30. Three Things

THREE THINGS

And then we wept together.

Me and Alex. For the ones who went away and didn't come back. For whatever part we may or may not have played.

"What happened to her?" he asked once our sobs quieted.

"I never found out for sure."

When the war ended, I looked for you in Krakow. I knocked on your uncle's door, but he spat in my face and said you were dead. Adek had heard rumors that you'd been stopped by a Gestapo guard who caught you with forged documents and shot you on the spot, but he also heard rumors you had escaped to the Soviet Union. I looked and looked and looked for years and never found you.

"But Adek lived?" Alex asked.

"Oh, did Adek live," I said, smiling at the memory of my dear friend.

He and I reunited in a displaced-persons camp, brothers now, family now, vowing never to part. And we didn't. We moved to America together. We started a business together. He married and had four children, who gave him thirteen grandchildren. A beautiful family that became my family, because how could I ever love any other woman as I had you? Adek lived to be one hundred. When he died, I moved to Shady Glen, and stopped talking, and waited to die.

"And then I met you," I rasped to Alex.

"Why did you choose me?"

I looked at the portrait of you. I could see it, see you. "I didn't. Olka did."

I could feel him looking at you. You looking at us.

And suddenly, so close to you, so close to the end, I saw it all. I understood what needed to be done.

"Alex," I said. My voice was a whisper now. Worn out by all that talking, by all that remembering, by the story I'd kept inside me all these decades, unloosed by this boy who so needed to hear it. By this boy who, by my inviting him to rise to the occasion of his life, had finally let me rise to mine.

"I need you to do three things. Can you do that?"

He was looking at your portrait as he answered me. "Yes. Yes, I can."