The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  “You haven’t destroyed anything,” Gavin says.

  I shake my head and look down at my lap. “I destroy everything.”

  “That’s crazy, and you know it.” Gavin clears his throat. “So is this what you’ve always wanted to do? Run your family bakery?”

  I laugh. “No. Not at all. I was planning to be an attorney. I was halfway through law school in Boston when I found out I was pregnant with Annie. So I left school, married Rob, and eventually moved back to the Cape.”

  “Why did you drop out of law school?”

  I shrug. “It felt like the right thing to do.”

  Gavin nods and seems to consider this for a minute. “Would you go back?” he asks. “Do you still want to be a lawyer?”

  I consider this. “I feel like a huge failure for dropping out,” I say. “But at the same time, I have this weird feeling that maybe I wasn’t really supposed to be a lawyer at all. Maybe I was supposed to run the bakery. I can’t imagine my life without it now, you know? Especially now that I know what it means to my family. Now that I know it’s basically all my grandmother brought with her from her past.”

  “You know, I don’t think you’re going to lose the bakery,” Gavin says after a minute.

  “Why do you say that?” I ask.

  “Because I think that in life, things tend to come through when you most need them to.”

  I look at him. “That’s it? Life works out the way it’s supposed to?”

  Gavin laughs. “Okay, yeah, I sound like a Hallmark card.”

  I’m silent for a moment. “Annie thinks you’re some kind of Mr. Fix-It of people,” I say in a small voice.

  He laughs again. “Oh, does she?”

  I glance sideways at him. “You know, you don’t have to fix me. Or save me. Or whatever.”

  He looks at me and shakes his head. “I don’t think you need me to, Hope,” he says. “I think you’re underestimating your ability to save yourself.”

  His words wash over me, and I stare out the window so that he can’t see my sudden, unexpected tears. Maybe this is what I needed all along. Not Matt’s money or his investors. Not someone to rescue me. Just someone who believes that I can do it on my own.

  “Thanks,” I whisper, so softly that I’m not sure Gavin will hear me.

  But he does. I feel his hand on my shoulder, and as I turn to face him, he squeezes once, gently, and then puts his hand back on the wheel. My skin tingles where he touched it.

  “It’s going to be okay, you know,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. And for the first time, I really mean it.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  We stop at an exit off I-95 in Connecticut so that we can fill up the gas tank, grab some breakfast, and use the bathroom. As I come out of McDonald’s, juggling two coffees and two orange juices on a tray as well as a bag full of various McMuffins, I glance across the street and notice a big, printed sign in the dim morning light, advertising a Bible study class called “Tracing the Old Testament Family Tree.” I’m about to look away, but then a familiar name catches my eye, and something suddenly slips into place in my mind. My jaw drops.

  “What are you looking at?” Gavin asks. He screws the gas cap back on and joins me beside the car. He takes the McDonald’s drinks and bag from me and sets them on top of the car. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Look at that sign,” I say.

  “‘Tracing the Old Testament Family Tree,’” he reads aloud. “‘From Abraham to Jacob to Joseph and beyond.’” He pauses. “Okay. So?”

  “Joseph was the son of Jacob in the Bible, right?” I ask.

  Gavin nods. “Yeah. Actually in the Torah too. And in the Koran I think. I think all that stuff tracing back to Abraham in the Old Testament is the same in all three religions.”

  “The three Abrahamic religions,” I murmur, thinking of Elida’s words. “Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.”

  “Right,” Gavin says. He glances at the sign again, then down at me. “So what’s up, Hope? How come you look so spooked?”

  “My mom’s name was Josephine,” I say softly. “Can that just be coincidence? That she’s named after the son of Jacob?”

  Realization dawns on Gavin’s face. “In the stories, Joseph became the one to carry on his parents’ legacy. He had to be protected for that reason.” He pauses. “You’re saying you think your mom might have been Jacob’s daughter after all?”

