The Imperfects Read online

  All of the information on the birth certificate she could have filled out herself. Date of birth: February 12, 1952; County of birth: Philadelphia; Mother’s maiden name: Helen Auerbach. Deborah’s own name: Deborah Flora Auerbach. On the line for father’s name: just the cream-colored background of the certificate.

  Deborah Flora Auerbach. It had never struck her as odd that she shared her mother’s maiden name. Helen always told her daughter that her marriage had been so brief she’d never felt like Helen Klein. She’d wanted to carry on her family’s name, so she’d changed their surname back to Auerbach after Joseph died. That, too, was a lie. Helen had always been Helen Auerbach. Deborah had always been Deborah Flora Auerbach until she became Deborah Auerbach Miller. After Kenny left, she’d wanted to change her name back, but the paperwork had been so daunting and, at that time, even getting out of bed was too much for her. Deborah reaches for the birth certificate and rips it in half. For now, she’d rather bear Kenny’s surname than Helen’s, but she wishes that she’d kept Flora as her middle name, that she could feel more connected to her grandmother.

  Her phone rings from across the room. Dazed and a little tipsy, she stumbles toward it.

  “You know that doll?” Beck asks as soon as Deborah answers. “Helen’s? The one from Austria? I need you to see if it’s hollow inside.”

  The doll rests on the dresser where Deborah has kept it since they found it in the archival box.

  “Hollow?” Deborah asks. Hollow like her childhood, like the pit of her stomach, like Helen’s lies. Deborah squeezes the doll. “It’s firm. I can’t tell.”

  “Cut it open.”

  Deborah really doesn’t want to deal with this right now. As she starts to ask if they can do this later, Beck cuts her off. “I need you to do this now, okay?”

  She has that Beck Miller bossiness in her voice, a tone that Deborah has always hated. For the moment, however, she likes being told what to do.

  In the kitchen, she finds a knife and slices an incision down the back of the doll’s soft body. Inside, the cavity is dark and hollow.

  “Can you see anything inside?” Beck asks.

  Deborah tugs the sides until they spread an inch apart. From the blackness, something catches the overhead light. She tips the doll over and three round diamonds tumble into her palm.

  Twelve

  Beck and Deborah step into the elevator and watch the numbers ascend toward Viktor’s apartment. Beck hasn’t seen Viktor in two and a half months, since he received the IGS color diamond grading report. So much has changed in that time—the weekly FaceTime conversations with her siblings, the dinners with her mother, the details they’d uncovered about Helen’s journey with the other children to America, the existence of a secret lover who may have been Deborah’s father.

  “The penthouse,” Deborah says, impressed. Since Deborah found the diamonds in the doll, she hasn’t let them out of her sight. While she doesn’t fight her children when they tell her they must sell the diamonds to pay a lawyer to represent them in the civil forfeiture, she insists on being involved.

  The elevator stops on the top floor. Beck turns to her mother. “Please don’t embarrass me.”

  “I’ll keep all premonitions to myself.”

  “I’m serious. Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. You’re silent.”

  Deborah uses her fingers to lock her lips.

  When the apartment door opens, a dapper, white-haired man offers both Miller women glasses of champagne. He’s wearing black cashmere, which strikes Deborah as both odd and pretentious. It’s eighty degrees outside and drizzling. Who does this guy think he is?

  “Beck, you didn’t tell me you were bringing your sister,” he says before Beck has a chance to introduce her.

  Deborah frowns. Flirting this obvious is a form of pity.

  “I’m her mother,” she tells him as she reaches for a glass of champagne, dismayed when Viktor takes this as an invitation to wink at her.

  In his living room, Viktor rests the diamonds on a piece of black velvet. They appear completely translucent against the dark, luscious fabric.

  “They’re high quality,” Viktor confirms. “About three carats each. They look like D quality, but we’d have to send them to the lab to be sure.”

  “That means they’re flawless,” Beck explains to her mother, who, as promised, hasn’t uttered a word since they sat down.

