“Come on, Aaron. You must know. You’ve been playing poker with the guy all these nights,” Wes says.
Dad stands and smooths down the five hairs on his head. “I will tell you the story. But this is a judgment-free zone.” He waves his arms likes he’s clearing judgment out of the air. “Is everybody with me?”
“Yes, Professor Levine,” Jeb says.
“Heinz was a member of the Nazi party when he was nineteen years old.”
Janie punches Wes in the arm. “I knew it,” she says.
“His job was to check passports on trains leaving Germany and turn in people with forged or missing documents.”
“That’s it? He didn’t even kill anyone?” Jeb says.
“Oh my God. Shut up,” I snap. Clearly Jeb has never read a book in his life.
“May I, please? He did the job for months before he found out he was sending people to camps. He was one of those kids who was bullied and tormented his whole life. He was a very sheltered young man, and thought he was serving his country by preventing people from defecting to the other side. He found out what the Nazis were doing at a picnic, of all places.” Dad makes the scrunch face and shakes his head. “So Heinz went back and scanned the ledger of people he had turned in and realized it was five hundred thirty-one people. He fell apart and tried to starve himself to death. Most of his family was killed in the blitzkriegs, but his sister somehow got him to Brazil, where he lived out his years with nieces and nephews. That’s the story.”
“So can he be considered a real Nazi?” Wes says. “I mean, he wasn’t working in a concentration camp.”
“The Nazis were a political party. Yes. He was a Nazi,” Dad says. “Now you all know the truth. I’m going back up to help him with the bottles.”
“What’s he doing with the bottles?” I ask.
“He’s writing letters to all five hundred thirty-one people he turned in, stuffing them into bottles, and throwing them into the sea.”
“Isn’t that polluting the ocean?” Janie says.
“Oh, come on, let the man be. He’s not asking to snorkel or see volcanoes. He just wants to find a little peace by honoring those five hundred thirty-one souls. That’s his only wish,” Dad says.
Gram summons us before I can make sense of any of this.
The good news is we’ve recovered the 482 letters Heinz has written so far. The bad news is there are not enough bottles for 531 messages.
We leave Vito, Dad, Bob, and the minister with Heinz and call an emergency meeting in the café to figure out how to help him. Gram comes up with an idea.
“Papier-mâché. We’re going to make five hundred and thirty-one fabulous bottles out of papier-mâché.”
Thirty people file into the art studio to gather materials, and Gram crafts a prototype using balloons, glue, newspaper, and paint. We stuff a paper inside and it works. We create an assembly line to slap the strips of tissue paper in layers. It takes every able-bodied person (and several not-so-able-bodied people) eight hours of work and large quantities of cookies and watermelon to complete and properly store all the bottles.
We take turns helping baby Grace crawl up the wheelchair onto Mark’s lap and back down again. Then she wants to push Mark all the way down to the lobby. It’s her baby obsession. She must think he’s sitting in a giant stroller.
It’s midnight when we text Dad to bring Heinz down to the ballroom. He’s been dozing for hours, and Dad and Wes practically have to carry the disheveled, big-eared old guy. Heinz sees us standing behind 531 handmade bottles, and some extras, just in case. His eyes get wide, and for the first time I see his smile.
I never imagined I would help a Nazi try to make peace with the universe.
Enzo and I collapse into bed without even kissing. I’m beginning to feel like we’re an old married couple. But I’m too tired to give it one last thought. The sound of a man singing wakes me up. Only it’s not singing. It’s Enzo yelling “no, no, no” in his sleep.
“Enzo, wake up.” I shake him gently. “Enzo, it’s okay.” He wakes with a horrified expression. “What’s wrong? What were you dreaming?” I ask.
He doesn’t say a word, and I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep. “I just… I haven’t had that dream in a long time.” Enzo sits up and blinks a few times. “I started having nightmares when Dad was sick. Right before he died, he had tubes coming out of every orifice: his nose, his mouth, one stuck into his side. He choked and coughed and struggled all day. No amount of morphine could fully dull the pain, so he moaned and cried.”