  I swallow hard and stare at the sign. Then I shake my head. “You know what? No, that’s crazy. It’s just a name. Besides, the years don’t add up. My mom was born in ’44, long after my grandmother last saw Jacob Levy. There’s no way.”

  I glance up at Gavin, feeling silly, and I’m surprised to realize his face looks completely serious. “But what if you’re right?” he asks. “What if your mother was actually born a year earlier? What if your grandmother and grandfather bribed someone to falsify her birth certificate? That couldn’t have been uncommon in those days. It was during the war. Some low-level clerk could have easily changed the paperwork, destroyed the originals. Easy to do before things were computerized.”

  “But why would my grandparents do that?”

  “So that it looked like your grandfather was the father,” Gavin says. He’s speaking quickly now, his eyes shining. “So that your mom would never think to doubt it. So that your grandmother would never have to explain Jacob to anyone. You say they didn’t move to the Cape until your mother was five. But at that age, it would have been nearly impossible to tell if they’d cheated by a year, especially if they said she was just tall for her age. What if she was really six?”

  I feel suddenly short of breath. “This can’t be possible,” I whisper. “My mom even looked like my grandpa. Straight brown hair, brown eyes. Same kinds of expressions.”

  “Brown hair and brown eyes are pretty common features,” Gavin points out. “And we don’t know what Jacob looked like anyhow. Right?”

  “I guess,” I murmur.

  “You have to admit, your mom being Jacob’s daughter would explain a lot. Like what happened to the baby. And why your grandmother moved on so quickly after losing Jacob.”

  “But why would she move on so quickly?” I ask. I don’t understand that part.

  “She must have believed that Jacob was dead already. Maybe your grandfather was a kind man offering her a chance to survive, and a chance to give her daughter a real life. And maybe she took that chance, because she believed it was the right thing to do.”

  “Do you mean that she never really loved my grandfather?” I ask. It hurts my heart to think that. “That he was just the means to an end?”

  “No, I bet she loved him,” Gavin says. “Maybe differently than Jacob. But he gave her and your mom a good life.”

  “The kind of life Jacob would have wanted for them,” I say.

  Gavin nods. “Yeah.”

  “But if that’s true, what did my grandpa get?” I ask, suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. “A wife who never really loved him the way he deserved to beloved?”

  “Maybe he knew all along that that’s what it would be,” Gavin says, “and he loved her enough that it didn’t matter. Maybe he hoped she’d come around. Maybe it was enough to have her there, to know he was protecting her, to be a father to her child.”

  I look away. I wish I could ask my grandfather what he’d felt, how he’d rationalized it all, if Gavin was right. But he’s long gone. I wonder whether the answers and the secrets they’d kept would forever remain buried. I know they will if Mamie never wakes up. In fact, even if she does awaken, there’s no guarantee she’ll remember anything.

  “Do you think my mom ever knew?” I ask. “If this is true,” I’m quick to add.

  “I would be willing to bet she didn’t,” Gavin says softly. “It sounds like maybe your grandmother just wanted to leave everything behind forever.”

  As we get back into the car, I realize I’m crying. I’m not sure when I began, but the hole in
my heart seems to keep growing bigger and bigger. Until recently, my grandmother had been merely a slightly sad woman who happened to hail from France and run a bakery. Now, as I peel back layer after layer of who she really was, I’m realizing that her sorrow must have gone far deeper than I’d ever comprehended. And she’d spent her lifetime pretending, wrapped up in secrets and lies.

  I want now more than ever for her to wake up, so that I can tell her she’s not alone, and that I understand. I want to hear the story from her own lips, because at this point, so much of it is conjecture. I realize I no longer know where I came from. At all. I’ve never known my father’s side of the family—I don’t even know who my father is—and it’s turning out that everything I knew of my mother’s side was a lie.

  “Are you okay?” Gavin asks softly. He hasn’t started the car yet; he’s just sitting there beside me, watching me cry.

  “I don’t know who I am anymore,” I say after a pause.

