My eyes stung at the sudden realization that I wouldn’t be coming back. Adelle couldn’t even remember my name. Whatever chance I’d had for a real grandmother didn’t exist anymore. “Um, okay,” I said.
Her mouth curved into one of those near-miss smiles.
For the first time, I was glad that Adelle’s memory was a sieve, and that this moment, like so many others, would sift right through.
MAY 1945
Herbert was a Buchenwald liberator who volunteered at the Displaced Persons Camp. Adelle thought it funny that he referred to the patients as “guests”—a fancy name for the sick and dying refugees housed in the former quarters of the German army. Everyone used pretty words to scrub away the scum of war.
She implored him to return on three separate occasions. Each time he did, she asked who he was. On the fourth visit, she fixed those brown eyes on him and said, “Hello, Mr. Friedman.”
He smiled, telling her, “My name has never sounded better.”
The American soldier was older than her—somewhere in his twenties—and she knew he found her attractive, although he kept his thoughts to himself. “You aren’t as thin as the others,” Herbert commented one day.
It took her a moment to compose a response. In broken English, she said, “I was in the camp hospital. A nurse gave extra rations sometimes.”
“A Nazi gave you food?” Herbert said incredulously. “I can’t believe it.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want me to die on her watch.” These soldiers were so simpleminded, Adelle thought, viewing everyone as either good or evil when the world was much more complex. There’s a decent heart in most of us, she wanted to say, if you’d only open your eyes.
Herbert’s jaw had tightened. He didn’t agree, she knew that. He’d seen the damage firsthand, the destroyed lives, the rotting corpses. He was incapable of finding humanity in the soul of a beast. And yet, he didn’t try to change her mind. He didn’t argue. He kept his feelings to himself, tucked away where they belonged.
In time, she felt a spark in her chest, as if her heart had cracked open the tiniest bit.
One afternoon, Herbert brought her a gift.
She pulled the Star of David necklace from a bed of cotton. The single overhead bulb caught the tiny diamonds, casting a shiver of light across her hand. She thanked him and politely returned it to the box. Later she discovered that people wouldn’t ask difficult questions as long as she wore the necklace. No one dared resurrect the trauma.
From then on, she never took it off.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
A COOL MIST SETTLED ON MY FACE AS I TREKKED over the Fillmore Street hill. I ran my hands down my hair in a lame attempt to keep it straight. The sun had vanished behind a bank of fog. God, I missed the late-night warmth of an East Coast summer. I used to escape to the roof outside my window and stargaze in a tank top and shorts. What I missed most, though, was the tree outside my bedroom. I could track the changing seasons by the color of its leaves. In a few days, summer in San Francisco would turn to fall, and I needed a calendar to know it.
“Mom, you here?” My voice echoed through our sparsely furnished apartment. The blinds were drawn, blotting out the last rays of daylight. I flipped on the light switch.
“Turn it off,” Mom said, her voice hoarse.
I did as she asked. She lay on the couch, sneakers on the armrest.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I have a headache.”
“You want me to get you an ibuprofen?”
She waved me off. “I need to rest.”
I sat down at the opposite end of the couch, careful not to disturb her. Mom used to get migraines back when she was fighting with Dad.
“What happened today?” I asked.
“Adelle’s a bitch.”
Even though that word was tossed around a thousand times a day at school, it sounded worse when applied to a little old lady. And not any old lady—my grandmother.
“She’s always criticizing me: ‘Gretchen, where did you hide my necklace?’ ‘Did you steal my diamond ring?’ ‘Gretchen, you didn’t put enough sugar in my coffee … It tastes like seawater!’” Mom’s imitation was close, but she exaggerated the almost undetectable European accent.
“I read that volatile moods can be a sign she’s getting worse,” I said, hope and sadness warring inside me.
“My mother’s always had a crappy disposition.”
“She likes having you take care of her.” I figured that Adelle had to be grateful on some level, even if she didn’t always show it.
Mom rolled onto her back. Shadows spread across her face, sinking into the hollows of her cheeks. Had she been eating these past weeks?
