She loved her husband. And because she loved her husband, she had told him about Jacob, because she knew she was supposed to be honest with the people she loved. And she had been honest—to a point. She had told Ted that there was a man she had loved very much in Paris. It had hardly needed to be said; she knew it was already clear.
But when he’d asked her if she loved the man in Paris more than she loved him, she hadn’t been able to meet his eye. And so he had known. He had always known.
She wished she felt differently. Ted was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful father to Josephine. He was trustworthy and loyal. He had built her a life she never could have dreamed of all those years ago in the land of her birth.
But he wasn’t Jacob. And that was his only flaw.
For the first few years after the war, she hadn’t wanted to know. Not officially, anyhow. When she’d first been married to Ted and they’d been living in New York, in an apartment not far from the Statue of Liberty, there had been bits and pieces of news from other immigrants who drifted in from France. Survivors, they called themselves. Rose thought that, instead, they looked like ghosts, already dead. Pale, washed out, hollowed eyes, floating through rooms like they didn’t quite belong there.
I knew your mother, one of the ghosts would say. I watched her die at Auschwitz.
I saw sweet little Danielle at Drancy, another would say. I don’t know if she made it to the transport.
And the bit of news that shattered her soul, from a ghost named Monsieur Pinusiewicz, whom she’d known in a former life. He was the butcher whose shop was just down the street from her grandparents’ bakery.
That boy you were running around with? Jacob?
Rose had stared at him. She hadn’t wanted him to go on, because she could see the truth written in his eyes. She couldn’t bear to hear it. She made a muffled sound, for it was all she could muster, and he took it as a signal to go on.
He was at Auschwitz. I saw him there. And I saw him the day they led him to the gas chamber.
And that was it. He was gone. The ghost of Monsieur Pinusiewicz, as well as the last shred of hope she had that she could somehow find her past again.
By the time she left New York, she knew they were all gone. The ghosts had told her. One had watched her father get sick while working at Auschwitz’s crematorium. One had held her mother’s hand as she died. Another had worked alongside Helene and had one day returned from the field, a day that Helene had been too sick to rise from her bed, to find her on the floor, beaten to death by the guards, her lovely brown hair matted with blood. The fates of the others were less clear, and Rose didn’t ask questions. What mattered was that they were all dead. All of them.
And so, when Ted had promised her a life far away from these hollow-eyed ghosts, far away from New York, in a magical place called Cape Cod, where he said the waves washed up on sandy beaches, and cranberry bogs grew, she said yes. Because she loved him. And because she needed to finish becoming someone else. She needed to concentrate on building a family, because the one she’d had was gone forever.
But by 1949, seven years after she’d left Paris, she had needed to know for sure. She knew she could not bury Rose Picard without the certainty that could only come from the official records. What if one of the ghosts was wrong? What if little Danielle had survived and was in an orphanage somewhere, believing there was no one in the world who loved her? What if Helene hadn’t died on that floor but had escaped and was waiting for her, wondering where she was? What if the ghost who said she’d held Rose’s mother’s hand had been mistaken about the identity of the woman she’d watched die?
But Rose couldn’t go. It had been nothing short of miraculous that her falsified papers had gotten her into the United States in the first place. She knew it was likely that the immigration people had looked the other way only because she had married Ted, a war hero. She had made her bargains; now her life was here, and she had a little girl who needed her. She didn’t trust France. She didn’t trust that she could get out again. And she feared her heart wouldn’t be able to bear going back anyhow.
And so she asked Ted to go. And because he loved her, and because he was a good man, he said yes.
He left on a shining summer Monday. She waited, the seconds ticking by like minutes, the minutes feeling like hours. Time stretched like the taffy she, Ted, and little Josephine had eaten on their trip to Atlantic City the summer before.
When he finally came home, very late that Friday, he sat her down in the still, damp heat of the Cape Cod night and told her everything.