  He nods, seeming to understand this. “I do,” he says simply. “You’re Hope. That’s all that really matters.” And despite the awkwardness of the center console between us in the car, when he pulls me into his arms and holds me tight, it’s the most natural and comfortable thing in the world.

  When he finally lets go, mumbling, “We should get on the road before it gets too much later,” it feels like only a few seconds have passed, although the clock tells me he’s been holding me for several minutes. It didn’t feel like enough.

  It’s not until we’re on the highway, and I see a tray of cups fly by the window, that I realize we left the food from McDonald’s on the roof. The laughter between us breaks the sad tension.

  “Eh, I wasn’t hungry anyway,” Gavin says, glancing in the rearview mirror, where I imagine the remainder of our uneaten breakfast has distributed itself on the road.

  “Me neither,” I agree.

  He smiles at me. “On to New York?”

  “On to New York.”

  It’s just past ten by the time we finish fighting traffic and pull off FDR Drive onto Houston Street in Manhattan. Gavin’s following his GPS now, and I look around as he weaves in and out of streets, narrowly avoiding pedestrians and stopped taxis.

  “I hate driving in New York,” he says, but he’s smiling.

  “You’re really good at it,” I say. I did a summer internship here in college and returned a few times since then, but it’s been more than a decade since I visited, and everything feels different now. The city looks cleaner than I remember it.

  “According to the GPS, we’re almost there,” Gavin announces after a few more minutes. “Let’s just find a place to park.”

  We find a garage and walk to the exit. As Gavin gets the ticket from the attendant, I nervously shift from one foot to the other. We’re just a few blocks away from the last known address of Jacob Levy. We could be face-to-face with him in ten minutes.

  Gavin hands me a map he’s printed out from the Internet. It has a star marked toward the south end of Battery Place, and I realize with a start how close Jacob lives to Ground Zero. I wonder whether he’d been here to witness the tragedy of September 11. I blink a few times and steady myself. I look north toward the hole in the skyline where the World Trade Center used to be, and I feel a pang of sadness.

  “This used to be my favorite area of the city,” I tell Gavin as we begin to walk. “I worked here for a summer when I was in college, for a law firm in midtown. On the weekends, I used to take the N or the R train down to the World Trade Center, get a Coke in the food court there, and then walk down Broadway to Battery Park.”

  “Oh yeah?” Gavin says.

  I smile. “I used to look out at the Statue of Liberty and think about how big the world was out there beyond the East Coast. I used to think about all the choices I had, all the things I could do with my life.” I stop talking and look down.

  “That sounds nice,” Gavin says softly.

  I shake my head. “I was a dumb kid,” I mumble after a moment. “Turns out life isn’t as big as I thought it could be.”

  Gavin stops walking and puts a hand on my arm, bringing me to a halt too. “What do you mean?”

  I shrug and glance around. I feel foolish standing in the middle of a sidewalk in Manhattan, with Gavin looking at me so intently. But he’s staring down at me, waiting for an answer, so finally, I look up and meet his eye. “This isn’t the life I thought I’d have,” I say.

  Gavin shakes his head. “Hope, it never is. You know that, right? Life doesn’t ever turn out the way we plan.”

  I sigh. I don’t expect him to understand. “Gavin, I’m thirty-six, and none of the things I wanted in my life have really happened,” I try to explain. “Some days I wake up and think, How did I get here? It’s like one day, you just realize you’re not young anymore, and you already made your choices, and now it’s too late to change anything.”

  “It’s not too late,” Gavin says. “Ever. But I know what you mean about feeling that way.”

  “How do you know?” My voice is sharper than I intend it to be. “You’re twenty-nine.”

  He laughs. “There’s no magical age when all your options shut down, Hope,” he says. “You have just as many chances to change your life as I do. What I’m saying is that no one’s life turns out the way they expect it to. But it’s how you roll with the punches that determines whether you’re happy or not.”

  “You’re happy,” I say, and I realize it sounds more like an accusation than a statement. “I mean, you seem to have everything you want.”

