by Amy Sorrells
Lakeview’s revolving door pushed her from the cold December air into the moist warmth of the front lobby, where the smell of disinfectants and fresh greenery greeted her, reconfirming her decision to bring Jakob here instead of the other nursing homes she’d visited in the brief time she’d had to choose one. She’d had an aversion to any facility, but if he had to go to one, Lakeview’s attention to detail, the decor and holiday celebrations, and the administration’s conscientious efforts to personalize care took the edge off the inevitable decision. She’d heard horror stories from friends and the news about patients lying for hours on urine-soaked pads, bedsores festering deeper as they lay neglected for hours while aides sat around laughing, thumbing through catalogs, and stuffing snacks in their mouths. Lakeview seemed to offer the best geriatric specialty care and amenities available. Art therapy. Music. Exercise classes. Pet visits. Games. She’d felt certain this was the best place for Jakob. And so far, the kind staff helped affirm the choice whenever she visited. Between Mattie and Nel, Jakob was rarely without a visitor for more than a day. Not even Mattie, who was more particular than Nel, had found anything concerning when she came to visit Jakob.
Nel found her dad sitting in a chair by the window in his room. He wore his old gray wool cardigan pulled loosely over the top of a blue oxford shirt. The sweater was buttoned up crooked, the left side hanging lower, which matched the lopsided droop of his saggy neck. He lifted his bloodshot eyes to her, the weakened eyelids too loose for their bony sockets. There again was the look of an old basset hound behind the thick bifocals.
Nel leaned toward him and grasped his hands. “Hey, Dad.”
“Well, well, well. Look who’s here.” Long wrinkles on his jowly cheeks stretched into a smile, and his eyebrows lifted in a moment of acknowledgment before he looked back out at the snow collecting on the arms of the evergreens dotting the rolling hills of the pasture and golf course beyond.
Nel sat in a chair next to him, and she fought the temptation to get weepy, as much from the drastic, rapid wasting that had occurred since his fall as from feeling so overwhelmed by this disaster happening so close to her mother’s death. She knew from friends and stories in the news how people married so long often die within a short time of each other. Living away from Mom and Dad had done more harm than good by isolating her from the more gradual ebb of life others who lived close to family experienced with their aging parents.
She picked up one of his favorite books, Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson, which sat next to his empty denture cup on the nightstand, beside a framed picture of him and Mom. He’d grown quiet—the doctors had said depression was common in elderly patients who fall—and she’d discovered reading helped ease the sometimes awkward silence of their visits.
“Now where’d we leave off? Here we go. The chapter on ‘Flashes of Insight.’” Jake’s countenance relaxed as Nel read. When she finished the paragraph, the room stilled, and both of them stared out at the snow. Eventually Jakob turned toward her when he realized she had quit reading, and she looked deep into his hazel eyes that were flecked with all the colors of a fall hillside. How fast the seasons had changed.
“I gotta talk to you about something,” she finally said.
His eyes widened and wrinkled, his mouth flattening with concern. “What is it, Catherine? What is wrong?”
Catherine. His lapses in lucidity, compounded with the severity of his episodes of delirium in the hospital, broke Nel’s heart. For a while she wondered if she should correct him, but that only agitated him. So as much as she could, she went along with his confusion until he slipped back into reality and remembered who she was. His short-term memory was the worst. Most days he was quick to talk about stories from when she was growing up, from when he and Catherine dated, and about the trips they’d taken. But then he couldn’t recall if he’d eaten breakfast or where to find or how to use the nurse call light, which he’d been taught to do tens of times. She wondered more and more about dementia, his family history, and the mystery of his past that Catherine had been researching.
“Nothing’s wrong … There’s a few things to fix around the house, and I think I’m going to ask David Butler to do that for us, if that’s okay.”
“Okay.”
“And I figured out how to get you some help at home. I’m going to stay here with you for as long as I need to.”
He didn’t reply.
“Dad? Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m going to be your help.”
He turned toward her, and she was surprised to see tears puddling in his eyes. “I never wanted to be a burden to you, Catherine.”
She scooted her chair closer to him. “Dad. It’s me, Nel.”
He studied her face, and she saw recognition flash across his eyes. “Nel. Of course. What did I say?”
“Never mind that. You’re not a burden, Dad. I want to do this.”
“It’s all too much.” He turned away.
Nel sat back and studied him, this man who had held her on his shoulders for summer parades, hooked fish for her, carried her into the house and lifted her into bed on moonlit summer nights after she had fallen asleep on burlap-covered cushions under the stars. He’d always been the strongest, kindest man in her life, and she wasn’t going to risk going back to Santa Fe and leaving him to die without her mom. “I don’t want to waste whatever time we have left.”
With as much lucidity as he’d had since his fall, he searched her eyes, and the tears that had been gathering in his fell. “Neither do I.”
“Okay, then. It’s settled. I’m staying.”
Nyesha nearly tumbled into the room before he could argue. Her arms were loaded with a stack of linens and waterproof bed pads. “I brought your linens since you’re up, Mr. Jake.” She set them down and nodded toward Nel as she began stripping the bed. “Meant to get this done before you came to visit.”
