“She did. I won’t say I’m not angry with her. It was very wrong. But she’s sorry, Jordan. She was crying her eyes out upstairs, saying it over and over.” His voice was thick. “People have reasons to lie, to hide things. Since the war I see refugees in my shop every week, selling their last antique brooch or bit of silver—men with names they’ve obviously changed, women holding children who don’t look anything like them, people making excuses for their scars or their accents. Every week I see people who were ashamed of what they did in the war, or what their friends did. War makes millions of people like that. Yes, she was wrong to lie. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand why she did it. That I don’t still love her.”
It wasn’t like her dad to speak so frankly, so emotionally. He’s hurting, Jordan thought. He’s hurting so much. “So you believe her?”
He spread his hands, helpless. “What’s more likely, missy? That she has a father and a name she’s too ashamed to claim, and a child who isn’t hers? Or that she’s some kind of Nazi schemer out of a Nuremberg headline?”
“I never said that!”
“You said she was dangerous.” He spoke gently. “You said she could be anything, a murderer. You say she lied to cover up something terrible; she says she lied to cover up something she was ashamed of. Now, we’ve lived with her for months. We know her. She’s never been anything but good to you, and to me she’s been everything I could possibly . . .” He paused, swallowing. “We know her, Jordan. So I ask you: Which explanation is more likely? That she’s dangerous? Or just ashamed?”
Jordan’s eyes spilled over then. She stood with tears streaming down her face, not even trying not to sob. Her father put an arm around her shoulders, pulled her against his side. He still sounded defeated. “I don’t blame you for wanting answers. You were right to ask. I just wish you’d—come to Anna about it differently. Willing to listen, as well as question.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jordan managed to say. “I was just—following what I saw.” And you did see something, she thought, but so what? Her dad was right; she’d looked immediately for the worst explanation possible.
Jordan and her wild imagination. Where had it gotten her? Here, watching her father struggle so painfully with his disappointment.
“Maybe I should have sent you to college, after all,” he said. “Anna was all for it. She said it would help you grow up, get your head out of the clouds. But I was hoping so much that you’d want to take the shop over from me. You and Garrett both, maybe. It was only a curio junk-room when I took it over from your grandfather, I wanted to make it into something special for you. A real future . . .”
His voice trailed off, but not before Jordan heard the naked hurt. The note in his voice of why isn’t it good enough, what I made for you? She felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said again, and she could see he was close to tears. Her rock-solid father, who had never shed a tear before Jordan in his whole life.
“I’m the one who needs to fix it.” She let her head drop on his shoulder. “I’ll—I’ll apologize to Anna when she wakes up. I’ll make it right with her, I promise.”
“She’ll need to make it right with you too. She needs to be more forthcoming with you, and she and I will talk about that.” He kissed the top of Jordan’s head. “You’re my girl, and you were looking out for your old dad. I know that.” He turned away, toward the stairs. He wanted to hide the tears in his eyes, Jordan knew. He couldn’t bear for her to see that. “I should put Ruth to bed.”
As he tramped up the stairs, Jordan could see the first touches of gray in his hair.
GARRETT ANSWERED JORDAN’S KNOCK, framed by the doorway. Jordan’s eye automatically composed the shot, but she had no camera, and anyway, his smile fell away when he saw her face. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything.” Jordan chafed her cold hands together; she’d run out of the darkroom straight into a cab, no coat or gloves. “I just needed to get away from home for a little while.”
Garrett steered her in, past a dining room littered with pie plates. Jordan smelled pumpkin pie, cinnamon, coffee. Garrett’s father was half asleep behind a newspaper; he bid a sleepy hello, and Garrett’s mother came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron.
“Jordan dear, you look like you’ve been crying. Family squabble? These things happen at holidays. Every Christmas I swear this is the year I’m going to scratch my cousin Kathy’s eyes out if she makes one more condescending remark about my cranberry sauce. Let me get you some cocoa . . .”
Soon Jordan and Garrett were sitting with whipped-cream-topped mugs in his bedroom, door left ajar after Mrs. Byrne’s habitual twinkling “Don’t get into any trouble, you two!” Garrett swept the pieces of a half-finished model airplane out of the way.
“The Travel Air 4000,” he said, self-conscious. “I know model kits are for kids, but it’s the plane I learned to fly on when I joined up . . . What happened, Jor?”
“I’ve sent my stepmother into hysterics and possibly destroyed my father’s marriage,” Jordan said. “How’s that for a Thanksgiving squabble? I’d rather have someone scratching my eyes out over cranberry sauce.”
Garrett tugged her into his chest, and Jordan inhaled the comforting smell of cocoa and model airplane glue. He didn’t interrupt while she blurted out the rest. Garrett never tried to offer advice when anyone was upset, just hugged and listened. “What are you going to do?” he asked when she was done.
“Grovel to Anna, hope she forgives me.” Jordan wiped her eyes on his green sweater. “You never believed my crackpot theories about her, did you?”
“You’re not one of those girls at school always making things up, Jor. You’re not crazy. You saw clues. Maybe you were wrong about what they added up to, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.”
“No, I was right—Anneliese was hiding something. But I was jealous when Dad wanted to bring her into the family, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, and that made me more interested in my theory that she was dangerous than the possibility that there might be another explanation. A harmless explanation. So I ended up hurting everyone.” The humiliation stung red-hot. I haven’t really come very far from that little girl who told herself her mother had gone away to become a movie star because that was a better story than the truth.
“Look on the bright side,” Garrett said. “Your stepmother isn’t some sinister Nazi, just a nice lady who makes punschkrapfen.”
“I was so stupid.” Lurking around her darkroom linking up dramatic theories, thinking she was so clever and observant. Thinking she was J. Bryde, future Pulitzer winner—what a joke.
“It’ll blow over,” Garrett said, sounding helpless.
“I have a lot of making up to do.” And you’d better get started, Jordan told herself. Because face it: you’re not going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White or Gerda Taro. You’re just an idiot girl who thought you could see like a camera, and all you ended up doing was hurting everyone you love. But you have a good family, if you don’t ruin things with them, and a good future. So go home, and start being grateful.
“I should get back,” she said, setting aside her cold cocoa.
“I’ll drive you.”
But they ended up pulling over halfway there, Garrett pulling his Chevrolet coup up next to the river when he saw Jordan was crying again. Because she was remembering that first photograph of Anneliese, the photograph that had started everything, wondering how that feeling had been so wrong—that surge of swift, sure recognition, of knowledge. Knowing that she had taken one of the best pictures of her life, knowing that in it she had seen something hidden and true and important. But it was all wrong. She hadn’t seen anything at all.
“Come here,” Garret said, kissing her in the dark car by way of comfort, his warm lips tasting like cocoa. Jordan twined her hands tight around his neck, squeezing her eyes tight shut. In a few more minutes she’d have to go back home, face her dad again, start forming an apology for Anneliese, but not yet. Garrett was pulling her collar open; Jordan hesitated a moment, then slipped the buttons of her blouse all the way down, and pulled his hands around toward the clasp of her brassiere. She could feel his surprise—this was where they usually stopped—but Jordan pulled him close for another kiss, and he gave a soft groan and tugged her hands under his sweater. If it had been a warm summer night, Jordan thought, they probably would have gotten on with it, right there with the sound of the slow-moving Charles River going by outside. But it was November, freezing cold, and the honks of holiday traffic sounded nearby, and eventually they pulled apart, breathing hard.
“Um,” Garrett said, fumbling to do up his belt. “I didn’t mean to, um. Push you—”