“No I wasn’t,” I say. “You were. And all the men who came in and out of her life. No offense.”
“None taken,” Thom says.
“It was like she was always looking for something she couldn’t find,” I say.
“At the end of her life, I think she found it,” he says. “It may have been too late for her to communicate that to you properly, though.”
I look up. “What do you mean?”
He sighs. “She was always talking about how she was too cold to care about anyone.”
“She said that to you?” My mother hadn’t seemed that self-aware. And in fact, I hadn’t known she was communicating with Thom at all. I thought that once people were out of her life, they were gone forever. It startles me to realize that she’d let him back in.
He shrugs. “We talked about a lot of things. Especially at the end. I think that with your mother slipping away, she had a lot of regrets. It wasn’t until the end of her life, Hope, that she realized what she’d been looking for had been right in front of her.”
I blink. “What do you mean?”
“She loved you,” he says. “More than she’d been able to truly understand as a young woman. I think that she spent her life searching for love, doubting her own ability to love, and at the end, she realized it had been there all along. In you. And if she’d recognized that sooner, maybe everything could have been different.”
I just stare at him. I don’t know what to say.
“Go read your grandma’s letter, Hope,” Thom says gently. “And if you learn anything from your mom, let it be that you don’t have to search as far as you think for what’s already there, right in front of you.”
That night, I call Annie to tell her about the inheritance from Jacob, which will be enough to cover the bakery and pay for her college costs—with plenty left over. As I listen to her whoop and holler on the other end of the line, I smile and promise myself that I’ll try harder with her. Things will be better. She’s a good kid, and I know that I need to keep trying to be a better mom. Maybe I can be better at this than I think.
I tell Annie to have fun at the First Night celebration, and she promises to call me after midnight, when Rob is driving her and her friends back to his house for a New Year’s Eve sleepover.
It’s just past eleven when I finally settle down in front of the fire with Mamie’s letter. My hands are trembling as I open it up; I’m aware that this is the last piece of her. It could be Alzheimer’s gibberish, for all I know, or it could be something I’ll treasure forever. Either way, she’s gone. Jacob is gone. My mother is gone. Annie will be grown up and out of the house within six years. I pull a blanket around me, a blanket my grandmother knit when I was a little girl, and try not to feel so very alone.
I pull the letter out. It’s dated September 29. The day we took Mamie to the beach. The day she gave me the list of names. The first night of Rosh Hashanah. The night everything began. My heart skips, and I take a deep breath.
Dearest Hope, the letter begins. For the next ten minutes, I read. I skim the letter once, and then, with tears in my eyes, I go back to read it again, more slowly this time, hearing Mamie’s voice in my head as she forms each of the words with her careful, lilting accent.
Chapter Thirty-two
Rose
Dearest Hope,
As I sit here today to write to you, I know this may be the last chance I have at clarity. I know my days are waning. You will receive this letter after I am gone, and I want you to know that I was ready. My life was long, and many parts of it were wonderful, but in my twilight, the past has returned to me, and I can bear it no more.
Tonight, if I can manage to stay lucid, I will give you the list of names that have been burned into my heart, and written on the sky. By the time you read this letter, then, you will know that most of my life was a lie. But it was a lie I had to tell, at first to protect your mother, and then, to protect myself.
I do not know if you will learn the truth on your own. I hope you do. You deserve to know it, and I should have told you long ago. I knew I had to keep the promise I made to your grandfather as long as he was alive, but after that, to have told you or your mother felt to me like it would have been a great betrayal of him. And he was a wonderful man, a good husband, a loving father and grandfather. I do not want to betray him. But in the last few months, as more of the past has come to visit me in the darkness of my memories, I know that I cannot take my secrets with me. You deserve to know who I am, and who you are.