prepare for this special day. Mrs. Coleman, thank you for inspiring me and everyone in my class to learn about our Jewish heritage.”
In the seat next to me, Madeline snorted. “I’d like to thank the Academy,” she whispered in a breathy falsetto.
I giggled and elbowed the side of her dress. It was kind of cool to see Parker up there on the bimah. She’d been jumpy with nerves when she first walked out. She’d even bumped into the side of the podium, and the microphone picked up her “oops” for everyone to hear. But she’d relaxed as the service went on, and now, nearing the very end, she was smiling as brightly as the rhinestones on her dress. Her braces had been removed for just this week, and she’d clearly spent some time in a tanning bed, but her grin was one hundred percent natural. Her professional photographer must’ve thought so too—he was taking photo after photo.
“And finally, thank you to my parents and my sisters for being so supportive. I love you.”
From the aisle seat of our row, Magda whooped and shouted “Go Parker!” which elicited as many laughs as it did dirty looks. Parker giggled and blew Magda a kiss. Rabbi Seider led Parker back to her seat, then led everyone in singing “Ein Keloheinu.”
My thoughts flashed to Anna, how she turned thirteen with no mention of a bat mitzvah. Was that just reserved for boys back then? Then I did what I did anytime this week when I found myself thinking of Anna: I forced the thoughts out of my head. My anger had cooled from a boil to a simmer, but I was still frustrated at how abruptly she’d left things, how many questions she’d left unanswered.
Nothing was settled with my mom, either. We didn’t talk once while she was away, and when she got back yesterday, she looked like she’d spent the entire week crying. I wanted to apologize, but that would mean reminding her of what I said, and that’d only make things worse. Besides, apologizing at this point seemed like too little too late—it’d be like Max’s uncles offering a dollar or two to help Anna’s family after she got the letter from Kurt.
So Mom and I only talked about surface things, like the logistics of attending Parker’s bat mitzvah, and Grandpa Fred’s arrival. He was coming to visit this week, and I was looking forward to turning the diary over to him. It was still in the box under my bed, but I kept taking it out and getting angry all over again. I couldn’t help myself, like Anna with the newspaper or Kurt’s letter.
There I was again, thinking of Anna. I shook my head and brought myself back to Parker’s bat mitzvah, which was now over.
“That was long,” Madeline said. She was standing up, stretching her arms. She gave a big yawn.
“Madeline!” I glanced at the bimah and was glad to see that everyone was too busy congratulating Parker to notice. “Do you want me to yawn during your bat mitzvah?”
“During it? No way. But after?” She gave an even bigger yawn than before.
“You’d better perk up,” I said as we walked out of the sanctuary. “We’ve got a giant party to go to. You’ve got to dance all night.”
“Afternoon,” Madeline corrected, “but don’t worry. I’m a slave to the beat.”
I burst out laughing. I’ve never seen Madeline dance in her life. If a dance contest breaks out at a slumber party, she makes herself the judge. She even brought a doctor’s note to get out of square dancing in gym.
Parker made her way over to us. Magda was on one side of her and the photographer was on the other.
“Imani!” Parker screeched, as though she didn’t know I’d be here. “Madeline! You are so sweet to come!” She gave us each a kiss on the cheek, something I’d never seen anyone our age do before. Maybe becoming a bat mitzvah really does make you an adult.
“You did such a good job,” I said, trying to act casual despite the click of the photographer’s camera. He was circling us, taking pictures from every angle, and it made it hard to know where to look. Photographers always do this when I’m around. They like to document “diversity.”
“Was it very boring?” Parker asked.
“Not at all!” I said it quickly before Madeline could jump in with something more truthful.
“It was long,” Madeline admitted. “What’s it like up there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s all, like, this big blur.” Parker sighed, beamed. Some older people came over to congratulate her, and she lapped up the praise. “See you at the party!” she called over her shoulder before being moved along by the crowd. The photographer took a couple more pictures of me before following her.
A woman in a black pantsuit appeared in his place. She had a clipboard in her hands, a walkie-talkie on her belt, and a forced smile on her face. “Do you need a ride to the party?” she asked.
“Um, yes,” Madeline said.
“Names?”
We gave her our names, and she found us on her clipboard. “You’re on bus A,” she said to Madeline. “You’re on bus B,” she said to me.
I said, “There are two buses?”
Madeline said, “We’re not together?”
The woman said, “No switching. Line up outside. Buses leave in five.”
