The Time Between (33 page)

Eleanor

I
t was after midnight by the time the car dropped me off at Luna Point. I had fallen into a fitful doze despite my headache, and dreamed of trees and angels and my father. I dropped my overnight bag and the Piggly Wiggly bag with my purse in the foyer, then walked through the sleeping house to the sunroom.

I threw open the door into the summer night and stepped out into a dark where not even the stars dared to show their light. The night sounds of the marsh and the smells of water and summer grass brought the old Ellie back to me in waves, the girl with the brave heart and fearless soul. I needed her now, more than ever. If I was going to be any use to Gigi and Finn, and even Helena, I needed Ellie to move back permanently. I felt her hovering, waiting for me to bring her back.

There is no risk in wanting something you can never have.
Helena’s words no longer made me angry, just ashamed. Ashamed that my father knew what I’d become, the father who’d risked his life on runs where other shrimpers wouldn’t because he believed in the dreams he had for our family. Because he believed I was good enough to go to Juilliard. Because he loved us. The only risks I’d taken since the day he’d died were simply stupid stunts to make me feel again. I’d been asleep all these years but hadn’t known it.
All shut-eye ain’t sleep.

“Come back to us, Gigi,” I whispered to the moonless night, hoping her angels would take the message to her. I needed her to come back so I could thank her for teaching me so much. I thought of her short life and her health struggles, but I knew that even if her life was short, she would say it had all been worth it. She lived each day with both eyes wide and an open heart, and I needed her to wake up so I could tell her she was right.

I retreated back into the sunroom, closing the night behind me. I was too wound up to go to sleep, knowing that when Helena woke I’d need to tell her about the accident. All she knew now was that Finn had called to tell her that we’d be staying in Charleston for the night. I hoped the half-truth had at least granted the old woman a night of restful sleep.

I sat down in one of the armchairs and picked up the television remote, then put it down again. I was in no mood for the late-night television of old reruns and white-toothed men shouting at me to buy food choppers and exercise machines. I wanted to call Finn, but I didn’t want to wake him just in case he’d managed to fall asleep. I had no claims to him or his daughter, but I could no longer deny that I wanted to.

My gaze fell on the stack of unread library books by the chair. I picked through the thick history books, pausing at the small booklet I’d shoved at the last minute into my stack.
The Catholic Church and the Holocaust in Hungary.
I was more interested in it since finding out the name of the convent where Bernadett had taught, but I selected it now mostly because it was short enough to hold my attention when my thoughts threatened to veer off in dangerous directions.

I fanned through the booklet, noting that it consisted of very little narrative and seemed to be just a listing of various Catholic institutions in Hungary during World War II. The words “Divine Redeemer” caught my attention, and I quickly flipped back pages until I saw the words again. The bold-faced header for the short paragraph that followed read: “Motherhouse of the Daughters of the Divine Redeemer.” Then, beneath it:

The motherhouse sheltered 150 children in secret, mostly Jewish but many physically and mentally handicapped, relying on the underground resistance movement to supply them with food and medicine. In July 1944, following information supplied by an informant, the Nazis raided the home and took all of the children, including many of the Sisters who chose to stay with them. They were deported to Auschwitz. All believed to have perished.

I stared at the words, all of my exhaustion vanished. My head throbbed harder, yet the pain seemed far away, disconnected from me somehow. The words moved on the page in front of me, twisting and turning, shifting positions like pieces in a puzzle. A puzzle in which the edges had suddenly formed, making the rest easier to place.
July 1944.
All believed to have perished.

My mind jumped and leaped, then turned back again like a winding path around the truth. I ran through old conversations with Helena and Finn, about the night Helena left Budapest, about Gunter and Benjamin. About Helena and Bernadett’s trek to Switzerland and their tiny house above the bakery where they grew up. Yet nothing seemed connected except for the July date in 1944 and the convent where Bernadett worked.
And the paintings.
The paintings had come with them from Hungary, and at least one of them had belonged to a family who had also all perished in Auschwitz except for little Sarah Reichmann.

