The Storyteller (58 page)

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.”

Let me just say that I’m doing everything I can not to get sick, right here in the office of the funeral director. The whole place creeps me out, which is pretty astounding for someone who scours photographs of concentration camp victims all day long.

“Are you okay?” Sage asks.

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking you that.”

She sits up. “Where’s Adam?”

Wow. Just like that, an invisible wall cleaves the space between us. I rock back on my heels, putting distance between the couch where she’s
lying and myself. “Of course,” I say formally. “I’ll get him for you.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to get him.” Sage’s voice is as thin as a twig. “How did you know . . .”

She doesn’t finish her sentence; she doesn’t have to. “I called you when I got back to D.C. But you didn’t pick up the phone. I started to get worried—I know you think a ninety-five-year-old isn’t a threat, but I’ve seen guys that age pull a gun on a federal agent. Anyway, someone finally answered. Your sister Saffron. She told me about Minka.” I look at her. “I’m so sorry, Sage. Your grandmother was a very special woman.”

“What are you doing here, Leo?”

“I think that should be pretty obvious—”

“I know you’re here for the funeral,” she interrupts. “But why?”

Various reasons run through my head: because being here is the right thing to do; because there is a precedent in the office for coming to the funerals of survivors who’ve been witnesses; because Minka was part of my investigation. But really, the reason I am here is that I wanted to be, for Sage. “I didn’t know your grandmother, of course, the way you did. But I could tell just by the way she looked at you when you didn’t know she was looking that family came first, for her. It’s like that for a lot of Jews. Almost as if it’s in the collective unconscious, because once, it got taken away.” I glance at Sage. “Today, I thought maybe I could be your family.”

At first Sage doesn’t move. Then I realize that tears are streaming down her cheeks. I reach for her, right through that invisible wall, until I am holding her hand. “So, no biggie, but is this good crying, like you’re happy to set another place at Thanksgiving, or bad crying, like you just found out your long-lost relative is a creeper?”

A laugh bubbles out of her. “I don’t know how you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it so I can breathe again,” Sage says. “But thank you.”

Whatever barrier I thought was between us is completely gone now. I sit next to her on the couch, and Sage rests her head on my shoulder, simply, as if she has been doing it her whole life. “What if we did this to her?”

“You mean by getting her to talk about what happened?”

She nods. “I can’t shake the feeling that if I hadn’t ever brought it up—if you hadn’t shown her the pictures . . .”

“You don’t know that. Stop beating yourself up.”

“It just feels so anticlimactic, you know?” she says, her voice small. “To survive the Holocaust, and then die in her sleep. What’s the point?”

I think for a moment. “The point is that she got to die in her sleep. After having lunch with her granddaughter, and a very dapper, charming attorney.” I am still holding Sage Singer’s hand. Her fingers fit seamlessly between mine. “Maybe she didn’t die upset. Maybe she let go, Sage, because she finally felt like everything was going to be okay.”

 • • • 

It is by all accounts a lovely service, but I don’t pay attention. I’m too busy looking around the room to see if Reiner Hartmann shows up, because there’s still a part of me that believes it’s possible. When I realize that he’s probably not going to come, I focus my attention on Adam, who is standing unobtrusively near the back of the sanctuary the way a funeral director should, trying hard not to stare at me every time Sage grabs on to my arm or buries her face in the sleeve of my suit jacket.

I’m not gonna lie; it feels pretty damn good.

When I got dumped in high school by a girl who wanted a more popular, studlier date on a Friday night, my mother used to say,
Leo, don’t you worry. The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I am starting to believe this might actually be true.

My mother would also tell me that hitting on a woman who’s grieving at her grandmother’s funeral is a one-way ticket to Hell.

I don’t recognize any of the mourners, except for Daisy, who is sobbing softly into a linen handkerchief. At the end of the service, Adam announces when and where
shivah
calls can be made. He also lists two charities, suggested by Pepper, where donations can be sent in Minka’s memory.

