The Summer of Lost Letters

by Hannah Reynolds

  We looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Here goes.” I took the necklace back from her, raised it to my mouth, and exhaled.

  The pendant misted over. The mist immediately vanished.

  A shiver went down my back.

  I swallowed and looked at Mom. She turned her hands, palms out, eyes wide. “Maybe you didn’t breathe hard enough?”

  I breathed again. Hard. Still the fog barely lasted.

  Mom coughed. “Well, I can certainly tell you had those garlic knots.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “Give it here.”

  But when Mom breathed, it still barely fogged over.

  “Maybe fog usually only lasts a second,” Mom said.

  “Maybe,” I said skeptically. I consulted my phone. “One of the other tests says to rub sandpaper over it.”

  “We don’t have sandpaper,” Mom said (irrefutable Mom logic). She squinted. “It’s probably some other similar jewel. There’s a few other clear gems, I think.”

  I wilted. “Yeah.”

  Mom smiled. “Still, no harm asking. Didn’t you say Nantucket is big on antiques? We can get it appraised.”

  I agreed, and we divvied up some ice cream and hot fudge we’d bought earlier, and climbed into bed and pulled up the covers. We watched Stargate and I haltingly told her a little more about Noah, and she told me about her first boyfriend, from when she was nineteen.

  It was very late when I dared voice the thought. “Mom,” I said. “What if it is a diamond?”

  Mom looked at me. And then, to my surprise, she started laughing. A grin split her face with childish delight, and her eyes closed in the familiar squint signaling utter amusement. “Hell if I know.”

  I laughed and closed my own eyes, a smile still on my face.

  But it slowly faded as another thought surfaced.

  What if Mom had been right, as she usually was? What if I had picked the past over the future?

  Was it too late to change my mind?

  * * *

  Nantucket had a long history of antiques: they had antiques shops and an annual antique show and this year, they’d decided to host an Antiques Roadshow–style event. It took place on the lawn outside the Boys & Girls Club, in peaked white tents filled with long tables and clumps of people.

  Mom and I waited in line for forty-five minutes to speak to a jewelry appraiser. Mom hummed and pointed out funny characters while we waited, her arm looped through mine. Every time my thoughts drifted to Noah, her words pulled me back, making us laugh until our sides hurt. A deep, effusive love filled me. She drove me mad, of course. But she was the best mom in the whole world.

  When we finally sat down in front of the appraiser, he greeted us with a weary politeness enunciated by his British accent. He was a bit of a stereotype, and I loved him for it.

  “What have we here?” he asked politely as I pulled the necklace from my purse. I’d put it back in the glasses pouch, and now felt silly, like I should have worked harder on presentation. I felt weirdly embarrassed, too, like a child taking up an adult’s time with something unimportant. “It’s my grandmother’s necklace. It might be worth nothing. I don’t know. I thought it’d be fun to find out.”

  I unspooled the necklace and laid it carefully on the table

  “Oh.” He sounded slightly surprised. For a moment he didn’t move. Then he picked up the necklace, carefully, sifting it through his fingers, the pendant coming to rest in his hands. He lifted his jeweler’s loupe.

  Even though I knew the necklace probably only had sentimental value, I couldn’t help hoping it would be worth real money. Mom and I had spent the morning watching Antiques Roadshow clips, and they kept valuing old jewelry at three to five thousand. I knew we only saw the highlights reel, but still. It could be worth something! Edward Barbanel had implied as much, hadn’t he?

  When the appraiser looked up, his face was professionally blank. “Can you trace the providence?”

  I looked at him, confused. “What’s providence mean?”

  “Where it comes from. Can you establish the path of ownership? You might have received a certificate when you bought it.”

  “It belonged to my mother,” Mom said.

  “Where did she get it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Hmm.”

  Mom and I exchanged a glance. She leaned forward. “Why does it matter?”

  He laid the necklace down, turning it over and pointing out a stamp on the back of one of the metal settings. “Do you see the mark here?”

  We nodded.

  “That’s the maker’s mark. It tells us who created this. This was made by the Goldman family, but without knowing the history of the purchase, it loses some of its value—especially since it might have been traded illegally at some point. The Goldmans were a German Jewish family who had most of their possessions seized by the Nazis.”

  A tiny shiver went down my back, tracing the line of my spine from crown to neck to spine, a dance of disbelief and anticipation. I glanced at Mom, whose wide eyes must have mirrored my own. She carefully crossed her hands in her lap. “The Goldman family,” she repeated. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “They’re our family.”

  The appraiser went very still, like a hunter wary of startling his prey. He spoke with the soft, calm tone of the emotionally suppressed. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s my mother’s family,” Mom said. “We’ve never heard of them being jewelers, though—but my mother was very young when she moved here from Germany.”

  “Where was she from?”

  Mom looked at me. “She was from a little town called Lübeck,” I said. “Her parents were Herman and Sara Goldman. They were both born in Lübeck.”

  He pressed his lips together, looking back and forth between us. “You’re sure?”

  Mom bristled. “Of course we’re sure.”