It’ll be okay, I’d told Tom. I’ll keep an eye on her.
I wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Mom’s face was flushed, eyes glazed with exhaustion. Was she getting sick? I ran my palms down my jeans. It didn’t seem like the best time to tell her, but I knew if I didn’t say something, Vickie would do it for me. “Mom, I met the other caregiver.”
Her head snapped to the side. “You visited my mother when I specifically asked you not to?”
Her tone floored me. It sounded so … Adelle-like. “I stopped by after school.”
“Why?”
“How can I live a few blocks away and not see her? She’s my grandma.”
“Save yourself the trouble.”
“But Adelle seems nice.” The innocent adjective was a weapon, I knew that, but I didn’t care. “She made me cookies again.”
“She always was a good cook. I can say that for her.”
I searched for a hint of sympathy in her rigid features. Finding none, I said, “She has a disease, Mom. She doesn’t have much longer.”
She rolled toward the back cushion, tucking her face into a crevice. “One can only hope.” I was about to accuse her of being immature when something sweet and sour hit my nose. Oh, God, Chanel No. 5. I hadn’t run across that particular scent in a long time. When I was a kid, I called it the Cover-up Smell.
“Jesus,” I said, bringing my fist to my nose. “Mom, you didn’t. You couldn’t. Not after all this time.”
“I’m tired, Liv. Just wanna sleep.”
“No!” I climbed over her, inserted my hand between the couch and her shoulder, and flipped her onto her back. “Five years, Mom, five years! You wouldn’t throw it all away, would you?”
Her pupils flared. “It was a little bit, Liv. To take the edge off. I needed something to help me relax.”
I started to cry. As much as I resented my own tears, I couldn’t help it.
“Don’t do that,” she pleaded. “Don’t look at me like that. Not until you’ve lived my life.”
“Mom—”
“Yesterday was my parents’ anniversary.”
I wiped my tears away so I could see her more clearly. “What?”
“I thought maybe it wasn’t too late to connect with my mother. It might be easier than before because at least now she was incapable of pulling up a laundry list of resentments.”
“I don’t understand …”
“I threw us a party, Liv. Just her and me. To remember my dad.”
Oh, God. Please let it have gone well, I thought to myself. But I knew it hadn’t. A person didn’t abandon five years of sobriety because she’d finally connected with a difficult parent.
“So I pulled out my photos of my father,” she continued. “He looked so handsome in his military uniform. I even found one of them on their honeymoon. They were learning to surf in the Bahamas. My dad was on a surfboard with her, and he had both his arms wrapped around her middle to keep her from falling off. She looked so safe, so secure. It was an amazing picture, because, you know, I can’t remember ever seeing my mom like that. I guess I thought that if she saw the photo, it would resurrect a feeling of being cared for.” Mom stared up at the ceiling. Then her voice dropped. “I brought her a heart-shaped balloon. Oh, and I made her a cake. An anniversary special, wi
th peach fondant roses, and icing like lace, and …” She stopped. Tears spilled over, running down her cheeks, leaving splotches on the pillow where her head rested. “The balloon popped. It popped, and she fell to the floor, and she covered her head, and she screamed. She screamed that I wanted to shoot her. That I had already stolen from her, and now I wanted her dead.”
The softness in her eyes melted away, like a snowball with a rock packed inside. My own anger hadn’t subsided yet, but I knew that she needed a hug. All I could manage was a touch on her wrist. “I’m sorry,” I said, dragging the words out.
“The party lasted ten minutes. Ten minutes, Liv, until I was so upset that I tossed the cake in the trash. And then you know what I realized?”
I shook my head, even though Mom was looking at the ceiling and not at me.
“I realized that my mother can’t be fixed. Even this disease won’t wipe away who she is, deep inside.”
