He hesitated for long enough I thought he might stay silent. Instead, he gave a tiny nod. “It’s notnotpressure.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “I just don’t get it,” I said. “I mean, I understand how your family would want you to go into business if you wanted something they considered fluffy, but biodiversity? No one could stay that’s not important.”
“Sure,” he said, an edge of bitterness in his tone, “but why should I be the one to do it? Other people will become scientists. Not everyone has a family business they’re expected to join. Weren’t we just talking about how rich people can raise awareness of causes? If I’d be better at making money than at being a botanist, shouldn’t I make the money and donate it? Isn’t it selfish to do what I’m interested in if I could do something else and have a bigger impact?”
I’d never had to think about my own future quite so intensely. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” he said, the bitterness stronger now, like it’d been brewing for a very long time. “Though my family has a definite opinion.”
Then he took in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, forcing his shoulders to relax, like he’d spent years teaching himself to calm down and dismiss his frustrations. He gave me a practiced smile and a firm nod. “Let’s look for your grandma.”
We wound back downstairs, into the wide hall between the old and new additions, where Edward Barbanel’s study lay. I hovered on thebrink of entering. “Will your family get mad if we go through this stuff?”
“Only if they find out.” He shot me a lightning-fast grin. “My grandparents are at the club. They’re not going to catch us.”
We pushed open the heavy velvet curtains shielding the deep window alcove, letting light flood the room. Then we pulled the scrapbooks from the shelves and sat on the red carpet. “If she came when she was a kid, we probably want to start with the late 1930s.”
“Let me find the one where I saw her picture—then I can show you what she looks like.” I pulled out the 1947–1951 album. My fingers tingled as I opened the green cover. Had O’ma listened to Edward play piano in the music room? Had she ever been in this study withhisparents, being disciplined, being disappointed?
Noah sat on the floor beside me, so close our knees brushed. In the silence, I could hear the sounds of our breaths, the turning of the pages. I scanned each black-and-white photo until I paused at the still I’d seen before. “Here.”
She looked up at us, laughing with parted lips, frozen in time.
Noah bent forward, curls falling into his face. “You look a little similar.”
“It’s the eyes, isn’t it? I hadn’t realized we have the same eyes.” I took a picture of the photo. “Do you think your family has any papers about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like how she came here? How she was placed with them? I want to find out where she was from, if she had any relatives who survived. I want to be able to trace our family back as far as you can.” I turned the page, hoping for more photos. “We know her parents’ names, and they’re in the database of people killed at Auschwitz, but there’s no other info. If you google my great-grandmother,nothingcomesup. Or, like, one German girl’s Instagram account. Nothing else. The records say they were deported from Luxembourg, so they must have gone there from Germany after sending O’ma off, but there’s no records of where they’re originally from.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“Thanks. Oh, look.” I paused on another photo of my grandmother, maybe fourteen, sitting on a sofa next to a grown woman.
Noah peered at her. “I think that’s my great-grandmother.”
Noah’s great-grandmother. Edward’s mother. I hadn’t thought about her before, but she’d raised O’ma, hadn’t she? She’d taken her in along with her own children. I studied the picture. Did they look like mother and daughter? Had theyfeltlike mother and daughter?
We kept turning pages, pausing every time we found one of O’ma so I could record it on my phone. Most of the photos in the scrapbook were family shots, meals or gatherings on the beach. Sometimes I caught half a profile of O’ma, or her face in the background. She didn’t show up often, but she showed up consistently.
I wished I knew what the dynamic had been like. Had she felt like one of the family, or not at all? Surely if she’d liked living with the Barbanels, she would have talked about them. If she’d seen Noah’s great-grandmother as a mother figure, how could shenothave mentioned her?
Here she was again, older this time, sitting on a porch chair with her lips pursed flirtatiously. Maybe Edward had taken the photo. I glanced at Noah, struck by parallel of us sitting here decades after our grandparents.History repeats itself,the saying went, but why? Were humans so predictable in our reactions and emotions? Were some patterns easier to fall into than others? Why were we so bad at learning from the past?
I looked back at the picture, then sucked in a breath. “Look at this!”
Noah leaned ever closer to me. “What?”
“She’s wearing the necklace.” It rested high on her clavicle, the central pendant—a giant, clear sparkler—resting in the hollow of her neck. Smaller rectangle pendants connected with each other to form the band. It was vaguely art deco and gorgeous, glitzy and glittering.
“So?”
“I told you. My grandmother had a necklace, and your grandfather refused to give it back.”
He removed his gaze from the photo to me. “What do you mean ‘refused’?”
Oops.We’d been getting along so well, I’d forgotten we were on different sides. “Well—she asked for it back, and he wouldn’t give it.”
