The Loose Ends List(69)

“This is so traumatic, I want to throw up,” Paige whispers.

All I can think about is Paige going into a seizure on all this broken glass.

After hours of painstaking work, we’ve cleaned up most of the cabin and Heinz is talking to Vito on his balcony. My back aches, and I’m miserable. But we keep going.

Janie and Jeb and Wes and I swarm Dad in his cabin and grill him about Heinz.

“Come on, Aaron. You must know. You’ve been playing poker with the guy all these nights,” Wes says.

Dad stands and smooths down the five hairs on his head. “I will tell you the story. But this is a judgment-free zone.” He waves his arms likes he’s clearing judgment out of the air. “Is everybody with me?”

“Yes, Professor Levine,” Jeb says.

“Heinz was a member of the Nazi party when he was nineteen years old.”

Janie punches Wes in the arm. “I knew it,” she says.

“His job was to check passports on trains leaving Germany and turn in people with forged or missing documents.”

“That’s it? He didn’t even kill anyone?” Jeb says.

“Oh my God. Shut up,” I snap. Clearly Jeb has never read a book in his life.

“May I, please? He did the job for months before he found out he was sending people to camps. He was one of those kids who was bullied and tormented his whole life. He was a very sheltered young man, and thought he was serving his country by preventing people from defecting to the other side. He found out what the Nazis were doing at a picnic, of all places.” Dad makes the scrunch face and shakes his head. “So Heinz went back and scanned the ledger of people he had turned in and realized it was five hundred thirty-one people. He fell apart and tried to starve himself to death. Most of his family was killed in the blitzkriegs, but his sister somehow got him to Brazil, where he lived out his years with nieces and nephews. That’s the story.”

“So can he be considered a real Nazi?” Wes says. “I mean, he wasn’t working in a concentration camp.”

“The Nazis were a political party. Yes. He was a Nazi,” Dad says. “Now you all know the truth. I’m going back up to help him with the bottles.”

“What’s he doing with the bottles?” I ask.

“He’s writing letters to all five hundred thirty-one people he turned in, stuffing them into bottles, and throwing them into the sea.”

“Isn’t that polluting the ocean?” Janie says.

“Oh, come on, let the man be. He’s not asking to snorkel or see volcanoes. He just wants to find a little peace by honoring those five hundred thirty-one souls. That’s his only wish,” Dad says.

Gram summons us before I can make sense of any of this.



The good news is we’ve recovered the 482 letters Heinz has written so far. The bad news is there are not enough bottles for 531 messages.

We leave Vito, Dad, Bob, and the minister with Heinz and call an emergency meeting in the café to figure out how to help him. Gram comes up with an idea.

“Papier-maché. We’re going to make five hundred and thirty-one fabulous bottles out of papier-maché.”

Thirty people file into the art studio to gather materials, and Gram crafts a prototype using balloons, glue, newspaper, and paint. We stuff a paper inside and it works. We create an assembly line to slap the strips of tissue paper in layers. It takes every able-bodied person (and several not-so-able-bodied people) eight hours of work and large quantities of cookies and watermelon to complete and properly store all the bottles.

We take turns helping baby Grace crawl up the wheelchair onto Mark’s lap and back down again. Then she wants to push Mark all the way down to the lobby. It’s her baby obsession. She must think he’s sitting in a giant stroller.

It’s midnight when we text Dad to bring Heinz down to the ballroom. He’s been dozing for hours, and Dad and Wes practically have to carry the disheveled, big-eared old guy. Heinz sees us standing behind 531 handmade bottles, and some extras, just in case. His eyes get wide, and for the first time I see his smile.

I never imagined I would help a Nazi try to make peace with the universe.

Enzo and I collapse into bed without even kissing. I’m beginning to feel like we’re an old married couple. But I’m too tired to give it one last thought. The sound of a man singing wakes me up. Only it’s not singing. It’s Enzo yelling “no, no, no” in his sleep.

“Enzo, wake up.” I shake him gently. “Enzo, it’s okay.” He wakes with a horrified expression. “What’s wrong? What were you dreaming?” I ask.

He doesn’t say a word, and I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep. “I just… I haven’t had that dream in a long time.” Enzo sits up and blinks a few times. “I started having nightmares when Dad was sick. Right before he died, he had tubes coming out of every orifice: his nose, his mouth, one stuck into his side. He choked and coughed and struggled all day. No amount of morphine could fully dull the pain, so he moaned and cried.”

“Oh, Enzo, that’s awful.”

“I imagine if Dad was able to talk, he would have told Mum to keep us away. I imagine he was humiliated. Mum had her own dad dying at the same time, so she left us by Dad’s side. He was our incapacitated babysitter. It was hell.”