12. Freedom!

FREEDOM!

When three days went by and not one resident vomited, the quarantine was lifted.

"I feel so free!" Minna rejoiced that morning at breakfast. "I haven't felt like this since the war ended."

"Don't be so dramatic," said Vivian, who earlier had told Maya-Jade that she felt as if she'd been paroled from prison.

"When Japan surrendered, we had a block party that went on for a week," Minna remembered. "Everyone was so happy."

"I was in Times Square in New York," Sid bragged. "They took that famous picture of me kissing that nurse."

"I happen to know that you are the same age as me, and I was only seven when the war ended," Vivian said.

"Well, if I'd been old enough, it woulda been me doing the kissing," Sid replied.

"All I remember is how badly I wanted chocolate," Vivian said. "We all had to wait. It was interminable. The war was over but still we had to ration everything. The opera didn't return for an entire season!"

"Weren't you a little young to sing in the opera?" Sid asked.

"My mother played opera on the phonograph for me," Vivian replied. "She says I was born a diva."

"I'll bet you were," Sid replied.

"I went to my first live opera a few years after the war ended. I was ten."

"Wow, I didn't go to the opera until I was forty-five years old," Minna said. "Steven's partner had extra tickets and gave them to us."

"What did you see?" Vivian demanded.

"I don't remember. It was in German," Minna said. "And I think it was about a queen who wants her daughter rescued. But the queen was wicked." She shook her head, the particulars fogging over.

"It doesn't sound familiar," Vivian said imperiously.

But it did. "The Magic Flute," I said.

There was a moment's pause as my tablemates stared at me, not mute, not brain-damaged, able to recall the name of an opera.

"Yes, that's the one." Minna smiled at me as she speared a section of grapefruit. "It's good to have you back."

Back , as if I'd been away. But I knew what she meant.

"It's good to be back," I told her.

The boy arrived a few hours later, expecting quiet halls and hazmat-looking suits, but instead it was back to normal. Residents chatted in the halls; the receptionist yammered on the phone; nurses and aides bustled about. He'd known that the quarantine would end, and not that he wanted anyone to barf, but he had secretly wished the lockdown would go on a few more days. Because it turned out that he was good at delivering meals, at making sure the diabetics never got the kosher boxes or the vegetarians the meat ones. And as the residents had gotten to know him, they'd asked him to run errands. So he'd fetched stamps for Fred Bocarelli from the little shop off the lobby, and he'd helped Elise Hadley do a FaceTime from her iPad, and of course he'd visited with me. The hours had flown by, and suddenly it would be five o'clock, time for his dinner, a real, Leyla-cooked hot meal, and then all too soon it was six o'clock and he had to leave.

But now all that would end and go back to how it had been before. The proof was in Maya-Jade standing in front of him with her clipboard. "Is it true," she asked breathlessly, "that Mr. Kravitz spoke to you?"

It had been a while now since he'd seen her, and he had to calculate where things stood between them: First he'd hated her because she'd been bossy to him, and then he'd hated her times two after she put him on bleach duty and times three because she got to eat lasagna with the residents. But then she'd taken him off bleach duty and put him on trivia, and now he got to eat the same delicious food Leyla cooked, not with the residents but on a stool in the kitchen, which was better and made him feel a little superior because he was almost staff. And speaking of superior, he had worked through the contagion, and she had stayed home. The good stuff seemed to cancel out the hating part, but he wasn't sure because feelings were not math. He was good at math, in spite of what everyone thought. Feelings, not so much.

"It's true," he answered her. "He talked to me."

"That's so incredible," she said, her fingers drifting to her elbow. The bandage was off now, in its place a bumpy scab that was starting to flake away. He really wanted to ask her what had happened, but even with all the adding and subtracting he knew that they weren't friends.

"Nana says Mr. Kravitz is a hundred and seven," Maya-Jade continued. "I didn't know people could be that old. But I looked it up in Guinness World Records and the oldest person ever was"—she paused to look at something written on her clipboard—"Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to a hundred and twenty-two. Women live longer, you know. The oldest man was"—here she consulted the clipboard again—"Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to be a hundred and sixteen. So Mr. Kravitz being a hundred and seven is almost Guinness records territory, and he's right here."

She was burbling with excitement as if they were the kind of people who regularly discussed Guinness world records.