  “You’re learning.” Viktor smiles at Beck. He has perfect teeth. Too perfect. Probably a Scorpio, Deborah decides. Kenny was a Scorpio.

  “Can you tell when they’re from?” Beck asks Viktor.

  “They’re definitely vintage.” He holds one of the diamonds between his thumb and index finger. “You see how it’s a circle with facets? No one cuts diamonds this way anymore.”

  “We found these in my grandmother’s things. Could they have been set in the hatpin?”

  It takes Deborah a moment to realize that Beck means the piece that held the Florentine Diamond before the brooch. Viktor holds his breath as he twists the diamonds in his hand. Deborah can see he’s drawing it out, gaining authority by making them wait.

  “Could be.” He pulls a black hardback book on diamonds from the shelves. It falls open to the page with an image of the hatpin. Viktor traces an arc of small circular diamonds along the top of the pin with his pinky. He’s wearing a ring with a round diamond at its center, faceted to shimmer in any light. “It’s difficult to tell the scale. They could very well be some of the round diamonds here.”

  “Is there any way to tell for certain?” Deborah hears herself asking. Beck glares at her, but Viktor looks pleased by the interruption.

  “I want you to study this diamond very closely,” he says, dropping one of the diamonds into her hand. She studies it perfunctorily, then gives it back to him. Along with the other two diamonds, he rolls it onto the velvet like dice. “I will buy you dinner at Le Bec Fin if you can tell me which one is your diamond.”

  Le Bec Fin hasn’t been open for years, not that Deborah ever went there. Deborah lifts one diamond, then another, until all three are resting in her palm, clear as droplets of water against her skin. They are perfectly round, bigger than the diamond she owned years ago. Or thought she owned. When she went to sell her engagement ring, she discovered the diamond Kenny had given her was really cubic zirconia, the white gold in fact silver. “But my husband said it was gold,” Deborah had protested to the dealer. “I’ll give you thirty-five for it,” he said. “Hundred?” Deborah asked hopefully. He looked at her, his face cast in pity as he reached into the register and placed a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “You aren’t the first wife I’ve had in here,” he told her.

  The three diamonds in her palm look the same, yet she’s positive that the one on the right is the stone she held before. She drops the other two onto the velvet, holding the last diamond in her palm toward Viktor. “This one.”

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “I’m sure.” Its energy feels calmer than the other two, more familiar, but she knows she can’t tell them this. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know.” Viktor smiles coyly. Deborah looks between him and her daughter, irritated.

  “He’s teasing you. These diamonds are all the same cut and flawless. That means they’re absolutely perfect. There’s nothing unique or different about them, no imperfections. It’s impossible to tell them apart, let alone identify them.”

  “So, can you sell them or not?” Deborah asks Viktor, embarrassed. Although he is strikingly handsome, she finds him repulsive. Definitely a Scorpio.

  “Well.” Viktor raises his eyebrows, seemingly calculating a price. Ever the salesman, Deborah thinks. They are about to get swindled. “No one wants this cut anymore, so whomever we sell them to, they’ll want to recut them. That will probably scale them down from three carats to two and a half. So we’ll
have to sell them that way.” He keeps pretending to do the math. “Then if we account for the time and cost to cut, plus the fact that you don’t have paperwork for them... I know a few people who might be interested. Not at market value, of course.”

  Deborah has to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from asking what’s his cut.

  “Whatever you can get,” Beck says.

  “For my favorite lawyer, I will do my best.”

  “Viktor, you know I’m not a lawyer,” Beck says bashfully.

  “Right. You’re too trustworthy.”

  Bile rises in Deborah’s throat as her daughter blushes.

  In the elevator, Deborah can feel Beck seething. Her stomach drops as the elevator descends, and she wishes she hadn’t had that second glass of bubbly.

  “What the hell was that?” Beck asks.

  “What?” Deborah says defensively.

  “Viktor is my friend.”

  “A man old enough to be your father is your friend?”

  “Not everyone has an ulterior motive.”