“Thanks, Nyesha.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled and gave Jakob a quick hug, then she tucked in the sheets and spread out the clean pads.
Nel took a deep breath, considering whether or not she should broach the other thing she wanted to talk about with him. She didn’t want to upset him. But at the same time, she didn’t know how many more times she’d have to talk to him about her mom’s research. And what if it was information she and her dad both needed to know?
“There’s one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, Dad.”
Nyesha wrapped up the dirty linens and stuffed them into the hamper as she left the room.
Nel pulled the envelope out of her bag and showed him the picture of the two boys.
“Dad … who’s Peter?”
Jakob’s eyes widened as he took the photo from her, then squinted as he strained to see the image clearly.
“Where did you get this?” His voice held an urgency Nel hadn’t heard before.
“Mom had been working on some genealogy before she died. An envelope came from New York, immigration services, and this picture was in it. I don’t recognize the name Maevski. I thought Mom’s family came from Pennsylvania. Who would we know from Russia?”
“Ukraine,” he corrected her.
“Ukraine? You know about this?”
He continued to stare at the photo. His hands were trembling now.
“When you were in the hospital, you kept mentioning someone named Peter. Is that one of the boys in this picture? Was he a friend of yours?”
“I … I had a brother.”
CHAPTER 18
A brother?
Jakob had never mentioned a brother. Nel couldn’t remember a time he’d talked about his parents, for that matter. Catherine never mentioned anyone either, besides Jakob’s parents on occasion, and mostly about how they’d built the lake house and passed it down in their will to him. Maybe it had been a generational thing that he had never wanted to talk
much about them, or anything, for that matter. But maybe there was more, and that’s what Catherine was trying to find out before she died.
How could Nel continue with that research? She hardly knew where to begin besides the envelope with the ship manifest. She couldn’t stop thinking about the names.
Peter Maevski, 14.
Jakob Maevski, 5.
The boys in the photo had to be her father and who she now knew was his older brother. It made sense for Peter to have passed away already, but when? And how? How had they come to America? And why had they come alone?
All kinds of scenarios were running through her mind, but she’d have to look into it more later. She would ask Mattie about it all—maybe Catherine had confided in her about what she was looking for. In the meantime, she had to finish her prototypes and that bracelet.
As Nel finished setting up the supplies and equipment Matthew had sent her, she admired how Jakob had arranged his lapidary worktable to catch the daylight as the sun moved from east to west. The long table had a view of several bird feeders hanging from the sycamores and river birch, and the lake beyond that. On one end of the table sat a Facetron machine. Across the back wall, he had placed several multidrawered metal boxes. On the other end sat old coffee cans full of tweezers and dop sticks, wax and needles, and gem-finishing tools of all kinds. Various sizes of plastic containers—former ice cream, cottage cheese, and salt buckets—and stacks of cigar boxes labeled with the names of raw stones rested beneath the table.
Nel picked a chunk of quartz off the windowsill, crystals jutting in different directions. She blew the dust off it. “You and your rocks, Dad.” She smiled, thinking of the hundreds of times she sat by his side as he worked the Facetron machine, sketched designs, and examined each rock for the perfect angle of cuts with his loupe on one eye.
She picked up a squared-off, deep-green stone from a coffee tin full of them and studied the lines Jakob had drawn on it with pencil. “Only someone with a heart for the stone can see the best angle to make the first cut. Someone who loves the stone well. Who takes time to get to know it. Who’s not afraid to feel the edges and get close to it. Who sees beyond the dirt and finds the precise section that will most reflect and refract light,” he’d explained over the years.
Collections of uncut stones called roughs peeked from beneath the lids of their overfilled cigar boxes: purple and lavender amethyst; chunks of emerald jade; nuggets of turquoise; slabs of tigereye, glass obsidian, Ceylon sapphire, blue Burma spinel, ruby, and topaz. Under the windowsill, Jakob had set olive jars filled with various types of opal swimming in pools of glycerin to keep them from drying out and cracking. Boxes full of halved geodes and beryl, corundum, and tourmaline rested under the table.
Oversize mayonnaise jugs full of grinding and buffing powders lined an antique oak dressing vanity, and within each drawer were more coffee cans of various tools he used to polish and shape and secure stones as he worked them on the Facetron or by hand. One can held a dozen old brushes from Catherine’s blush compacts. Another held toothbrushes, tweezers, hemostats, and chisels. Another drawer held ring boxes and baby-food jars and square-inch boxes lined with aging, yellow-edged foam for storing finished stones. And a bookshelf against the back wall of the room was stuffed full of gem-club and magazine journals, binders straining with faceting designs and techniques, graph papers covered with angle calculations and diagrams. All the years spent measuring and developing mechanical equations at Brake-All had helped Jakob hone his hobby well. He’d even created his own faceting designs, which had won awards at gem shows and had been published in Lapidary Journal. The mathematical aspects of those designs alone were a feat few hobbyists were able to perfect, and the sheer volume of all he’d created, museum worthy.