“But Mom, Alzheimer’s makes her do—”
She talked over me, lost in her own world. “When Vickie came in for her shift and asked how her day was, you know what Adelle said?” She turned to me then, as if I had the answer. When I didn’t guess, she went on. “My mother said, ‘Gretchen spilled my food!’ She didn’t remember the party. She didn’t remember the cake that took me four hours to make. The photo montage. None of it. All she could pull out of that brain was a complaint. Just like it’s always been.”
I felt a familiar swell of emotions. Pity. Sympathy. Sorrow. Emotions that tamped down anger. But I wasn’t going to let them do that this time. “Where’s the bottle, Mom?”
She finally turned her head and fixed her eyes, brimming with hurt, on mine. “What do you want to do, make things worse?”
What did I want to do? Yell and scream and break everything in sight, for starters. But I had a better idea and grabbed my phone off the table.
“Who are you calling?”
“Tom.”
“No, don’t!” She swung at my phone. I pulled it out of reach.
“I’m calling him if you don’t tell me where the booze is!”
“Don’t call him. Please.” She inserted a hand behind the cushion. Out came a bottle of Scotch, two-thirds empty.
“Just a little bit,” I said, “to take the edge off.”
“It’s my first slip, Liv. I swear it’ll be my last.”
I wanted to believe her. I really did. The thing was, hope, as a cure for heartache, had worn thin. “I think we should call Tom,” I said. “You guys need to talk.”
“I’ll call him after we both get a good night’s sleep.”
“Okay,” I conceded, but only because it was three hours later on the East Coast. I’d call him tomorrow morning, whether Mom wanted me to or not.
Her meek smile had all the right ingredients—shame, apology, gratitude—but her eyes scared me. They were dark as snuffed-out candles.
Five years ago in March, Mom almost ran over an eight-year-old boy riding his bike to the park. This was what recovering addicts called rock bottom—the moment when you need to make a choice: recover or lose everything. When Mom rehashed the story at her AA meetings, she always ended with, “I could have killed someone’s child.”
Within a week of the accident, she admitted herself to Evergreen Center, a rehab facility with shuffleboard and a swimming pool and group therapy sessions under the fringe of a willow tree. I loved visiting her there. Tom was her counselor. Mom said that he had a heart the size of Manhattan and a ten-year sobriety button pinned over it. After she finished the program—and discovered that Dad was on his way to Australia with the “other woman”—she trekked thirty miles each way to go to the same AA meetings as Tom. Not long after, she asked if he’d be her sponsor, and he said yes.
She fell off the wagon three months later. Not because Tom was a bad sponsor. Or because a calamity overwhelmed her, like going bankrupt, totaling her car, or having our house burn down. No, the reason was way less impressive than the catalyst for sobriety.
My mother drank again because we ran ten minutes late to my sixth grade performance in Sleeping Beauty. She got caught behind too many red lights.
I remember being on stage that night. I played Olivia Oak in Maleficent’s forest. Standing on stage, I had lots of time to scan the audience for my mother. Twenty minutes in, I saw her sit down. Third row, chin to her chest, mouth open wide enough to swallow a bee. As soon as the curtains fell for intermission, I darted down the steps, wove my fingers through hers, and led her out of the gymnasium. God knows how we made it home in one piece, but when you’re eleven, the threat of embarrassment trumps safety.
You know what else? Our director didn’t even notice I was gone.
CHAPTER
NINE
MY BRAIN, CRAMMED WITH WORRIES, LEFT LITTLE ROOM for the trifling details of high school. During Spanish, I tuned out irregular past-tense verbs and considered if it was possible for Mom to drink one day and stop the next like a normal person. Maybe she had downed the booze for no other reason than it helped her relax, and not because the monster that lay dormant inside her all those years had stirred.
And maybe I really was the queen of Liechtenstein.
After class, Franklin D. appeared beside me, pinpricks of sweat on his forehead. “Ready or not, here I am,” he said, spreading his arms wide.
“Hello to you, too,” I said.
“You’re a fast walker, Livvy Newman. Have you considered joining track? I like a girl who can reinvent herself. Prom planner one day, mega-jock the next. You always keep me on my toes.”
“Prom?” Oh, right, my excuse for not sitting with him during lunch that first time.
