A Fire Sparkling

by MacLean, Julianne

  Vivian shuddered with a painful intake of breath. “There isn’t much time. Take the ring and promise me you won’t betray England. You won’t go back to Ludwig. He’s not a good man. Theodore told me he wasn’t. Please believe me, April, and stay here where it’s safe. Have your baby in England, and don’t tell anyone the truth. Promise me!”

  She coughed violently and spat out blood.

  “Help us!” April screamed. “Please, someone help us!”

  But no one came.

  Vivian had no more strength. She closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief when she felt her sister’s grip on the gold band, tugging it up the length of her finger.

  She opened her eyes again. “Good. Now put it on. You’re a married woman, and your name is Vivian Gibbons.”

  “No, I’m not you,” April sobbed. “I could never be you.”

  “Yes, you can, because we’ve always been an ‘us.’ Just don’t get caught. Don’t ever let them catch you. Promise me, April, because I want you to live a good life. I want you to be happy.”

  From out of the blue, a comfortable warmth washed over her, and Vivian felt tranquil in her sister’s arms.

  “I promise. I love you,” April sobbed.

  They were the last words Vivian heard before she exhaled with relief. Then suddenly, she felt as if she were floating, so she reached out and took hold of Theodore’s hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  2011

  I stared at my grandmother for several silent seconds and couldn’t speak. No one could. My father simply sat there, his brow furrowed with bafflement. It was as if we’d both been knocked over by a swinging boom on a sailboat.

  “Wait a minute,” Dad said, sitting forward on the sofa in the living room. “Are you telling me that you died in that bombing?” He shook his head. “No, I mean that Vivian died, but April took her ring, which means that . . . you’re April?”

  Something chilly settled in the air like a fog rolling in from the sea. Gram tilted her head back and blinked up at the ceiling. I tried to imagine how difficult it must have been for her to revisit those final moments in the bombed-out house, when she’d watched her sister die.

  I knew what it was like to watch a loved one die—to wish you could have done something differently to prevent it or to save them. Your life is never the same after a trauma like that. You’re haunted by grief and guilt for the rest of your days.

  “Dad,” I said, “maybe we should let Gram rest for a while. We can talk about all this tomorrow.”

  She lifted her head and turned to my father. “I had no choice, Edward. They were going to arrest me and send me to prison when I was pregnant with you. Maybe even execute me if they thought I was helping the Germans. I don’t know. And Vivian made me promise not to get caught. It was the last thing she asked for.”

  Dad’s eyes filled with the most awful pain-filled shock. “But if you’re April, then that means I’m . . .” His voice broke as he placed his open hand on his chest.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  Dad’s mouth fell open. “But according to what Theodore said, Ludwig was a terrible Nazi war criminal.” Dad looked away and cupped his forehead in his hands. “How could you have lied to me about this, Mum? You told me I was the son of an English aristocrat, and I remember living in that big country house. Were you lying to them too?”

  “Dad . . . ,” I said firmly. I wanted him to give Gram a break. She’d just relived the death of her twin.

  “Did Theodore’s parents ever find out the truth?” he asked. “Is that why we left England and never returned? Why we never kept in touch with them after the war?”

  “They never knew the truth,” she replied.

  “But what about Jack? Did he know?”

  “Not at first. Not when we first met,” Gram replied. “But I told him eventually, because I trusted him, and he never betrayed that trust.”

  There was so much that I, too, wanted to ask my grandmother, but she looked haggard and overcome with grief. I’d never seen her look so old.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I need to go upstairs.”

  I rose to my feet and helped her out of her chair. Meanwhile, my father sat in a brooding silence, frowning at the floor.

  Gram had always been proud and stubborn about allowing anyone to help her up and down the stairs, but tonight she took my arm and surrendered to her old age. We moved slowly and carefully.

  When we reached her bedroom on the second floor, I said, “I’m glad you told us,” even though I was reeling inside and felt as if she were suddenly a stranger to me. Who was this woman we never knew?

  April.

  Part of me felt hurt. If she had trusted Grampa Jack with the truth, why hadn’t she trusted Dad and me? Had there never been a time when she was tempted to tell us?

  I helped her into bed, pulled the covers up, and switched off the lamp.

  “I’m very tired,” Gram said with a sigh.

  “It’s been a long day. Get some rest.”

  Closing the door, I went back downstairs, where I found my father in the kitchen pouring whiskey into a glass.

  I fetched a glass for myself and slid it toward him. He poured me some as well. Then we stood beside each other, leaning against the counter, staring at the opposite wall.

  “This is a shock,” Dad said.

  “Yes, but at least she told us.”

  His gaze met mine. “But would she have, if we’d never found those pictures in the attic? Probably not.”

  “But she kept them all these years. If she really wanted the past to stay buried, she would have destroyed them, wouldn’t she? Maybe a part of her wanted this to be discovered.”

  He sipped his whiskey and shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she kept the pictures as a memento, because she carried a torch for that man all her life, even after she left England and came to America with Jack. You heard how she described him. She was head over heels in love, always defending him, and she wanted to go back to him when she found out she was pregnant. That’s why she sent that telegram. The only reason she didn’t go was because the house was bombed that night, and she was forced to assume her sister’s identity. Then she had no choice but to pass me off as Theodore’s son.”

