Camp (25 page)

The next morning, Charlie hugged me when the minibus came. “Only three more days of summer school, buddy. Then we’ll have a whole week together.”

With Charlie off to school and my father at the office, my mother and I worked at avoiding each other. I hid in my room, where memories played in my mind: the initiation; Rory at the ice cream party; Andy at the social, on visiting day, at my tennis match; Uncle Ed and Patsy.

I listened for footsteps before I came downstairs to make myself something for lunch.
Let Mom be doing laundry
, I prayed.
Let her be in the basement.
We had barely spoken since I’d gotten home. Better not to say anything, I decided, until I knew as much as Robin.

On the camp bus, I had figured out how to get what I needed. If my mother had a secret family, there’d be proof: photos, letters, birth certificates maybe. And if those clues existed, I knew just where I would find them.

Alone at the kitchen table, I thought again about what my cousin had said. A husband in Germany. Another daughter. How was that possible?

My mother carried up the laundry basket as I finished my sandwich. “Find everything you need?” she asked.

Not yet, but I will
, I vowed to myself as I grunted a “Yeah.”

Later that afternoon, my mother announced she was going marketing. “Take your time,” I told her. “I’ll look out for Charlie.”

“The summer driver’s not as good as the regular one,” my mother reminded me. “Sometimes he pulls away before I get to the curb.”

“Don’t worry.” I tried to smooth the edge in my voice. “I’ll be out there.”

From my bedroom window, I watched the Impala roll down the driveway, then forced myself to wait. I had to make sure my mother wouldn’t come back in for a coupon she might have forgotten or to count the eggs in the refrigerator. Sitting on my bed, I listened to the hum of the house and thought about what Erin might be doing. Probably shopping with her mother, buying school clothes, I assumed. They would stop at a coffee shop on their way home, order pie à la mode, and laugh about something Erin said or a silly TV show her mother had seen. Erin would go on about the last half of camp while eating all the ice cream off her pie. Then Mrs. Hollander would spoon over some of hers.

I checked my clock, the same one that had awakened me the morning I left for camp. My mother had been gone more than five minutes. It was safe now. Time to find out who she was.

I crept downstairs to my parents’ room. My mother’s closet door groaned when I opened it. I pulled the chain to turn on the light. It shone on a lineup of shoes: brown high heels and navy pumps; black patent leather and tan sandals; the white flats my mother had worn on visiting day. Each perfectly positioned, toes and heels aligned. A sentry of shoes guarding her metal box. I moved them aside, careful to memorize where each pair belonged—slippers next to moccasins I had never seen; red pumps next to gray ones.

Kneeling beneath her dresses, I smelled my mother’s floral cologne as if she had sneaked in beside me. I grabbed the box by its handles and tried to drag it out. Then wrapping my arms around its cool metal sides, I tugged hard at my mother’s fortress, harder and harder until the box inched forward.

How much time did I have? Forty-five minutes until Charlie’s bus. If my mother hurried at the market, she could be back by then. My heart jumped in my chest. I opened the lid.

A hodgepodge of papers. No file folders or big clasp envelopes. I couldn’t pull everything out. How would I get it back in right? Sitting cross-legged on the beige carpeted floor in front of my mother’s closet, I thumbed through Charlie’s progress reports—in order from preschool through last year—a note from his speech therapist, a letter from one of his teachers. Not jumbled at all, I noticed. A perfect system. His birth certificate had to be there. I found it in front of Charlie’s school papers.
Name of father: Louis S. Becker.
I forced all the air from my lungs. Good, not Uncle Ed. But my mother could have lied, I realized. She would have, probably, if Uncle Ed was actually Charlie’s father. I’d have to find out some other way, some other time.

What I needed now would be further back, behind Charlie’s papers, behind mine. I pushed items forward, ignoring my own life history—school notices, report cards, and swimming certificates from day camp.
Fast, Amy. Faster.
Clothing receipts clipped together. One group for dresses. Another for shoes. My camp list fastened to the sales slip from the store where we’d bought the Takawanda uniform. Household items: a carpet care guide, an air conditioner warranty, a booklet about the refrigerator. Too recent. I didn’t need to know how to keep meat fresh. I needed to know who my mother was.

A thick folded paper. I lifted it from behind a pamphlet about the washing machine.
Marriage Certificate
—printed in blue, curlicue letters. It opened like a greeting card, freeing a longer sheet that unfurled.
This is to certify that on the seventh of November in the year 1946, the holy covenant of marriage was entered into at Brooklyn, New York, between the Bridegroom, Louis S. Becker, and his Bride, Sonia Kelman Jonas.

