Helene. It broke Rose’s heart every time she thought of her older sister. What if she had tried harder to reason with her? Could she have saved her if only she’d managed to convince her that the world had lost all logic and had gone mad? Had Helene regretted, in her final moments, not believing Rose? Or had she held out hope until the end that perhaps they were only being sent away to work, and not to die? Somehow, Rose always imagined her slipping away in her sleep, peaceful, alone, although she knew from the ghosts that her end had likely been much different. Each time she thought of how Helene had reportedly been beaten to death, simply for being too ill to work, Rose had to run to the bathroom to throw up, and for days afterward, she couldn’t hold down a meal.
Claude. Just thirteen, he had tried so hard to be grown up, to pretend to understand the things that adults understood. But he was a child the last time Rose saw him. Had he become the adult he’d always wanted to be in the few days inside the Vel’ d’Hiv? Had he been forced to understand things he shouldn’t have known for years? Did he try to protect the younger ones, or his sister, or his mother? Or had he remained a child, terrified of what was happening? Had he made it onto a transport to Auschwitz? Had he survived there for a while, or had he been drawn out of line upon his arrival, judged to be too young or too small to work, and sent immediately to the gas chamber? What had he said with this last breath? What had been his last waking thought?
Alain. The one Rose loved the best. And the one who understood everything, although he was only eleven. Her heart ached most of all for him, because without the cloak of denial that the others had managed to wrap themselves in, there was no way to dull the pain. He would have felt every moment of it, because he understood it all, understood what was happening, believed Jacob’s urgent warnings. Had he been frightened? Or had he grown up in those moments and decided to meet his fate with brave resilience? He was tougher than Rose was, tougher than all of them. Had he used that bravery to rise above the terror? Rose felt sure that he hadn’t lived long; he was much smaller than Claude, very small for his age, and no guard in his right mind would have selected such a little boy for work duty. When Rose closed her eyes at night, she often saw Alain’s little face, his eyes somber, his rosy cheeks sallowed, his beautiful blond hair shaved, as he awaited the fate he knew was coming in the midst of a thousand other children in the cold darkness of a gas chamber somewhere in Poland.
And then there was Jacob. It had been nearly seventy years since she’d last seen him, and still, his face was as clear in Rose’s mind as if they’d parted just yesterday. She often imagined him as she’d seen him the first time she met him, in the Jardin du Luxembourg in the winter. His dancing green eyes, his thick brown hair, the way they had looked at each other and known in that very first instant what they’d found. She could imagine, in her darkest moments, his face, resolute and brave, as he endured the torture of the Vel’ d’Hiv, or as he was thrown aboard a transport to a transit camp, or as he entered Auschwitz. But unlike the others, she couldn’t visualize him dying. It was strange, she thought, and she wondered whether it was her mind’s way of protecting her, even though she did not want to be protected. She wanted to feel the pain of his death, because she deserved it.
But those weren’t the only moments of her life that Rose returned to as she drifted farther and farther away from the world. She thought also of the moments that had come since then, the few happy times over the years, when her heart had filled up with love and joy, the way it once had when she was a girl. And here in the depths of her coma as she floated through the darkness, she thought back to a cold morning in May 1975, one of her favorite memories.
That morning, Rose had woken to find Ted gone to work already. Usually, she was up long before the dawn, but her nightmares had sucked her in that night, as they sometimes did, and held her captive until nearly six in the morning. When she slept in like this, Ted let her rest and called Josephine to open the bakery in her mother’s stead. He didn’t understand that she wasn’t resting but reeling in the terror that she could never find a way out of. And because she loved her husband, she didn’t tell him this. He thought that in marrying her, and in giving her a good life, he had helped the past to disappear, as she wanted it to. She could not bear to tell him that in the thirty-three years since she’d last seen those she loved most, the memories, both real and imagined, hadn’t faded at all.
Rose had stared at herself in the mirror that morning. She was still beautiful at fifty, although she hadn’t seen herself that way since the last time Jacob had looked at her. In his eyes, she knew she was something special. Without him, she had wilted like a flower without sunlight.