“No, I bet she loved him,” Gavin says. “Maybe differently than Jacob. But he gave her and your mom a good life.”
“The kind of life Jacob would have wanted for them,” I say.
Gavin nods. “Yeah.”
“But if that’s true, what did my grandpa get?” I ask, suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. “A wife who never really loved him the way he deserved to beloved?”
“Maybe he knew all along that that’s what it would be,” Gavin says, “and he loved her enough that it didn’t matter. Maybe he hoped she’d come around. Maybe it was enough to have her there, to know he was protecting her, to be a father to her child.”
I look away. I wish I could ask my grandfather what he’d felt, how he’d rationalized it all, if Gavin was right. But he’s long gone. I wonder whether the answers and the secrets they’d kept would forever remain buried. I know they will if Mamie never wakes up. In fact, even if she does awaken, there’s no guarantee she’ll remember anything.
“Do you think my mom ever knew?” I ask. “If this is true,” I’m quick to add.
“I would be willing to bet she didn’t,” Gavin says softly. “It sounds like maybe your grandmother just wanted to leave everything behind forever.”
As we get back into the car, I realize I’m crying. I’m not sure when I began, but the hole in my heart seems to keep growing bigger and bigger. Until recently, my grandmother had been merely a slightly sad woman who happened to hail from France and run a bakery. Now, as I peel back layer after layer of who she really was, I’m realizing that her sorrow must have gone far deeper than I’d ever comprehended. And she’d spent her lifetime pretending, wrapped up in secrets and lies.
I want now more than ever for her to wake up, so that I can tell her she’s not alone, and that I understand. I want to hear the story from her own lips, because at this point, so much of it is conjecture. I realize I no longer know where I came from. At all. I’ve never known my father’s side of the family—I don’t even know who my father is—and it’s turning out that everything I knew of my mother’s side was a lie.
“Are you okay?” Gavin asks softly. He hasn’t started the car yet; he’s just sitting there beside me, watching me cry.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” I say after a pause.
He nods, seeming to understand this. “I do,” he says simply. “You’re Hope. That’s all that really matters.” And despite the awkwardness of the center console between us in the car, when he pulls me into his arms and holds me tight, it’s the most natural and comfortable thing in the world.
When he finally lets go, mumbling, “We should get on the road before it gets too much later,” it feels like only a few seconds have passed, although the clock tells me he’s been holding me for several minutes. It didn’t feel like enough.
It’s not until we’re on the highway, and I see a tray of cups fly by the window, that I realize we left the food from McDonald’s on the roof. The laughter between us breaks the sad tension.
“Eh, I wasn’t hungry anyway,” Gavin says, glancing in the rearview mirror, where I imagine the remainder of our uneaten breakfast has distributed itself on the road.
“Me neither,” I agree.
He smiles at me. “On to New York?”
“On to New York.”
It’s just past ten by the time we finish fighting traffic and pull off FDR Drive onto Houston Street in Manhattan. Gavin’s following his GPS now, and I look around as he weaves in and out of streets, narrowly avoiding pedestrians and stopped taxis.
“I hate driving in New York,” he says, but he’s smiling.
“You’re really good at it,” I say. I did a summer internship here in college and returned a few times since then, but it’s been more than a decade since I visited, and everything feels different now. The city looks cleaner than I remember it.
“According to the GPS, we’re almost there,” Gavin announces after a few more minutes. “Let’s just find a place to park.”
We find a garage and walk to the exit. As Gavin gets the ticket from the attendant, I nervously shift from one foot to the other. We’re just a few blocks away from the last known address of Jacob Levy. We could be face-to-face with him in ten minutes.
Gavin hands me a map he’s printed out from the Internet. It has a star marked toward the south end of Battery Place, and I realize with a start how close Jacob lives to Ground Zero. I wonder whether he’d been here to witness the tragedy of September 11. I blink a few times and steady myself. I look north toward the hole in the skyline where the World Trade Center used to be, and I feel a pang of sadness.