Madeline waved dramatically as she boarded bus A with everyone else from our school. I stood in line for bus B with a bunch of strangers who all knew each other—they must have been Parker’s friends from sleepaway camp.
“How do you know Parker?” the boy in front of me asked.
“We go to school together. And Hebrew school.”
The boy got bug-eyed, like he was in a cartoon. “You’re Jewish?”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“No way,” he said.
“What?” said the girl i
n front of him.
“She says she’s Jewish,” the boy said, pointing at me.
“You can be black and Jewish?” the girl asked.
One of her friends gasped, elbowed her to shut up.
“What?” the first girl said defensively. “I didn’t know you could be black and Jewish.”
“Are you, like, half Jewish?” the boy asked.
Another girl joined in. “Oh wait, are you from Ethiopia? There are black Jews in Ethiopia.”
“I’m adopted,” I said dully, and watched the pieces click together. My mind flicked to the Torah portion I’d been practicing for my own bat mitzvah. In it, Moses takes a census of all the Israelites who were wandering the desert, to see who they were descendants of. That was where this conversation was headed for sure: a census of one. Only the camp friends were going to ask in the way everyone asked: What are you really?
Was it too late to pretend I didn’t speak English? My bare brown legs shivered under my coat, and I looked at bus A with longing. Why on earth did Parker put me on bus B all by myself?
“Hey, Imani.”
Ethan! I could’ve jumped into his arms. Or Parker’s. She didn’t put me on bus B to be alone; she put me on bus B to be alone with Ethan. And luckily, as soon as he arrived and started talking to me like I was a person rather than a specimen in some world heritage survey, the camp friends lost interest.
“I like your dress,” Ethan said.
It was the gray shimmery one that my mom bought me before I stabbed her in the heart. But right now, it was totally covered by my coat.
“I, um, saw it inside,” he explained. His face was pink, but that could have been from the cold.
“Right,” I said. “Thanks. I like your . . . um . . .” I scanned him. “Purple yarmulke.”
Ethan laughed and took it off. “Souvenir,” he said, putting it in his pocket.
The line started moving into the bus, and all the camp friends raced to the back. I sat down in the second row, and Ethan slid in next to me, even though there were plenty of empty seats. Even though my row had a wheel well. I imagined Parker and Magda in the seat behind us, saying awwww.
“Did this make you excited for your bat mitzvah?” Ethan asked.
“Kind of,” I said. “You?”
Ethan shook his head. “It stressed me out. I’m nowhere near ready. My haftorah’s really long.”
“The speech,” I added.
“And the Holocaust project. Are you still using your great-grandma’s diary?”
“Ugh, don’t ask.” I slumped back in the seat and wedged my bent legs on the back of the row in front of us. The skirt of my dress collapsed around my thighs, and I quickly pushed it back and secured it under my knees.
“Okay,” he said. “I won’t ask.”
The bus pulled out of the temple parking lot and turned onto the road. One of the boys in the back shouted, “Party!” and the other camp friends cheered. Ethan sat quietly. I remembered what he told me about his great-grandfather being in the Kindertransport.
“So, I finished reading the diary,” I told him, “and it was a total letdown.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just ended. There’s no closure. No resolution.”
Ethan’s eyes were narrowed. I could see that he was trying very hard to follow me, to be angry along with me, but he didn’t get it. How could he? It’d been a week since I’d finished reading, and I still didn’t get it.
“I thought she’d find out that her whole family died, and, you know, deal with it.” I was trying to put into words exactly what it was that made me so upset with Anna. “And Madeline has this theory—she read it too—that the cousins my grandma went to live with were not actually her cousins at all. But Anna doesn’t write about that. I don’t know if she found it out later, or if Madeline’s wrong. And it doesn’t even matter, right? Because she was living with people who loved her, so who cares if they had the same DNA or whatever. But I still just want to know.”
“You were hoping for answers,” Ethan said, nodding slowly.
“Yes!” That was it. I was looking for answers. “It’s like . . .”
My eyes searched around and settled on a hole someone had made in the seat in front of me. It was the size of my thumb, and it was empty and dark except for some crumbly yellow foam and a few loose threads around the edges. For some reason, staring at that random hole made everything fit together in my head.
“There’s so much I don’t know about my history, you know? So when I found this diary, it was like I could fill in those gaps with information about my family’s history.”
Ethan nodded. “But it didn’t do that.”
“Exactly. Because it just ends, and Anna doesn’t know any more than I do. There are still so many . . . blanks.”
