The Imperfects Read online

  “This was in the brooch,” she begins.

  * * *

  The Millers spend three restless days and nights in the house on Edgehill Road; even Beck, who never returns to her apartment. She finds some clothes from high school in the spare bedroom, sifting through camo pants and striped mini-tees until she unearths black pants that Helen must have made her, pants she’s probably never worn. Guests filter in and out, bringing food and flowers as condolences, even though mourners are not supposed to accept flowers during the shiva.

  When one of Helen’s former clients offers the Millers lilies, Jake thinks of Kristi. He hasn’t told his family about the baby. They will lecture him on how he’s not ready, by which Ashley will mean kids are expensive and Beck will mean there should be some law against him procreating. None of their opinions matter, only Kristi’s. He is ready. Sure, it wasn’t planned. True, they make less than thirty dollars an hour combined. And they have no idea what they’ll do about child care. But the parenting, the love, the family—he’s more than ready.

  He texts Kristi. I miss you and our little one. It’s weird, missing someone who hasn’t been born yet.

  At night, once the guests have left, the Millers discuss Helen and the diamond. Beck is honest with them about the grading report, about Viktor’s estimation that the diamond is worth ten million dollars. The diamond is upstairs, hidden. Only Beck knows its location. The Millers agree to this arrangement because they know Beck is more civil when she feels in control.

  “I don’t understand how she could have had this,” Ashley says, flipping through the IGS grading report. “One hundred and thirty-seven carats? Do you know how big that is?”

  “How long do you think she’s had it?” Jake stares at the brooch, the tiny clear and green stones, which Beck says are diamonds and emeralds. Even with the Florentine Diamond removed from the brooch, it’s the most valuable thing he’s ever held. The money it’s worth won’t solve all his and Kristi’s problems, but it would create a cushion, one that might ease Kristi’s panic over the costs of having a baby.

  Ashley takes the brooch from Jake, running her finger in the empty setting at the center of the orchid. “I mean, how could it be a diamond?”

  Deborah leans over Ashley’s shoulder to inspect the brooch. “It’s a cattleya orchid.” None of her children are surprised that she knows what type of flower it is.

  “Viktor thinks it’s from the mid-’50s.”

  “Who’s Viktor?” Deborah says, squinting suspiciously at Beck.

  “A former client,” Beck says to her mother. “A friend. Don’t look at me like that, he’s old. Don’t look at me like that, either. You’re not his type.”

  As far as Deborah knows, she has not looked at Beck one way or another.

  “Unless Helen has paperwork for it, there’s really no way to know when or how she got it.” Beck grabs the brooch from Ashley and shows them the symbol SJ on the back. “This is the maker’s mark, so if we can figure out who made it, we can start to piece together a paper trail. Viktor didn’t recognize the brand, and I’m not sure how we’d go about locating them. There’ve been so many tiny jewelry companies over the years, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “So was finding the Florentine Diamond, right?” Ashley smiles.

  “If the yellow diamond is the Florentine, it’s been missing since 1918. Helen wasn’t alive then, so it must have passed through at least one other person’s hands.”

  “Why did you say if it’s the Florentine?” Jake asks.

  “It’s the Florentine,” Beck says.

  “So why if?” Jake prods.

  “Because the Florentine isn’t like the Hope Diamond. We know it’s the Hope Diamond because it’s never gone missing. We can trace its ownership. The Florentine’s been missing since it disappeared out of the museum in Vienna a century ago. If it’s the Florentine, there’s no official record of what happened between Austria in 1918 and when Helen wrote it into her will. So, you either need to build a paper trail, which is beyond doubtful, or you need to prove it’s the Florentine through characteristics of the diamond itself, kind of like scars or tattoos, something that makes the Florentine different from any other 137-carat diamond.” Beck is careful not to say, I need to prove. She’s careful not to say we, either.

  “Are there a lot of 137-carat diamonds?” Deborah asks.

  “As far as gemology experts know, there’s only one.”

  “So then it is the Florentine Diamond,” Deborah presses.

  “We still have to prove it,” Beck says, annoyed.

  “Did Helen steal it?” Jake asks, a scene building in Jake’s head: Helen, in a beret, slips a pearl-handled pistol on the counter of a jewelry store and tells the shopgirl, Be a doll and get me the diamond, won’t you?

  The Millers stare soberly at Jake. Helen the jewelry robber might make a great character, but Helen the thief does not.

  “Is there another explanation?”

