The Length of a String

by Elissa Brent Weissman

  Thursday, October 23, 1941

  Dear Belle,

  I still know nothing about what matters. About you . . . about home. (For a moment I forgot the Luxembourgish word for home. How could I forget “doheem”? Doheem. Doheem.)

  School helps for distraction, but not entirely. I sat with some girls at lunch one day. They were trying to be friendly, but I wasn’t helping them very much. If only you were here . . . I could see they didn’t want me to sit with them again, so I’ve been eating lunch in the apartment with Hannah instead.

  Tomorrow I will have lunch with Miriam, the girl Mme. Veron said needs help with French. I do hope we get on. Then we can meet during lunch every day. I am tired of “The Romance of Helen Trent.”

  Friday, October 24, 1941

  Lunch with Miriam was wonderful! We brought our lunch to Mme. Veron’s room, so I did not have to sit in the cafeteria. You would be mad about her, Belle. She has masses of curled black hair. And a very excited humor always, like she just cannot wait to tell you secrets. And you will never guess what we talked most about . . . “The Romance of Helen Trent”!

  Miriam adores that show, just like Hannah. She repeated the introduction, in a dramatic voice just like the man on the radio . . . “And now, the real-life drama of Helen Trent, who—when life mocks her, breaks her hopes, dashes her against the rocks of despair—fights back bravely, successfully!” She had me in stitches. She said, “Mme. Veron says you came here all by yourself from the war. You are a real-life Helen Trent!”

  I put the back side of my hand to my forehead and said, “Yes, I also hope to prove that when a woman is 35 or over, romance is not over.” (This is also in the beginning of the program.)

  When is the last time I laughed with a girlfriend? I can’t even remember . . . It felt warm and wonderful, I did not want our lunch to end. Maybe it is a good sign and there will be happy news from you tomorrow!

  CHAPTER 25

  The text message sound pulled me out of Anna’s world. I wasn’t even going to look at it. Madeline had left for a trip this morning, so her phone was off while she was on the plane. That meant the text was probably my mom telling me Jaime was stretching before his soccer match. I knew I’d get a whole bunch of messages throughout the morning, enough to re-create the whole game kick by kick. My dad probably brought his video camera too. He and Jaime would relive the match tonight with a bowl of popcorn. They’d want me to watch too. This is why it’s usually easier to just go to Jaime’s games. But it was super windy out, and I was feeling lazy. I’d decided to spend the morning lounging around in my pajamas and finding out if Anna managed to hear anything about her family.

  My phone chimed again. Another text. I held my right hand in the crease of the diary and reached for my phone with my left. It wasn’t from my parents at all. Both were from Ethan!

  Hey Williams

  U there?

  I smiled. I closed the diary, making sure to mark my page with the green ribbon.

  Yeah, I typed. What’s up?

  It took so long for Ethan to reply, I looked at the clock seven or eight times. Strangely, the time didn’t change from 10:03.

  Is ur brother playing soccer right now?

  Yeah. Why?

  Watching my sister on field 3. Come hang out.

  No! I gasped and dropped my face into my pillow. Of all days for me to skip Jaime’s game.

  I’m at home! I typed, hoping I sounded disappointed, but not so disappointed that it’d be weird.

  Ethan replied with a sad face, typed out because his phone is even older and less smart than mine. It made me grin.

  I thought itd be boring, I explained, and windy.

  It IS boring and windy, he said. We coulda been bored and cold together.

  My stomach got genuine butterflies. I could imagine Parker and Magda shrieking behind me. I reread the whole exchange a few times, trying to think of the perfect response. The best I could come up with was a slanty-mouthed face and the words Next time.

  Ethan didn’t reply for a few minutes. Then he asked if I was going to Parker’s bat mitzvah.

  Yeah, I typed. U?

  He replied with not one, not two, but three smiley faces. Three! Then he added, See u there Williams!

  That exclamation point was better than a bowl of three-cheese tortellini. I sent him a grinning face and dropped my phone into my covers. Then I got up and shook out my arms and legs, which were kind of tingly.

  I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. The wind was whistling against the window, and the trash bins were rolling around outside like drums, waiting for me to break into song. I spit out my toothpaste with a satisfying pwew and wiped my mouth on a towel. I didn’t change out of my pj’s, though. I got right back in bed and started reading the next entry.

  Sunday, October 26, 1941

  Belle,

  My good humor from Friday has been buried by worry again. The news from Europe is disgusting. If I don’t hear something soon from Mama or Papa, I believe I will go mad.

  Freddy and I rode the bus to downtown Brooklyn today. This driver knows Freddy, so he let us stand in the wheel well and ride for free. We went to a store for magic tricks. Freddy kept asking the boy working to demonstrate tricks, but he didn’t buy any, so it was as though we had our own private magic show for free. Then we went to a bakery where Freddy knows the owner, and she gave to us both free doughnuts. It was an enjoyable afternoon, and all for free, since we made sure to catch a bus with the same driver on the way back to Bensonhurst. But my mind is still elsewhere.

  Bier is starting to lose the smell of Oliver. Or maybe I’m just forgetting what he smelled like.

