“Hello, darling.” Mom met my gaze, and her eyes crinkled up with pure delight. “I’m happy to report you did, in fact, marry rich.”
Twenty-Eight
Let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, a girl was born to a family of jewelers in a forested town by the sea. She was loved and cossetted and happy, but when she was four years old, her family had to send her away for her own safety. They sewed an exquisite necklace made of diamonds into the hem of her dress. She traveled across an ocean to a country where she didn’t speak the language, and went to live with strangers on a windswept island, in an exquisite house called Golden Doors. She fell in love with a boy she was too poor to marry. A boy who betrayed her in the end because he thought it would bring her back to him.
Let me tell another story:
Once upon a time, a girl was born to a family in Upstate New York. She helped her parents at their deli, and she studied, and she helped her little sisters with their homework. She was very smart and she put herself through college and married a kind man and had two children and landed a job that paid for a mortgage and vacations and college funds.
The second story wasn’t as exciting as the first. No one would gasp or widen their eyes or cry while listening to it. It wasn’t mournful or melancholy or romantic.
But it was anactivestory. It was a story where the girl took charge, where she owned her agency, where she went out and forged her ownpath. It was a real story. It was a powerful, heroic story. We didn’t tell it enough. We didn’t always acknowledge this story was a story at all, a story with a heroine, and the heroine was my mother.
I left Nantucket amid a whirl of tearful goodbyes and hugs and promises to text. I hugged Mrs. Henderson and Ellie Mae and Jane, and waved goodbye, and bumped my suitcase down the steps of the porch, just as I’d bumped it up months ago. Mom and I rolled our luggage through the colorful downtown, still picturesque, still all-American. I mentally said goodbye to everything we passed, trying to print it on my memory. The heavy tree branches, the uneven sidewalks, the sign posts, the flower pots.
Then it was time to climb aboard the ferry, to say goodbye for the final time. Mom and I stood by the rail of the Hy-Line catamaran, watching Nantucket shrink into the distance, until it disappeared into the brilliant blue sea.
Within a short hour, we reached Hyannis, where Dad waited with the family car and a hug. We swung our luggage into the trunk and set off across the Cape. We waded through the traffic at the bridge, and merged onto 495. The ocean was replaced by trees, the salt by the scent of the forest. It took less than three hours to get home, to turn off the highway onto the winding roads of South Hadley, to drive down streets I’d memorized a decade ago, to pull into the driveway of home.
And Mom set everything in motion.
She hired a lawyer. She contacted the museums. She talked to specialists in restitution. The museums and private collectors mighthave more lawyers than us and more money, but they didn’t have our story, and Mom made sureeveryonehad our story. After our local paper published the story, Twitter ran with it. BuzzFeed, HuffPo, theBoston Globe, and theNew York Timescovered it. A story containing diamonds, Nazis, and lost history? People ate it up.
Goldman jewelry might be worth a fair amount of cash, but most museums decided good PR was worth more.
“What are we going to do with all of these?” Mom asked in bewilderment after we heard a pair of sapphire earrings valued at twenty thousand dollars would be sent to us.
“Are you kidding?” Dad asked from behind his laptop. He pushed his glasses higher. “I’m going to wear them to work.”
Mom’s question wasn’t too serious: we’d keep a few pieces and sell most back to museums, to pay for my college education and Dave’s college education and the college education of all our cousins, since, of course, the money didn’t belong to Mom alone, but to her two younger sisters and their families as well. We reached out to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see if they’d be interested in hosting an auction for many of the pieces, and they said yes.
“We don’t have to do this,” Mom said, before we sent the confirmation email. We were in the living room, windows and tabs spread across our computer screens. I’d inherited my messiness from her; Dad kept his email at inbox zero (Mom’s currently numbered close to ten thousand unread messages, which caused Dad visceral pain). “For O’ma’s necklace, in particular. You could keep it.”
I looked at the necklace, which I’d draped across my knee for no better reason than I liked to look at it. My great-grandparents had beenjewelers.Goodjewelers.
Part of me did want to keep it. O’ma had wanted this necklace sobadly, and no wonder—it was the only thing she had left of her parents, and a huge piece of financial stability. And I’d spent all summer trying to find out what happened to it.
But.
It was so tangled up in Noah, this necklace. I wanted to look at it forever and I never wanted to look at it again.
“No,” I told Mom. “It’s the most valuable piece in the collection. It’ll bring in the most money. And I think it’s important to donate the money.”
So Mom sent the email, which—stupidly, bizarrely—felt like I’d cut ties with Noah all over again.
Focusing on the Goldman jewelry scattered throughout Europe served as a solid distraction from him. Most of the time, he didn’t infiltrate my thoughts. Most of the time, I could pack him up into a little box in the back of my head.
But at night the box opened and all the demons came out and there was no Pandora at the bottom, no hope, no anything.
I missed him.
But missing someone didn’t mean I’d made the wrong decision. Better to have a clean break. Better to move on.
Wasn’t it?
WasI just afraid? Was I more scared of actually being in a relationship than of my pride getting hurt? Maybe. After all, being in a relationship meant letting someone else in completely. It felt like flinging myself into a void with utter abandon. And that wasterrifying.