“Oh, Enzo, that’s awful.”
“I imagine if Dad was able to talk, he would have told Mum to keep us away. I imagine he was humiliated. Mum had her own dad dying at the same time, so she left us by Dad’s side. He was our incapacitated babysitter. It was hell.”
“Is that your dream?”
Enzo opens a bottle of water and takes a big gulp. “The dream is terrible. It’s the way I saw the tubes when I was a kid, like serpents crawling into Dad and eating him alive. In the dream, the serpents are crawling into me.” He shudders. “When you’re sitting there for weeks, there’s never a good-bye moment. It’s suffering, and then relief when the suffering stops. We never had a good-bye.”
I wrap my arms around Enzo and hold him as tightly as I can. I don’t know what else to do. Nothing I say will exorcise that memory.
“Now you know why I used to avoid patients on this fucking ship. Or tried, at least.” He gets up and walks out, leaving me to endure a miserable, sleepless night.
TWENTY-ONE
MY AUNT ROSE is dead in a freezer.
Uncle Billy found her curled up under the covers, dead and smiling. It’s not that her dying was so surprising, but this was all about Gram’s death trip. It’s like when one sister elopes in Vegas days before the other sister’s wedding.
Aunt Rose painted papier-mâché bottles for Heinz all day yesterday. She recited our family’s plum pudding recipe—in perfect order, even—for Gloria’s book. Now she’s in a freezer in the underbelly of the ship because she wanted to be buried with Karl near their Charleston house.
Gram holds Aunt Rose’s sweater to her face. “To be perfectly honest, my initial reaction was Of course Rose dies smiling in her sleep. She’s the easy sister. But now I realize it was a gift. Deep down, Rosie knew I was worried sick about her. I know I had you people to look out for her, but we ate lunch at our place on Madison three times a week and talked on the phone every day. She was a pain in the ass, but she was my pain in the ass.”
“She was a sweetheart,” Bob says. “And a very pretty lady. I remember when we were young, she’d meet us for root beer floats and talk about her dates. She always wore red lipstick and smoked cigarettes.”
“Aunt Rose smoked?” I say.
“Everybody smoked, Maddie,” Gram says.
“How is this happening? She’s gone, just like that.” Wes shakes his head. “It’s going to be strange not to hear her talk about Karl in Central Park.”
“And how her plumbing didn’t work,” Dad says.
“And the dead dogs. ‘Where’s Tippy? Is Karl walking him at this hour?’” Uncle Billy imitates Aunt Rose’s high-pitched voice.
“Is that you, Weebles?” Wes squints at Uncle Billy’s face. Even Gram cracks a smile.
“You know, guys, those stories are silly to us, but she lost the majority of her mind, and those are the ones that stuck.” Mom pauses. “Those were Rose’s snow globe moments.”
“See, people? We don’t need to scale mountains. It’s all about the little things,” Wes says.
“Like reproductive problems and getting gas from kielbasa,” Uncle Billy says.
“You’re such a jerk, Billy. C’mon, Assy, let’s have a service for her here,” Wes says. “We’ll do a luncheon because we all know Aunt Rose lived for luncheons. We can dress Easter chic and talk about all the fun we had in Charleston.”
“Good idea, Wessy,” Gram says. “Now, everybody clear out so I
can mourn my sister in peace.”
The luncheon is full of tea roses and Dixieland music. I wear my pink dress, Aunt Rose’s favorite color, and Bob and Eddie surprise Gram with side-by-side enlargements of the old and new Bled photos. It’s all very elegant, just like Aunt Rose. It feels like she went the way she was meant to go, on her expiration date.
Gram breaks down when Uncle Billy and Wes leave to pack up Aunt Rose’s cabin. I watch her through the eyes of a little girl terrified to see a grown-up cry.
It’s late, and insomnia is rampant on this ship. The closer we get to the end, the longer the line is for Whac-A-Mole. For a small woman, Paige can smack the hell out of those moles.
Enzo and I have spent hours on Mom and Dad’s balcony, eating popcorn while Dad shows us the constellations in his fuzzy slippers.
