“But I’d like to.”
Leo’s answer seems to shock him as much as it shocks me. “I bet you say that to all the girls who are crying hysterically.”
“Ah, you’ve figured out my M.O.”
He hands me a handkerchief. Who still carries a handkerchief? A guy who has an eight-track in his car, I suppose. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose, then tuck the little square into my pocket.
“I’m twenty-five years old,” I say. “I got laid off from my job. My only friend is a former Nazi. My mother died three years ago and it feels like it was yesterday. I have nothing in common with my sisters. The last relationship I had was with a married man. I’m a loner. I’d rather have a root canal than have my photo taken,” I say, crying so hard I am hiccupping. “I don’t even have a pet.”
Leo tilts his head. “Not even a goldfish?”
I shake my head.
“Well, lots of people lose their jobs,” Leo says. “Your friendship with a Nazi could lead to the deportation or extradition of a war criminal. I’d think that would give you something to chat about with your sisters. And I also bet it would make your mother proud, wherever she is now. Photos are so airbrushed these days you can’t trust what you see, anyway. And as for you being a loner,” he adds, “you seem to have no trouble having a conversation with me.”
I consider this for a moment.
“You know what you need?”
“A reality check?”
Leo puts the car in gear. “Perspective,” he says. “The hell with going home. I’ve got a better idea.”
• • •
I remember thinking, as a kid, that churches were so incredibly beautiful, with their stained-glass windows and stone altars, their vaulted ceilings and polished pews. In contrast, the temple where I was dragged for my sisters’ bat mitzvahs—a full hour’s ride away—was downright homely. Its roof came to a massive brown metal point; some sort of abstract ironwork—probably meant to be a burning bush but it looked more like barbed wire—decorated the lobby. The color scheme was aqua, orange, and burnt sienna, as if the 1970s had projectile-vomited all over the walls.
Now, as Leo holds the door open for me so I can walk inside, I decide that either Jews must be universally bad interior decorators or all temples were built in 1972. The doors to the sanctuary are closed, but I can hear music seeping out from beneath them. “Looks like they’ve already started,” Leo says, “but that’s okay.”
“You’re taking me on a date to Friday night services?”
“This is a date?” Leo replies.
“Are you one of those people who looks up the nearest hospital before you travel, except it’s not a hospital you scout out but a temple?”
“No. I was here once before. I had a case once that involved the testimony of a guy who had been part of a Sonderkommando. When he died a few years later, a contingent from my office came to the funeral here. I knew we couldn’t be too far away.”
“I told you—religion isn’t really my thing—”
“Duly noted,” he says, and he grabs my hand, cracks open the sanctuary door, and pulls me inside.
We slip into the last pew on the left. Up on the bema, the rabbi is welcoming the congregation, and telling them how good it is to worship with everyone. He begins to read a prayer, in Hebrew.
I think back to the moment I lobbied my parents to stop going to temple. Sweat breaks out on my forehead. I think I’m having a flashback. Leo’s hand closes around mine. “Just give it a chance,” he whispers.
He doesn’t let go.
When you do not understand the language being spoken, you have two options. You can struggle against the isolation, or you can give yourself up to it. I let the prayers roll over me like steam. I watch the congregation when it is their turn for responsive reading, like actors who’ve memorized their cues. When the cantor steps forward and sings, the music is the melody of sorrow and regret. It suddenly hits me: these words, they are the same words my grandmother grew up with. These notes, they are the same notes she listened to. And all of these people—the elderly couples and the families with small children; the preteens waiting on their bar and bat mitzvahs and the parents who are so proud of them that they cannot stop touching their hair, their shoulders—they would not be here if things had gone the way Reiner Hartmann and the rest of the Nazi regime had planned.
History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.
There is a prayer for the sick and the healing, a sermon from the rabbi. There is a blessing over challah and wine.
Then it is time for the kaddish. The prayer for loved ones who’ve died. I feel Leo get to his feet beside me.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mayh rabo.
Reaching down, Leo pulls me up, too. Immediately I panic, sure that everyone is staring at me, a girl who doesn’t know the lines of the play she’s been cast in.
“Just repeat after me,” Leo whispers, and so I do, unfamiliar syllables that feel like pebbles I can tuck into the corners of my mouth.
“Amen,” Leo says finally.
I don’t believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for—even if it’s just a better tomorrow—is the most powerful drug on this planet.
The rabbi gives the closing prayer, and when he lifts his face to the congregation, it is clear and renewed: the surface of a lake at dawn. If I’m going to be honest, I feel a little like that myself. Like I’ve turned the page, found a fresh start.
“Shabbat shalom,” the rabbi says.
The woman sitting next to me, who is about the same age as my mother and who sports a gravity-defying spiral of cherry-red hair, smiles so widely I can see her fillings. “Shabbat shalom,” she says, clasping my hand tightly, as if she has known me forever. A little boy in front of us, who has been wiggling most of the time, bounces onto his knees and holds out his chubby starfish fingers, a toddler’s high five. His father laughs. “What do you say?” he prompts. “Shabbat . . . ?” The boy buries his face in his father’s sleeve, suddenly shy. “Next time,” the man says, grinning.
