The Sweetness of Forgetting (49)

He was at Auschwitz. I saw him there. And I saw him the day they led him to the gas chamber.

And that was it. He was gone. The ghost of Monsieur Pinusiewicz, as well as the last shred of hope she had that she could somehow find her past again.

By the time she left New York, she knew they were all gone. The ghosts had told her. One had watched her father get sick while working at Auschwitz’s crematorium. One had held her mother’s hand as she died. Another had worked alongside Helene and had one day returned from the field, a day that Helene had been too sick to rise from her bed, to find her on the floor, beaten to death by the guards, her lovely brown hair matted with blood. The fates of the others were less clear, and Rose didn’t ask questions. What mattered was that they were all dead. All of them.

And so, when Ted had promised her a life far away from these hollow-eyed ghosts, far away from New York, in a magical place called Cape Cod, where he said the waves washed up on sandy beaches, and cranberry bogs grew, she said yes. Because she loved him. And because she needed to finish becoming someone else. She needed to concentrate on building a family, because the one she’d had was gone forever.

But by 1949, seven years after she’d left Paris, she had needed to know for sure. She knew she could not bury Rose Picard without the certainty that could only come from the official records. What if one of the ghosts was wrong? What if little Danielle had survived and was in an orphanage somewhere, believing there was no one in the world who loved her? What if Helene hadn’t died on that floor but had escaped and was waiting for her, wondering where she was? What if the ghost who said she’d held Rose’s mother’s hand had been mistaken about the identity of the woman she’d watched die?

But Rose couldn’t go. It had been nothing short of miraculous that her falsified papers had gotten her into the United States in the first place. She knew it was likely that the immigration people had looked the other way only because she had married Ted, a war hero. She had made her bargains; now her life was here, and she had a little girl who needed her. She didn’t trust France. She didn’t trust that she could get out again. And she feared her heart wouldn’t be able to bear going back anyhow.

And so she asked Ted to go. And because he loved her, and because he was a good man, he said yes.

He left on a shining summer Monday. She waited, the seconds ticking by like minutes, the minutes feeling like hours. Time stretched like the taffy she, Ted, and little Josephine had eaten on their trip to Atlantic City the summer before.

When he finally came home, very late that Friday, he sat her down in the still, damp heat of the Cape Cod night and told her everything.

He had been to the synagogue Rose had grown up in. It pained her deeply when he told her the synagogue had been destroyed during the war, but that they had rebuilt it, as good as new. She knew then that he didn’t understand that when things were rebuilt, they weren’t the same. You could never get back the things that had been destroyed.

“They all died, Rose,” he told her gently, looking into her eyes and holding her hands tightly, as if he were afraid she’d float away, like a helium balloon bound for the heavens. “Your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers. All of them. I am so sorry.”

“Oh,” was all she could muster.

“I spoke to the rabbi there,” Ted said softly. “He showed me where to find the records. I am so sorry.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to know what happened to them, Rose?” Ted asked.

“No.” She shook her head, looked away. She could not hear it. She feared it would break her heart in a million pieces. Would she die right here, in front of her husband, with her daughter upstairs, when it shattered? “It is my fault,” she whispered.

“No, Rose!” Ted exclaimed. “You can’t feel that way. None of this is your fault.” He took her in his arms, but her body was stiff, unwilling.

She shook her head slowly against his chest. “I knew,” she whispered. “I knew they were coming for us. And I did not try hard enough to save them.”

She knew she would have to live with that forever. But she didn’t know how. It was why she couldn’t be herself anymore. It was why she had found solace in Rose Durand, and then Rose McKenna. It was impossible to be Rose Picard. Rose Picard had died in Europe with her family long ago.

“It’s not your fault,” Ted said again. “You have to stop blaming yourself.”

She nodded, because she knew it was what was expected of her. She pulled away from him. “And Jacob Levy?” she asked in a flat voice, looking up at long last to meet Ted’s eye.

This time, it was he who looked away. “My dear Rose,” he said. “Your friend Jacob died at Auschwitz. Just before the liberation of the camp.”

Rose blinked a few times. It was as if someone had pushed her head underwater. All of a sudden, she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She gasped for breath. “You are certain?” she asked after a very long while, when air filled her lungs again.

“I’m sorry,” Ted said.

And that had been that. The world became very cold for Rose that day. She nodded and looked away from her husband. She would not cry. She could not cry. She had already died inside, and to cry would be to live. And how could she live without Jacob?

Jacob had always told her that love would save them. And she had believed him. But he’d been wrong. She had been saved, but what good was she without him? What meaning did her life have?