  He laughs again. “Hope, do you really think I sat around as a kid and dreamed of being a handyman?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. “Did you?”

  “No! I wanted to be an artist. I was the dorkiest kid in the world; I used to insist my mom take me to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston so I could look at the paintings. I used to tell her I was going to move to France and be a painter like Degas or Monet. They were my favorites.”

  “You wanted to be an artist?” I ask incredulously. We begin walking again, toward the address we have for Jacob Levy.

  Gavin chuckles and glances down at me. “I even tried to get into SMFA.”

  “SMFA?”

  “Ah, you’re not a big art fan, I see.” Gavin winks at me. “The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.” He pauses and shrugs. “I had the grades, and I had the portfolio, but I didn’t qualify for enough scholarships to pay for it. My mom couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to take out tons of loans and be in debt for the rest of my life. So here I am.”

  “So you just didn’t go to college?”

  Gavin laughs. “No, I went to Salem State on scholarship. I majored in education, because I figured if I couldn’t be an artist, I’d be an art teacher.”

  “You were an art teacher?” I ask. Gavin nods, and I add, “But what happened? How come you’re not anymore?” I bite my tongue before I add something about him being just a handyman.

  He shrugs. “It didn’t make me happy. Not the way that working with my hands does. I realized that if I couldn’t be an artist in the traditional sense—let’s face it, college or not, I’m no Michelangelo—I could create art in some form if I could make things for people. And that’s what I do now.”

  “But you fix pipes and stuff,” I say in a small voice.

  He laughs. “Yeah, because that’s part of the job. But I also build decks and paint houses and install windows and shutters, and renovate kitchens. I get to make things beautiful, and that makes me happy. I think of it as making the town one giant piece of art, one house at a time.”

  I stare at him, incredulous. “Are you being serious?”

  He shrugs. “It’s not what I dreamed of when I was a kid,” he says. “But I’ve realized that I never really felt like me until I wound up on the Cape. Life doesn’t work out the way we plan, but maybe it works out the way it’s supposed to after all. You know?”

  I nod slowly. “I think I do.” He made a decisi
on to find himself, and he’s happy with what he found. I wonder whether I’ll be able to do the same someday. I’ve come to look at life as a series of closed doors; it hasn’t occurred to me until this moment that in some cases, all I have to do is open them. “I never knew all that about you,” I say softly, after a pause.

  Gavin shrugs again. “You never asked.”

  I look down and swallow hard.

  We finally arrive at the address on Battery Place. I look up at the building, which has an older-looking brick facade and appears to be a dozen stories tall. It’s dwarfed by the buildings to the north of it, but there’s something about it that seems charming and traditional to me. I’m startled a moment later to realize it reminds me a bit of France.

  “We’re here,” Gavin says. He smiles down at me. “Ready?”

  I nod. My heart is beating a mile a minute. I can hardly believe we might be finding Jacob at any moment now. “Ready.”

  According to Elida’s note, Jacob lives in apartment 1004, so we try buzzing that unit first. When there’s no response, Gavin shrugs and begins randomly punching units until the front door buzzes.

  “Voilà,” he says. He holds the door for me as I enter.

  Inside, the foyer is dimly lit, and there’s a narrow staircase straight ahead. I look around. “No elevator?” I ask.

  Gavin scratches his head. “No elevator. Wow. That’s weird.”

  We begin walking up, and by the time we get to the fifth floor, I’m ashamed to say I’m breathing hard. “I guess I should work out more,” I note. “I’m huffing and puffing like I’ve never climbed a staircase before.”

  Gavin, who’s behind me, laughs. “I don’t know. Huffing and puffing aside, it doesn’t look to me like you’re in need of a workout.”

  I look back at him, my face on fire, and he just grins. I shake my head and continue climbing, but I’m flattered.

  We finally reach the tenth floor, and I’m in such a rush to see whether Jacob still lives here that I don’t even bother catching my breath before knocking on the door to 1004.