He had been to the synagogue Rose had grown up in. It pained her deeply when he told her the synagogue had been destroyed during the war, but that they had rebuilt it, as good as new. She knew then that he didn’t understand that when things were rebuilt, they weren’t the same. You could never get back the things that had been destroyed.
“They all died, Rose,” he told her gently, looking into her eyes and holding her hands tightly, as if he were afraid she’d float away, like a helium balloon bound for the heavens. “Your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers. All of them. I am so sorry.”
“Oh,” was all she could muster.
“I spoke to the rabbi there,” Ted said softly. “He showed me where to find the records. I am so sorry.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to know what happened to them, Rose?” Ted asked.
“No.” She shook her head, looked away. She could not hear it. She feared it would break her heart in a million pieces. Would she die right here, in front of her husband, with her daughter upstairs, when it shattered? “It is my fault,” she whispered.
“No, Rose!” Ted exclaimed. “You can’t feel that way. None of this is your fault.” He took her in his arms, but her body was stiff, unwilling.
She shook her head slowly against his chest. “I knew,” she whispered. “I knew they were coming for us. And I did not try hard enough to save them.”
She knew she would have to live with that forever. But she didn’t know how. It was why she couldn’t be herself anymore. It was why she had found solace in Rose Durand, and then Rose McKenna. It was impossible to be Rose Picard. Rose Picard had died in Europe with her family long ago.
“It’s not your fault,” Ted said again. “You have to stop blaming yourself.”
She nodded, because she knew it was what was expected of her. She pulled away from him. “And Jacob Levy?” she asked in a flat voice, looking up at long last to meet Ted’s eye.
This time, it was he who looked away. “My dear Rose,” he said. “Your friend Jacob died at Auschwitz. Just before the liberation of the camp.”
Rose blinked a few times. It was as if someone had pushed her head underwater. All of a sudden, she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She gasped for breath. “You are certain?” she asked after a very long while, when air filled her lungs again.
“I’m sorry,” Ted said.
And that had been that. The world became very cold for Rose that day. She nodded and looked away from her husband. She would not cry. She could not cry. She had already died inside, and to cry would be to live. And how could she live without Jacob?
Jacob had always told her that love would save them. And she had believed him. But he’d been wrong. She had been saved, but what good was she without him? What meaning did her life have?
It was at that moment that Josephine appeared from around the corner, wearing the long pink cotton nightgown Rose had sewn for her, clutching her Cynthia doll.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” Josephine asked from the doorway, blinking sleepily at her parents.
“Nothing, my dear,” Rose said, standing and crossing the room to kneel beside her daughter. She looked at the little girl and reminded herself that this was her family now, that the past was in the past, that she owed it to this life to keep going.
But she felt nothing.
After she’d tucked Josephine back into bed, singing her a lullaby her own mother had sung to her so many years before, she had lain beside Ted in the dark until his chest rose and fell in slumber and she could feel him slipping away into his dreams.
She rose softly, silently, and moved toward the hall. She climbed the narrow staircase to the small widow’s walk atop their house, and she emerged into the still night.
The moon was full, and it hung heavy over Cape Cod Bay, which Rose could see over the rooftops. The pale lunar light reflected on the water, and if Rose looked down, she could almost believe that the sea was lit from within. But she wasn’t looking down. Tonight, she was searching the heavens for the stars she had named. Mama. Papa. Helene. Claude. Alain. David. Danielle.
“I am sorry,” she whispered to the sky. “I am so sorry.”
There was no answer. She could hear, in the near distance, the waves lapping at the shore. The sky was silent.
She searched the sky, murmuring apologies, until dawn began to break on the eastern horizon. Still, she could not find him. Was this her fate? Was he lost to her forever?
“Jacob, where are you?” she cried out to the sky.