The Sweetness of Forgetting (22)
“Your . . . family?” Hope asked tentatively.
Rose nodded, and Hope unfolded the slip of paper. Her eyes quickly scanned the seven names.
Seven names, Rose thought. She looked upward, to where the stars of the Big Dipper were beginning to appear. Seven stars in the sky. “I must know what happened,” she told her granddaughter. “And so, now, must you.”
“What’s going on?” Annie interrupted. She looked scared, and Rose longed to comfort her, but she knew she was no better at comfort than she was at truth. She never had been. Besides, Annie was twelve. Old enough to know. Just two years younger than Rose had been when the war began.
“Who are these people?” Hope asked, looking down at the list again.
“They are my family,” Rose said. “Your family.” She closed her eyes for a moment and traced their names on her own heart, which, astoundingly, had gone on beating for all these years.
Albert Picard. b. 1897
Cecile Picard. b. 1901
Helene Picard. b. 1924
Claude Picard. b. 1929
Alain Picard. b. 1931
David Picard. b. 1934
Danielle Picard. b. 1937
When Rose opened her eyes, Hope and Annie were staring at her. She took a deep breath. “Your grandfather went to Paris in 1949,” she began. Her voice was strained, for the words were hard to say aloud, even now, even so many years later. Rose closed her eyes again and remembered Ted’s face the day he came home. He’d been unable to meet her eye. He’d spoken slowly as he delivered the news of the people she’d loved more than anything in the world.
“They all died,” Rose continued after a moment. She opened her eyes again and looked at Hope. “It was all I needed to know then. I asked your grandfather to tell me no more. My heart could not bear it.”
Only after he’d delivered the news had she finally agreed to return with him to the Cape Cod town where he’d been born and raised. Until then, she had been determined to remain in New York, just in case. It was where she’d always believed she’d be found, in the meeting place they’d spoken of years before. But now, there was no one left to find her. She was lost forever.
“All these people?” Annie asked, breaking the silence, bringing Rose back to the moment. “They all, like, died? What happened?”
Rose paused. “The world fell down,” she said finally. It was all she could explain, and it was the truth. The world had collapsed upon itself, writhing and folding into something she could no longer recognize.
“I don’t understand,” Annie murmured. She looked scared.
Rose took a deep breath. “Some secrets cannot be spoken without undoing a lifetime,” she said. “But I know that when my memory dies, so too will the loved ones I have kept close to my heart all these years.”
Rose looked at Hope. She knew that her granddaughter would do her best to explain it to Annie one day. But first, she would need to understand it herself. And for that, she needed to go to the place it had all begun.
“Please go to Paris soon, Hope,” Rose urged. “I do not know how much time I have.”
And then, she was done. The toll was too high. She had said more than she’d said in sixty-two years, since the day Ted had returned with the news. She looked up at the stars and found the one she had named Papa, the one she had named Maman, the ones she had named Helene, Claude, Alain, David, Danielle. There was still one star missing. She could not find him, no matter how much she searched. And she knew, as she’d always known, that it was her fault he wasn’t there. A piece of her wanted Hope to find out about him, on her journey to Paris. She knew the discovery would change Hope’s life.
Hope and Annie were asking questions, but Rose could no longer hear them. Instead, she closed her eyes and began to pray.
The tide was coming. It had begun.
Chapter Seven
Do you, like, have any idea what she was talking about?” Annie says as soon as we get back in the car after dropping Mamie off.
She’s fumbling with her seat belt as she tries to buckle it. It’s not until I notice that her hands are shaking that I realize mine are too.
“I mean, like, who are those people?” Annie finally clicks the belt closed and looks at me. There’s confusion etched across her smooth brow, along with her smattering of freckles that are fading more the farther we get from the summer sun. “Mamie’s maiden name wasn’t even Picard. It was Durand.”
“I know,” I murmur.
When Annie was in fifth grade, her class did a basic family tree project. She’d tried to use a website to trace Mamie’s roots, but there’d been so many immigrants with the last name Durand in the early 1940s that she’d gotten stuck. She’d sulked about it for a week, upset at me that I hadn’t thought to research Mamie’s past before her memory began to vanish.
“Maybe she got the name wrong,” Annie says finally. “Maybe she wrote Picard but she meant Durand.”
“Maybe,” I say slowly, but I know that neither of us quite believes it. Mamie was as lucid as we’d seen her in years. She knew exactly what she was saying.
We drive the rest of the way home without speaking. But for once, it’s not an uncomfortable silence; Annie isn’t sitting in the passenger seat resenting me with her every breath; she’s thinking about Mamie.