I stared at my mother’s name: Sonia Kelman Jonas. Jonas, a name I had never heard. Did that mean Robin was right about my mother being married before? Married to a man whose last name was Jonas? I drew in a sharp breath. If Robin had gotten that right, maybe there really was another daughter. I slipped the marriage certificate back into the box. That baby in Germany. I had to find her.

The screech of a car made me jump. I raced to the window, though my parents’ room didn’t face the street. I would never be able to hide my mother’s stash quickly enough behind her shield of shoes. Again to the closet.
Breathe, Amy. Breathe.
No sound. Nothing. No one.

The clock on my father’s night table told me she couldn’t be home yet. More papers. Medical bills and health records. Four bundles: my father’s, my mother’s, mine, and Charlie’s. Camp notices from Uncle Ed. My letters from Takawanda, all folded in their envelopes, a rubber band around them.

More letters behind those. I pulled out an old-fashioned greeting card, red roses on the front. Inside:
Birthday wishes for the one I love.
No date, but my father’s handwriting. I was sure of that.

I ran my fingers over the names: Kurt and Anna. Kurt Jonas? My mother’s other husband? And Anna. Was she the daughter?

Another card, more flowers on the front:

Time stopped while I read the notes my father had written, the tool he had used to slip into my mother’s heart. I couldn’t imagine him speaking those words, saying aloud the thoughts he had penned on pretty cards. I couldn’t mesh the image of my father then with my picture of him now. How could that be the same man who said, “Sonia, enough Sonia,” in an irritated way?

I needed to know more. Why hadn’t Kurt met my mother in Paris? And what about Anna? I read until I found the answer:

I read it again.
Our children will honor Anna’s memory.
Again and again until I choked on the truth. I could never be good enough for my mother. No matter how I looked and who my friends were, I would never satisfy her. No matter how many “A”s on my report card, my mother wouldn’t want me. She would always want Anna.

A memory ran through my mind. Woolworth’s, the day before camp. The cashier punches the wrong key. My mother asks her name. “Anna,” she says softly, fearful this customer will tell the manager to fire her. But my mother says only, “I’m sorry, dear,” in a voice so soft I don’t recognize it.

Now I knew the truth. There was room for only one child in my mother’s heart. A baby in Germany. Such a little girl filled all the space my mother had for love the way Charlie filled all the space in our house. I couldn’t squeeze in beside Anna. I couldn’t replace her—no matter what I did, no matter how I tried.

I stuffed the cards back into the spot from where I had pulled them. Everything in its place, and a place for every thing. Where was my place, I wondered as I shoved my father’s notes all the way in so their edges rested perfectly on the bottom of the metal box.

That’s when I found the three old photos—two in polished silver frames—buried under papers in the back of the box. I held each to the light, studied them as if I had the power to decipher the past.

The first framed picture gave me Anna: a toddler in a white dress sitting on her mother’s lap. My mother, of course, but not the Mom I knew. Anna’s mother looks like a movie star, with a smile as wide as the ocean she would cross. Anna rests her tiny hand in her mother’s, our mother’s. What could this little girl know about the war that would roll over her family like a bulldozer? And how long after this picture was taken until this photo became all my mother had left of her child?

The second picture: a framed portrait of my mother and Kurt, I guessed. He stands next to her, arm around her waist. Her leading man in a dark suit, the kind my father hated wearing. My mother’s other life: Mom and Kurt and Anna. That’s all she wanted, I thought as I gazed at the man who never made it to Paris. Then I held again the picture of the perfect toddler who claimed my mother’s heart.

A third photo curled at scalloped edges, its sepia image creased but not faded. A man all alone, I saw, as handsome as Kurt, but different somehow. Not a stiff handsome but a confident one. A jacket drapes over the man’s arm, as if announcing he doesn’t need a suit for his image—he’s handsome enough without it. I wondered who he was as I flipped the photo over. No inscription, no name. And whom did he remind me of? It hit me with a jolt. That self-assurance. The intensity of his gaze. The photo made me think of a James Dean magazine picture Patsy had shown me. And it made me think of someone else too. Although it wasn’t a picture of Uncle Ed, it was his face I saw as I studied the photograph.

Yet even more than the ghosts of that day, what happened next haunts me still. Though I have relived this story a hundred times, searching for ways to erase my guilt, I find only one truth—a simple fact: I didn’t hear Charlie’s bus. Not then. Not while I looked again at the picture of Anna and my mother. Anna, that child I could never be. I outlined her face, traced her arm to my mother’s hand.