The curtain yanked open. Edward Barbanel towered over us, expression inscrutable.
And hot, terrifying mortification swamped me.Oh no.
“What are you doing here?” Edward’s voice was gravelly and low, and his gaze swung back and forth between the two of us.
“We’re...” Noah’s face displayed the same horror I felt. He pulled me to my feet and we stood side by side, frozen.
“Mr. Barbanel.” I stumbled the words out. “I’m so sorry. We’ll go.”
“No.” He nodded at the pair of Windsor chairs. “Sit.” He lowered himself into the seat behind his massive desk.
Noah and I exchanged another nervous glance, then did as we were bid, pulling the chairs closer, schoolchildren before the principal. I placed my hands under my legs, then folded them in my lap, trying to look contrite but not cowardly.
“What are you doing here?”
Noah stayed statue-like, wearing the same unreadable expression as Edward, like they were two blank-faced rooks in a game of chess. Yet I could imagine what roiled behind Noah’s mask. Should he offer silence, truth, or a lie?I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something,Noah had said to me. But now the alibi he’d alluded to felt impossible to voice, when it almost hadn’t been a lie at all.
“I wanted to know more about my grandmother,” I said. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come in here. I just—I just want, so much, to know about her life.”
His eyes, so similar to his grandson’s, held mine. “Then why didn’t you ask her?”
Why hadn’t I asked her?
I had asked her, hadn’t I? Sometimes. But she hadn’t wanted to talk about her past, about the years before New York City, before she met O’pa. She’d always redirected the conversation.Wasn’t it rude to push someone when they resisted?
Why was it so much easier to dig into someone’s life when they weren’t around to protest?
“Maybe I should have asked more,” I finally said. “But for whatever reason, we didn’t know about Nantucket. We didn’t know about... you.”
He didn’t say anything.
My hands kneaded each other nervously. “We don’t know where she’s from, if she had any family, if they survived. I thought, since she had your letters—I thought maybe you would have hers, and she might have written things in them about her past.”
“Those letters are private.”
“I know. Right.” Didn’t I know? When did letters stop being private and enter the public sphere? Historians read old diaries and letters all the time. Was it when the people connected to them had died? Was it if you, the reader, had no connection? Or was it always an invasion of privacy? “I only wanted to find out more about her. Do you have any records from when she came to live with you?”
He frowned. “No.”
I deflated. But then again, he had been a boy when O’ma arrived—his parents might have known, but why would he? “Okay.”
His frown deepened, but whatever emotion it contained didn’t seem directed at Noah and me. “You really didn’t know about Nantucket?”
“She never mentioned it. Not once. I thought she’d grown up in New York. So when I realized I was wrong—when I learned she’d spent her summers here when she was my age—I was curious. It’s a big secret to keep.”
Edward studied me. I wondered what he saw: A girl with no respect for boundaries? A granddaughter who never bothered to ask questions? “Why do you think she kept it?”
I could have asked him the same thing. “I don’t know. I always figured she was... sad. Too sad to talk about it.”
Noah caught my hand and squeezed it.
Edward lowered his chin to his chest and kept it there for so long I thought he might have drifted off. But then he squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “When she first arrived, yes. Sad like a cold you couldn’t shake. Sad, sickly, frail, eyes too large. Like a persistent shadow, quick to scare away if anyone looked too long at her but always creeping back. She put me off, but Mother said it was tzedakah to take her in, and so we had, and we would be kind to her.”
Tzedakah. Charity.
Hearing someone describe O’ma like a character out of a story was strange yet familiar, because I’d always seen her so myself. Except this was a different story than I was used to hearing; this was the lost second act, while I’d only heard the first and third.
Edward looked at Noah. “She was four, maybe five, when she arrived. I used to look at your father when he turned five, and try to imagine him going through what she’d gone through. Separated from her parents. Sent alone to different countries. Housed with a family who didn’t speak her language. I can barely remember being younger than five, and she’d already lived an entire lifetime.