  Tuesday, October 28, 1941

  Some news! Mme. Veron heard from someone in Vienna that a train full of Jews left for “the east” a few weeks ago. She said someone else got a letter from Jews who were to be transported east from Frankfurt. It could be that Luxembourgish Jews were transported as well.

  I can’t make heads or tails of this. How I long to see you, or just speak with you, or do anything to contact you besides write in this dumb journal that you can not read! Are you truly going east? Why? You are supposed to move closer to me, not farther away. Hannah has been on the telephone all afternoon, but no one knows more. On Saturday Max will see what he can learn from the other men at shul. I have waited so long, and now I must wait longer. How will I survive?

  The wind shook the tree outside my window. I was no longer in the right mood to read about this. The whole situation was so unfair. If only the internet had existed in 1941. That would have made it so much easier for Anna to contact her family and find out what was going on. She wouldn’t be at the whim of the post office during a war. She wouldn’t have to just sit and wait and wonder.

  Wait a second.

  Anna didn’t have the internet, but I do. So do my birth parents.

  I had an idea.

  CHAPTER 26

  Downstairs, I threw together a bowl of cereal and brought it over to the computer. Outside, the wind was still going nuts, but inside, it had nothing on my heartbeat. The lousy feeling I had after snooping in the filing cabinet was still fresh in my memory, but I’d tried talking to my parents, and that’d felt even worse. This new idea might be a total bust, but it was safer to find that out while no one was home.

  When Madeline had given me that list of adoption websites, they all looked really official, with URLs that ended with .gov and stuff like that. I knew those sites wouldn’t tell me anything without permission from my adoptive parents, or at least the name of the adoption agency they used—two things I didn’t have. But I did have something. Three things, actually: my birthdate, the city where I was born, and the internet. If my birth mother wanted to find me—or if any adult wanted to find a child they’d given up for adoption, just, you know, hypothetically—they’d use those same three t
hings, right?

  Here’s what I typed into Google:

  find daughter adopted philadelphia june 2002

  Here’s what came up: 604,000 results.

  I slowly raised a spoonful of cereal to my mouth as I scanned the page. I decided to click on the third down, a link that said “Search and Reunion,” and found myself on some kind of message board. There were thousands of posts (78,885, to be exact), all from people who were looking for someone or something.

  Looking for half-brother born 1976 Rochester, NY

  Girl born August 1982

  Abandoned baby Dallas Texas 1960

  Looking for my son born NJ 1984

  As I scrolled more, I realized that some of the posts had different subjects:

  I may have found my birth father

  Meeting my birthmom today! What do I say?

  HELP! Do they want to know me or not?

  I kept scrolling, reading title after title and clicking to learn more about other people’s searches. Some of these people were really old (their birthdays were from a long time ago), and some were looking for cousins or grandparents or siblings. Some knew nothing except which foreign country they were adopted from, and some knew a person’s whole name (first, middle, and last) but still couldn’t find them.

  I chewed another bite of cereal, now warm and soggy, as I scrolled and read. It was as mesmerizing as the pictures of all the Imanis. Here were all these different people, all over the world, who were, in some small, important way, like me.

  “Imani?”

  I jumped so high, I banged my knee into the bottom of the desk. Tears came to my eyes, it hurt so badly.

  My mom came running from the front door. “Ouch. Are you okay, sweetie?”

  I meant to close the browser, but in my panic I only minimized it. And there wasn’t time to do anything else. I limped over to the couch and rubbed my throbbing knee. I needed to keep Mom away from the computer.

  “You scared me,” I said.

  “Sorry.” She frowned and sat down on the edge of the couch, as I hoped she would. “I didn’t want you to be scared when someone opened the door. That’s why I shouted your name. But I guess I made it worse.” She kissed the sore spot, like she used to do when I was a kid. “Better?”

  “A little,” I said. “Why are you home?”

  Mom’s eyes went up to a corner of the ceiling for a few seconds. “Oh!” she remembered. “To get Dad’s video camera. He forgot it. And so did I, for a second there,” she said with a chuckle. “Senior moment. While I’m remembering things,” she continued, “do you have plans tomorrow?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Good. You and I are going to go shopping.”

  My blood was racing and my knee was aching, but this still made me groan. “Why?”

  “Parker’s bat mitzvah’s coming up, and that’s just the first of many.”

  My body became a blob on the couch. Shopping with my mom is so embarrassing. She always gets the salespeople involved. When we went for new school clothes, she even called a salesgirl inside my fitting room to show her how big some pants were in the butt area. “Can’t we just look online and I’ll try them on here?”

  “No, it’s better to go to the mall,” Mom said. “I’ll be away for work most of next week, so this is our only time. I wouldn’t know what size to get anyway. Your body’s changing.”

  Great. Now my mom will probably tell the salespeople that my body is changing. Or she’ll decide that this is a good time to talk about puberty. I needed to keep her away from the computer, but how desperate was I willing to get? Better to talk about dresses. “How many dresses do I need?”

  “At least two or three. You can’t wear the same thing to every party. And at some point we’ll have to get one for your own bat mitzvah, of course.”

  I made a face.

  “You can’t wear jeans and a T-shirt on the bimah, Imani.”