"Imagine the history he's lived through. The stories he has to tell." She sighed. "I tried to do video interviews with the residents. I thought it would make a good bat mitzvah project."

What was she talking about? And what was a bat mitzvah project?

"But no one wants to talk to me," she carried on. "Or if they do, they're like Ginny and Dickie—sorry, Mrs. Koong and Mr. McGinity—who don't remember anything, even though as, like, the Romeo and Juliet of Shady Glen, they must have such a good story." She paused to breathe. "I met Ginny's—sorry, Mrs. Koong's—granddaughter Lydia, and she told me that Dickie's kids—sorry, Mr. McGinity's family—don't approve of the romance and have tried to stop it. They've complained to Etta—darn, Mrs. Winston—it's so weird this whole Mr. and Mrs. thing. I go to a private school and we call our teachers by their first names, so I don't get it."

Of course she went to a private school, the boy thought. She'd probably been at the same school the whole time and never had to repeat a grade even if she understood all the material.

"Anyhow, Lydia said that Mrs. Winston says that they're adults and she can't stop them from fraternizing ." Maya-Jade laughed at that word for some reason. "Lydia thinks it's racism. That Dickie's kids don't approve because he's white and she's Korean, and she said that she thinks that Ginny herself wouldn't have approved of it herself when she was younger, but that maybe that's how it is when people get older."

"How what is?"

"Think about it. When we're babies, we don't care what race or sexual orientation or gender identity someone is, and then we learn to care, but when we get old, we kind of turn back into babies again—I mean for real, with dolls and soft foods and diapers—and maybe all that dumb stuff we learned melts away."

"Uh-huh," the boy said.

"All I'm saying is that these people here have such interesting stories to tell, but they're locked inside. I was thinking that maybe Mr. Kravitz could talk to me for my bat mitzvah project. He's Jewish. He would be perfect!"

"How come?" he asked.

"Nana says he's from Poland, and if he's a hundred and seven, he lived through the Holocaust. So, what do you think?"

"What do I think about what?" he asked, more than a little confused. Was he supposed to know what a bat mitzvah project was? And why was Maya-Jade talking to him like they were friends when the math definitely did not bear that out?

"About having Mr. Kravitz talk to me for my project."

What did the boy think? He thought, No way . Even though I had only just begun telling him my story, and even though so far it was mostly about arguing with a girl, the boy understood it was a good story. And he did not want Maya-Jade horning in. First, even if he didn't hate her, he didn't like her. She was smug and spoiled and walked around with that clipboard like she owned the place! Second, after five years of not speaking, of all the people in Shady Glen I had picked not Julio or Etta and certainly not Maya Hyphen Jade to speak to, but him.

"He talks about sewing," the boy told her. It was not a lie. I had talked a bit about sewing.

"Sewing?" Maya-Jade wrinkled her nose. "Really?"

"Really," he said. He left her in the lobby and went to the kitchen to find Leyla, who often baked a tray of baklava in the morning and would let him take a piece right out of the oven when it was still warm and gooey.

She was there, in her chef's jacket and headscarf and the funny chef's hat she called a toque. The past few days of lockdown had made things calmer in the kitchen than usual, Leyla had explained. Boxed-up meals were simpler than the usual three-course affairs she served.

"Alex," she called breathlessly. "Hi. Back to normal craziness. Julio asked you to stop by his office."

The boy's stomach bottomed out. Being sent to the office—be it the principal's or the physical therapist's—was never a good sign.

Julio was sitting in the PT room, in a chair amid all the torture equipment, grimacing into the phone like he was the one being tortured. He gestured for the boy to come in as whoever was on the other end of the line talked and talked and talked. Finally, Julio hung up the phone. Pinching his nose, he muttered something in Spanish. The boy did not need to understand Spanish to guess what Julio had meant.

"Are you okay?" the boy asked. It felt strange to ask a grown-up this, but Julio did not look so great.

"Etta had some cramping and went to the hospital. She's fine, but she's on bed rest and corporate is sending in some replacement, and she told me not to let them, but I'm just a physical therapist, so what does she expect me to do?"

Was he actually asking the boy this? And if so, how was he supposed to respond? When his mom used to ask questions like, "Well, Alex, the landlord's raising the rent and this place has rats, what should we do?" he knew she wanted him to say that they should move. But when his aunt asked questions like, "What are we going to do about the state of your hair?" he wasn't supposed to say anything at all.