  Oh, but they do.

  When they get outside, Beck opens an umbrella even though it’s barely raining and motions in the opposite direction of the Red Rabbit. “I’ve got to go meet the translator.”

  “Come on, Becca. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

  “You never do.”

  “What did I do that was so terrible? Explain it to me.”

  “You didn’t trust me.”

  “I didn’t trust Viktor.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  Deborah watches her daughter walk away. She wants to chase after her, to wrap her in her arms and ask her why she has to make everything difficult. Beck is a Cancer. Born to be sensitive. She’s never learned to tame her emotions. Until she does, she’ll never learn to be truly happy.

  * * *

  Ryan pulls up to the train station, double-parking beside the stairs to the platform. He’s wearing mesh shorts that Ashley hates and a faded NYU Law T-shirt. The irony is not lost on either of them, not of the provenance of the T-shirt nor the fact that Ashley is about to take the train to the city while Ryan will return home to prepare dinner.

  “You’re going to do great,” Ryan says, motioning her out of the car. Ever since she told him her plan to put out feelers to her old contacts, he’s been wholeheartedly supportive, almost too supportive. It makes her want to instigate a fight, but she resists this instinct. Ryan, for all his faults, has always been straightforward. If he says it’s a good idea, it’s because he thinks it is. If he assures her she’ll do great, it’s because he knows she will, even if she isn’t so certain herself.

  “Let’s hope so.” Ashley unbuckles her seat belt and steps into the sticky morning. Before she shuts the door, she reminds Ryan, “Tyler has practice at the batting cage today and Lydia’s flute lesson starts at four. Oh, and I keep forgetting to pick up your dry cleaning. They have the credit card on file, so you don’t need—”

  “Ash, I got this. Go kill it.” Ryan flashes her his rehearsed smile, and she almost believes it. She wishes she hadn’t mentioned his dry cleaning, the suits that he no longer needs to wear.

  She leans into the car, grabs a leather tote she hasn’t used in ten years, and gives him a quick peck before racing to the train. Her interview isn’t until eleven, but Ashley wants to be downtown by ten to review her talking points over a cup of mint tea. She knows her former assistant, Stella, is taking this informational meeting as a courtesy. She also knows that she can walk out of an informational interview with an offer. At least, she used to be able to. Now, only time will tell.

  * * *

  When Ashley rushes out of the building in Tribeca, the embarrassment hits her all at once. She actually thought of Stella as a friend, someone she’d groomed and trusted. Stella had been at her wedding, for crying out loud. And today, today Stella didn’t even invite her up to the office. No, they met in the café downstairs where, every few minutes, Stella had glanced at her watch. She didn’t tell Ashley it would be an uphill battle, finding a job. She didn’t offer her any contacts who might be hiring. Instead, Stella just said, “Good for you, getting back into the work force. But then, you’ve always been brave.” Somehow, brave didn’t sound like a compliment.

  Ashley stumbles south, unsure where she’s headed. She isn’t ready to go back to Westchester, to have Ryan pick her up, his eyes sparkling as he asks her how it went, genuinely assuming it couldn’t have gone anything less than great. He’ll offer her some words of encouragement that will anger her, and they will fight in the car at the train station because Lydia and Tyler are home and they have vowed not to argue in front of the children. She isn’t ready for all that, so she just keeps walking until she reaches Battery Park.

  It’s early June, and her pencil skirt sticks to her thighs. Sweat darkens the satin blouse that she really shouldn’t have worn on such a humid day. She leans against the railing where she has a clear view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the distance. Was the Statue of Liberty Helen’s first sight of America? In all their researching, the Millers haven’t bothered to look up where in New York her boat landed. Ashley’s feet are killing her, so she removes her right heel to stretch her swollen toes. When she lived in Manhattan, she could have run a marathon in stilettos. When she lived in Manhattan, Stella wouldn’t have dared treat her the way she did today. Ashley wouldn’t have permitted it. She turns away from the gray water to look at her former city. Now, she allows all sorts of things her past self would have forbidden. She allows her husband to waste his days baking. She allows her daughter to be confused and worried, her son to be blissfully unaware. She allows herself to be defeated.

