The Summer of Lost Letters

by Hannah Reynolds

  I stopped behind Noah’s chair. “Does it ever bother you how the doors aren’t actually golden?”

  He swiveled in his chair and smiled up at me, a bright, beatific smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “The poem doesn’t even end with golden doors, actually. It’s ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

  “So everything’s wrong.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “We tried painting the doors once,” a boy across the table said. A cousin, maybe. “It didn’t go over well.”

  “They used my nail polish,” a girl said. “I told them it was a stupid idea.”

  “The nail polish was gold sparkles,” Noah said. “They thought it would be subtle.”

  “It was not,” the girl said.

  Everyone smiled at me and I smiled back, then gestured to the seat next to Noah. “Okay if I sit here?”

  “I saved it for you, so yes.” He turned to the others. “This is Abby.”

  “Abby.” The boy on Noah’s other side leaned forward. He wore heavy eyeliner and had green hair and a few years on us. “The famous Abby.”

  “Famous?” I glanced warily at Noah as I sat. “Should I be alarmed?”

  “Should we?” the green-haired boy said. “I hear you’re a blackmailer.”

  I kicked Noah under the table.

  “Ow,” Noah said calmly. “This is Jeremiah. Our moms were roommates in grad school.”

  “Always a pleasure to meet a fellow delinquent.” Jeremiah shook my hand, then turned to Noah. “The parental rumor mill says it’s Harvard.”

  Noah nodded.

  “Sorry you couldn’t get into Yale.”

  “Screw you,” Noah said with a laugh.

  I’d never seen Noah so relaxed before, and it thrilled me to be allowed into his private circle. I couldn’t stop smiling. I liked these people. They listened and laughed when they talked. They were smart and funny and attentive. I wanted to belong to them. I wanted this to be my place.

  “All right, everyone!” Noah’s mother called from the adults table. “Ready?”

  Everyone quieted down. At our table, Noah’s cousin Shira appeared and picked up the matches. As the sun started to set, we lit the candles and sang the prayers, and the sense of belonging settled deeper into my bones. Baruch atah Adonai, we said. Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat. This was belonging, to me, words I’d said since before I could understand them, candles lit, wine poured, challah ripped.

  But no matter how familiar it was, no matter what sense of familiarity cloaked the evening, I was still an interloper at Golden Doors. I kept glancing at Noah’s parents and grandparents, and more than once found their attention on me: wary, puzzled, cautious. Worse, though, was the way Edward and Helen didn’t look at each other, but instead stiffly focused on anyone else. How could I talk to them if they were still so tense?

  I tried to focus instead on the people in front of me, laughing and teasing and being teased in return. I ate couscous with tender carrots and zucchini and peppers and a dozen spices; stuffed artichokes in lemon sauce; baklava from Jane’s bakery. When my leg brushed Noah’s, I didn’t move it, and he didn’t move his, either. I spent the meal riding high on the light touch of skin against skin.

  Like my own parents, Noah’s adults were liberal about underage drinking on Shabbat. At home, I stuck to grape juice, but Nantucket had apparently done a number on me, so as the evening waned, I nursed a glass of wine. Only when the candles faded into smoke and the cousins cleared the tables and people milled about on the lawn did I lean in toward Noah. “Your grandparents haven’t looked at each other all evening.”

  He grimaced in acknowledgment. “I know.”

  “They’re still fighting?”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe tonight’s not the right time to ask more questions.” Much as I wanted to, we’d probably have the same results as if we threw ourselves against a brick wall.

  He finished the rest of his wine, then turned to me with a familiar determined look on his face. “Okay, then.”

  “Okay?” I repeated warily. “Why does this okay make me nervous?”

  “Come on.” He wrapped his hand around mine and pulled me up.

  God, I loved the feel of Noah’s hand around mine.

  I did not love being clueless as he dragged me across the lawn, through the milling people, and into the house. “What are we doing?”

  We passed Shira, who caught my eyes and rolled her own.

  We wound our way through the great room, then into the hall, and I started resisting as I realized where we were going. I dug in my heels when we reached the study. “Noah . . .”

  “You want your grandmother’s letters, don’t you? You want her records. You want to find out where she came from.”

  I wavered. “I want to talk to your grandfather! Not go through his stuff.”

  “Now you have morals?”

  “Won’t your family be wicked pissed if they catch us?” And now, knowing more about Noah’s relationship with his dad and grandfather, I didn’t want them to be even more strained.

  “They’re busy hosting their friends. They won’t notice.” He pulled me inside and shut the door.

  “I’d like the record to note I’m against this.”

  “Chicken. Come on.” He peeled up the corner of the mouse pad on the desk, lifted a key, and unlocked the desk’s top drawer.

  “That’s a terrible hiding place.”

  “Right? And look.” He lifted a ring of keys from the drawer. “This is for everything else.” He unlocked a floor-to-ceiling cabinet on the far wall from the bookshelves, revealing endless files.

