The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  “To protect the life he’d begun with her,” I say, feeling a sudden chill. I lean closer to the fire.

  Jacob nods. “Yes. I believe so. But can I blame him? He loved Rose and loved Josephine, who had become his daughter. He had built a good life with them. If Rose had known I had survived, perhaps he would have lost everything. He did what he could to protect his family. And I cannot fault him for that. In fact, I did the same, did I not? I made choices to protect the people I loved most. We all make choices, sacrifices, for what we believe to be the greater good.”

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “But if that’s what happened, he prevented you and my grandmother from being together. He kept you apart for seventy years.”

  “No, my dear,” Jacob says. “It was the war that kept us apart. The world went mad, and your grandfather was no more responsible for the outcome than I was, or than Rose was. We all made our choices. We all had to live with our regrets.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. I feel I’m apologizing to Jacob for what my grandfather did, and for the terribly unfair hand he was dealt. But he merely shakes his head.

  “Do not be,” he says. “Your grandmother asked me, just before she passed, to forgive her; she felt she had betrayed me by marrying Ted. But I told her there was no need for forgiveness, for she had done nothing wrong. Nothing. She acted as she did because she believed it to be the right thing for our daughter. The important thing is that Rose lived. As did Josephine. As did you and Annie. Regardless of what happened, Rose saved the child we had created together, the greatest declaration of our love, and gave her the life we had always dreamed of, a life of freedom.”

  “But you spent your life waiting for her,” I say.

  He smiles. “And now I have found her. I am at peace.” He reaches for my hands again and looks into my eyes for a long time. “You are our legacy. You and Annie. You must honor where you came from, now that you know.”

  “But how?”

  “By following your heart,” Jacob says. “Life gets complicated. Circumstance tears us apart. Decisions guide our fate. But your heart will always show you true north. Your grandmother, she knew this always.”

  I hang my head. “But how do I know what I’m supposed to do?” I don’t know how to explain that my heart has never led me into anything more than trouble.

  “You will know,” Jacob says. “Just listen. The answers lie inside you.”

  The next morning, as I’m getting ready to leave for the bakery, I come into the living room to find Jacob staring out the window, just where I’d left him the night before. I wonder whether he’s looking at the stars, the way Mamie always did.

  “Hey, Jacob,” I say as I grab my keys from the kitchen table. “I’m headed out. If you feel like it, come by the bakery later. I’ll bake you a Star Pie.”

  When he doesn’t respond, I go over to the chair and kneel beside him. “Jacob?”

  His eyes are closed, and there’s a small, peaceful smile on his face, as if he’s in the midst of a dream he doesn’t wish to leave. I wonder whether he’s thinking about my grandmother.

  “Jacob?” I say again. I touch his arm lightly, and that’s when I know. “Jacob,” I murmur softly, tears beginning to run down my face. His arm is cold, and so too is his cheek, when I reach up to touch it gently. He’s gone. And somehow, I’m not surprised at all. He has spent a lifetime trying to find Mamie. And now he has eternity to make up for all those lost years.

  I don’t disturb him. I don’t wake Annie or Alain. I don’t leave for the bakery. I just sit beside him, this man whose courage gave me life so many years ago, long before I was ever born, and I cry. I cry for everything lost and everything found. I cry for my grandmother, and for my mother, who never knew the story of her birth. I cry for Annie, because she’s had to endure far more loss than one should have to at such a young age. And I cry for myself, for I don’t know the way. I don’t know how to find the answers Jacob seems to believe I carry in my heart.

  After much careful thought, Alain and I decide to bury Jacob beside my grandmother. After all, he has no family left elsewhere, and we can’t imagine anywhere in the world he’d rather be than beside the love of his life. I have found her, he told me on his last night. I am at peace.

  Elida White and her grandmother drive down from Pembroke for the funeral, and we all stand together—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and listen to the words of the rabbi at the grave site. I look east, in the direction Jacob’s tombstone will face, once it’s delivered. Mamie’s will face that way too. In a few hours, the first stars of evening will begin to poke through the sky, just like they always have, just like they always will. For as long as there are stars in the sky, I realize, Jacob’s promise to love Mamie will live on. The stars she once looked for will keep watch silently over her, and over the love of her life, who has, at long last, returned to her side.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Winter on Cape Cod is long and lonely, and this year, it feels as if time has frozen in place, as I wait to lose the bakery. There are no prospective buyers, for who would want such a place in the dead of winter? But the bank intends to take it from me all the same. Matt does nothing to stop it, and I do not ask him to. Every morning, as my breath hangs in the air like puffs of frozen smoke, I wonder whether today will be the day that the last of Mamie’s legacy will disappear. Until then, I will keep running the bakery, because it is all I know how to do.

  One might think that this season would be my least favorite time of year, because of the slow desolation and the lack of business. But I’ve always found peace in the winter months. The evenings are so still, just before the sun sets, that when the caw of a single seagull sounds over the sea, I can hear it from inside the walls of my cottage. When I walk on the beach, frozen ice sometimes crunches beneath my worn boots. And Main Street feels like a ghost town before the holidays; on the mornings when I arrive at the bakery, sometimes I believe I’m the only person in this wintry wonderland, and I imagine what I’d do if no one else could see me.

