Strangers in Budapest

by Jessica Keener

  Maybe they were all victims of fate.

  Thirty-six

  A year later, on the anniversary of that night in early September, Annie went for a jog around a small pond in the woods near her parents’ house in Portland, Maine. Her legs were flying on their own through the familiar path under the pine trees. Annie was the mother of two now, ever since the hour before dawn on that night in Budapest when she and Will conceived Gracie—naming their daughter in honor of her brother, Greg. Now Leo had a baby sister asleep in a bassinet on their grandparents’ deck in the backyard. Tracy was visiting, too, on this Labor Day Sunday, her older sister in a wheelchair, her head ensconced in a helmet from years of seizures and medications, a dependent child in a mature woman’s body. Annie fought against feeling pity for her sister. Edward was right. Pity didn’t help. It took life away.

  She wished Greg were here. If only he were alive and able to hear the truth that it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. She put her hand to her chest and inhaled the minty scent of pine trees that ringed the pond and whose veil of thin, dry needles softened the trail under her feet.

  The day after Edward died, Nan arrived in Budapest with her partner, Patricia. They stayed at the Kempinski Hotel and brought Edward back to Massachusetts to bury him next to Deborah and Sylvia.

  Annie tried to imagine Edward’s frame of mind, taking a gun with him across the ocean. Why the gun? Did he believe that Stephen would try to kill him, too?

  “He refused to listen to me,” Nan had told Annie in the hotel lobby. “I told him not to come here.” Nan was pretty in an androgynous way, with her crew-cut hair and man-tailored shirt and pants. She had her father’s intelligent, quick eyes. “He wouldn’t listen to anybody. That was my dad,” Nan said, resigned but not embittered. “That includes you, Annie. And that’s why we loved him.”

  Annie hugged Nan and promised to stay in touch.

  That night, Annie called Rose from the police station and learned that neither Rose nor Josef had any idea about the gun, only that Edward needed a place, and was trying to find his son-in-law and didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  “I should never have given him the address,” Annie said to Rose.

  “It is not your responsibility,” Rose said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, Annie,” Rose said. “We are not responsible for the choices Edward made.”

  According to the lawyer Will hired to translate the police documents for them, Stephen was drunk and also high on Vicodin. His death was ruled a suicide, Edward’s a homicide.

  The lawyer also helped the police understand that Annie and Will, Bernardo and Eileen, Agnes and Marta and her grandmother—none of them—had committed any wrongdoing.

  “Annie!” Will called to her at the end of the running path. “Are you coming?”

  “One more round, okay?”

  Will was smiling more since their return to the States. He had accepted a job in Boston with a small start-up called AllConnect. The company created software that allowed businesses to send out emails in the form of newsletters. Annie was still trying to understand the excitement Will felt about the internet, its power to reach out to the world. He still believed that telecommunications had the potential to curb wars. She doubted that. Humans destroyed the most promising things.

  “The applications are endless,” Will told her. “We’re only seeing the beginning of it.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  And everyone—all the big papers and news networks—was talking about China now. How it was much bigger than the Eastern European gold rush. Hungary was a blip, a mosquito compared to behemoth China. Bernardo, too, had abandoned Hungary, but he had not given up on trying to recruit Will to his latest scheme in Hong Kong—a city Bernardo avowed was Manhattan on steroids. She was no longer annoyed by Will’s old boss and would forever maintain a soft spot for Bernardo and Eileen because of what they endured together on that fateful night and, most important, because they and Agnes had waited at the elevator and directed the police back to Stephen’s apartment and, who knows, maybe they had saved her and Will’s life. Maybe Stephen had turned the gun on himself when he saw the police at the door, choosing suicide for his final escape.

  Still, Annie had stood her ground when she told Will if they didn’t leave Budapest now, once everything was settled with Edward, she was going to leave without him. Within ten days, they had packed up thirteen bags of luggage and returned to Boston, to a rental apartment near the Route 128 technology corridor.

  Two months after that, Will accepted the job with AllConnect, and a month later they bought a new modest, contemporary home in Concord, forty minutes outside of Boston, rushing back into home ownership before the rising real-estate market shot out of their reach. Even Josef and Rose were talking about selling their water-stained house for much more than what Annie would have believed possible. But, as her father liked to say, “A house is worth what the market will pay for it,” and the real-estate market in the last year had turned volcanic, with people buying up wrecks, then knocking them down and replacing them with McMansions everywhere, a new emblem of prosperity, one more way to prove that too much was never enough. During that time, Annie was going through her morning bouts of nausea in the new house—unborn Gracie asserting herself.

