The tires of the car crackled over the salted roadway, and she parked at the curb rather than turning into the driveway, now covered in deep drifts of snow. The empty spot where the house had been looked incongruous. There was a pair of tall maples in the front yard. In the fall, when Jenny was little, her grandfather used to rake the leaves into a pile so high, she could jump into it and disappear. Now the trees looked out of place, bare skeletons randomly standing in the middle of nowhere. She could see clear through to the backyard. A demolition company had followed in the wake of the salvage workers, leveling the place to rubble. Freshly cleared, it had resembled a war zone of black, scorched earth.
But it had snowed the previous night and most of the day, and thick drifts had virtually erased all traces of a house that had stood on the site for seventy-five years. Now all she could see was a lumpy expanse of white, cordoned off by safety tape. In the light of the street lamp, she could make out every contour. A set of rabbit tracks bisected the area where, she guessed, the living room had been, where her grandmother used to sit in the evenings and talk with Jenny.
Before her stroke, Gram had been a great talker. She loved to discuss things in endless detail, and loved to answer questions. This made them a good match, because Jenny had always been full of questions.
“What was it like when you were a little girl in Poland?” she would ask.
That was one of Gram’s favorites. Her eyes would soften and shift focus as she went away somewhere, to a far-off place. Then she would tell Jenny about the old days in a village called Brze´zny, surrounded by wheat fields and sycamore woods, the air filled with birdsong, the rush of a fast-moving river and the sound of tolling bells.
When she was sixteen, Helenka’s father put her in charge of driving the wagon loaded with wheat or corn to the miller for grinding. There, she met the miller’s son, a young ox of a man who was strong enough to operate the mill single-handedly, and who had eyes the color of a robin’s egg and a laugh so loud and merry that people who heard it tended to stop what they were doing and smile.
And of course, she fell in love with him. What else could she do? He was the strongest, kindest man in the village, and he told her she was brighter than the sun.
To Jenny, it sounded like an idyllic fairy tale. But she knew that unlike a fairy tale, there was no happily-ever-after for the newlyweds. Just two weeks after they married, the Germans initiated their September Campaign and invaded Poland. Soldiers overran the village, burning homes and shops, murdering or conscripting able-bodied men and boys, terrorizing women and children. When Jenny grew old enough to research the massacre of Brze´zny, she realized her grandmother had protected her from the ugliest of details.
The only reason Helenka and Leopold had escaped the carnage was that they had been sent that day to the district capital to register their marriage. When they returned, the village was in chaos, and their families gone—murdered or fled.
“The next day,” Gram would tell Jenny, “we started to walk.” It took several tellings and much questioning before Jenny learned that they had walked away from their village with only the clothes on their backs, a sack of withered apples and a few supplies, including the coffer of rye starter Gram’s mother had given her on her wedding day.
The Germans attacked the Poles in the west and the Russians in the east. For the people of Poland, every river and roadway became a battleground, and not one square inch was safe for the people who lived there, tilled the soil, raised their children and buried their dead. About six million Poles died in World War II. Jenny’s grandparents were lucky to escape with their lives.
“Where did you walk?” she used to ask.
“To the Baltic Sea.”
When Jenny was little, she thought it was like walking to the corner store to buy a quart of milk. Later she learned that her grandparents, who were little more than children themselves and had never before left their tiny rural district, traveled hundreds of miles on foot and, once they reached the port of Gdansk, paid for their passage by the labor of their backs.
Sometimes, Jenny would think about the people Gram had never seen again—her parents, six brothers and sisters, everyone she’d ever known. “You must miss them so much,” Jenny would say.
“That is true,” Gram told her. “But they are here.” She pressed her hand gently to her chest. “They are here in my heart, forever.”
Leaning against the idling car, Jenny closed her eyes and pressed her fists to her chest, praying that Gram was right, that you could never really lose someone, so long as you held their memory in your heart and tended to it, nurturing it with love.
She let out a long, unsteady breath, opened her eyes and blinked at the cold night. It wasn’t working. There was nothing in her heart. She felt hollow, with unreasoning panic ricocheting back and forth inside her.
A car rounded the corner and washed the area in white light. Across the way, a curtain stirred in the window of Mrs. Samuelson’s house. As the visitor drew closer, Jenny recognized Rourke McKnight. He pulled over to the curb and got out of his car and walked toward her. Jenny’s heart skipped a beat.
He was still dressed for work, his long overcoat billowing out behind him as he came closer.
She shivered and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked around the empty lot.