  “We have birth records and death records and everything,” I said, because I’d done a lot of hard work to find said records.

  He nodded several times. Then he cleared his throat. “To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t expecting this sort of situation today. I have some due diligence to do, and then if you’re—interested—I might have a few more facts to share with you.”

  Mom and I exchanged a glance. “Of course,” she said. When he asked, she scribbled her number and email down on a piece of paper for him.

  “Thank you,” he said. He had the air my brother had when our parents interrupted him from gaming—polite but itching to dive back into his own world. Clearly we’d been dismissed.

  Yet as we stood and I put the necklace back in its bag and my purse, my curiosity was too strong to be denied. “What about the necklace? Did you have an estimate?”

  He looked up. “A necklace from the Goldmans of Lübeck, of yellow cut diamond?” He smiled, brief and wry. “I’d like to look into it a bit more, but I’d tentatively appraise it at eighty thousand dollars.”

  * * *

  Mom and I wound up at the Juice Bar.

  “The Triple Chocolate Mountain flavor is very good,” I said.

  “Is it. Well.”

  We both ordered the flavor, took our cones, and sat down at one of the wooden tables. We stared at each other. Then we started laughing, small giggles at first, then loud, reckless, near-hysterical laughter.

  “I tried googling them,” I said when we recovered. “O’ma’s parents. But nothing came up. Shouldn’t it have, if they’re well-known?”

  “Maybe they’re only well-known in the antiquing sphere,” Mom said. “And maybe it’s like with all those archives—the actual records about them haven’t been digitized.”

  I placed the necklace between us on the wooden planks of the table. The stones (the diamonds, real diamonds) glistened i
n the sun. “What are we going to do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  I shook my head, still too blown away to have any actual response. What do you do with eighty thousand dollars? I wouldn’t even know what to do with eight hundred extra dollars. Put it in my savings account?

  “Well,” Mom said. “We could sell it and put it toward your college fund.”

  Yet another exceedingly practical Mom answer. “I guess.”

  “Did you want to spend it?” she asked with a smile. “I think it’d be better spent on education or your IRA, but a discretionary amount for something fun makes sense.”

  Education made sense. Fun made a ton of sense. Even if Mom only let me have a thousand dollars, I could do so many things—take a trip abroad, buy a million books. Maybe some new dresses.

  What else?

  What did anyone want? A vacation home, a house on the shore, Golden Doors. But I didn’t need anything.

  O’ma had needed Golden Doors, because O’ma had needed a home. “We could sell it and donate the money. To a refugee fund.”

  Mom took a bite of her ice cream. “It’s a very sweet thought, Abby.”

  It wasn’t just a thought. It had clicked. It was right. “Let’s do it.”

  “You should think about it a little bit first . . .”

  Sometimes I did need to think about things, to sit on them, to sleep on them. But this time, I didn’t. “Do we need the money? I thought we were fine if I went to state school.” I frowned. “Do you and Dad need the money?”

  “No. No, you don’t worry about us. But, sweetie, you could go to a private college with this. You could go anywhere you got in, even without a scholarship.”

  “For one year.”

  “There are loans and financial aid.”

  I licked my ice cream. “We never even expected to have this. So it’s not much of a loss.”

  Mom set down her tiny spoon. “Okay.”

  I hadn’t been expecting her to fold so quickly. “You’re not going to fight me? It’s your necklace.”

  “You found it. And it’s a good idea.”

  “Maybe we can do an auction,” I said, more excited by the moment. “Get it on BuzzFeed and HuffPo and everything.”

  Mom smiled, tremulously. “I’m very proud of you,” she burst out. “Remember that.”

  * * *

  When I got home, I found Jane lying in bed, holding her phone above her.

  “Guess what.” I tossed the necklace toward her.

  She caught it. “We’re going to go reenact Titanic? Because, for real, we could.”

  “It’s worth eighty thousand dollars.”

  “What?” She shucked the necklace away and onto the blankets. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope. Crazy, right?”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m going to sell it to raise money for refugee relief.”

  “You’re mad,” Jane said. “Sell it? Eighty thousand dollars? Are these, what, diamonds?”

  “Yellow cut, whatever that means.”

  “Don’t sell it!” she cried. “Keep it! Wear it to the Met Gala.”

  “Jane. I’m never going to be invited to the Met Gala. You’ve seen Ocean’s Eight too many times.”

  “No defeatist thinking. You won’t be invited if you don’t have something to wear. Wait, you could sell it to the Met and part of the price could be an invitation. Oh my god, I’m a genius. Yes. Two invitations, I’m your date, screw Noah.”

  “I’m done with Noah.”

  “Right. Sorry. I forgot.” She cautiously picked up the necklace and held it close to her face. “Shiny.”

  I didn’t feel done. I desperately wanted Noah to text me. It felt like more than a want; like a need, like I might pass out if I didn’t hear from him. Every day, I looked at my phone over and over, in case I’d missed the buzz of an incoming message. I opened our last exchange, in case a new text had slipped in unnoticed. I even restarted my phone.

  But I’d told him we were done, and he must have believed me.

