20. Nothing

NOTHING

Nothing. I had called myself nothing . The word rattled in the boy's brain; it shook in his heart. He knew a thing or two about feeling like nothing, about having other people treat you like nothing.

Which was maybe why at age twelve, the boy understood something that at age twenty-five, I had not. Why Olka had left the sewing machine. It was to give me something to do, to make me feel useful. Like the boy felt useful helping the residents of Shady Glen.

Maybe it's a small thing, sewing a hem, helping someone with a crossword puzzle. But stitch one small thing to another small thing and another, and eventually you have a tapestry as big as the world.

After the boy left me, he went to Minna's room across the hall. She was on her way out the door to bingo. "Walk me there, Alex?" she asked him. And he did.

Maya-Jade was calling bingo, and when she saw the boy, she waved him over and in her rushed way of speaking said, "Do you want to come for dinner? I called home and they say it's okay as long as we stay in the living room. We can order pizza and watch movies."

He found he did want to go to Maya-Jade's, but he wasn't sure if he could. He left Shady Glen at six, and by the time he got to Maya-Jade's and they watched a movie, it would probably be past eight o'clock. He didn't know which bus went from her house to his aunt's house or when the buses stopped running. He tried to imagine asking his aunt or uncle for a ride home. He could see his aunt clucking her tongue and sighing heavily and his uncle giving one of his looks.

As if she could read his thoughts, Maya-Jade added, "And Mim said we can drive you home if your parents can't get you."

He called his aunt to tell her he was invited to a friend's house for dinner and would be getting a ride home after. His aunt didn't ask who the friend was, or say she was glad he'd made a friend, or ask to talk to the parents. She just grunted her assent and said not to make a racket when he came home.

At six he and Maya-Jade went to the circular driveway. At 6:05 a car pulled up; its doors opened like wings. The boy gawked. "It's like something out of Fornax Force," he told Maya-Jade.

"Ohmygod. You're a Force-ster, too? I love those books," she replied. "I even write fan fiction."

"What's that?"

"I write my own stories. I love doing stuff as Commander Calvados. She's my favorite. I went as her for Halloween last year and it took like a week for the green paint to come off but it was so worth it to be able to go around saying, ‘It's not Officer Calvados; it's—'?"

" Commander Calvados," the boy said in unison with Maya-Jade. Everyone loved that line. It was famous. "I haven't read all the books," he said, "but I've seen most of the movies."

"Ohmygod! We have them all. We could watch one tonight. Better yet, we should have a marathon and watch all seven of them before the new one comes out at the end of the summer. I mean, not tonight but in time for the new one. It comes out September seventh."

As they climbed into the back seat of the spaceship car, the boy thought about that. September seventh. Six days after his hearing. Though it was only weeks away now, he couldn't really see past September first. Or maybe he didn't want to.

The spaceship doors closed with a satisfying whirr.

"Mim, this is Alex," Maya-Jade said. "Alex, this is Mim."

The boy was confused. Wasn't the mom with cancer supposed to be home, in isolation, immunocompromised? But here she was, driving, looking fine.

"So nice to meet you, Alex," Mim said. "Maya-Jade's been so glad to have a friend this summer. She wasn't super thrilled when we insisted she spend the summer at an old-age home."

"Did you already get the pizza?" Maya-Jade asked.

"Pepperoni with extra garlic."

"Is that okay with you?" Maya-Jade asked. "I forgot to ask."

In response, his stomach offered a gurgle of approval.

The car was so quiet as they drove, like the Fornax ship in hyperdrive. It would've been silent, save for Maya-Jade's burbling excitement as she filled Mim in on the reunion of Ginny and Dickie.

"Well done, you two," Mim said as they turned off the road and onto a long winding driveway that led up a steep hill into the woods. She pulled into the garage next to another car, this one a brand-new Volvo.

Maya-Jade led the boy through the garage and into a gleaming white kitchen that opened into a soaring living room with glass walls and a partially glass ceiling, so the trees in the surrounding woods looked like they were inside. He had never seen a house like this.

"Cool, huh?" Maya-Jade said. "Mim designed it. She's an architect."

Mim dropped the key into a turquoise-colored bowl before washing her hands in the sink. "I'm going to see your mom. Come say hi in a few. She's tired but having a pretty good day." She dried her hands and walked toward the wooden staircase. "Pizza should be here in ten."

"She's nice," the boy said after she'd gone. "Does she live with you?"

"Of course she lives with me. She's my mom."

"But your mom has cancer."

"That's my other mom. Laura I call Mom. And Miriam I call Mim. It's a little confusing, I know."

"You have two moms?" he asked.

"Technically, if you include my birth mother, I have three." She opened the refrigerator, a gallery of fruits and vegetables and cheeses and yogurts, with a whole shelf full of drinks. She grabbed two sodas and turned back to the boy. "Is that a problem?"

Maya-Jade lived in this house? With two moms? A part of him, a familiar part, wanted to say that yes, it was a problem. A huge problem! Why should she get two—three!—moms when he had none? Why should pizzas be on the way when she already had a refrigerator bursting with food and the boy had gone to school so many days with his stomach rumbling, his head aching? He'd gotten so skinny that the gym teacher had sent him to the school nurse, who had sent him to the guidance counselor, who had asked why he'd lost so much weight. And he'd been hungry. So hungry that he'd told her.

Why did Maya-Jade get one life and he another? It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. A few months ago, the boy might have given in to this anger. It was a comfort to him, a fire that kept him warm. That part he knew. But he hadn't really thought about how other people got burned by his fire, people like Toby Crawford.