  We sipped our drinks.

  “I wonder if she ever saw Ludwig again,” I said. “What happened to him?”

  Dad took a seat at the table and went completely pale. When he spoke, his voice shook, and I realized the gravity of this.

  “I’m wondering that too,” he said, “because, my God, he was my father.” Dad shut his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead.

  Something inside me broke at the sight of his distress as he struggled to come to terms with what he’d just learned. It had been many years since I’d seen him cry, and I could see that he was fighting to keep it together. My heart raced with compassion, so I moved toward him and laid my hand on his shoulder. All I could do was stand there, not knowing what to say but wishing he wasn’t in pain. We’d experienced enough pain in our lives.

  He reached up and covered my hand with his. The gesture was an emotional connection—a form of intimacy we had not shared since before Mom died, and it felt as if he had just lowered a bridge across that gully that stood between us.

  Neither of us spoke, however.

  It was one thing to lower a bridge. It was quite another thing to walk across it.

  Wiping a hand down his face, he sniffed hard and pulled himself together. “Part of me wants to google Ludwig right now and find out what happened to him, but another part of me doesn’t want to know. What if he was one of the Nazis who were convicted at the Nuremberg trials? What if there’s a long list of heinous crimes he committed?” Dad downed the rest of his whiskey and pushed the glass away. “I always thought my father was a great man. A brilliant, honorable cabinet minister in Winston Churchill’s government. I’ve always been so proud of that, but now I have to live with the fact that my moth
er has been lying to me about where I came from. All her life . . . lying to her own son.”

  I sat down as well and faced him. “It wouldn’t have been an easy truth for her to reveal to you. I’m not a mother, but when, exactly, would you bring up something like that? I can see how she might have wanted to wait until you were old enough to understand, but when would that day ever come? With every year that passed, it probably got harder and harder to figure out how to tell you—even more so when you were old enough to understand. Maybe she just wanted to protect you from the truth. I can understand that. Sometimes it’s not easy to talk about things that are painful. It’s easier to just avoid them. To bury the subject.”

  His eyes met mine, and we stared at each other intently for a long while, acknowledging the fact that we had been burying something painful ourselves—for many years.

  He squeezed my hand affectionately, then rose from the table and placed the empty whiskey glass in the dishwasher. “I should go to bed.”

  “I should too,” I replied, feeling closer to him, even though we hadn’t mentioned a single word about Mom. “But I’ll be amazed if either of us can sleep.”

  He approached me and kissed the top of my head. “I’m glad you’re here, Gillian.”

  I was happy that we were connecting this way, about something, at least. “Me too, Dad.”

  He turned and started up the stairs. “Let’s hope Gram will talk more about this in the morning. And I’m not going on the internet tonight.” He paused halfway up. “I’d prefer it if you resisted that urge as well, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Honestly, Gillian, I’m not ready to know everything. I need to let this sink in.”

  “Okay.”

  He continued to pause on the stairs, just looking at me. “And listen . . . if you ever need to talk about anything . . . about Malcolm, I’m a good listener. I’d like to help, if I can.”

  I stared back at him in disbelief. And in gratitude. “Thanks, Dad. I appreciate that.”

  He nodded and went upstairs, and I sat back down at the table, feeling profoundly moved by our conversation and unable to get Gram’s story out of my head, especially the part about her sister dying right in front of her eyes.

  In a way, it didn’t surprise me that she’d never talked about it. A loss like that can affect people in all sorts of ways. I knew that very well because of what I went through after Mom died. The next few years of my life had been catastrophic, and that’s why Dad and I had grown apart. Then Grampa Jack died from a heart attack a year after we lost Mom, and everyone was grief stricken all over again.

  Most of that first year was a blur because I’d grown numb to survive, mentally. I dropped out of college, drank too much, partied too hard, and worked a series of part-time jobs that required no skills or dedication beyond showing up on time. I barely kept in touch with my father, who didn’t know exactly where I was living—in a grungy basement apartment in Jersey with two girls I’d met in a bar. We lived like vampires—out all night, sleeping all day.

  But then something woke me up. I remember the exact moment it happened. I was sitting in a coffee shop one morning, hungover and desperate for caffeine. In walked an old high school friend who had just graduated from law school. Her name was Jodi, and she wore a form-fitting gray tweed suit and black patent-leather pumps, and she carried a briefcase.

  I hadn’t even gone to bed the night before. I’d been out partying in some random guy’s apartment until dawn, and I was still half-drunk, sipping on a strong black coffee at a corner table, wondering if I’d get fired from my job at the souvenir store if I called in sick for the fifth time that month.

  Jodi spotted me, and we chatted for a few minutes. She asked what I’d been up to lately, and I was embarrassed to say, “Not much.”

  She looked at me with sympathy, and the whole situation grated like grinding metal over my pride and the ambition I’d once had, because I’d always considered myself smarter than Jodi during high school. I’d gotten better grades, and I often helped her along socially, because she was shy. But there she stood that morning, looking gorgeous, confident, and successful, while I looked like I’d just rolled out of a homeless shelter. It was as if the universe had thrown a glass of water in my face.