It’s almost midnight, and I get a text from Uncle Billy: Run?
“Be back in a little while.” I kiss Enzo’s cheek.
I pass the Skinny Dave chair and the Grotto and climb the stairs to the track. I walk up behind Uncle Billy, who’s leaning over the railing.
“Hey, Mads. Thanks for coming up. I needed a running partner who can’t talk and run at the same time.”
I stretch out my calves. “Hey, I think that’s an insult.”
“Oh my God. Wes won’t stop talking.” He laughs. “I actually tried to stuff a sock in his mouth, but he managed to talk through it.”
We sit on the floor and stretch in silence, bathed in starlight.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he says, staring at his running shoes.
I nod. “You were her favorite,” I say.
“You guys never knew the younger version of Aunt Rose. She was still sweet, but she was a force of nature.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, screw the run. Let’s walk and talk.” We jump up and walk at a fast clip.
“As you might have noticed, Mother was not happy about Trish marrying a Jewish guy.”
“Yeah, but Gram claims she was afraid Dad wouldn’t see the value in her international Advent calendar collection. That can’t be the reason.”
“Actually, that was the reason. She was afraid he would ruin the North family Christmas traditions.”
“Gram is pretty obsessed with Christmas.”
“Yeah, but Rose convinced her to give Trish her blessing. You know how wishy-washy your mom is. I don’t know if she would have married Aaron without that blessing.”
“Damn. I never knew that.”
“And then it happened again with Wes. Mom—and Dad, for that matter—were not cool with the gay thing.”
“Oh, come on. Gram brags about how she loves the gays.”
“Yeah, but she loved the idea of grandchildren more, and when she realized gay meant no grandchildren, she resented the hell out of Wes.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way. I’ll never forget overhearing Aunt Rose rip Mom a new one. I had invited Wes to the Charleston house, and Mom was being rude to him. Aunt Rose told her to get over herself and welcome Wes with open arms, or she would make Astrid North O’Neill’s life a living hell.”
“I can’t imagine Aunt Rose saying that.”
“She didn’t say it, she yelled it. The next morning, Mom and Wes hugged it out. And that was that.”
“I’m going to miss her so much.” The image of Aunt Rose in the freezer creeps me out. I want to remember her warm and smiling.
“Me too, Maddie girl.”
We stop talking and run. I think about how Aunt Rose used to be—all the times she called us in for lemonade as she played her Dixieland music and how she wrote formal letters from Charleston to tell us how she couldn’t wait to see us again. I had no idea behind all that grace and kindness was a quiet matriarch.
I get into bed emotionally drained and afraid it will be another night without Enzo sex. I snuggle into him and smell his neck. He pulls me on top of him, and I’m sucked into another dimension. It’s all the senses and the breeze and the moon and his mouth. We keep going, swirling around the vortex of ecstasy and enchantment, until it finally collapses and we sleep fourteen hours straight.
TWENTY-TWO
ENZO DID NOT prepare me properly for Wishwell Island. I thought it would be a lab and a few scientists in cabins, but it is outrageous. Francesca showed us a lab complex that’s bigger than three Target stores. It’s divided into sections they call studios, named for famous places. Walden Pond, an outdoor lake in the middle of the complex, is the algae substation. The scientists here analyze millions of plants, fungi, insect secretions, leeches, and even shark cartilage.
My favorite part of the island is the shaman and faith healer village, where medicine people are recruited from tribes around the planet to share healing wisdom and hang out with priests and rabbis and imams. Outside the village, farmers grow superfoods for the people to eat. There are kids here and a small school and streets with quaint shops. The founders of the Wishwell movement wanted the people they recruited to be happy because happy people are creative people.
Mom is a nervous wreck, planning Gloria’s recipe book unveiling with a feast for the patients, staff, and crew. Uncle Billy and Wes are up in the orchard right now, selecting fruits for the cobbler. I hope they don’t make the Chicken Cordon Bleu.