  The third week of November, Gavin asks me to go to dinner and a movie with him, and although I say no, he comes by a few days later and invites Annie, Alain, and me to his family’s house near Boston for Thanksgiving. I’m missing Mamie more than usual that day, and I’m on edge about the bakery, so I explode at him without meaning to.

  “Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and my family,” I tell him, as my stomach tightens into a knot. “But I can’t do this to Annie.”

  He looks baffled and wounded. “Do what?”

  “Take a chance on someone like you.”

  He stares at me. “Someone like me?”

  I feel terrible, but just like Mamie had put her child’s life first, neglecting her own needs, I know I need to do the same. I owe it to my daughter. “You’re wonderful, Gavin,” I try to explain. “But Annie has lost so much lately. She needs stability now. Not someone else who might disappear from her life.”

  “Hope, I’m not planning on disappearing.”

  I look down. “But you can’t promise me today that you’ll be here forever, can you?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, so I go on. “Of course you can’t. And I would never ask you to. But I can’t let anyone into my life if there’s even a chance they’ll hurt my daughter.”

  “I would never . . .” he begins.

  “I’m sorry,” I say firmly, hating myself.

  I watch as his jaw clenches. “Fine,” he says. He walks out without another word.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmur again, long after he’s gone.

  Hanukkah overlaps with Christmas this year, and Alain decides to stay so that we can celebrate the holidays together. Annie is with Rob during the first two weeks of December, but I have her for the second half of the month, while Rob and his girlfriend travel to the Bahamas. That allows Alain to teach Annie about the Jewish holiday traditions, and we exchange gifts and light the candles of the menorah as Mamie must have done seventy years before, when she
believed that a life of happiness with Jacob stretched before her. The sadness of her death has remained, a fog wrapped around us, although some days, I wonder whether it’s her life we’re mourning instead of her death. For she died with a smile on her face and was joined soon after by the one person capable of completing the puzzle we never knew she was trying to piece together.

  It’s been over a month now since I’ve heard from Gavin. It’s better that way, I tell myself. Annie and I are just finding our footing again. She’s just beginning to trust me. I can’t bring a man into that mix, not now. I want her to know that she will always come first.

  Alain tries to talk to me about this on the last day of Hanukkah, the day before he returns to Paris, but he doesn’t understand.

  “Gavin cares for you,” Alain tells me. “He helped you find me, and Jacob. He has been kind to your daughter. He did not have to do those things.”

  “I know,” I reply. “He’s a wonderful guy. But we’re fine without him.”

  “I know. But do you want to be without him?” Alain asks, looking at me carefully in a manner that assures me he already knows the answer.

  I shrug. “I don’t need anyone. I never have.”

  “We all need people who love us,” Alain says.

  “I have Annie,” I reply.

  “And me,” he says with a smile.

  I smile back. “I know.”

  “Do you not believe in love?” he asks after a long pause. “Did you not see it, plain as day, between your grandmother and Jacob?”

  I merely shrug in reply.

  The truth, which I cannot explain to Alain, is that I do believe in love now, the kind of love that can exist between a man and a woman. I have Mamie to thank for that, and I will forever be grateful, because it is a lesson I never expected to learn. I suppose I am my mother’s daughter in that way.

  But my heart is as surrounded by ice as the bird feeder that has frozen solid on our back porch. Just because love exists does not mean that I am capable of it. Sometimes, in the darkness of night, I wonder whether I’m even capable of loving Annie in the right way or whether I’ve forever inherited my mother’s coldness. Annie is my child, and I know I would lay down my life for her in a heartbeat, or give up anything in my own life to make her life better, but is that love? I have no way of knowing. And if I can’t be sure of my ability to love my daughter the right way, how could I possibly believe I could love someone else?

  Besides, it seems to me that Mamie hung on to her love for Jacob like a rope that could save her from drowning. But over the years, the rope that saved her became a noose that tightened more and more with each passing year. I’m afraid that’s what love can turn into, if you let it.

  Gavin was right; there are layers upon layers of defenses surrounding my heart, and I don’t know how someone could get past them. I don’t believe anymore that there’s anyone out there willing to try. It only took one conversation to push Gavin away, and he disappeared entirely, proving to me that he’d never really cared that much in the first place. How foolish I was to think any differently. How foolish that this breaks my heart.

  On December 30, the day after Alain has left to return to Paris, Annie appears at the door to the bakery at two in the afternoon, when she should be home, hanging out with her friend Donna, whose mother had agreed the girls were old enough to be trusted alone in my house for a few hours.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask instantly. “Where’s Donna?”

  “She went home.” Annie smiles. “You got a call.”

  “From who?”

  “From Mr. Evans,” she says, naming the town’s only estate attorney. “Mamie left a will.”

  I shake my head. “No, that’s not right. We would have known about it already. Mamie died last month.”

  Annie tilts her head to the side. “So I’m lying now?” I open my mouth to reply, but she keeps going. “He said that, like, Mamie didn’t want him to call you ’til December 30, ’cause there’s some letter she didn’t want you to have ’til New Year’s Eve.”

