I climb the stairs to apartment five, turn the key in the lock, and push open the door. Wow—the cleaners did an incredible job. I can see details that used to be hidden beneath the blankets of dust: the elaborate claw feet of the dining room table and chairs, the patterns on the oriental rugs in the drawing room, Gram’s and Adalyn’s smiling faces in the photographs next to the front door. It’s like the whole apartment shifted into focus.
I still can’t believe Gram left it to me.
I could go around studying every piece of furniture in the apartment, but what I really want to do is learn as much as I can about Gram and her family. Since we read the will I’ve been thinking about it constantly, shutting my eyes and replaying scenes in my mind, and now I’m certain Gram was intentionally keeping secrets. I remember a couple of times when her past almost came up in conversation, and she cleverly managed to steer things in another direction before I realized what she’d done.
Take last March, when I asked if she would look over my homework for European History, which was a detailed map of Germany’s invasions in World War II. I thought she might actually be interested, since she was alive when it happened, but Gram scanned the page for no more than a second before setting it aside and asking, “Is this the class with the boy? Has he figured out how to properly kiss a woman?”
Yes, this was the class with the boy. After all my stress about not having a date, Nathan Pomorski ended up asking me to the spring semiformal. He kissed me in the middle of a slow song—or rather, he suctioned his lips onto the bottom half of my face, so that my whole entire mouth ended up inside his. It was horrible.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I told Gram. “I already told him nicely that I don’t want to hang out again, but I don’t think he got the message. He keeps showing up at my locker to say hi.”
Gram slammed her coffee mug onto the table with a thunk. “So tell him he kisses like a vacuum cleaner!”
At that point, we both dissolved into laughter, and the history homework lay forgotten.
I didn’t get to see the bedrooms the other day, so that’s where I go first. It isn’t hard to find them. Farther down the hallway where I peeked inside the coat closet, I find two doors, each with a painted sign on it. One says “Chloe.” The other says “Adalyn.”
There’s no question about it, I’m doing Gram’s room first.
Gram’s room—what a weird thought. I still can’t process the fact that she lived here, that her hand turned this very same rickety brass doorknob. My heart beats wildly at the thought of finding some kind of clue about her past inside.
Oh, jeez. The room looks like a hurricane came through here. Gram’s closet door is wide open, and clothes are strewn haphazardly across the bed. Random shoes and books lie open on the floor. I can’t imagine what it looked like before the cleaners got to work. Is this how Gram packed to leave for America?
Two tiny objects on top of the dresser catch my eye, and the questions I was asking myself completely disappear as my throat tightens up again.
The tears come quickly, like there’s a hand squeezing my neck and forcing my feelings to the surface. I wiped them away when it happened in front of Mom, but this time, I let them flow freely down my cheeks, hot and wet and salty—a real mess of emotion. I’m a wreck . . . and I’m immediately embarrassed about it. I usually don’t cry in front of anybody, including myself. It was the needle and thread on the dresser that got me, a sliver of evidence that Gram, my Gram, once lived and breathed in this foreign room. She worked as a seamstress when she first moved to America, before she got her degree to become a teacher. She always loved to sew, though; she even made clothes for my stuffed animals when I was little. I pick up the needle and roll it between my fingers, and amazingly, like someone draping a blanket around my shoulders, the apartment starts to feel a little more like home.
I pull myself together and get back to looking around. On top of the clothes pile, there’s a long purple dress Gram apparently didn’t want to take with her. Strangely, it has a yellow star sewn to the chest that looks like it was added later. The star says “zazou” in the middle. What does that mean? I know the Nazis made Jewish people wear stars on their clothing during World War II, but Gram was Christian.
I peruse the scattered clothes some more, caressing the fabric and wishing Gram were here to explain everything to me. Why was this place such a secret, and why did she leave it to me? Why not Mom? Was there something she wanted me to find? In search of clues, I move to the chest of drawers, finding only a few stray stockings inside. Argh. Give me a sign, Gram! Stupidly, I look over my shoulder to see if anything has magically revealed itself, but the room is the same as it was when I came in.
If it’s mostly old clothes in here that Gram didn’t want to take with her, maybe I should look in the room next door—the one that belonged to Adalyn, the mysterious great-aunt I never knew I had. I take one last lap of Gram’s room and go back out into the hall.
Adalyn’s door swings open with a long, low creak.
The first thing I see, in the mottled sunlight coming in from the courtyard, is a gorgeous canopy bed with carved wooden posts. I used to beg my parents for a bed like that nonstop when I was in the first grade, but then Mom went through that dark phase, and I learned pretty quickly how to censor my behavior. I guess I forgot about it by the time second grade rolled around, and I haven’t really thought about it since.
I scan the room, wondering where to look first. If someone went into my room back home, where would they find my most personal belongings? No question, it would have to be my desk drawer. That’s where I stash all my cringeworthy poems that will never ever see the light of day. It’s also where I keep the address Nathan gave me for his summer camp in Canada; he asked me to write him letters because there isn’t any cell service there, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I hurry over to the writing desk under Adalyn’s bedroom window, but with my fingers on the knob of the drawer, I pause. I feel like a bit of a snoop, rummaging through her things. If Mom ever opened my desk drawer and saw the poems I wrote a few years ago, when she was in another one of her phases, I’d probably die on the spot. But all that being said, Adalyn hasn’t lived here for years—decades, in fact. Wherever she is now, I doubt this stuff is particularly important to her.
Curiosity gets the better of me, and I pull.
Inside, there are pencils, blank stationary, and a few stray coins and bobby pins. There’s also a leather-bound black notebook. I flip it open to the first page, and right away, I see paragraph after paragraph of tiny cursive handwriting. There’s a date in the top right corner: 30 mai 1940—May 30th, 1940.
My heart skips a beat.
I think I just found Adalyn’s diary.
I know I’m being the ultimate snoop, but I can’t resist. I’ll go through their parents’ bedroom later. Right now, I need Google Translate.
I check the other drawers to make sure there’s nothing I missed, except for one that’s jammed so tightly it won’t budge. Then I hightail it back to the Airbnb, stuff my laptop into my backpack, and set out in search of a café with free Wi-Fi. I could have done this from the rental apartment, but I didn’t want to risk having Mom walk in on me and get upset all over again. Thankfully, it doesn’t take me long to find a quiet seat in the corner of a café; it’s a gorgeous summer day in Paris, which means everyone else at the restaurant is clamoring for a table outside on the sidewalk. As soon as I connect to the internet, I prop open the diary with an elbow and begin to type the first entry into Google Translate.