Anna, too, was home with her family on her semester break. They spent as much time together as they could.
She was different here than she had been at school. Troubled by her mother’s decline in her absence, Anna told Jacob her mother was begging her not to go back in January.
“You deserve to live your own life. You don’t have to be a prisoner in your parents’ house. They can’t stop you if you want to leave. You’re an adult now,” he reminded her.
They’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday together in early October, sharing their first kiss beneath a full harvest moon and falling leaves.
“Zemra ime,” he’d whispered, staring into her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“‘Heart of mine.’ It’s what you are. It’s what you will always be.”
They’d welcomed the New Year with a kiss, too. No moon, no leaves, and they were indoors this time, at a Manhattan restaurant where he knew he’d never run into anyone from the neighborhood.
Just before dawn on New Year’s Day, he let himself into the house, assuming his parents were in bed. Still giddy from a romantic, champagne-fueled evening with Anna, he walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water, turned on the light, and cried out.
His father was there, alone in the dark.
“Happy New Year, Baba.”
No reply, not even a glance, from the man who sat with his hands clasped on the table before him. His black eyes were shadowed in dark circles, thick black hair gone gray in a week’s time.
“Did you just get up, or are you still up?” A sniff of the air and a glance at the stovetop answered the question when his father did not. There was no hint of the strong coffee Baba set to boil first thing every day, nor of his morning smoke. His cigarettes and lighter bulged in the chest pocket of the dress shirt he’d had on yesterday.
At last, he cleared his throat and looked up. “Where were you all night, Granit?”
“Out. It was New Year’s Eve.”
“I know what night it was. Who were you with?”
“A girl.”
“Always a girl. Which girl?”
“You don’t know her.”
“Oh, but I do.”
The words sobered Jacob like a bucket of ice water. He’d been told to keep Anna under surveillance, but clearly, someone was doing the same to him. He forced himself to meet Baba’s eyes. How much did he know?
“I trusted you. I believed you were capable of doing what we asked of you.”
“I am capable!” Jacob protested. “I did exactly as you asked.”
“Did you?”
“You said to keep an eye on her. You said to get to know her. Get close to her. Find out what I could about her family.”
“And report back to me. You’ve told me nothing.”
“Because she’s told me nothing.”
“She’s told you nothing? Hours and hours, days and days of conversations, of eating and dancing and kissing . . . and she’s told you nothing?”
“She doesn’t like to talk about her family! She hates them.”
“She hates her own mother?”
Seeing the dangerous gleam in Baba’s eye, Jacob explained, “It’s like she’s a prisoner in her own house. In her own body. And her mother . . . there’s something wrong with her. She’s done cruel, terrible things . . .”
He closed his mouth and shook his head. It felt like a betrayal, repeating the words Anna herself had uttered to him just hours earlier.
“So she does share with you. And what do you tell her in return, about your own father?”
“Nothing at all. Don’t worry, Baba. I protect you.”
“And what about her? Do you protect her?”
He gave the answer he knew his father expected. “Of course not. She’s nothing to me.”
“I hope that isn’t a lie, my son. If it is, it will soon come to light, and there will be no one to protect you. Not your mother, and not me. In this family, disloyalty carries terrible consequences.”
Jacob knew his father spoke not just of the family to which they were connected by blood, but of the clandestine network bound by bes?.
Even in that moment, weary, bleary with champagne, he’d sensed that he’d reached a pivotal moment in his relationship with Baba; that much was weighing on whatever he said next. But did he grasp that it would determine the direction of his future?
Later, in prison, he endlessly replayed the conversation and the events that unfolded in the weeks that followed. If only he could go back and choose a different response, a different path.
But when he looked at his father’s face, branded in the sorrow of that mournful week, Jacob couldn’t bear to hurt him further.
“I owe you everything, Baba. I owe you my whole life,” he said. “I could never be disloyal to you.”
And so his fate was sealed, as was Anna’s.
Midway through January, his father announced that Jacob had been assigned the task of executing not just the man now known as Stanley Toska, whose disloyalty had destroyed so much business and so many lives in that distant branch of the organization, but also his wife, and . . .
Anna. Oh, Anna.
Jacob had known it was inevitable, yet hearing the words rendered him speechless. He listened as his father described what he was expected to do, and how, and when.
“Do you understand, Granit?”
At last he found his voice, and it warbled like an injured puppy. “But . . . she didn’t harm anyone. She’s just a girl. Why her? Why her mother? Why not just the man who betrayed us? Why do they want me to do this?”
Something flashed in his father’s expression, and Jacob knew, then. He knew that the order hadn’t come from some higher force that Baba couldn’t repudiate. It had come from Baba himself, meant to test Jacob’s loyalty, like a crude and brutal street gang initiation.
“Do you understand, Granit? Do you?”
This time, Jacob nodded, and he kept his voice steady, and he held that black, black gaze. “Yes, Baba. I understand perfectly.”
Part Five
Stacey
Early October brings the radiant autumn Stacey has anticipated ever since her parents said they were moving to the Northeast. On this Saturday afternoon in the park, a canopy of red and orange boughs blaze fire in the sky and every breeze showers leaves like sparks around the bench where she sits with Lennon.
“Our bench,” he calls it whenever he texts her about going to the park.
They’re unwrapping the sandwiches they’d bought at their deli on Edgemont.
He’s romantic. It’s sweet.
“Look at this. It’s gorgeous.” She sighs contentedly and leans back, biting into her toasted salt bagel.
“Yeah, they don’t skimp on the lox.”
She laughs. “I mean the park today! I feel like we’re in Paris.”
“I’ve never been to Paris.”
“Neither have I.”
“Then how do you know this is what it’s like?”
“Everyone knows it’s beautiful—the City of Light. Brooklyn is beautiful, too. And glowing.” She gestures at the luminous foliage and the fountain that shimmers in golden sunshine.
“Yeah, well . . . ‘Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees . . .’”
“What?”
“Haven’t you ever read Hemingway?”
“Of course I have.”