White Picket Fences (12 page)

Amanda inhaled deeply and stroked the card in her hand.
God, what am I supposed to do? But
the room was silent.

The beeping of her cell phone split the quiet. Delcey was texting her, reminding her that she needed to be picked up from dance team practice. Amanda picked up her book bag and walked out of her classroom, still holding the card in her hand, oblivious to the sound of her clicking heels.

Dinner was a subdued affair. Amanda made a lasagna toss, which apparently none of the family really cared for but was a quick fix on busy days. Delcey picked at it, Chase opted for salad
and bread, and Neil ate his without comment. Only Tally ate what was given her without complaint.

Neil stood up as soon as he was finished and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’ve got to take the rocker over to the nursery tonight.” He picked up his plate and began to take it into the kitchen.

“You want to go with him, Chase?” Amanda asked.

Chase looked up from his salad. Neil was already in the kitchen, putting his plate on the counter.

“Do you need help with it, hon?” Amanda called out to her husband.

“Chase can come if he wants,” Neil said as he tossed his napkin into the trash. “You don’t have to if you’ve got better things to do, Chase. I understand. It’s just one chair. You decide.”

“I’ve got a physics quiz tomorrow,” Chase said, chasing a cherry tomato across his plate with his fork.

“Well, I don’t blame you, then. That’s more important. See you all later.” Neil disappeared from view. The door to the garage opened and closed, and he was gone.

“Can I be finished?” Delcey’s cell phone trilled. She pulled it out of her pocket and dashed into the family room for privacy.

Chase stood as well and wordlessly took his plate to the kitchen. He looked up at Tally as he placed his plate in the sink, and then he left the kitchen through the archway to the living room. Amanda heard his footsteps on the stairs.

She turned to Tally. “Guess it’s just you and me with the dishes.”

Her niece stood. “I don’t care. I like doing dishes. Your plates are pretty. They all match.”

Amanda smiled, lifted the pan of pasta, and stepped into the kitchen. She moved a dishtowel off the phone dock to set the pan down and saw a blinking light indicating a voice message. She hadn’t noticed it earlier. She pressed the Play button, and a woman’s recorded voice filled the room.

“Hello, Mrs. Janvier. This is Nancy Fuentes from Pima County Human Services in Tucson. Just checking in to see if you’ve heard from Tally’s father. We haven’t heard anything here, so if you could give me a call sometime tomorrow, that would be great.”

The woman gave her phone number. The machine beeped and then fell silent. Amanda looked up at Tally. Her niece had stopped inches from the kitchen counter with two plates in her hands. She stared at the sink.

Amanda reached for the plates Tally held. “I’m sure your dad’s just lost track of time. He’s probably finding it harder to locate our relatives than he thought, you know? And he doesn’t speak a lick of Polish.”

Tally raised her head. A faint sheen of disappointment glistened in the girl’s eyes.

Amanda wanted to pull her into her arms. Instead, she put the two plates in the sink and tried to think of something to reassure her niece that somehow everything would turn out okay. “Did your dad ever tell you about the time he and I got lost when we went camping?”

Tally blinked and shook her head.

Amanda walked back into the dining room, and Tally followed
her. “We were camping in Yosemite. I was eight and he was twelve, and our parents let us go on a little hike on our own. They told us to stay on the trail, but of course Bart never liked to color inside the lines. He heard a waterfall off in the distance, and we walked off the trail so we could find it. It was a beautiful little waterfall, but as you can probably guess, when we turned around to go back, we couldn’t find the trail.”

Amanda handed Tally a bottle of salad dressing to put away.

“What happened?” the girl asked.

“Well, after about an hour of trying to find it, I started to cry. I was sure we’d never be found, that we’d freeze to death or starve or be mauled by bears. Bart told me to stop crying because he’d heard that wild animals can sense fear. And he said he was sick and tired of trying to find the trail so he was going to look for Indian arrowheads instead. So we started looking for arrowheads instead of the trail. And a couple of hours later, we found it. We found the trail when we weren’t really looking for it. We met a search party on the way back, and I remember Bart got a talking-to for going off the trail. And our mother couldn’t stop touching us, as if to reassure herself that we were actually there. We fell asleep in our sleeping bags that night with her hands on our backs.”

