Amity Gaige - Schroder

Her eyes widened. “Don’t do that.”

“No, it’s fear. It’s my fear . I don’t think saying certain things out loud will really kill me. Maybe I’m worried that you will reject me, and that would feel like a death. You’re sort of all I’ve got.” My eyes slid subtly in her direction. Look at you, I thought, trying to secure amnesty from a child.

But she — gifted she — only shrugged. “I guess you just have to try your best.”

I smiled. “Right you are.

OK,” I said. “Let me put it to you this way. Do you remember how for a while you wanted a baby sister? You wanted one so badly, and you thought about it so much, that sometimes it felt to you like you really did have a baby sister? And how sometimes you would even talk about your baby sister to other people, perfect strangers, and you would kind of forget to tell them that you were pretending? And they would believe that you really did have a baby sister and would ask you questions about her, like how old she was or what her name was? And you realized that you knew the answers? Because when other people believed you, even though you knew she was make-believe, she seemed realer — that is, realer to you . Do you know what I mean?”

She nodded.

“Great,” I said, wiping my brow. “Great. You comfy? Nice bus.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, a couple things. Firstly. I used to tell you about Twelve Hills, where I grew up. I didn’t exactly grow up in Twelve Hills. I wished I had grown up in a place like Twelve Hills. But instead, I grew up not too far away, in a place called Dorchester, which you will see soon. And before that, long before that”—I cleared my throat—“I was born, in Germany.”

“Oh.” She looked confused. “So you never lived on Cape Cod?”

“No. But hell, I visited it once or twice. I loved the names out there. Cotuit. Barnstable. Wellfleet. Do you know much about the Kennedy family, your sort-of namesake? They had a compound in Hyannis Port. A very important family. John F. Kennedy was the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Germans love Kennedy. When there were bad men ruling Germany, he went to Germany’s great city, and he said, I am from here! Everyone is from here! We are all slaves until we are all free! President Kennedy was a real German hero.”

“So President Kennedy was German too?”

“No.” I looked at my hands. “Uh, yes and no. You know what? That’s a great theoretical question. Listen. I don’t want to confuse you with geopolitics. The person I want to tell you about is your grandfather. Not Pop-Pop, and not the gentleman from Twelve Hills. Your other grandfather. He’s the German. His name — his name — is Otto Schroder. That’s who I’d like you to meet.”

“Otto Schroder,” she said, screwing up her eyes. “He’s my grandfather?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then how many grandfathers do I have?”

“Well, two. Or three. It depends on how important Grandpa Kennedy is to you. The point is — the problem is — you’ve never met either of them but Pop-Pop. And I owe you — I owe you an apology.”

I stopped to compose myself, staring over her shoulder at the receding foothills of the White Mountains.

“I owe you an apology because I kept you from information that’s your birthright. I kept you from information that helps you know who you are. For you not to have this — for me to take this from you — well, I hope someday you’ll forgive me. You’re only six. Hopefully you’ll forget some of the stuff I said and did?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What about Grandma?”

“Grandma?” I winced. “You mean Mom-Mom?”

“No.”

“You mean Grandma Kennedy? Buried in Twelve Hills?”

“No.”

“Ah. You mean Otto’s wife.”

And while I had thought that the worst part of this conversation would be beginning it, I realized suddenly that hers was the name I could not say. I shut my eyes. In the darkness of my mind, I heard the sound of her company, that rhythmic sound of her walking beside me amidst the cheerful, unoppressed birdsong in Treptower Park, and I knew that the most excruciating pain of my life was the fact that I did not even know if this woman was alive or dead. I didn’t know if I wanted her to be alive or dead. All I knew was that for as long as I was Eric Kennedy, she was neither living nor dead. When I was Eric Kennedy, she did not exist at all.

Meadow touched my arm. “Daddy?”

My eyes opened. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right.”

“I can’t tell that part yet. I have to begin — elsewhere.”

Silence.

Meadow turned to me with a smile. “So, did you have any pets in Germany?”

“Pets!” I laughed. “I did. When I lived with cousins in West Berlin, they had a little rat terrier named Brutus.”

“Brutus!”

“Brutus could walk across the room on his hind legs.”

“That’s crazy .”

“And when I was a boy in Dorchester, my father let me keep a snake. Ha! Haven’t thought of him in years. He ate crickets. But I loved him. Snakes are very good pets, actually.”

“So are mice and frogs.”

“I’ll bet.”

“And what about your school? Your real school, Daddy, not your pretend one.”

“I wasn’t very happy at school. I wasn’t happy in Dorchester.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Nobody liked me. I was a stranger.”

“Were you sad all the time?”

“I–I—” A shrieking laugh came out of me. “Sorry. This is even harder than I thought.”

I remember how the shades were drawn on the Works Progress — era school building on the corner of Tuttle and Savin Hill Road at the end of each day, as if signaling the end of that day’s guardianship, and how the pretty teachers would all leave the building afterward, while I would remain standing there, awaiting something, some hugely unmet need. After a long time, I would cross the pedestrian bridge over the oceanic traffic of the expressway, winding my way down to the waterfront of Dorchester Bay. Funny to call it a bay. It was more like a tidal pool ringed by the expressway and a beach of hard-packed sand. When I was a teenager, they cleaned up the area, adding a long white stretch of pavement intended for strolling and decorated with benches and heavy, maritime chains strung through small concrete abutments. Even though I was often alone, well into my adolescence, being alone didn’t matter at the waterfront. You could walk around anonymously and root for whatever team you wanted at McConnell Park. Maybe you’d see someone you knew.

I opened my eyes and smiled at my daughter. “No. I wasn’t sad all the time.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“When it snowed, you couldn’t even tell whose house was whose. We all lived really close together. Snowball fights were epic. Whole armies of kids. Catapults. Forts. There was always something going on.”

“I like school,” Meadow said, pulling a swath of scorched blond hair over her shoulder.

“You do?”

“I do. I do like school. But I don’t always tell the truth either.”

I let my head fall back against the seat, grateful to let her talk, grateful that she was speaking to me at all. “What do you mean?”

“I pretend I don’t know things, like how to read. If I read things out loud, they say I’m a know-it-all.”

I said nothing.

“I don’t want them to say mean things about me. So I pretend I don’t read the words or know what the big words mean. I pretend I can’t see. Then they call me Four Eyes.”

“Oh, Meadow. That kills me. We should find you a school that can handle a child like you. A gifted child. You’re gifted .”