“Well, it’s not like you live here anymore,” she says, and then she wiggles her hips oddly and smirks at me, like she’s just said something deeply devastating. In fact, she’s just reinforced my newfound feeling of tremendous freedom, and I smile.
“You’re right,” I reply. “I absolutely don’t. Thank God.” I cross the garden, stepping across the ground where my beloved roses used to be, until I’m standing face-to-face with her. “One more thing, Sunshine,” I say calmly. “If you do anything to hurt my daughter, and I mean anything, I will spend the rest of my life making sure you regret it.”
“You’re crazy,” she mutters, taking a step back.
“Is that right?” I ask cheerfully. “Well, push me the wrong way, and I guess you’ll find out.”
As I walk away, I can hear her muttering behind me. I climb into my car, start the engine, and back onto the main road. I head west, toward Hyannis, for I plan to spend the rest of the day with Mamie, beginning to understand the lessons in love that I didn’t realize I was missing until right about now.
Chapter Nineteen
North Star Blueberry Muffins
MUFFINS
INGREDIENTS
Streusel topping （see recipe below）
1/2 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups blueberries
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners.
2. Prepare streusel as directed below. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, using a hand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. Add eggs, beating well.
4. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar mixture, alternating with the milk, sour cream, and vanilla. Mix until just fully combined.
5. Gently fold in the blueberries.
6. For oversized muffins, fill each muffin cup nearly to the top. Sprinkle generously with streusel topping.
7. Bake for 25–30 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in pan, then move to wire rack to cool completely.
STREUSEL TOPPING
INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup very cold butter, chopped into small cubes
2 tsp. cinnamon
DIRECTIONS
Combine all ingredients in a food processor and process with quick pulses, until mixture has consistency of thick crumbs. Sprinkle over unbaked muffins, as directed above.
Rose
For years, in the darkness of the night in this idyllic Cape Cod town so far from where she’d come, the mental pictures always came back to Rose. Unbidden. Unwanted. Images she had never seen in person but that were burned into her memory nonetheless. Sometimes, imagination was a stronger painter than reality.
Crying children being torn from their dead-eyed mothers.
Filthy huddles of people being hosed down in piles while they screamed.
The terror on parents’ faces at the very moment they realized there was no going back.
Children in long lines being herded systematically to their deaths.
And always, in those images that played like an endless picture show across her mind, the people had the faces of her family, her friends, the people she loved.
And Jacob. Jacob, who had loved her. Jacob, who had saved her. Jacob, whom she’d foolishly, horribly sent back to die.
And now, in the dark netherworld of her coma, the images of those she’d loved were floating before her like a picture show. She had imagined so many times what might have happened to them that she could see it now just as if she had witnessed it with her own eyes.
As she drifted through this dark, underwater world between life and death, she could see Danielle and David being ripped from her mother, their little faces streaked with tears, their eyes wide with confusion, their screams vivid in her ears. She wondered how they had died. Right there in the Vel’ d’Hiv, just blocks from the Eiffel Tower, in whose shadow they had lived their whole short lives? Or later, in the crowded, airless train cars on the way to camps like Drancy or Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers? Or did they make it all the way to Auschwitz, only to be led in a neat, orderly line into a gas chamber, where they surely would have gasped in terror for their final breaths? Did they cry out? Did they understand what was happening to them?
Maman and Papa. Had they been separated in the Vel’ d’Hiv, or not until they were taken away from France? How had Papa borne being ripped from the family he had always so fiercely protected? Had he fought back? Had he been struck by the guards, beaten for his obstinacy? Or had he gone willingly, already resigned to the futility of it all? Had Maman been left alone, with the children huddled around her, knowing the terrible truth that she could no longer protect them? How would it feel to realize you were no longer in control of your fate, no longer able to protect the children you would gladly die to save?