  A breeze gusted through the tops of the trees as Annie rounded the small pond again. It had been weird seeing their former house painted green when she took Leo to visit Rose and Josef in their old neighborhood. She agreed with Rose: she didn’t like the change in color. Rose’s house remained unchanged except for a pair of Edward’s paintings that Nan had given them, which now hung in their front hallway. Nan gave one to Annie and Will as well—a landscape with dark smudges of blue-gray mountains and a thin streak of lemon-yellow horizon, which Annie interpreted as hope rising above.

  “We have life and we have death,” Josef said, patting her shoulder. “Right now it’s your job to enjoy your life.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “You Americans. Trying? What’s trying? You can do better than that. Come on, Leo. What do you say in Hungarian?”

  “Jó napot kívánunk! Good day!” Leo said, shaking his auburn curls and giggling.

  “Hungarian is in him,” Josef said.

  Annie could thank Klara and Sandor for that. All those hours they cared for Leo. Now the young couple were living together in a four-hundred-square-foot flat in Pest, expecting a child of their own. Klara said they lived near the Roma. “You will be happy to know this,” she wrote to Annie in a letter.

  Persze. Annie wondered what the two Roma sisters were doing on this warm September day, guessing they were plucking flowers as usual at the Parliament and selling them. She wished she could have done more for them than hand out American cash. There were too many things to fix in the world.

  A BREEZE CROSSED the path, ruffling the pond water’s silver-blue surface. How she missed Edward on this anniversary day. She felt it in her chest.

  “I was thinking about Edward,” Annie said, slowing down to walk with Will, who was waiting for her. “I don’t blame him for wanting to know the truth. But the gun. Why did he have to have a gun? It shows he had harmful intentions. There’s no justification for that, is there? If only I hadn’t given him the address.”

  “If only the road to hell weren’t paved with good intentions,” Will said.“If only someone hadn’t stolen my wallet, or murdered Edward’s daughter, or accidentally hit your sister with a baseball. If only,” Will said. “None of it is good. And if someone killed our child, what would you do, Annie? What would I do? I’m a peaceful guy, but I think there’s a good chance I might get a gun.”

  “It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t bring his daughter back,” Annie said. She heard the whine in her voice because the thought of someone killing her child was too much to contemplate.

  “He said he wanted the truth,” Will said. “I’m guessing he thought the gun would force Stephen to tell him, and it d
id.”

  She scuffed the path, dissatisfied with that answer, her sneakers kicking up tiny pebbles as they emerged from the trail onto the sidewalk leading back to her parents’ house. The sidewalk was lined with sycamore trees, distinctive for their mottled, exfoliating bark. As a child, she stored strips of the thin bark in a shoe box and wrote wishes on them. I wish Tracy would get better. When she graduated high school and was packing up for college, she threw the shoe box away because the strips had crumbled, and Tracy’s health had gotten worse. Where was the justice in that?

  The road to wisdom was a long one.

  Thankfully, Mr. Calloway had stopped contacting them. It had been around this time when he last wrote, wrapping up any future obligations they had with him.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gordon:

  As promised, I passed on your materials to little Leo’s birth mother. This completes our agreement. If you are ever so inclined, I hope you will drop me a line from time to time and let me know how you and the little guy are faring.

  Sincerely,

  John Calloway

  At the heart of it, she understood that Calloway was likely someone who didn’t get enough praise for what he did in his life. But that wasn’t her burden to carry. She had two children to raise.

  How much had she had contributed to Edward’s death, or to Stephen’s death, or Greg’s? What was her fault? What wasn’t? Who was responsible for how things turned out? Some questions didn’t have answers. Instead, they left permanent stains on her heart.

