“No, Mamie,” Annie says. “Who’s Leona?”
But this time, it’s Jacob who answers. “Leona was my little sister.” He’s looking intently at Annie now. “My God, Annie, you look so much like her.”
Annie looks back at Mamie, her eyes wide. “You’ve been calling me Leona for months,” she says. “That’s who you meant?”
Mamie looks confused.
Annie turns to Jacob. “What happened to Leona?”
Jacob glances at me, and I nod slightly. Annie’s old enough to know. “She died, my dear,” he says. “At Auschwitz. I believe she did not suffer very much, Annie. I believe that she went peacefully.”
Annie’s eyes fill. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs to Jacob. “I’m really sorry about your sister.”
He smiles at her gently. “I can see her in you,” he says. “And that makes me glad.” He turns back to Mamie and bends toward her again. “Rose, Leona died many years ago. But this young lady here is Annie. Your great-granddaughter.” He pauses and says, “Our great-granddaughter.”
Annie looks at me sharply, and I realize that I haven’t told her yet. I haven’t told her that Jacob married Mamie long ago and was the real father to my mother. I reach over and squeeze my daughter’s hand. “I’ll explain everything later,” I whisper. She looks confused, and a little alarmed, but she nods.
Mamie is studying Annie now. “Annie,” she says finally. I can see recognition dawning in her eyes. “The youngest.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Annie mumbles.
“You are . . . good girl,” Mamie says. “I am proud . . . You have . . . spirit in you. It reminds me of . . . something I lost. Never let go . . . of that.”
Annie nods hastily. “Okay, Mamie.”
Finally, Mamie turns back to Jacob, who is still bent over her. “My love,” she says softly. “Do not cry.”
I realize that Jacob’s body is shaking with sobs, and that tears are streaming down his cheeks.
“We are together now,” Mamie continues. “I have . . . waited for you.” They stare at each other in silence, and it takes me a while to realize I’m holding my breath.
I watch as Jacob leans forward, slowly, gently, and kisses Mamie on the lips, pausing there with his eyes closed, as if he wishes never to move again. In that frozen moment, I’m powerfully reminded of yet another fairy tale. He looks very much like the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty, awakening her after a hundred years of slumber. I realize with a start that in a way, she’s been asleep for nearly that long; for seventy years, she’s lived a sort of half life.
“Forever, my love,” Jacob says.
Mamie smiles at him and stares into his eyes. “Forever,” she murmurs.
Chapter Thirty
Just past three in the morning, just a few hours after Annie, Alain, Gavin, and I left her alone with Jacob, Mamie slipped away peacefully in her sleep.
Jacob sat by Mamie’s bedside for the next few hours, and just after dawn, when he stepped out of a cab outside the front door of the bakery Mamie had founded so many years ago, he seemed a different man. I had expected that he would be sad, defeated, for he’d waited seventy years only to watch the love of his life slip away. But instead, his eyes shone differently than they had when we’d first seen him in New York, and he seemed a decade younger.
The nurses told me afterward that Jacob had talked to Mamie long into the night and that when they finally came to check on her, and realized she had died, she was smiling, and Jacob was still holding her hand, whispering to her in a language they didn’t know.
Gavin called his rabbi, who came to meet with Jacob, Alain, and me, and together, we planned a burial according to Jewish customs. I understood now that Mamie had always been Jewish; that had never changed. Perhaps, as she’d said, she’d been Catholic and Muslim too. But if one could find God everywhere, as Mamie had once told me, it seemed to make the most sense to send her home along the same road she’d entered upon.
We took turns sitting with Mamie—Gavin explained to me that in the Jewish faith, one is not supposed to leave the deceased alone—and a day later, she was buried in a wooden casket beside my mother and grandfather. I had struggled with what to do about that, having just learned that her marriage to Jacob in effect annulled Mamie’s marriage to my grandfather. But Jacob had wrapped his hands around mine and said gently, “God does not mind where you are put to rest. I think Rose would want to be buried here, where she lived her life, alongside the man who gave her a new life, and alongside her daughter. Our daughter.”