Tally looked down at the dressing in her hands.

“Maybe your dad is just, you know, looking for arrowheads instead of the trail and he’s lost track of time,” Amanda said.

“I know what he’s looking for,” Tally muttered.

Amanda felt her pulse quicken. “You do?”

Tally nodded.

“Why don’t you tell me what it is? Then maybe we could
find him. We wouldn’t have to wonder where he is or if he’s all right.”

Tally said nothing.

“Is he in trouble, Tally? Is that why you had to leave San Antonio in such a hurry?”

Nothing.

“He made you promise not to say anything, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Bart.
She could strangle him. Putting his daughter through this for his own gain. He probably told Tally not to cry too, so no one could sense her fear. Amanda took a step toward her niece and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. “It’s okay to break a promise if that’s what it takes to help someone. If your dad needs help, we need to be able to give it to him.”

“I…I don’t think he needs help.”

“How do you know he doesn’t?”

Tally shrugged. “If he needed help, he would get it.”

“Can you tell me why you left San Antonio?”

Again Tally lifted and lowered her shoulders. “Dad has never liked to stay in one place for very long.”

“Was he in some kind of trouble in San Antonio, Tally? Are the police looking for him? You can tell me.”

Her niece looked away for a moment. When she turned back, her eyes glittered with anger. “Why does everyone think my dad is in trouble? He’s not a bad father. I know that’s what everyone thinks. But he’s not.”

Amanda swallowed hard. “Of course he’s not.”

Tally blinked, unconvinced.

“I don’t think he’s a bad father. And I won’t ask you again to
break your promise. But if you want to tell me what your dad is looking for, I’m here. And if you think it will help us find him so we can tell him where you are, then I’m here. I’d like for him to know that you’re safe.”

Being reminded that Bart didn’t know where she was seemed to tug hard at Tally. The girl sighed lightly. “I didn’t read the letter.”

Amanda had no idea what her niece was talking about. “What letter?”

“The letter from his dad.”

Their father had been dead for two years. “From his dad? My dad?”

Tally nodded once. “You sent it to him when Grandpa died. With your grandma’s wedding ring and the other stuff.
That
letter.”

In her mind, Amanda saw herself taking the little box her father had asked her to send to Bart to the post office. Her brother got nothing else from their father’s estate, not that there was much to be shared. Still, it rankled Amanda that their father had left his entire estate to her and a little cardboard box to Bart. Perhaps in the few strained conversations her brother and father had over the last twenty years, Bart had made it clear he didn’t want anything from their father’s estate. She could quite easily imagine Bart saying something like that. The box was sealed when her father gave it to her the week before he died. She had no idea what had been in it.

“What did the letter say?” Amanda said, barely above a whisper.

“I just told you I didn’t read it. But it’s because of that letter
that he went. He told me he was going to Warsaw He didn’t say where besides that.”

“But why?”

“You said you wouldn’t.” Tally picked up more dishes and headed toward the kitchen.

“I wouldn’t what?” Amanda followed her.

“Ask me again to break my promise.” Tally set the dishes on the counter.

“I’m just trying to do right by you, Tally. I don’t have to know why he’s there. But it matters that we don’t know where he is. It matters that he doesn’t know where
you
are.” Amanda put an arm around the girl and gently pulled her into the crook of her arm. “I don’t want you to break a promise. Or get hurt. By anyone.”

Her niece stood still within the one-armed embrace for only a second. A moment later, Tally pulled away.

sixteen

A
nurse’s assistant wearing maroon scrubs positioned Eliasz’s wheelchair in front of the tripod.

Chase looked up at her. “Actually, you can turn the chair to face my cousin. She’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll film it from a slight angle. It will look a little more natural that way.”

“Yes, don’t make me unnatural,” Eliasz quipped, his words etched with Eastern European inflection.