The booklet slid from my fingers to my lap, and I let it fall to the floor. The throbbing in my head became real again, intensified by my growing sense of confusion and grief. Gigi lay in a coma, and I needed to break the news to Helena, an old woman who’d wanted to die following the death of her sister.
Bernadett killed herself.
It was as if all these pieces were like strings of yarn rolled in a tight ball. And at the center was an old woman with plenty of secrets.

I dug in my purse for the pain pills I’d brought from the hospital but tossed them aside. I needed to have all my wits about me. Instead I took two extra-strength Advil that I found floating in the bottom of the inside pocket of my purse, then lay back against the chair and closed my eyes.

Helena

I dreamed again that the Danube was blue, and that I walked along the bridge with my arms linked with Magda’s and Bernadett’s. We were young again, with smooth skin and bright hair, and it seemed as if war and death and separation were very, very far away. Then the sky darkened, the bombs falling like rain, and I watched as the water turned red.

“Helena?”

It was Eleanor. It must have been early morning, and the sun broke through the sides of the curtains. When had she started calling me Helena? I didn’t mind it, I decided. I blinked my eyes to focus them and then felt her slide my eyeglasses onto my nose. I saw the bandage on her forehead, and I suddenly knew why the river in my dream had turned red. “Where is Gigi?”

The look in her eyes answered my question. She moved forward and took my hand, her skin as cold as my own. “We were in an accident yesterday, on our way here. A driver ran a red light. . . .” She stopped, knowing that the details didn’t matter. None of the details would alter the end result.

She continued. “She’s in the hospital. She has swelling on the brain, and they’ve had to put her into a coma. If the swelling comes down, she has a good chance of a complete recovery. But we won’t know for a few days. Finn and Harper are with her.”

An icy cold settled around my heart, oddly soothing me so that I could no longer feel it beating in my chest. I expressed no emotion as I looked at Eleanor’s wounded face, the tear streaks she had tried to brush away, the light that had dimmed in her eyes. It is hard to feign surprise when the news has been expected for a long time, a patient panther waiting to pounce.

Her expression changed and I realized she thought I was in shock, had not comprehended her words. Impatiently, I pulled my hand away. “I am hungry. Is Nurse Kester making my breakfast?”

Eleanor drew back. “Didn’t you hear me? Gigi is in the hospital. She could die.”

“I heard you. I am not deaf. But I am hungry.” I could not stomach food, but I wanted her to leave before I was forced to tell her how it was all my fault, that I had been waiting all these years for God to exact his punishment on me: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A child for a child. I wanted to tell her how I had not wanted to love Gigi as much as I did, how I held back at first to protect her. And when she’d recovered from her cancer, I had felt the finger of God pass over me. But He had merely been waiting. “God giveth, and God taketh away,” I said, hoping she’d understand.

“Do you not care?” she asked, her voice quiet and incredulous.

I leaned back against my pillows, resigned now that I knew my fate.
“Mindenki a maga szerencséjének kovácsa,”
I whispered to the dark corners of my room and the ghosts who hovered there.

“Everyone’s the blacksmith of their own fate,” she translated, saying each word slowly as if one of them would hold the answer to why I could not cry over my sweet Gigi.

Her shoulders were rounded, her palms flat against her pants, reminding me of the girl I’d first met—the odd mixture of defeated posture and fierce eyes. Even then, I had seen the hint of who she truly was, but I could see now that her true spirit had almost completely reemerged. I knew that if she sat down at the piano and played now, the music would be pure and exquisite and would make me weep for all the sorrows of the world. And if Gigi were here, she’d press her small hands against her heart.

“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice tinted with anger and confusion. “How could this be Gigi’s fault?”

I shook my head. “Not Gigi’s. Mine.”

Her light blue eyes stared at me without really seeing me, and I could almost picture the pages of the history books she’d been reading flipping through her mind, the things Finn and I had told her, trying to draw conclusions to a story to which she did not want to know the end.