  I took in the determined energy shining through Noah as he moved about. He walked a tightrope, both constantly angry with his father and grandfather yet wanting to please them badly. If you didn’t clean a wound before the scar tissue formed over it, it became harder to rout out the dirt. “You’re closer to your grandma than your grandfather, right?”

  He nodded, riffling through another drawer. “I used to follow her around when I was a kid. My mom always tried to fix things, you know? When I’d get in fights with my dad. Grandma didn’t. She’d be out in the garden, and I’d join her, and she wouldn’t talk—just clip here, plant here, this is a hybrid tea rose, this is a shrub rose, this is a climber.”

  “Are you still mad on her behalf?”

  He let out a deep sigh. “Yeah. She’s done so much for this family—not just bringing in money, but playing host for my grandfather, holding dinners and parties for his business associates, going to events, raising the family—and what, she was picked because she was rich? Not because she was the partner he wanted? He was writing love letters to someone else while he was dating her?” He shook his head. “It’s shitty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you do it?” He focused on me intently. “What your grandmother did?”

  “It depends what you’re asking,” I said carefully. “Would I write letters to someone I loved? Sure.”

  “Even if you knew he had a girlfriend?”

  I stiffened. “I’m pretty sure my grandmother was Edward’s girlfriend before Helen was. Besides, why are we putting this on Ruth? Why not Edward? He was the one making a choice—love or money.”

  “Ruth is the one who broke up with him.”

  “Maybe because she knew he was cheating on her! Maybe because he refused to choose between the two of them, so someone had to do something.” I jutted out my chin. “So what would you do?”

  “I’d choose the person I loved.”

  “So you say,” I said skeptically. “But you can’t really know.”

  “I do.”

  “Seriously? So—even if the first girl was a poor orphan, and the seco
nd a rich society girl who’d also bring the family company to another level, you’d pick love? Because I’d think the wealth of the second would go a long way to soothing any heartbreak.”

  “No,” he said, and for whatever reason his decisiveness infuriated me. “I wouldn’t be with someone I didn’t love.”

  “You can’t be certain.”

  “Yes, I can,” he said, and maybe I’d infuriated him, too, because his voice rose. “Because I actually care about how other people feel. Though maybe I should stop, maybe I shouldn’t care about my dad or my company or the family and I should only focus on me if that’s just what everyone else does!”

  I felt gutted. “Noah—”

  He let out a deep whoosh of breath. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me. God, Abigail.”

  Now he sounded even more upset. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Um, it doesn’t sound like nothing? You sound—worked up.”

  He tugged open another desk drawer. “If I am, it’s for entirely different reasons.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Then why’d you say it?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. “Because sometimes you drive me crazy!”

  My stomach drew inward. My lips parted. Noah’s and my gazes collided, his intense, mine surprised. And for one crazy, maddening instant, I thought—

  I thought—

  The door swung open.

  Time slowed down as the door scraped against the floor. Noah grabbed my waist and thrust us both toward the window alcove, with the tall glass panes and the velvet curtains. We tumbled inside, landing on the window’s ledge. Noah caught a fistful of the fabric and yanked the curtain closed. It whisked across the floor and shut us both in a tiny enclave of space, dark and private.

  We huddled there, between the cool glass and heavy velvet, chests rising and falling. My hand clutched his arm. One of his had settled on my waist. His body radiated heat.

  “We’re in so much trouble,” I whispered. A hysterical smile edged my mouth. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Shh,” he said, but only barely. He was trying to muffle his own laughter.

  Outside, we heard footsteps and the closing of drawers. We clutched each other, mirth more hysterical than entertained. Then, slowly, we stilled. The humor drained out of me. We were so close. I could see his individual lashes.

  I drove him crazy, he’d said.

  God, I wanted him so badly it felt like a physical ache. Only inches separated us. All I had to do . . .

  The curtain yanked open. Edward Barbanel towered over us, expression inscrutable.

  And hot, terrifying mortification swamped me. Oh no.

  “What are you doing here?” Edward’s voice was gravelly and low, and his gaze swung back and forth between the two of us.

  “We’re . . .” Noah’s face displayed the same horror I felt. He pulled me to my feet and we stood side by side, frozen.

  “Mr. Barbanel.” I stumbled the words out. “I’m so sorry. We’ll go.”

  “No.” He nodded at the pair of Windsor chairs. “Sit.” He lowered himself into the seat behind his massive desk.

  Noah and I exchanged another nervous glance, then did as we were bid, pulling the chairs closer, schoolchildren before the principal. I placed my hands under my legs, then folded them in my lap, trying to look contrite but not cowardly.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Noah stayed statue-like, wearing the same unreadable expression as Edward, like they were two blank-faced rooks in a game of chess. Yet I could imagine what roiled behind Noah’s mask. Should he offer silence, truth, or a lie? I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something, Noah had said to me. But now the alibi he’d alluded to felt impossible to voice, when it almost hadn’t been a lie at all.

  “I wanted to know more about my grandmother,” I said. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come in here. I just—I just want, so much, to know about her life.”