Nel pulled open the tiny drawers of a desktop cabinet where Jakob kept all his metal findings, many similar to the sorts she worked with: silver and gold clasps and holders, rings and pendants—all for securing and displaying finished stones for wear. The settings depended on the type of cut: faceted, like the traditional diamond sorts of cuts, or cabochons, a smooth, usually oval-shaped cut that looked as if they were sliced off the side of an egg and polished to a near mirror-like finish. These fascinated Nel the most because it took the greatest amount of skill and talent to see precisely how to choose and center the section of stone to reveal its prettiest pattern. She’d practiced at shaping stones for nearly a decade before her craftsmanship matched Jakob’s. And to think that folks walked by rocks like these along footpaths and hiking trails every day, with no idea what such rocks could become.
A trickle of sweat rolled down the small of Nel’s back as she pushed and lifted as best she could the boxes full of unused laps and long-forgotten supplies from under the table and moved them to one side of the room.
She wasn’t trying to be nosy when she made the next discovery in a box in the farthest corner under the table. As she had with the other boxes, she lifted the flaps to see what was inside so she could arrange the boxes by their contents, if similar. At first she only noticed more dowel rods, wrapped chunks of dop wax, and a large collection of old tweezers. She was about to set the box aside when a tarnished silver cup, with something wrapped in cheesecloth stuffed inside it, caught her eye. She studied the intricate design of a village etched on the outside of the cup, thatched-roof homes, fences, livestock, and rolling hills scrolling across the cup’s surface. The work reminded her of the etchings she used in her silver and rose-gold jewelry.
As she pulled the cheesecloth out of the cup, the doorbell rang, startling her. Something fell to the floor and slid across the wood beneath a pair of old horsehair, swivel chairs.
“Coming!” she called as whoever was at the door followed the ring with knocking.
“You’re out of breath.”
“David—hi! What are you doing here?” She ran her fingers through her hair, suddenly self-conscious.
“I never did apologize for the prom.”
She feigned annoyance and crossed her arms. “As a matter of fact, you never did.”
He held up a bag with the Sherman’s logo on it. “Thought maybe ice cream would be a start?”
“I was kind of in the middle of something …”
“It’s okay. I know I’m unannounced. I can just leave it and come back another time. But you’ve been having to handle some rough stuff. And if I remember correctly, mint chocolate chip is your favorite.”
When she hesitated, the look on his face reminded Nel of a middle school boy who’d overspent on a Valentine’s gift for a crush. “Oh, come in. Maybe you can help me—I lost something. Besides, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about fixing some things on the house.”
He followed her into the kitchen.
“Just set that on the counter and come with me,” Nel said over her shoulder as she headed back to Jakob’s lapidary room. “Remember how Dad’s a rock hound?”
“Yeah, sorta.”
“I’ve been moving stuff around to set up a workspace in here. My agent—Sandra—she’s breathing down my neck about finishing a couple of projects that can’t wait.” She got on her knees and pressed her cheek to the floor to scan and feel around under the chairs. “Anyway, I dropped something just when you rang the doorbell.”
Sam crouched down and held something out to her that flashed in the sunlight angling through the window. “Is this it?”
She sat back and gasped. “Yeah … I think it must be.” She took the stone from his hand. Nel had never seen a gem faceted so beautifully, round in shape and at least as large as a golf ball. “Aquamarine, maybe. Maybe sapphire. Topaz. But probably aquamarine.”
“You’ve never seen this before?”
“No … it fell out of this cup I found stashed at the bottom of this last box of Dad’s things I was moving to make room for my stuff.” She nodded toward the cup on the edge of the table. She turned the stone every
which way, up against the light of the window, the light of the ceiling lamp, studying every facet. “I think the top facets create a Star of David.”
“Yeah?” David, sounding distracted, picked up the silver cup and turned it in his hand. He pulled a couple of folded pieces of paper out of the bottom of it, as well as a tattered object resembling a tassel. “Did you see these, Nel? This one looks like it’s written in Slavic or something.”
He handed her the two papers. On one, a friable piece of parchment, someone had drawn a faceting diagram with words that did look Slavic, although if Nel’s growing hunch was right, they would prove to be Ukrainian. Angles were jotted down the right-hand side and words on the left, with lines and notes pointing to various parts of the shape, which seemed the same as the stone she held in her hand. She’d have to look closer with a loupe to know for sure, but the design did indicate the top of the stone was faceted in the shape of a Star of David.
The second paper wasn’t quite as old. It was a death certificate from a place called the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The full name on the certificate was Peter Maevski Stewart, the date of death May 14, 1915. Cause of death: consumption. His birth information was listed as June 12, 1890, Russia. His parents were listed on there too: Josef Maevski, place of birth, Russia; Eliana Maevski, place of birth, Russia.
“What do you think it all means?” David asked.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Nel said. “But I’m going to find out.”
CHAPTER 19
Jakob did decide to eat his dinner in the dining room eventually, and more often as the days passed. No use sitting in his room letting his joints stiffen further. He’d lived too long, that was the bottom line. People aren’t supposed to live into their nineties. If he were dead and in the ground next to Catherine where he should be, the choice about where to eat his meals wouldn’t matter.