All around us the same words are being spoken, like a ribbon that sews its way through a crowd, a drawstring pulling everyone together. As people begin to drift away, milling into the lobby where Oneg Shabbat—tea and cookies and conversation—has been set up, I stand. Leo, however, doesn’t.
He is gazing around the room, with an expression on his face I cannot quite place. Wistfulness, maybe. Pride. Finally, he looks at me. “This,” he says. “This is why I do what I do.”
• • •
At the Oneg Shabbat, Leo brings me iced tea in a plastic cup and a rugelach that I politely decline, because it’s clearly store-bought and I know I could do better. He calls me a pastry snob, and we are still laughing about that when an older couple approaches. I start to turn away, instinctively trying to conceal the bad half of my face, but a sudden thought of my grandmother flashes through my mind, explaining her mastectomy scar years ago and today, her memories of the Holocaust. But see how much of me is left?
I lift my chin and directly face the couple, daring them to comment on my rippled skin.
But they don’t. They ask us if we’re new in town.
“Just passing through,” Leo tells them.
“It’s a nice community for settling down,” the woman says. “So many young families.”
Clearly, they assume we’re a couple. “Oh. We’re not—I mean, he isn’t—”
“What she’s trying to say is that we’re not married,” Leo finishes.
“Not for long,” the man says. “Finishing her sentences, that’s the first step.”
Twice more we are approached and asked if we’ve just moved here. The first time, Leo says that we were going to g
o to the movies but nothing was playing so we came to temple instead. The second time, he replies that he is a federal agent and I’m helping him crack a case. The man who’s been chatting with us laughs. “Good one,” he says.
“You’d be surprised how hard it is to get people to believe the truth,” Leo tells me later, as we walk across the parking lot.
But I’m not surprised. Look at how hard I fought Josef, when he tried to tell me who he used to be. “I guess that’s because most of the time we don’t want to admit it to ourselves.”
“That’s true,” Leo says thoughtfully. “It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of, if you buy into the lie.”
You can believe, for example, that a dead-end job is a career. You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you’re crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it’s safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can’t lose someone you never had.
Maybe it is because Leo is a professional keeper of secrets; maybe it is because I have been so emotionally bruised today; maybe it is just because he listens more carefully than anyone else I’ve ever met—for whatever reason, I find myself telling him things I have never before admitted out loud. As we drive north again, I talk about how I was always an outsider, even in the confines of my family. I tell him that I worry my parents died wondering if I’d ever be able to support myself. I admit that when my sisters come to visit, I tune out their talk of carpools and Moroccanoil treatments and what Dr. Oz has to say about colon health. I tell him that once, I went for a whole week without speaking a word, just to see if I could, and if I would recognize my voice when I finally did. I tell him that the moment bread comes out of the oven, when I hear each loaf crackle and sing as it hits the cool air, is the closest I’ve come to believing in God.
It is nearly eleven o’clock when we pull into Westerbrook, but I’m not tired. “Coffee?” I suggest. “There’s a great place in town that stays open till midnight.”
“If I drink coffee now I’ll be bouncing off the ceiling till dawn,” Leo says.
I look down at my hands in my lap, feeling impossibly naïve. Someone other than me would have been able to pick up on social cues, would know that this camaraderie between us is forced by the case Leo’s investigating, and not an actual friendship.
“But,” he adds, “maybe they have herbal tea?”
Westerbrook is a sleepy town, so there are only a handful of people in the café, even though it is a Friday night. A girl with purple hair who is absorbed in a volume of Proust looks annoyed when we interrupt her to place an order. “I’d make a snide comment about the youth of America,” Leo says, after he insists on paying for my latte, “but I’m too impressed by the fact that she’s reading something other than Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“Maybe this will be the generation that saves the world,” I say.
“Doesn’t every generation think they’ll be the one to do it?”
Did mine? Or were we so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn’t think to look for answers in the experiences of others? I had known what the Holocaust was, of course, but even after learning my grandmother was a survivor I had studiously avoided asking questions. Was I too apathetic—or too terrified—to think such ancient history had anything to do with my present, or my future?
Did Josef’s? By his own account he had believed, as a boy, that a world without Jews would be a better place. So does he see the outcome, now, as a failure? Or as a bullet that was dodged?
“I keep wondering which is the real him,” I murmur. “The man who wrote college recommendations for hundreds of kids and who cheered a baseball team to the state playoffs and who shares his roll with his dog—or the one my grandmother described.”
“It might not be an either-or,” Leo says. “He could be both.”
“Then did he have to lose his conscience to do what he did in the camps? Or did he never have one?”