She straightened, her eyes widening, our gazes meeting in a battle of wills neither of us wanted to lose. I felt the bonds of my web snapping strand by strand, and I flailed desperately, trying to hold on to what was left. And I did it with the only weapon I still had left.

“How is Eve? Is her pregnancy going well?”

Eleanor didn’t answer, but I had not expected her to. I continued. “I have a question for you—something that has been running around in my brain all these months.” I pretended to gather my thoughts for a moment. “Now that you have feelings for Finn—and do not say that you do not—do you no longer wish that she would die?”

She jerked out of her chair. “I never said that.”

“You did not have to. I had two sisters, remember. I would think it odd to go through life with a sister without having had that thought at least once. Love and hate are merely two sides of the same coin.”

Eleanor stormed to the door, but until she left this house I knew that I had not yet won. She stopped, then slowly turned around, and one more strand popped, the sound as it hit the wall and slithered away loud in my ears.

“Is that what this is about? Misplaced guilt over Bernadett’s death? I know she killed herself—Finn told me. And you wanted to die—but not because you couldn’t live without her. It was because you couldn’t live with the knowledge of
why
.”

“How dare you?” I said in the feeble voice I used when I wanted to get my way. “I am an old woman. . . .”

“Yes, you are. Which is why, I would think, you would not want to die with whatever guilt you have hanging over you. And I can’t stop thinking how, after all of this time we’ve been together and I’ve been digging into your past, you haven’t once asked me to stop. Not once. I never stopped digging because I couldn’t help but wonder if you’ve been hoping all this time that you would be forced to tell your story.”

“None of this has anything to do with you.” Even I could tell that my voice had weakened, that my protestations weren’t real.

“I suppose in the beginning it didn’t. I was simply curious and digging up your secrets meant I didn’t need to dwell too much on my own. And your antagonism toward me from the beginning encouraged me.”

She bit her lip, something I recognized as a sign that she was measuring her words. But I already knew what she was going to say before she had even uttered the first word.

“It is my business now. Because of Finn, and because of that sweet little girl whom I’ve grown to love as if she were my own who is fighting for her life. How will Finn feel when I tell him that he could have just called you and told you on the phone, since you don’t apparently care about what happens to Gigi? I know that’s not true.” She pressed her hand against her heart, reminding me of Gigi. “I know you love her, and I just want to understand how something that happened in your past could come to this. I need to know. . . .” She stopped, her eyes widening, like a person seeing the stars for the first time. “I need to know because for a long time I could see myself in your place sixty years from now—guilt ridden and lonely.”

I wanted to yell at her, to tell her she was wrong and insulting and that she had no idea what she was talking about. But I had seen it, too, and knew that she was very, very right.

Eleanor took a deep breath, and I felt her weariness. “Whatever happened to you and Bernadett is part of your family’s legacy. Something to pass on to Finn and Gigi. Good or bad. You
survived
, Helena. When so many did not. I don’t know what it is to have my home invaded by a foreign army, or to have bombs falling on my roof while I’m trying to save a dying sister. I cannot and will not judge you for whatever choices you’ve made. Maybe you just need to be forgiven.”

“Is that all I need?” I asked, my words bitter-tasting. “Did your sister forgive you?”

After a moment she nodded. “Yes.”

“But have you forgiven your sister?”

She stared at me, not comprehending.

“Forgiveness works both ways. It will not be finished between you two until you both are at peace with choices you’ve made that hurt the other, regardless of your intent.”

“And for you and Bernadett, you think it’s too late. But what if it’s not?”

“And what if it is?”

Eleanor returned to the chair by the side of my bed and took my hands in hers again. “How will you know unless you try?”

The last strand popped, and I was suspended, it seemed, as if I hadn’t been the one holding on to them all of these years, but they had been clinging to me. A relic of my Catholic school education emerged from my mouth.
“Veritas vos liberabit.”
I smiled at her confusion. It was not as easy as I had once hoped to stump Miss Eleanor Murray, but I had finally managed it. “I should have assumed your American education neglected to teach you Latin. It translates to ‘The truth shall set you free.’”