"Anyhow," Julio was saying, "I really need your help now."

"What can I do?"

"What you've been doing. Check in on the residents. See if they need anything. Etta wants us to keep things running smooth, so whatever magic you pulled with Mr. K., I want you to work it with the other residents."

"Magic?" The boy hadn't done anything except bang into a wall and dislodge a painting. Was he supposed to go around knocking things off all the other residents' walls?

"Just talk to them. Like you did Mr. K. It makes them feel good."

"It does?" Something warm and sticky, not unlike Leyla's baklava, flared in the boy's chest. He knew that helping had made him feel good, but he hadn't considered the other way around.

The phone rang again. Julio grimaced, like there might be a flesh-eating zombie on the line. He sighed loudly, looked at the boy, and said, "Go," before facing his own monster.

WE STARTED SIMPLE: RUNNING STITCH , basting stitch, slip stitch. If my rows were crooked or unevenly spaced, Olka ripped them out. "Again!" she ordered. As someone who did not have the luxury of making mistakes, she was relentless in a way I had never encountered before.

Olka, it turned out, worked hard on everything. She had a voracious mind, and while I sewed, she interrogated me about my studies. What classes was I taking? What texts were we reading? What essays was I writing? What thesis statement was I making? Was I sure about the logic of that? Was that evidence strong enough to back up my claim? It was as if she were trying to inhale the education that wafted so casually from my pores.

One day I happened to mention that my class in German literature was reading The Sorrows of Young Werther , and her eyebrows spiked. "In German?" she asked, and when I confirmed this, she added, "Ah, I remember your German was good at school."

If it was, it was not because I was particularly studious. My mother's family came from Breslau, and she had grown up speaking German, so she insisted I do too, hiring a strict governess named Frau Schmidt to look after me.

" The Sorrows of Young Werther is my favorite book," Olka said, "but one I am not sure I have truly read."

By this point I knew better to question whether she'd read the book. Olka could devour a four-hundred-page tome in a night, could remember the details, could untangle the themes. She scarcely needed a professor's help. She could've helped the professor.

"Why is it you feel that way?" I asked.

"I've read the novel a dozen times, but in Polish. I can't feel I've truly read it unless I read it in German."

"I can assure you, it is still the same book. Same story. Charlotte marries Albert. Werther's life ends just as unhappily."

"It is not the same," Olka replied. She shifted her attention to my hands, where I was yanking the thread with such tension that the fabric was puckering. "You're pulling too hard."

Here's a secret: I was a much better seamster than I let on. If my stitches were uneven or my fabric puckered, it was not entirely a matter of faulty technique. The more time I spent with this odd girl, the more I wanted to. This was something I could hardly admit to myself, let alone her, so I intentionally stalled my progress to have a reason to come back.

But now she'd given me a much better excuse. "I could teach you German," I offered casually, while calculating the months this endeavor would take. "Then you'd be able to read Goethe in German."

"Those stitches look like an old man's teeth," she said, as if she hadn't even heard my offer. "So uneven."

"Would you like me to teach you German?" I repeated.

She looked up at me, her expression as pointed as the needle in her hand. "Why in the world would you do that?"

"Because I…" I struggled for words.

"Because you feel sorry for me?" she finished.

"No. Because you taught me to sew. It seems only fair."

"But I didn't really teach you to sew," she said.

"I know I'm a slow learner, but surely I'm not that bad," I joked.

"That's not what I meant at all." She looked up at me and added, "You didn't do that for yourself; you did that for me." Her voice was soft, which was more disarming than her bark. "No one has done something like that for me."

"Like what? Endure your withering criticisms?"

"No, Jozef." She looked up, her eyes clear and blue and deep. "When you forgave me my transgression and then asked me to teach you to sew, and now when you offer to teach me German…" Her voice faltered for a moment before she cleared her throat. "It's as if you've invited out my better self and, in doing so, invited me to rise to the occasion, rather than sink to it."

It was such a strange little soliloquy, but I could feel her sincerity, her meaning, her gratitude. So many people had asked so little of Olka's better self, had expected even less. But I'd let her teach me to sew. And now I offered to teach her German. She said yes to both, altering the trajectory of both our lives.