  “Mo-om,” I said with the tone of a verbal eye roll. Just because I don’t want to spend the weekend dress shopping doesn’t mean I plan to wear jeans and a T-shirt at my bat mitzvah.

  “Okay.” Mom stood up and patted my shoulder. Then she went to get Dad’s video camera from—oh Mamelikanner—the desk.

  Don’t look closely at the screen, I willed.

  “Do you want to come back to Jaime’s game with me?” Mom asked. She was moving some stuff around on the desk, looking for the camera. “I’ll wait while you get dressed.”

  My mind flashed to Ethan—we coulda been bored and cold together, he’d said—but it was too risky to leave my mom alone with the computer while I changed. “No thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah, stay home and relax,” she agreed. “The wind is terrible. And it seems like it might rain. Maybe I should bring an umbrella. I’ll just check the weather . . .” She opened the browser.

  She opened the browser.

  She saw the website that was there. Adoption search and reunion. And her whole body froze.

  “Um,” I said. Because what could I say? That this wasn’t what it looked like? It was exactly what it looked like.

  Mom stayed frozen in front of the screen, silent and stiff.

  “Mom?”

  Finally, she straightened. I couldn’t see her face, because she didn’t turn around. And I found that instead of feeling guilty, this time I felt angry. There were so many adoptees who wanted to know where they came from. Over 78,000 of them on one website alone. Clearly, it’s normal to wonder. Why can’t I?

  “I was just—”

  “That’s enough screen time for today,” Mom interrupted, shutting down the computer and this conversation. Because of course we weren’t actually going to talk about anything. We were going to pretend that my body had lived in her belly for nine months, and that she was just upset about screen time. Never mind that the whole reason I was looking at stuff in secret was to avoid hurting her. Never mind that the only reason she even caught me was because I had to spend my measly amount of screen time on this family computer instead of having my own phone, like a normal seventh grader.

  “Don’t forget the video camera,” I said coldly.

  She took it. “Remember,” she said, finally facing me, and forcing a fake smile, “tomorrow we’re shopping for bat mitzvah dresses. Your bat mitzvah is in June.”

  That’s all she said before she left, but I got the rest of the message loud and clear: You’re part of this family, Imani. End of story.

  Saturday, November 1, 1941

  Belle,

  I am FURIOUS. I am positively fuming. I must write about what happened tonight. It began at dinner, when the uncles were talking about the conversation at shul. They looked at me with sad faces. They were speaking about Russia (in Yiddish, of course).

  Hannah scolded them in Yiddish and told them to be quiet. I’d been eating in silence, but I looked up when she said, in English, “Things will be different for Anna’s family.”

  Uncle Onion shook his head and began grumbling to Uncle Egg. They both seemed angry and sad. It seemed like they may have heard news for me at shul but were not sharing. So I said, “What? What will be different for my family?”

  Hannah shook her head, but Max held up his hand. He said, “My uncles came from Russia about forty years ago,” he explained to me, “to escape the pogroms.”

  Then Uncle Onion said (in English!), “Killing Jews. Always with killing the Jews.”

  Hannah tried to change the subject to how the meat was a bit dry, but it didn’t work. That word, “killing,” hung over us all. Max cleared his throat and told me the uncles were teenagers when they came to America.

  “Achtzehn,” said Uncle Onion.

  “Fünfzehn,” said Uncle Egg.

  18 and 15. Uncle Egg was only a bit older than Kurt.

  “No money,” said Uncle On
ion.

  “Nothing,” said Uncle Egg.

  “They came alone,” Max told me. “Without their parents.”

  Uncle Onion said something in Yiddish. He wanted Max to translate. So Max said, “Like you. Only they didn’t know anyone here. They had no place to live, no one to care for them.”

  Hannah put down her glass of wine so quickly that some of it spilled over the top, but she didn’t even make a move to dab it. She said, “That’s enough for now.”

  But Uncle Egg was still talking, and Uncle Onion was nodding along. If Hannah knew I can understand a little Yiddish, she would have done more to silence them, I’m sure. Because they were saying that they never saw their parents again. That they were left all alone, hungry and poor, to make it on their own.

  Can you believe it? They probably wanted me to feel grateful for having someone to care for me here. Maybe even feel grateful for having them. I am not grateful. I am furious! Shouldn’t the uncles understand then, about saving my parents? They should be gathering every dollar they have hidden beneath their mattress to make sure my story ends differently. They might have been poor then, but they are not poor now. They know my suffering and still they cannot spare a single penny? They have NO excuse, unless they want me to suffer like they did.

  My anger builds as I write this, just as it did at dinner. Months of worry and frustration and heartache piled inside me. Oh, I felt like a stick of dynamite that had finally been lit! I started to shout, “Let me see my parents again!” I shouted it so loud that everyone startled. Hannah reached her hand to me but I pulled my arm away and kept yelling. The uncles began to grumble in Yiddish, so I cursed at them in Luxembourgish (my private language!). Then I shouted, “How dare you! You have the money to save them! I don’t want to be here alone!” I kept saying, “How dare you, how dare you!” and I threw my plate onto the floor, and it shattered.