“You said my mama was a maid at your brother’s house,” she says next. “So that means... that means she wasn’t the bride?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Why was she a maid and not the bride? Didn’t she want to be the bride?”
“I don’t know if she did, honey. It’s... it’s complicated, Amaryllis. There’s so much I will tell you when you’re older about your mother and father. You’re going to have to trust me that now’s not the right time. For now, just know that I’m so glad you’re you. And so glad you’re here.”
She seems satisfied enough with this. When we arrive at the cemetery and find Truman’s grave, she sits in front of it for a long while, looking at his last name, which she now shares.
After we return home, it’s almost as if Amaryllis has fixed something that was crooked in her mind, at least for now. Her questions about Truman began to taper off.
Rosie, though, is another matter. Amaryllis peppers me with questions about her mother, wanting to hear everything I know about her on a continuous loop. I tell her nearly weekly about the month I spent at the vineyard when Rosie was just a toddler who followed me around and begged to be held and sung to and played with, and Amaryllis will want to hear it again. And then again. Then she’ll want to hear about the three weeks I spent at the vineyard when Rosie was nine, just her age, over and over. I tell her about the stamps and letters Rosie liked, and then I am asked to repeat it a week or two later. I tell her about the amaryllis at Christmastime, her favorite story. I tell her about the accident that took Rosie’s family, not because I want to but because Amaryllis insists on hearing it multiple times.
I continue to dig for Rosie’s whereabouts despite never seeming to gain any headway there. George even asks a friend at the police department to run a check of the name Rosanne Maras and finds nothing, either, not even a driver’s license. As time passes and we continue to come up with nothing, it is Lila who suggests to me that perhaps with everything that happened to her, Rosie doesn’t want to be found. Perhaps she has forged a new life and left the sorrow of her past far, far behind her.
Lila may be right.
I decide it’s probably time for Amaryllis and me to begin to come to terms with that.
A few nights later, as I’m putting Amaryllis to bed, I tell her that I’ve sadly had no luck finding Rosie.
“I’m guessing your mother moved from California, perhapsfar away,” I tell her. “She surely believes you were adopted, Amaryllis, just like I did. So maybe she was thinking there was no reason to stay here. And so she moved far away.”
Amaryllis exhales, puckers a brow. “Can’t you find her in the faraway place?” she asks after a moment’s pause.
“Maybe. But I’m thinking until I do that, you just keep your mother where you have always kept her.”
She stares at me, not understanding.
I press my hand to her pajama top. “In your heart. Just like you are probably inside hers. She’s there, isn’t she? You feel her there, yes? It’s why you whisper to her at night in your bed. Because she’s right there inside you.”
Amaryllis blinks slowly as she considers this, and then she nods.
I can see in her eyes that this is not the same as seeing Rosie’s face, hearing her voice, holding her hand.
But I know too well this is the way, the only way, to keep close to you someone who is gone from your life. It is better than the alternative—isn’t it?—which is never having had them at all.
35
Before...
LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND
NOVEMBER 1947
I stepped out of the post office on Zürichstrasse, clutching an envelope tight as an autumn breeze tried to tease it out of my hand. It’d been a while since I’d opened my mailbox to find anything inside, though the postwar mail service had resumed long ago. I’d expected only to receive word that my Swiss work visa had finally been renewed, but then I saw the nonbusiness-type envelope and my hopes rose. The envelope looked like personal stationery that had traveled a bit of a distance.
And indeed it was. But it was my own personal stationery: the most recent letter I wrote to Hanna Maier in Innsbruck returned to me, undeliverable, like the others before it.
I went every Saturday to the post office, stubbornly hoping for news of the Maiers each time, even though no word from them was ever waiting for me. I liked the two-kilometer route to get there. I liked walking past the bakery and the little music studio where young violinists learned from the elderly maestro who lived inside it. I liked strolling past the house where the two gray catssunned themselves on the front windowsill and stopping in at the stationer’s store to look at his beautiful Italian writing papers. I liked meandering down to the tip of the lake to marvel at the water’s glacial blue majesty.
I had learned to rely on Lucerne’s loveliness for uncomplicated joys like these, especially during those thirteen intense months— until the borders closed for good and Franz was transferred to Bern—when Emilie and I rescued nearly a dozen disabled children out of Austria. Franz had been right. It was only with great reluctance that the canton officials in Lucerne allowed Wilhelm to stay as a temporary but long-term guest of a generous parish family. Finding homes for the sudden influx of “Swiss” youngsters left on the steps of the convent had been easy by comparison, but I’d daily worried our deception would be exposed and I’d be arrested.
About the same time Franz was transferred, Emilie got word that the T4 program in its official capacity was ending, but we both knew the killing of the innocents would likely not stop. Indeed, in that August of 1941, it was only beginning.
But we rescued no more children after that.
Lucerne had survived the war intact, as had most of Switzerland. The undisturbed respite I’d enjoyed here had come at an emotional price, though. Every time I heard a report that Innsbruck had been bombed by the Allies, I could only hope and pray that Martine and the children were all right, and all while I sat in relative ease. Those were the worst months. Feeling safely tucked away in Lucerne and knowing that Martine and the children were not safe at all.