  I stare at my daughter. “You’re kidding.”

  Annie shrugs. “That’s what Mr. Evans says. Call him if you don’t believe me.”

  So I call Thom Evans, one of the many men in town who’d dated my mother on and off when I was a kid, and he tells me in his stiff, careful tone that yes, there is a will, and yes, there is a letter, and I can come over any time the next day to pick them up, even though it’s a Saturday, and a holiday to boot. “The law never sleeps,” he tells me, which makes me have to stifle a laugh, because the whole town knows that if you stop by Thom Evans’s office, you’re as likely to find him passed out at his desk with a bottle of scotch in his hand as you are to find him actually working.

  The next afternoon, I close the bakery early and head over to Thom’s office, which is just a few blocks down Main. The sun is shining brightly, although I know that in just a few hours, it will disappear into the sea for the last time this year. Annie is spending tonight with her father, who has agreed to take her, Donna, and two other friends over to the big First Night celebration in Chatham, and I plan to spend the evening alone at the beach, even though I’ll need several layers of thick wool to steel myself against the cold wind blowing in from the bay. I’ve been thinking lately of all the nights Mamie spent searching the heavens, and it seems right to see the year off doing the same thing, from the place where the view is the clearest.

  I take off my coat and hat and peek my head into Thom’s office, where he appears to have nodded off at his desk, although there’s no liquor bottle in sight. I pause before knocking. He must be nearly seventy now; I know he graduated high school the same year my mother did, and for a moment, seeing him brings back the past, making me long to see my mother.

  I rap lightly on the door, and he wakes up instantly. He shuffles some papers and clears his throat in an apparent attempt to pretend he wasn’t just sleeping. “Hope!” he exclaims. “Come in!”

  I step into his office, and he gestures toward one of the chairs facing his desk. He stands and riffles through his file cabinet, while we make small talk about how quickly Annie is growing up and how much his own great-niece, Lili, liked the gingerbread cookies he’d picked up from my bakery on Christmas Eve on his way to Plymouth, where Thom’s sister and her family live.

  “I’m glad they were a hit,” I say. “That was one of my grandmother’s favorite things to make every holiday.” When I was Annie’s age, I’d taken my job as the bakery’s official gingerbread froster quite seriously; I’d dress all the little figures up with sugary hats, gloves, and sometimes even Santa outfits.

  “I remember,” Thom says, smiling at me. He finally extracts a folder from the cabinet and comes back to sit at his desk. “Lili asked me to make a request for next year. She wants to know if you can make the gingerbread men with ice skates.”

  I laugh. “She’s into ice skating now?”

  “In the last year, she’s been obsessed with horseback riding, ballet, and now ice skating,” he says. “Who knows what it’ll be this time next year.”

  I smile. “You know,” I say gently. “I’m afraid the bakery probably won’t be here next holiday season.”

  Thom arches an eyebrow at me. “Oh?”

  I nod and look down. “The bank’s calling in the loan. I don’t have the money. It’s been a rough few years with the economy and all.”

  Thom doesn’t say anything for a moment. He puts his glasses on and studies one of the papers he’s pulled out of the folder. “You know, if this were It’s a Wonderful Life, this would be the part where I’d tell you all the townspeople will pitch in to help save the bakery.”

  I laugh. “Right. And Annie would be running around telling everyone that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” The movie is my favorite; Annie and I had watched it on Christmas Eve, with Alain, just last week.

  “Do you actually want to save the bakery?” Thom asks after a moment. “If you had a choice, would
you prefer to be doing something else?”

  I think about this for a minute. “No. I do want to save it. I don’t know that I would have said that a few months ago. But it means something different to me now. I know this is my legacy.” I half laugh and think back to the movie again. “Where are the generous townspeople when you need them, right?”

  “Hmm,” Thom says. He studies the document in his hands for another moment and then looks up at me, the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “What if I told you that you didn’t need the townspeople to save the bakery?”

  I stare at him. “What?”

  “Let me put it this way,” he says. “How much money would you need to cover all the costs and get it back up and running again?”

  I snort and look away. From anyone else, the question would have been rude. But I’ve known Thom forever, and I know he’s not being intrusive; this is just his way. “Much more than I have,” I say finally. “Much more than I’ll ever have.”

  “Hmph.” Thom slips on a pair of reading glasses and narrows his eyes at the page. “Would three and a half million do it?”

  I cough. “What?”

  “Three and a half million,” he repeats calmly. He peers at me over the top rims of his glasses. “Would that solve your problems?”

  “Geez, I’d say so.” I laugh uneasily. “What, did you buy me a lottery ticket for Christmas or something?”

  “No,” he replies. “That happens to be the amount that Jacob Levy had in savings and various investments. When you contacted me about the arrangements for his funeral last month, do you remember me getting in touch with his attorney in New York? The one whose name was on his property documents?”

  “Of course,” I murmur. Although Jacob had never remarried and didn’t have any relatives that we knew of, I knew we had to notify someone of his death, particularly if we planned to bury him here on the Cape. Gavin had helped me track down an attorney listed in some of his old records.