“Does it even matter, Sage? He clearly has no sense of right and wrong. If he did, he would have turned down the orders to commit murder. And if he committed murder, he could never develop a conscience afterward, because it would be suspect—like finding God on your hospital deathbed. So what if he was a saint for the past seventy years? That doesn’t bring back to life the people he killed. He knows that, or he wouldn’t have bothered to ask you for forgiveness. He feels like there’s still a stain on him.” Leo leans forward. “You know, in Judaism, there are two wrongs that can’t be forgiven. The first is murder, because you have to actually go to the wronged party and plead your case, and obviously you can’t if the victim is six feet underground. But the second unforgivable wrong is ruining someone’s reputation. Just like a dead person can’t forgive the murderer, a good reputation can’t ever be reclaimed. During the Holocaust, Jews were killed, and their reputation was destroyed. So no matter how much Josef repents for what he did, he’s really striking out on two counts.”
“Then why try?” I ask. “Why would he spend seventy years doing good deeds and giving back to his community?”
“That’s easy,” Leo says. “Guilt.”
“But if you feel guilty, that means you have a conscience,” I point out. “And you just said that’s impossible for Josef.”
Leo’s eyes light up at our verbal sparring. “You are far too smart for me, but only because it’s past my bedtime.”
He keeps talking, but I do not hear him. I do not hear anything, because suddenly the door of the café opens and in walks Adam, with his arm around his wife.
Shannon’s head is bent close to his, and she is laughing at something he’s just said.
One morning, when we were tangled in the sheets of my bed, Adam and I had tried to top each other by telling the worst joke ever.
What’s green and has wheels? Grass—I lied about the wheels.
What’s red and smells like blue paint? Red paint.
A duck walks into a bar and the bartender asks, What’ll it be? The duck doesn’t answer because it’s a duck.
Have you seen Stevie Wonder’s new house? Well, it’s really nice.
So . . . a seal walks into a club.
How do you make a clown cry? You kill his family.
What do you call a man with no arms and no legs who is on your doorstep? Whatever his name happens to be.
We had laughed so hard that I started to sob, and I couldn’t stop, and I think it had nothing to do with the jokes.
Did he just tell Shannon one of the one-liners? Maybe a joke I’d told him?
This is only the third time I’ve seen Shannon in person, the first without a great distance or a pane of glass between us. She is one of those effortlessly pretty women, like the Ralph Lauren models, who don’t need makeup and who have all the right streaks in their blond hair and who can wear an untucked shirt and have it be a fashion choice instead of sloppiness.
Without really thinking about what I’m doing, I slide my chair closer to Leo’s.
“Sage?” Adam says. I don’t know how he can speak my name without his face becoming flushed. I wonder if his heart is racing like mine is, and if his wife notices.
“Oh,” I reply, trying to act surprised. “Hey.”
“Shannon, this is Sage Singer. Her family was one of our clients. Sage, this is my wife.” I feel sick to my stomach at his description of me. But then again, what would I have expected him to say?
Adam’s eyes flicker to Leo, waiting for an introduction. I slip my arm through his. To his credit, he doesn’t look at me like I’ve just lost my mind. “This is Leo Stein.”
Leo holds out his hand to shake Adam’s, and then his wife’s. “Pleasure.”
“Just saw the new Tom Cruise film,” Adam says. “Have you seen it?”
“Not yet,” Leo replies. I have to stifle a smile; Leo probably thinks the “new” Tom Cruise film is Risky Business.
“It was a compromise,” Shann
on says. “Guns and aliens for him, and Tom Cruise for me. But then again, I would have watched paint dry if it meant getting a sitter and leaving the house.” She is smiling, never breaking eye contact, as if she is trying to prove to both of us that my scar doesn’t bother her in the least.
“I don’t have kids,” I say. I never really had your husband, either.
Leo puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes. “Yet.”
My jaw drops. When I turn to him, a smile twitches at the corners of his mouth. “How did you say you know Sage, again?” he asks Adam.
“Business,” we say in unison.
“Would you two like to join us?” Leo asks.
“No,” I quickly reply. “I mean, weren’t we just leaving?”
Taking my cue, Leo stands up, grinning. “You know Sage. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting. If you know what I mean.” Putting his arm around my waist, he says his good-byes and leads me out of the café.
As soon as we have turned the corner, I light into him. “What the hell was that?”
“From your reaction, I’m assuming it was the boyfriend you told me you didn’t have. And his wife.”
“You made it sound like I’m a sex fiend . . . like we . . . you and me . . .”
“Are sleeping together? Isn’t that what you wanted him to think?”
I bury my face in my hands. “I don’t know what I want him to think.”
“Is he a cop? I’m getting that vibe . . .”
“He’s a funeral director,” I say. “I met him when my mother died.”
Leo’s brows shoot up to his hairline. “Wow. My gut instinct was way off there.” I watch the usual interplay of emotions across his face as he connects the dots: this man touches dead bodies; this man touched me.
“It’s just a job,” I point out. “It’s not like you go and reenact the Allied victory in the bedroom.”
“How would you know? I do a mean Eisenhower impression.” Leo stops walking. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I guess it’s a pretty big shock to find out that a guy you were involved with is married.”
“I already knew,” I confess.
Leo shakes his head, as if he can’t quite figure out how to say what he needs to. I can tell he’s biting his tongue. “None of my business,” he says finally, walking briskly to the car.
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