  As for Stephen Házy, aka Van Howard, she couldn’t say for certain that he had followed her. She was inclined to believe Edward’s version of the story because of the coincidental meetings—at Luigi’s, on the street near Edward’s flat, and at the Bem József statue, where she had stopped with Leo. Even Stephen’s uninvited appearance at the police station might have been planned. Was it kindness or manipulation, or both? As time passed, she wondered how thin was the line that divided good from bad. Stephen had lied. He was a murderer. And yet, she couldn’t ignore that he had also been kind to her, which in some ways made it even worse. Deborah’s criminal overdose was Stephen’s ticket back to reclaim his father’s home. And what did it buy him? Multiple deaths.

  How had she allowed herself to be so convincingly deceived? Could she really blame it on the fact that she was a woman feeling estranged in a stranger’s land?

  Annie knit her fingers in Will’s, and in response, he stopped to kiss her before they returned to her parents’ house, one of a dozen stately brick estates gracing the street.

  Only one question continued to claw at her: did Edward intend to kill Stephen?

  She wanted to believe he had brought the gun across the ocean to scare his son-in-law into making a confession, as Will had said, and not harm him. She needed to trust in the ultimate goodness in humanity. She yearned to believe that Edward hadn’t deceived her or set her up. He hadn’t sought them out, after all. He had told her again and again to stay away. But in his insistence to hunt down the truth, hadn’t he also crossed a critical line? Hadn’t he put her and Will and the others in lethal jeopardy? In his defense, he didn’t realize that they would still be there at Stephen’s. The party had run long, after all.

  If she had been in Edward’s position, how far would she have gone to make things right?

  She didn’t know.

  What she did know was that Edward and Deborah, Tracy and Greg, and Stephen, and all those lives shattered on European shores during and after the wars, and on an asphalt driveway in America—those lives whose truths had disappeared into a vault of eternity beyond her reach—were not gone or silenced. She could hear them calling.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my Hungarian friends for life, Laszlo Szotyory and Szófia Székely, who taught me so much about a different way of being when I lived in Budapest for a year, in 1994, and to George Hazy, who introduced me to Hungary’s beautiful city on the Danube.

  Throughout the writing of this novel and its many revisions, I turned to those who understood and helped: Susan Henderson, Caroline Leavitt, Patry Francis, Barbara Shapiro, Risa Miller, Deb Henry, Dawn Tripp, Tish Cohen, Robin Slick, Billie Hinton, Joyce Norman, Daphne Kalotay, and my dear friends at Book Pregnant and ePubs and Pen names.

  Thank you to Emma Sweeney, my brilliant agent, who saw the promise of a book early on, and to everyone at the agency for making things happen behind the scenes. Emma also brought me to Chuck Adams, extraordinary editor at Algonquin Books and wonderful human being. To the outstanding Algonquin team—Brooke Csuka, Betsy Gleick, Jude Grant, Brunson Hoole, Debra Linn, Michael McKenzie, Lauren Moseley, Craig Popelars, Ashley Mason, Elisabeth Scharlatt, and everyone else—your incredible devotion to books is inspiring and necessary to a free world. It’s an honor to be one of your authors.

  I gained a deeper understanding of WWII, the holocaust, and Hungarian Jews during the 1940s from talking to generous individuals, many gone now, who took time to share some of their experiences with me—from the horrors in Europe to their harrowing journeys to get to America, where they subsequently prospered and thrived. Thank you: Hannah Entell; George Friedmann; Marika Barnett; Joel T. Klein, PhD; and Bob Berger.

  Eternal thanks to my father, Melvin H. Brilliant, also gone now many years, for his WWII service in the US Army’s Rainbow Division, and for his part in helping to liberate Dachau concentration camp. Though he refused to see himself as any kind of hero, I view him differently. His memories helped guide this book.

  Thank you to Mom, my sisters and brother, for keeping it real, and to my in-laws and extended family members for your talents and diverse perspectives. And to Tina Cherry, founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, for her incredible heart and wisdom.

  To our son, thank you for teaching me more than I ever imagined about life.

  To my husband, Barr, thank you for believing in my work, for your genius insights, and for walking beside me all these years, with love.

  JESSICA KEENER is the author of the national bestselling novel Night Swim and a collection of award-winning short stories, Women in Bed. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, the Boston Globe, Agni, and other publications, and she has taught English literature and writing at Brown University, Boston University, the University of Miami, and GrubStreet. She lives in the Boston area. Learn more at www.jessicakeener.com.

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  Published by

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  © 2017 by Jessica Keener.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-768-7

 

 

 
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