“No.”
“He used to take us all the time. My favorite was this place downtown, four flights up, no elevator—with sticky noodles and lotus leaves and purple taro and fried chicken feet—so many new weird foods, it terrified my sister. He could be a pain in the ass about it. ‘Just try,’ he’d say.” It made her happy to recall. “The waiter would tally up the check at the end by counting the number of plates on the table, and my dad used to joke that they should hide plates under the table to lower the bill. There was that time he flew us up to San Francisco for the day—via charter plane—just to try out a dim sum place that a patient of his swore was the best.”
“He chartered a plane just for the family?”
“Yes, I know,” Lizzie said, reddening. “It was too much.” She wished she had left that detail out. “But it wasn’t long after we moved to L.A., and in retrospect, I think he was trying to impress us. Our mother had just died. I did not want to be living with him. I think he was trying to make us happy.”
“You were fortunate to have him.”
“Very,” Lizzie agreed. She began stacking sugar packets atop each other, thinking: it had been so hard, but she and Sarah were lucky. Once Rose left Vienna, she was alone.
“So what happened on that trip up to San Francisco for dim sum?” Rose asked. “Did he impress you after all?”
“Not exactly. The flight was bumpy and loud—it was a tiny plane, and it was nerve-racking. And then it got worse when we arrived. Sarah complained of stomach pains, and we spent the first part of the day in the lobby of a Union Square hotel where she locked herself in a bathroom stall. Finally my father insisted we take her to the doctor. So we ended up going to the emergency room in San Francisco, and they checked her out. Turned out that she was just—well, seriously constipated.”
“Oh my.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said with a chortle, shaking her head. “It was a disaster. But he tried. He tried a lot. And I didn’t give him credit for it.”
“He knew,” Rose said.
“I’m not so sure.” The sugar packets had become an unwieldy tower. “So he talked about us?”
“He did. He talked about you a lot. He used to say you were like him, you know. He told me that once. ‘Determined,’ he called you.”
Lizzie so wanted this to be true. She gave an odd, contorted smile. “That was code for ‘pain in the ass.’”
“I don’t think so,” Rose said soberly.
The waitress approached, asked if they needed anything else. Lizzie, following Rose’s example, shook her head. The waitress slid the bill on the table. Lizzie reached for it, but Rose was faster. “Please, do not insult me,” Rose said. “This is on me.”
“Fine,” Lizzie said. “This time. Thank you. I wish . . .” She trailed off, that sibilant sound—sshh—lingering. There were so many things she wished for. “I wish my father had told me about you.”
Rose took bills out of her long zippered wallet. “You know what? I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No.” And Rose smiled here, as if she knew she was about to bestow a treat. “I’ll tell you why,” she said as she reached across the littered Formica table and took Lizzie’s hand. “Because meeting this way, this has been such a pleasure.”
6
London, 1945
Amid the giddy carousing on that warm May night, Rose and Margaret picked their way through the packed streets, Union Jacks fluttering, bunting spilling out of windows, bonfires ringed by children and adults dancing, faces pink and slick with perspiration. Now and again fireworks shot up; a Roman candle whizzed through the air. They passed a piano that had been dragged out onto the sidewalk, draped with people singing “Roll Out the Barrel.” A stranger thrust a glass of lemonade and a slice of apple cake into Rose’s hands.
It took Rose several beats to realize why it was so bright, to understand that the blackout curtains had been yanked away, and several more minutes before it occurred to her: she had never seen London lit up at night before.
All the light was unquestionably beautiful. And yet it made Rose feel off-kilter. It illuminated things better left in the shadows: a gaping pile of rubble where a trio of terraced houses had once stood, the dinginess of her thin white cotton dress (despite the red, white, and blue ribbons that Margaret had braided around her waist tonight, and her own too). The light couldn’t do anything about that smell, the taste of dust in the back of her throat that she couldn’t manage to swallow away.
But none of this mattered. She would see her parents soon. This knowledge was like a strand of silk thread that they used in the factory: barely visible, yet material you could rely on. She would go home tonight and write to her parents. She had an address through the Red Cross. They would surely receive letters now. They would come to England—she would be seeing them soon.
How long would it take? Two weeks, a month? Longer? What would that be like, seeing them again? That last night, on the way to the train station, Mutti wearing her navy wool coat with the rabbit-fur collar, her hands sweaty despite the winter chill; Papi, telling her not to worry, she shouldn’t worry, Gerhard would watch out for her. Rose had been eleven then. Now she was nearly eighteen. It had been almost half her life since she had seen them. Would she recognize them? Would they know her?
It was over. All the waiting, over. She grabbed Margaret’s hand and jumped up and down, as she used to do when they were kids. “Come on. What are we waiting for?”
Margaret’s mouth, reddened by beetroot juice, widened into a smile. She had only two inches on Rose but seemed taller, more comfortable in her enviably curvaceous body. “Since when are you in a hurry for anything?” she said, but she picked up speed. They cut through the thicket of revelers. “To Trafalgar we go! We are celebrating—finally!”
Finally was the only word to describe it. The night before, a thunderous rainstorm had woken Rose up. Her body was primed for that shuddering sound, the vibrations that meant a rocket. She looked over at Margaret’s sleeping form in her own narrow bed, thinking she had to wake her up, they had to rush down into the shelter. But then she remembered: the war was over.