“But don’t make him look better than me or I’ll never hear the end of it,” Josef said.

“Could we bring in a couple of those wingback chairs from the lobby?” Tally asked tentatively. “If that’s okay, I mean. I think it would be nice if Mr. Bliss and Mr. Abramovicz could sit in, you know, regular chairs.”

“Yes, yes, regular and natural, that’s for me,” Eliasz said, and Josef laughed.

“It’s not a pretty picture when we’re unnatural and irregular,” Josef said.

The nurse’s assistant said she thought that would be all right. Matt left to get the chairs.

Chase glanced over at Tally. “That’ll look nice,” he said, and she nodded.

Several minutes later, the two men were seated in rose-hued
wingback chairs. Afternoon sun shimmered on their downy heads from a side window. A grand piano far off in the unfocused background made a peaceful backdrop. Chase positioned a potted palm slightly behind Eliasz’s chair.

“Just moving a plant behind you, Mr. Abramovicz,” Chase said.

“Yes,” the man said. “I smell it.”

When everything was in place, Matt spoke first. “Um, okay, well, thanks for letting us talk with you guys. We really appreciate it.”

“It was a feat, fitting this into our busy schedules, wasn’t it, Josef?” Eliasz said.

Josef nodded. “Indeed. You picked a good day to come. Thursday would’ve been impossible.”

The two men laughed.

“Lucky us, then.” Matt turned to Chase. “Are we rolling?”

Chase nodded.

“Okay, so Tally here has a list of questions, and she’ll ask them and…”

Josef held up a hand. “Pardon the intrusion, but how about if we just tell you our story, and then perhaps when we are finished, you will decide if you have questions? Yes?” He turned to Chase.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Chase said.

Josef turned his attention back to Matt. “How much do you want to know?”

“We need twenty minutes of footage,” Matt replied.

“We need to know what impact the Holocaust—and in particular,
the Warsaw Ghetto—had on history,” Chase said, adjusting the lens and avoiding Matt’s pointed stare.

Josef smiled. “You need two different things.”

“Uh, we need to turn in a topnotch project in less than three weeks,” Matt said.

“Why don’t we just let them start talking and see where it takes us?” Tally laid the page of questions gently in her lap.

“I’m cool with that.” Chase made another adjustment on the camera.

Matt pressed his lips into a thin line. “Okay.”

“Where should we start, Eliasz?” Josef said, turning to his friend.

“The ghetto begins before there was a ghetto,” Eliasz answered. “It begins here.” He pointed to his head. “It begins with one mind, one idea, one man. Wouldn’t you say, Josef?”

“Indeed. I met my friend Eliasz here a month before the Germans invaded Poland. It was early August 1939. He was fourteen. I was twenty-two. He seemed very young to me then. Here I was, an important government employee in charge of so much, and he just the young son of the Jewish family who owned a bakery on my street. I had just moved to Warsaw from Lódz when I got my new job. I was second in charge of the waterworks. It was an important job. My parents, they wanted me to become a priest, but I was in love with a beautiful girl named Katrine, so there would be no priesthood for me. Katrine was a nurse.”

Josef stopped for a moment. Chase zoomed in on the man’s withered hands. Josef was spinning a gold wedding band on his ring finger.

“Would you like to hear how we met?” the old man said.

Matt hesitated. Tally quickly said yes, and Chase brought the focus back to the old man’s face.

“I met Katrine several months before the Nazis invaded. She had lost a lovely butterfly pin that I found in a park near the hospital where she worked. It was a different kind of pin; I had never seen one like it. It was made of gold, I suppose, and it was an open-winged butterfly with a tiny chain affixed to it so that a second, smaller butterfly could be pinned above it or below it, wherever Katrine wanted. There were a few small sapphires and tiny pearls too. I don’t think it was worth a fortune or anything, but it was distinctive. I found it in the grass under a bench. It seemed to me that whoever lost it would want it back. I found out later it had belonged to Katrine’s late grandmother, and it was exceptionally special to her.