The Toby flame was still too hot for him to touch, but he could allow himself to think about me and about you. How angry we both had been, you at me when we first met, me at you before you gave me the sewing machine. What might have happened if we had stayed angry at each other.

Maya-Jade was looking at him, holding two sweating cans of soda in her hand, waiting for his answer, her expression wavering between hurt and hope. He could choose to be angry, and he could choose not to be.

He chose the latter. "Not a problem at all," he told her.

Later that night, after he and Maya-Jade had watched one and a half Fornax Force movies and eaten one pepperoni pizza and a pint of chocolate ice cream (him) and strawberry (her), Mim and Maya-Jade took the boy home.

"Let's do this again," Maya-Jade said in between yawns. "Maybe we can knock off the end of part two and get through part three next time."

"I'd like that," he said.

Outside his aunt's condo complex, Mim activated the door to the car, and as it whirred open, Maya-Jade bundled the boy into a hug, scrunching his face into her ponytail.

At first he didn't know what to do. He hadn't been hugged by anyone in a while. And she was a girl. What if she had, you know… boobs? By the time he thought to put his arms around her, it was over.

"Hey," he said as he stepped out of the car. "I was thinking of asking Josey if you could come when he tells me his story. Maybe you could use it for your bat project."

"Bat mitzvah," she corrected.

"Yeah, that," he said. "Anyhow, it's a lot about Jewish stuff and it's really interesting and also sad. I'm learning a lot."

"I thought you said he only talked to you about sewing," Maya-Jade replied.

"He does talk a lot about sewing," the boy replied. "But it's not sewing sewing. It's like lifesaving sewing."

"Lifesaving sewing?" Maya-Jade asked. "This I gotta hear."

AS BAD AS THINGS MIGHT be, they can always be worse. This Mother discovered a year and a half after the initial invasion, when the Jews remaining in Krakow were given hours to leave their homes and move to what the Nazis were calling "the Jewish quarter," a square of blocks surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence. It wasn't a Jewish quarter; it was a Jewish ghetto. The flat we now shared with four other families made our spartan apartment in Kazimierz seem like a palace. Mother, Father, and I had one small room, with one small window, which was bricked up. We were given rations of four ounces of bread a day, a pound of fat or sugar per month.

As bad as things might be, they can also be better, too. For once we moved to the ghetto, I could see my Olka! Jews were not permitted to leave the ghetto unless it was for forced labor, but my much-improved sewing skills meant that I went from cleaning latrines to sewing German army uniforms at the Madritsch textile plant outside the ghetto walls. And though Poles like Olka (Jews were no longer considered Poles) were barred from entering the ghetto—except on the streetcars that cut across the walled-off area but did not stop—a handful could obtain special permits if they had work in the ghetto. And Olka had managed to get herself a job as a courier at the Eagle Pharmacy, the sole Polish-owned business that was permitted to stay open within the ghetto walls.

And so, here, with the walls slowly closing in, Olka and I were as free to be together as we ever had been. By day the Eagle was a bustling pharmacy, with Jews coming in not just for medications but to read the foreign and underground newspapers stocked by the sympathetic owner. By night the twenty-four-hour pharmacy became something of a salon, with people gathering and trading news, musicians playing. Under the cover of her job, Olka was able to come and go easily, and we spent many a night sipping fiery homemade slivovitz, listening to a violinist play Mahler, sometimes even dancing. It felt like courting. A patch of normalcy in the midst of misery, the way a flower can grow in cracked asphalt.

If the ghetto reunited me with Olka, it also returned to me a less-welcome presence: my old nemesis, Adek, who had gotten himself a job at the Madritsch factory even though he did not know how to sew. I watched him on the factory floor, never working, always hiding in corners talking to one person or another. I remembered Olka's initial description of me as someone who floated through life and thought myself to be swimming. That was Adek to a T.

So you can imagine how I felt when I began to see Adek with Olka. At the factory once. At the Eagle a few times.

"I didn't realize you and Adek were friends," I said to her one night after I saw them whispering in a corner together.

"We were in the same year together at school. You know that."

"That doesn't mean you were friends." I paused. "What were you talking about?"

"Oh, gossip," she replied casually.

"Gossip?" Olka was not one to gossip. "With Adek? Who lied about being the top student when it was you?"

"Oh, Josey," she said with an almost maternal sigh. "That was a lifetime ago. None of that counts anymore."

It seems obscene to say that I was happy amid so much suffering. But I was with Olka. So when she began making noises again about our family escaping to the Soviet Union, I made more excuses. Though she'd been right before when she'd predicted things would get worse, I lacked the imagination to see how they could be worse than this. Besides, even if I had wanted to flee, Father had become so frail in body and mind that he could not have endured such a journey. Olka said she was willing to take that risk.

"And if Father dies, do you want his blood on your hands?" I asked her.

"Better mine in love than theirs in hate," she said. "Will you think about it? Talk to your mother? I know people who can help us."

I promised I would, and I did, but only half-heartedly. Olka and I, you see, were operating by different clocks. Hers ticked with the urgency of the moment. Deportations from the ghetto were increasing. On any given day, soldiers might pound on your door, holding a registry of names. If yours was on the list, you had an hour to gather your belongings before you were marched along with all the other unlucky souls to the train station for "relocation," Nazi officials said, to less-crowded environs on account of the typhus outbreaks. The deportees were never heard from again.

Me, I was going by a clock of the heart. Maybe even then I knew that Olka's and my days together would be numbered, and I wanted to slow time down, to draw out every last minute with her.

I was young and stupid and selfish. So very selfish. Because one early summer day, while I was at the factory, Nazi soldiers knocked on the door. They had a list of people to be deported. Father's name was on it.