  A few blocks away, a hexagonal granite building stands out from the skyscrapers that surround it. Concrete horizontal louvers comprise the roof, narrowing in a triangular pattern. It’s stunning, not that Ashley knows anything about architecture. Still, she finds herself gravitating toward the stoic building.

  It feels like fate when she sees the museum’s name in white letters across the mirrored entrance: Museum of Jewish Heritage. In the lobby, the metal detector beeps when she tries to walk through. It’s the metal in her heels that she can barely walk in. After she passes through the detector without alarm, she takes the elevator to the second floor. The museum isn’t a heritage museum so much as a Holocaust memorial, filled with posters in opposition to the Nazis, photographs and videos of survivors. She watches a recording of a woman who describes her time at Dachau as a girl. Helen’s family—Ashley’s—had been sent to Dachau, too.

  A hunched woman with curled white hair approaches. “Do you have any questions?” She introduces herself as a docent. “It’s my job to answer your questions. Anything you want to know.”

  Being a docent isn’t a job. Rather, it’s the kind of job Ashley always imagined she’d have, one that gave her a sense of worth if not money.

  “Why don’t we know more?” What Ashley means is, Why don’t I know more?—more about her family that died at Dachau, more about Helen, more about Judaism. Her children don’t even light a menorah at Hanukkah. She knows the candles represent the light that burned for eight days, but she doesn’t know who lit those candles, why they didn’t have more oil. While the men in Helen’s family—her father, Leib, and brother, Martin—were sent to Dachau, Ashley has no idea what happened to Helen’s mother, Flora.

  The docent smiles at her, evidently used to opaque questions.

  “My grandmother escaped Austria,” Ashley continues. “Her brother and father were sent to Dachau. We never learned what happened to her mother.”

  “The Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC has all sorts of records for people who died during the war. Have you tried there?” Ashley admits that she hasn’t. “It’s alarmingly easy. You just type her name into their database online, and if they have information on her, it will pop
up.”

  From a bench in the park, Ashley pulls up the website for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and follows instructions to its online database. The search form asks for background information she doesn’t have on Flora: year of birth, maiden name, prisoner number, death place. She types in Flora’s name, then hesitates before clicking the search button. If she finds Flora, she won’t be able to un-find her. Once she discovers what happened to her grandmother, she will have to tell the Millers. After that, they will forever know their great-grandmother’s fate.

  Only one hit for Flora Auerbach appears in the results, and Ashley is surprised she could find her great-grandmother so quickly. Helen had looked for years and never found anything. The website explains that most of the information on survivors and victims wasn’t available until the 2000s. By then, Helen must have assumed the window for learning what had happened to her mother had long passed.

  Ashley reads the results.

  Birth date: 1898

  Birth place: Wien

  Source: Registry of names of the Lichtenburg Concentration Camp Prisoners List, April 1939

  Source: Transport lists to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, May 1939

  Ashley doesn’t remember the exact date Helen’s train left Vienna for Berlin or when the SS President Harding set sail from Hamburg to New York. It was sometime in April 1939. While Helen was traveling to a new life, Flora was traveling toward her death.

  First, Ashley clicks on the link to the Lichtenburg Concentration Camp Prisoners List, because Flora could not have died at Lichtenburg if she was transferred to Ravensbrück. She isn’t ready to click on the Ravensbrück link where Flora may very well have died. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The lists aren’t online, only descriptions of the sources and their sponsors. Momentarily, Ashley feels relieved that she cannot discover Flora’s death so quickly. Then the relief is replaced with burden: she must find out. She promised Deborah. Helen spent her entire life not knowing what happened to her mother. Ashley owes it to them to discover the truth, no matter how painful. She opens an email and writes to the museum archivist, asking how she can access copies of the records of victims who were transported from Lichtenburg to Ravensbrück.