Camilla figured out that Jeb’s a douchebag, so he’ll be our fifth wheel late tonight when Enzo takes us to Wishwell Island’s bioluminescent lagoons. It’s Jeb’s own fault for screwing things up with Camilla, who is apparently getting her PhD in bioethics, whatever that is. Jeb has no ethics.
“Hey.” Enzo smiles. I’ve been watching him sleep.
“Good morning.” I slide over and lay my head on his chest. It feels unsettling to be docked and bobbing when we’re used to moving with the sea.
“You have that look on your face,” he says. His morning stubble is adorable.
“What look?”
“The same look you had last night when you were running around the island. Like a girl who’s seen a fairy.”
“I just can’t believe a place like this exists.”
“When we first got here, I was sure this place was magic and it would swallow up my father and spit him back whole. But it didn’t quite work that way. They said the same things the doctors back home said: ‘We’re sorry, folks. He’s riddled beyond repair.’”
“You know how Gram says we need to take the pain and grow beauty? That’s what they’re doing here.” I’m quoting Gram a lot these days.
“That’s exactly what funds this place. All those heartbroken people give money with the hope that other people won’t go through what their loved ones have been through,” Enzo says. He stops talking, and I hear his heartbeat. He leans down and tries to kiss me. I push him away.
“How do you not wake up with morning breath?”
“Caveman no care about breath.”
“I need to get up. I’m helping Gram write Aunt Rose’s obituary. She doesn’t think anybody else will do justice to her memory.”
“I bet those two were wild in the good old days.”
“You know, I’m very close with my gram. We eat together, shop together, talk about travel and sex and movies. And yet I’ll never really know what she was like seventy years ago. It’s kind of bizarre.”
“It’s bizarre that you talk to your grandmother about sex. Have you told her about us?”
“Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time. She won’t be able to die without knowing how big your package is.”
“Fantastic. Tell her it’s thirty centimeters.” He holds his hands an arm’s width apart.
“How many inches is that?”
“You Americans and your inches. It’s about twelve,” he says. “That’ll silence her.”
“No. That’ll just make her grope you more.”
Jeb and Camilla made up in the middle of Wishwell Island’s massive cannabinoid pasture. It took an entire field of pot to stop Jeb from being a douchebag. So Camilla
will be joining our kayak trip tonight after all.
Dad and I are walking out of the invertebrate center. I haven’t seen Dad this excited since the Roman ruins.
“Doesn’t it seem like forever ago that Astrid told us her nutty plan? I gotta give it to her, this is the way to go out with a bang,” Dad says, stopping abruptly to close his eyes and take a cleansing breath. I take a good, long yoga breath myself. It’s as if the island is nudging us to breathe.
He leaps up and smacks the branch of a flowering tree. Tiny white petals tumble to the ground. “Think about it. Next time we’re on the couch, zoning out in front of the tube, we’ll be wondering why we’re wasting precious time when we could be making extraordinary moments. It’s as if all this death has given us the meaning of life.”
“Dad, are you high?”
“High on life, maybe.” He attempts to skip. I pull him by the shirt and make him stop.
“Have you ever seen Mom with such a spring in her step? I think she might have found her calling.” Dad takes off his shoes and digs his hairy white feet into the sand. “She has loved every minute of helping Gloria with those recipes. She lies in bed at night talking about how she wants to visit nursing homes and record people’s legacies.”
“That’s a perfect job for Mom. She actually has the patience to listen to people.”
My toes make little marks as we wander on the edge of the beach. This island is a living organism, covered in sprawling vines and flowers. The birds and the bugs, the nectar suckers, hover and dart. The island is breathing, too, and we’re stepping on it, tickling it. The lava tubes and the caves are arteries; the magma deep inside is its blood.
“There he is.” Dad points down the beach to Enzo, talking to a woman I don’t recognize. I get the stomach feeling. Who the fuck is she?
“Love you, Dad. That was fun.” I make a beeline for my boyfriend.
“Hey, Maddie, this is Layla. She’s a botanist here.” A botanist? She’s a hot girl in her twenties with olive skin, huge boobs, and a surfboard.
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