“Girls sure like to plan ahead,” he said pleasantly. “Prom’s, what, seven months away?”
Guess he wasn’t as clueless as I’d thought. “I’d rather be by myself at lunch. I’m not feeling very social these days.”
“You really miss your old school. Creston High, right?”
I stopped suddenly, which caused Franklin D. to slam on the brakes. The guy behind us swerved to avoid a collision. We moved to the wall so we wouldn’t cause a traffic jam.
“I asked Hilda in the office. That was all I could get out of her,” he admitted.
My groan was swallowed up by hallway noise.
“What you need are good friends, and since I’m stuck here eight hours a day, I have nothing but time to charm you,” he said. “I’m failing epically, aren’t I?”
I laughed, wanting to deny it, but caught myself. “Listen, it’s not your fault. I’m not in the best space for friends right now. It’s—”
Franklin D. pulled an imaginary sword from a holster and thrust it through his heart. “Argh, a variation on the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech! I thought those days were over in middle school.”
I laughed again, acknowledging my own epic failure to build a fortress.
Franklin D. cleared his throat. “‘Friendship sought is good, but given unsought is better.’ Twelfth Night, Act three, Scene one.”
“Shakespeare?” I rolled my eyes. Secretly I was impressed with his ability to pull a quote on demand.
“The Bard of Avon has something to say for every occasion.” Franklin D. shrugged. “Well, if we’re going to get all technical, the way it goes is, ‘Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.’ I didn’t want to freak you out by saying the ‘L’ word or anything.”
His thoughts flowed from brain to mouth like water through a colander. Oddly I found his unfiltered honesty refreshing. I didn’t have to weigh the truth of his words, like with Mom, or decode subtext, the way I had to do with Candace and Audrey.
He walked me to chem lab and took off. Fifty minutes later, he was back. “I was wondering if you’d changed your mind about having lunch with us?”
“Us?”
“Me and my friends.”
I had to admit, I was curious. Kids back home would’ve chopped this guy up and used him for kitty litter. I shrugged, nonco
mmittal. “I don’t like cafeteria food.”
He patted his backpack, designed like a TARDIS from the Doctor Who series. “I’ll share my sandwich with you. Today we have the PB&J special. The J refers to my mother’s tantalizing homemade plum jam.”
I pushed the double doors open and shielded my eyes from the blinding sunlight. “I appreciate it, but I have money for lunch.”
He followed me toward Alvarado Street. As we walked, he shed his green parka, revealing a sweatshirt with the message “Counting in binary is as easy as 01 10 11.” Then he stopped under a tree. “This seems like a nice spot for lunch, don’t you think?” He snapped his jacket out and spread it on the ground like a picnic blanket.
I gestured to his backpack. “Peanut butter and jelly, huh?”
He took a sandwich out of a lunch bag and tore it in half, giving me the bigger share. My last PB&J had been somewhere around fifth grade. The plum jam tasted sweet and tangy. The peanut butter was smooth, the way I liked it.
He put his finger to his knee and coaxed an ant to crawl on, then delivered it to a fallen leaf. “This is an excellent first step, Livvy. Tomorrow, we’ll try the cafeteria. I’ve trained my friends not to bite—unless you attack first.”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“Is that body language for, ‘Sure, I’d love to?’”
“I don’t know … maybe.”
“I’ll take ‘maybe.’”
I think I might have nodded, but I didn’t say anything that would imply a verbal contract.
The next day, figuring it would take Franklin D. thirty seconds to get from his class to mine before lunch, I tore out of school and sped across the parking lot like there was a tsunami coming. I found a bench two blocks away and sat down to write him a text. It took me three tries before I came up with Sorry to miss lunch. Had to go for a walk to clear my head.
I checked e-mail. Only a message from Dad.
Dear Liv,
How are you? Your mom told me about the move. I don’t know what to say, except I hope you’re okay. San Francisco is an exciting town. Life here is good. The boys start preschool this year, and they joined a Peewee T-ball …
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