Because what if I did, what if I flung myself at Noah and told him I wanted him, I adored him, I loved him, I was one hundred percent committed, and he wasn’t? What if he broke my heart?
Again.
Or what if he said yes,he did want to be with me, and three monthspassed, six months passed, a year passed, and then he said no, he was done, we were done? We would fall apart and I would fall apart and it would be worse than this time. It would be worse than anything.
And he didn’t care about me as much as I cared about him, if I was thinking about it logically. You had to believe what people told you, and he had told me he would never give up on the person he loved; he would be with them, no matter what. Noah believed if you made promises, you kept them. He believed if you loved someone, you fought for them.
But he hadn’t fought to stay with me. He hadn’t texted. He’d let me go after one fight. Yes, I’d told him to go. Yes, a relationship was a two-way street. But if Noah actually wanted to be with me, he wouldn’t have let me walk away so easily.
And he had.
So I would let him walk away, too. It would be better for us both, in the end. People recovered from heartbreak. We’d be fine. I couldn’t regret what had happened, because while my heart had broken, if I thought about it, really thought it through—it’d been worth it.
A week after I came home from Nantucket, school arrived, as inevitable as the changing seasons. Niko picked me up in her old beat-up Toyota, with the top peeling off the ceiling and a side door no longer capable of opening. (“Barack took Michelle out on a date in a car with a hole in the floor,” she liked to remind us. “I’m destined for great things.”)
Brooke already sat in the passenger seat, and she handed me a hot chocolate from Dunkin as I climbed in. “Woo! Senior year!”
“Go Turtles,” Niko said. (Turtles were not our mascot, but Nikohad spent the past three years insisting they were.) She craned her head to give my outfit a once-over: a red skirt and a black top, with earrings to match. “Solid choice. Should have worn the necklace though.”
“I didn’t get my matching evening gown dry-cleaned in time. And look at you! Really breaking out of your mold!”
Niko, as per usual, wore all black.
My brother scooted in after me. “Hey, Davy.” Brooke beamed at him from the front seat. “Ready for high school?”
Dave, whose sole contribution to the Goldman jewelry discovery had been to ask if it meant he could get a tattoo (I worried about his disjointed logic), said, “I hear it’s a barrel of monkeys.”
We opened the windows and blasted music as we drove down the winding road. Canopies of golden leaves arched above us. I could smell fall in the air, fast approaching, crisp and cool with the promise of leaves crunching under our feet and pumpkins and apple pie and cozy sweaters.
This could be the beginning of my story. There were always new beginnings, new school years and college and the world after. My story didn’t have to be of a girl on Nantucket, looking for a necklace and breaking her heart. Or I could reframe my thinking entirely: each person was a continuous story. We didn’t begin or end, rise and fall. We weren’t so contained. We were endless. We were infinite.
What would your grandmother have thought?Helen Barbanel had asked, looking at the table of World War II books. O’ma’s story had not been limited to the space of ten years, to her childhood and her teens. It had spanned more than being ripped from Nazi Germany and sent to America and raised by strangers. It had kept on going, through the fifties and the hippies and the now. It didn’t end bittersweet or optimistic; it didn’t end for decades.
And neither would my story.
The auction for the necklace happened the second week of September, a week so warm it could have still been summer, if not for the way the light had changed—a slight softening, a golden glow. I left my sweater at home when I headed over to Niko’s house. I didn’t want anything to do with the auction; I didn’t want to think about never seeing the necklace again. One day, Mom had placed it in a box, placed the box in a canvas bag, and carried it away. I tried not to let it distress me too much.
“Aren’t you desperate to know?” Niko asked. We sat on the swings in her backyard, idly pushing off the ground and drifting through the air. We faced the forest of oaks and maples behind her house, watching as the occasional bunny dashed purposefully by. “I’d kill to be there.”
“I’ll find out soon. I didn’t want to have to see someone buy O’ma’s necklace. It’s what I want to do, but it still sort of sucks.”
“Do you still miss him?”
I dug my toe into the grass, sending myself on a more forceful swing. “When you spend so much time with someone, it’s impossible not to.”
“But do youmisshim?”
I could feel how much I missed him in my stomach, in my throat, in my eyes. I shrugged.
Her eyes were sharp. “Do you still want to be with him?”
“I don’t even know what that would look like.”
“You don’t have toknow,” Niko said. “You’re allowed to try to figure it out.”
A few days later, we learned the amount of money the necklace had raised: six figures—overone hundred thousanddollars. And thepang at giving up O’ma’s necklace was soothed over by the knowledge of the good this money would do.
When my grandmother came to the States, she was lucky.She had people willing to take her in. She had had a woman who called heronce a weekfor her entire life. When your people lived in a diaspora, that was what you did, whether in 1940s Europe and America, or sixteenth-century Spain and Morocco. You looked after your own.