  Or maybe it was the ghost of my mother, who had always been proud of me and told me I could be anything I wanted to be if I set my mind to it and worked hard enough. I didn’t want to disappoint her or let her down a second time, so I decided, right then and there, that it was time to go back to school and finish my degree. I would make my mother proud again. I owed her that, at least.

  Now I too wore a suit and carried a briefcase to work as assistant director of communications for a nonprofit organization that raised awareness for breast cancer. I was passionate about my work, and when I landed the job a few years before, I knew that Mom would have been proud of me. I had felt her nearby.

  I still felt her sometimes, mostly when I suspected she was worried about me.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I jumped. I pulled it out and checked it for messages. There were a few emails from friends at work but nothing that couldn’t wait until Monday. Thankfully there was nothing from Malcolm, but he knew enough to give me space. He was smart that way. The diamond ring would do the work for him. It would keep him in my thoughts. Remind me of how sorry he was and how much he loved me.

  I raised my hand and looked at the ring on my finger. It certainly did sparkle under the light, but I was determined not to let it charm me. I needed to keep a cool head. Keep my eyes wide open—like they were the night before when I saw that supermodel bouncing up and down on his lap.

  Turning my attention back to my phone, I was tempted to ignore my father’s advice and do a quick search online for Ludwig Albrecht, World War II Nazi. I felt an overwhelming curiosity, but I didn’t want to betray Dad’s trust, and I wanted to respect Gram’s privacy as well. She had confessed a great deal to us over the past few hours. Perhaps she would confess the rest if we just gave her a chance. She’d said she wanted to be done with it—as if that was all there was to tell—but there had to be more. The war was only just beginning when her sister died in the Blitz. Then Gram had taken on a whole new identity and eventually met Grampa Jack.

  Neither Dad nor I was going to let it go, but I did need to get some sleep. So I put my phone away—on top of the fridge so that I wouldn’t be tempted to check it during the night. Then I went upstairs and forced myself to be patient until the morning, when we would ask Gram to tell us more about what had happened to her during the war and whatever had become of Ludwig Albrecht.

  The German Nazi.

  My grandfather.

  PART THREE:

  APRIL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  September 1940

  I woke in the hospital the morning after the bombing, overcome with despair because my twin sister was dead. There was a cavernous hole in my heart, a void in the world, and I felt guilty for being alive when she wasn’t. I wanted to die too.

  Numb with disbelief and depression, I could do nothing but lie in a motionless heap, staring at the wall. I was in shock. The depth of my grief was incomprehensible.

  The room was bright. Too bright. Sunshine beamed in through the windows, and I was forced to squint. I’d never felt more alone in my life, but I wasn’t alone. I was in a large, open ward with at least twenty beds, all filled with other patients groaning and complaining.

  Vivian . . .

  Her pained whimpers in her final moments assailed me, and I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t stop reliving the explosion and my desperate, unsuccessful attempts to rescue her from the rubble.

  A young nurse hurried past the foot of my bed, like a ghost on feet made of vapor. She carried two bedpans, and I caught a whiff of something foul. Nausea hit me hard, and I knew I was going to be sick. Rising up on my elbows, I winced at a sudden stabbing pain in my rib cage and shoulder. There was a sick bowl ne
xt to my bed, so I grabbed hold of it and expelled the contents of my stomach, which wasn’t much, but the dry heaves were violent, and the retching was excruciating.

  “Are you all right?” another nurse asked, appearing like an angel of mercy and reaching to take the bowl from my trembling hands. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She set the bowl aside and picked up a cup of water. “Take a drink of this.”

  I managed a small sip. Then memories flooded back to me—the air raid siren and the bomb whistling as it fell from the sky, just over the rooftop of the house.

  I heard the windows shatter. Then I was falling . . . piles of bricks were beneath me, on top of me. Dust filled my lungs and choked my throat.

  Vivian, where are you?

  Rolling away from the young nurse, I buried my face in the pillow to smother a sob. “Please . . . I just want to be alone.”

  The nurse set the cup on the side table. “Yes, Mrs. Gibbons.”

  My eyes flew open at the sound of my sister’s name on her lips.

  As soon as she was gone, I pulled my hand from beneath the covers and examined the gold wedding band on my finger. It fit perfectly, but the sight of it caused a deep, heavy ache in my soul, because it reminded me that Vivian was truly gone, and I was still here, without her. But I could never take her place. How could I, when I felt like only half a person?

  I had two broken ribs, a serious concussion, and a dislocated shoulder, which had been set in place after they carried me away on a stretcher. The procedure had occurred in the back of the ambulance, and it was agonizing on top of the emotional trauma of losing my sister . . . of leaving her behind in the piles of bricks and fallen timbers, with strangers digging her body out with picks and shovels.

  Hours passed in the hospital, where the necessity of accepting her death was like having a limb torn from my body or having my intestines pulled out while I watched. They were gruesome images, but that’s how it felt. I couldn’t escape it. And I hated Hitler for ordering those bombs to be dropped over London. I hated him more than ever, with every breath I took.