  His eyes, so similar to his grandson’s, held mine. “Then why didn’t you ask her?”

  Why hadn’t I asked her?

  I had asked her, hadn’t I? Sometimes. But she hadn’t wanted to talk about her past, about the years before New York City, before she met O’pa. She’d always redirected the conversation. Wasn’t it rude to push someone when they resisted?

  Why was it so much easier to dig into someone’s life when they weren’t around to protest?

  “Maybe I should have asked more,” I finally said. “But for whatever reason, we didn’t know about Nantucket. We didn’t know about . . . you.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  My hands kneaded each other nervously. “We don’t know where she’s from, if she had any family, if they survived. I thought, since she had your letters—I thought maybe you would have hers, and she might have written things in them about her past.”

  “Those letters are private.”

  “I know. Right.” Didn’t I know? When did letters stop being private and enter the public sphere? Historians read old diaries and letters all the time. Was it when the people connected to them had died? Was it if you, the reader, had no connection? Or was it always an invasion of privacy? “I only wanted to find out more about her. Do you have any records from when she came to live with you?”

  He frowned. “No.”

  I deflated. But then again, he had been a boy when O’ma arrived—his parents might have known, but why would he? “Okay.”

  His frown deepened, but whatever emotion it contained didn’t seem directed at Noah and me. “You really didn’t know about Nantucket?”

  “She never mentioned it. Not once. I thought she’d grown up in New York. So when I realized I was wrong—when I learned she’d spent her summers here when she was my age—I was curious. It’s a big secret to keep.”

  Edward studied me. I wondered what he saw: A girl with no respect for boundaries? A granddaughter who never bothered to ask questions? “Why do you think she kept it?”

  I could have asked him the same thing. “I don’t know. I always figured she was . . . sad. Too sad to talk about it.”

  Noah caught my hand and squeezed it.

  Edward lowered his chin to his chest and kept it there for so long I thought he might have drifted off. But then he squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “When she first arrived, yes. Sad like a cold you couldn’t shake. Sad, sickly, frail, eyes too large. Like a persistent shadow, quick to scare away if anyone looked too long at her but always creeping back. She put me off, but Mother said it was tzedakah to take her in, and so we had, and we would be kind to her.”

  Tzedakah. Charity.

  Hearing someone describe O’ma like a character out of a story was strange yet familiar, because I’d always seen her so myself. Except this was a different story than I was used to hearing; this was the lost second act, while I’d only heard the first and third.

  Edward looked at Noah. “She was four, maybe five, when she arrived. I used to look at your father when he turned five, and try to imagine him going through what she’d gone through. Separated from her parents. Sent alone to different countries. Housed with a family who didn’t speak her language. I can barely remember being younger than five, and she’d already lived an entire lifetime.

  “But she grew up straight and sure and—and yes, maybe a little sad at times, but strong, too. She had a core of strength in her. Like polished diamond. I’ve—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Listening to this man as he grasped for words to describe a woman he’d known decades ago, at times sure and at times lost, I wanted to ask if he’d loved her. A question you could only ask certain people: friends, yes, but I’d never dare ask my parents, becaus
e what if the answer was no? And the answer couldn’t be no, not the way they parented, as an indisputable team. The question was too much, too personal, the answers too dangerous.

  And yet here, with this man who was practically a stranger, I could almost ask. He seemed almost like a character in a story himself, just like O’ma, and I wanted to drink in every word he was willing to spill.

  Except he wasn’t a character, and he looked so sad right now, and I hardly needed to ask, not when I’d read his letters. (Don’t do anything stupid. I love you.) And O’ma wasn’t a fairy-tale heroine, either. Her story didn’t begin and end with the war. To act as though it did shortchanged everything else she’d experienced. Her story was complicated and messy, many stories wrapped in one, with no neat bows.

  And right now, I wanted to know this story, with all its cuts and bruises. “How did the two of you . . .”

  Edward looked at me again, but this time I didn’t think he saw a granddaughter or a delinquent, but someone from the past. He smiled wistfully. “I came back one summer during college and she was here. I’d never paid any attention to her before, but—I don’t know. She was pure emotion. She felt so much. I don’t think we ever felt so much as when we were young.” He blew out a long breath. “We were so young.”

  I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “How did you feel?”

  He leaned back in his chair and let out a half laugh. “It was so long ago. I don’t remember the details so much.” He pressed a hand to his heart. “I felt . . . like I’d been standing in a room with no light and she was an incandescent flame. I remember her smile. I remember . . .” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  He met my gaze. His looked, suddenly, tired. “I remember I cried when she left.”

  Regret pulsed through me. “I’m sorry.”

  Edward didn’t respond.

  Noah hadn’t spoken in several minutes, but he’d tightly kept hold of my hand. I glanced at him now, worried he’d be upset about how emotionally his grandfather had spoken about a woman who wasn’t his grandmother. Why was it so much easier to talk to strangers rather than family about intimate details? Because strangers judged less? Cared less?