At the graveside, I stand behind Sage, who sits between her two older sisters. They look like her, but overblown; birds-of-paradise flanking a primrose. When it is time for Sage to throw dirt into the grave, her hands are shaking. She tosses three handfuls. The rest of the mourners—a collection of both elderly people and friends of Sage’s parents, from what I can gather—throw handfuls of dirt as well. After it is my turn, I catch up to Sage, and without saying a word, she slips her hand into mine again.

Sage’s house, which has been commandeered by her sisters to host a post-funeral gathering for friends and family, looks nothing like the home I was in just a few days ago. Furniture has been rearranged to accommodate the crowd. The mirrors have already been covered for mourning. Food is spread on every horizontal surface. Sage looks at the throngs of people streaming in the front door and takes a shuddering breath. “Everyone’s going to try to talk to me. I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can. I’m not going anywhere,” I promise.

As soon as we walk inside, people swarm around Sage to offer their condolences. “Your grandma was my bridge partner,” one nervous, birdlike woman says. A meatball of a man with a gold pocket watch and a handlebar mustache who reminds me of the guy on the Monopoly Chance cards hugs Sage tightly, rocking her small frame back and forth. “You poor thing,” he says.

A balding man holding a sleeping toddler in his arms catches my eye. “I didn’t know Sage was dating someone.” He awkwardly sticks out his hand, which is caught under the chubby knee of his son. “Welcome to the circus. I’m Andy. Pepper’s other half.”

“Leo,” I say, shaking his hand. “But Sage and I . . .”

I realize I have no idea what she’s told her family. It is certainly at her discretion to explain what’s going on with Josef Weber, if she sees fit. But I’m not going to be the one to break the news to them if Sage hasn’t.

“We’re just working together,” I finish.

He looks at my suit dubiously. “You don’t look like a baker.”

“I’m not. We met through . . . well, Minka.”

“She was something else,” Andy says. “Last year for Chanukah, Pepper and I got her a trip to a fancy salon for a manicure. She liked it so much she asked if, for her birthday, we could get her a
pedophile.” He laughs.

But Sage has overheard. “You think it’s funny that English wasn’t her first language, Andy? How much Polish and German and Yiddish do you speak?”

He looks horrified. “I don’t think it’s funny. I thought it was sweet.”

I put my arm around Sage’s shoulders and steer her in the opposite direction. “Why don’t we see if your sisters need a hand in the kitchen?”

As I lead her away from Pepper’s husband, Sage frowns. “He’s such a dick.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but if he wants to remember your grandmother with a smile, that’s not such a bad thing.”

In the kitchen, Pepper is putting sugar cubes into a glass bowl. “I understand not buying creamer because of the fat content, but do you really not have milk, Sage?” she asks. “Everyone has milk, for God’s sake.”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Sage mutters. I notice that when she talks to her sisters, her shoulders hunch and she seems like a smaller, paler version of herself. Like she’s trying to be even more invisible than usual.

“Just bring it out there,” Saffron says. “The coffee’s cold already.”

“Hi,” I announce. “My name’s Leo. Is there anything I can do to help?”

Saffron looks up at me, then at Sage. “Who’s this?”

“Leo,” I repeat. “A colleague.”

“
You
bake?” she says doubtfully.

I turn to Sage. “Okay, so which is it—do bakers wear clown suits or something, or do I dress like an accountant?”

“You dress like an attorney,” she replies. “Go figure.”

“Well, good,” Saffron says, sailing past us with her platter, “because it’s completely criminal that there’s not a single decent deli in this entire state. How am I supposed to feed sixty people with pastrami from Price Chopper?”

“You
used
to live here, you know,” Sage calls out after her.

When her sisters bustle out of the kitchen and we are alone, I hear crying. But it’s not Sage; and she hears it, too. She traces the sound to the pantry, and opens the doors to find Eva the dachshund trapped inside. “I bet this is a nightmare for you,” she murmurs, picking the dog up in her arms, but she is looking at all the people gathered to celebrate her grandmother’s life. People who want to make her the center of their attention, as they share memories.

While she is still holding the dachshund in one arm, I pull her through the back door of the kitchen, down a set of stairs, and across her rear lawn to the spot where I’ve parked my rental car.