  My last night on Nantucket, my friends went to the beach one last time. The air hung heavy with moisture, almost chilly. We wore sweatshirts and huddled close to each other. Everyone was going home soon, back to school and regular life. Pranav and Sydney had already left; Evan would be gone tomorrow morning; Stella and Lexi were leaving in three days.

  Jane and I sat side by side on a towel, watching the bonfire spark orange into the night. “Come back next summer,” she said. “You can avoid Noah. I need you to be my roommate.”

  “You could use a wing-woman, for sure.”

  She made a face, her gaze trailing after Evan. “You want who you want, right? Even when it doesn’t make sense.”

  I rubbed her back and we watched the dancing flames. “Go talk to him. What do you have to lose? Even if it goes poorly, you’ll have a whole year to recover.”

  “True.” She stood up. “Here goes nothing.”

  Not nothing, I thought as I watched Evan’s face light up when Jane approached him. I let out a sigh, pushing to my feet and walking down to the water.

  I hadn’t realized how different breakups could be. With Matt, I’d been so angry. So furious and hurt and determined to move on and get over it. I hadn’t wanted to see him again. I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near him.

  With Noah—I was still angry, but mostly, I was hurt. Mostly, I ached for him to come back from Cambridge and to knock on my door and to say I’m sorry. Let’s fix this.

  Mom had asked why it mattered, the necklace, an object, the past over the future. Why did it matter? You’re too goddamn proud, Noah had said. Was that it? You’ll make yourself miserable.

  But I didn’t think pride alone would keep me from someone who brought me intense joy. What else had Noah said?

  You’re scared, Abigail Schoenberg. Scared to really put yourself out there.

  I wrapped my arms around my belly, shivering in the night wind. So easy to say Be brave, take risks, show some chutzpah. Harder to do it, to risk getting destroyed, to put yourself and your emotional well-being in someone else’s hands.

  The waves beat the shore, over and over. The moon glided across the water, a bright path you could follow forever without reaching the end. I watched the ripples of white on black until the wind off the ocean became so cold I couldn’t stop shivering, and then I turned away and walked back to my friends.

  * * *

  The next morning, before we left, Mom and I found Mr. Barnes—the appraiser—in a well-appointed sitting room on the first floor of his hotel. The walls and curtains were done in muted off-whites, the floor and furniture dark brown. Paintings of ships hung in elegant frames.

  Mom and I settled on a sofa, kitty-corner to Mr. Barnes’s armchair. He stood when we arrived, then sank back into his seat, taking off his glasses and rubbing his brow.

  “I got in touch with some industry folk last night,” he said. “After I looked through the paperwork. I should have told you this yesterday, but I was surprised, and a little . . . skeptical, maybe. It’s not often people appear saying they’re the descendants of a notable jeweler family.”

  He folded his hands and leaned forward, addressing Mom. “As you’re aware, the Goldman family lived in Lübeck during the years leading up to the war. Your mother was sent away. Soon afterwards, the family’s work was seized by the Nazis.”

  He cleared his throat, while Mom and I nodded. So far he wasn’t telling us anything we hadn’t heard before.

  “Much of the jewelry ended up in private collections. However, some wound up in museums after the war. Goldman jewelry can be found in the British Museum, the Hofburg, the Louvre. I pulled a file of the pieces I know about.” He slid a glossy printout across the coffee table.

  Mom picked the file up, but instead of flipping through the pa
pers, regarded them with an almost bewildered expression. I leaned my head against her shoulder.

  “You might be familiar with some cases where families recovered their family’s work. The most famous is the Woman in Gold”—Mr. Barnes cracked a smile—“popularized by the Helen Mirren movie. There are other similar cases. It’s possible for the families to get restitution or the return of their property.” He paused. “The Goldman collection is—lucrative.”

  Mom stared down at the file. “You’re saying there’s more? More jewelry?”

  “I’m saying there’s much more.” His rather bemused smile grew larger. “I’m saying, Ms. Cohen, that if you claim your inheritance, you will be a very, very wealthy woman.”

  * * *

  When we walked outside, the sun broke over us, so bright we squinted and reached for our sunglasses. Mom raised her face to the sun and smiled, bright and all-encompassing as a star. She would burn forever, my mom. Then she looked at me. “How do you feel about raising money for refugee relief and going to whichever college you want?”

  “I feel great.”

  “Good.” She pulled out her cell, dialing a number, and I could hear Dad pick up on the other end.

  “Hello, darling.” Mom met my gaze, and her eyes crinkled up with pure delight. “I’m happy to report you did, in fact, marry rich.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Let me tell you a story:

  Once upon a time, a girl was born to a family of jewelers in a forested town by the sea. She was loved and cossetted and happy, but when she was four years old, her family had to send her away for her own safety. They sewed an exquisite necklace made of diamonds into the hem of her dress. She traveled across an ocean to a country where she didn’t speak the language, and went to live with strangers on a windswept island, in an exquisite house called Golden Doors. She fell in love with a boy she was too poor to marry. A boy who betrayed her in the end because he thought it would bring her back to him.