Ethan didn’t say anything. I thought about when my brother was little, and he’d get all worked up about something, and Mom and Dad would tell him to use his words. I smiled a little, remembering Jaime, tiny, struggling to find the right words through his sobs. Once he’d done it, Dad could usually fix the problem, which was always dumb, like Jaime wanted a different color sippy cup. I guess what I was facing wasn’t as simple as switching a blue cup for a red one, but putting it into words still felt like a step forward.
“This was your great-grandma’s real diary, right?” Ethan said finally.
“Yeah.” I thought he was going to say the same thing Madeline had said, about how it isn’t some book that needs to have a satisfying ending. But he didn’t.
“She was a real person, so this diary’s not the only information that exists about her.”
He looked at me with his green eyes, his eyebrows arched just slightly over his glasses, like he wasn’t sure if what he said was totally obvious or completely brilliant. The amazing part: It was both.
“You’re right,” I said.
“You could ask other people in your family about her. They might know if her cousins were really her cousins.”
I’d been determined to not ask Grandpa Fred—to just turn over the diary and forget all about it—mostly because of how smug Madeline sounded when she insisted Grandpa Fred would confirm her theory about Anna being adopted by strangers. But now that I’d read the whole diary, and some time had passed, it sounded a lot more reasonable. Grandpa Fred did know that Grandma Anna had been a twin, and he knew that Freddy was her first friend. He probably knew other things too.
“Maybe she left other stuff behind,” Ethan continued. “Another diary from later, or old photos. . . .”
“The bear!” I shouted it so loud that the camp friends stopped talking, then laughed, but I didn’t care. The ratty old teddy bear that had always been on the shelf above her bed, the one she left to my cousin Isabel—that must have been Oliver’s bear!
“The baseball glove, the marbles . . . the fur coats!” This I said at a more reasonable volume, but I still said it out loud. Those things Jaime inherited—were they originally Freddy’s? And all those fur coats my mom and her siblings were fighting over, who ended up getting them? One could be the coat she got for her thirteenth birthday.
“Maybe other things too!” Ethan said. He was getting excited along with me, even though he didn’t have any clue what I was talking about. It was so cute, and I was so happy, and without even thinking, I took his face in my hands and kissed him, right on the mouth.
When I pulled away, we were both in shock. We stared at each other, our mouths still partly open. “Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay!” Ethan’s eyes were dancing. He rushed forward and kissed me again, quickly, then pulled away just as quickly and turned to face the aisle. I turned to look out the window. I could see the reflection of myself, my grin.
The bus pulled into the parking lot. Ethan and I didn’t look at each other as we filed off and into the dance hall, w
here we were barraged by flashing lights, thumping music, and a life-size cardboard cutout of Parker.
I didn’t think of Anna once the entire afternoon.
CHAPTER 33
When Grandpa Fred arrived on Wednesday night, he was looking better. His face was kind of thin, and his pants were bunched up around his belt, but his eyes were happy, and he greeted me and Jaime by asking us to pick a card, any card. After dinner (and after making my card magically switch suits with Jaime’s), he settled onto the couch with a big bag of pistachio nuts. I sat next to him with an empty bowl for the shells.
“Do you want me to bring you the diary?” I asked.
“Not right now,” he said. “I’ve got nuts to crack.”
I’ve never seen anyone open pistachios as quickly as Grandpa Fred. He often has two going at once—one in his hands and one in his teeth. Since he was at the beginning of the bag, each shell made a little pling as it dropped into the bowl.
“I have to warn you,” I said, “the diary doesn’t have such a happy ending.”
Grandpa Fred nodded, his focus on his fingers. Pling.
“It doesn’t really have an unhappy ending, I guess. Well, it kind of does. I don’t know. It’s just very abrupt.”
Pling, pling. Grandpa Fred offered me a de-shelled pistachio and I popped it into my mouth.
“How old was she when she stopped writing?” Grandpa asked.
“Thirteen.”
Pling.
“I still think you should read it,” I said. “I just wanted you to know, so you won’t be disappointed at the end.”
Grandpa Fred stayed focused on the nuts. “I don’t think I’ll be disappointed,” he said. Pling.
“Why not?”
“Because I know the end of the diary was not the end of the story. My mom lived another—what?—seventy-five years.”
“Were they happy years?” I asked. It sounded silly, but I wanted to know.
“Most of them, yes,” Grandpa said. “Very happy.”
He went back to the pistachios. Shells covered the bottom of my bowl now, so the pile grew without a sound.
The Length of a String Page 17