  “There has to be,” Beck says.

  “One hundred and thirty-seven carats.” Ashley stares into the empty setting at the center of the brooch. “That’s, like, really big, like can’t wear on your finger big.”

  “Is it possible that Helen brought the diamond over during the war?” Jake tugs at the fuzz on his chin. He’s never been able to grow enough facial hair to have a goatee or proper sideburns, much less a beard. “Helen’s Austrian. So’s the Florentine. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  The Florentine is not Austrian, Beck thinks. It was mined in India, then eventually landed with the Medicis in Florence—hence the name—before Charles of Lorraine brought it to Austria upon his marriage to Maria Theresa von Habsburg.

  Instead, she says, “Of course it can be a coincidence. That’s the definition of a coincidence.”

  “Besides,” Deborah says, “how would a poor Jewish girl have gotten her hands on the largest diamond from the Austrian Empire?”

  Jake shrugs. “Stranger things have happened.”

  Beck knows he’s right, only she doesn’t want Jake, with his Hollywood imagination, to be the one to figure out the mystery of how Helen got the diamond.

  “If Helen didn’t bring over the diamond, someone else must have,” Jake says.

  “One hundred and thirty-seven carats—that’s, like, seven times the size of Kim Kardashian’s ring.”

  “Ashley! We get it. It’s a big diamond.”

  “Don’t snap at me,” Ashley says to Beck, giddy but sulking.

  “You’re a broken record. Yes, it’s massive. Can we move on?”

  Jake feels his patience waning. “Move on to what? The fact that you still don’t think you have to share it with us?”

  “I don’t have to share it with you,” Beck counters.

  As Deborah tries to follow her children’s conversation, her mind keeps drifting to childhood, those weeks where they didn’t have enough money for meat, the outdated skirts Helen made her wear, patched and rehemmed. Did her mother have the diamond then? If so, why didn’t she sell it? Their lives could have been so different; their relationship, too, if Helen had hawked the diamond.

  “Why’d you bother telling us if you aren’t planning to share it?” Ashley asks, knowing that Beck will share. Even if it gets ugly, she will not get to keep a ten-million-dollar diamond while Jake and Ashley split Helen’s old sofa and teacup collection.

  “Because I thought you deserved to know that Helen was keeping a secret.”

  “How considerate of you,” Jake says.

  “You’re really not planning on sharing with us?” Ashley’s voice grows louder, and the cycle begins anew, the Miller-style blowout where they cast cruel but true criticisms at each other, injuries none of them remembers minutes later when they are calm again. They make no progress, not in the fighting, not in negotiating Beck’s inheritance, and not in solving Hel
en’s secrets, either.

  * * *

  Over those three days, Ashley cannot help googling the Florentine Diamond. She emails Jake articles she finds on gemhunters.com and jewelrymysteries.net: “The Florentine Diamond: The World’s Most Famous Diamond You’ve Never Heard of...and for Good Reason,” and “The Jewelry World’s Greatest Mystery.” The articles offer theories on who may have stolen the Florentine: an untrustworthy adviser, a crooked servant, a Nazi who hid it in a mine in Salzburg, an American soldier who found the diamond buried in that mine, a Habsburg descendant who passed it covertly from generation to generation. Any of these sound promising? Ashley writes to her brother.

  Who knows? Maybe the Habsburg descendant? It’s the simplest explanation. Those are usually right.

  Look—Ashley sends Jake an article on Marie Antoinette—the Florentine belonged to Marie Antoinette. She wore it on her wedding day! I can’t believe I held something that Marie Antoinette wore.

  In return, Jake sends her an article, “The Curse of the Florentine Diamond.” This writer says the diamond cursed everyone who wore it. Maybe it will curse Beck for being selfish.

  Maybe she’ll be beheaded like Marie Antoinette. After Ashley hits Send, she realizes her comment isn’t funny.

  Then Jake writes, Or maybe she’ll be killed by an Italian anarchist like Sisi. (She was the last Habsburg to wear the diamond.)

  Jake’s own poor humor does not quell Ashley’s guilt. Are we right? Helen did leave it to her.

  Helen always assumed the best of Beck, Jake responds. If she left it to Beck, it’s because she thought Beck would do the right thing.

  It’s worth a lot of money, Ashley writes. Jake must be thinking about money. Beck must be, too. Certainly, Deborah is. Despite the questions it raises about Helen, it’s impossible not to fantasize about ten million dollars.

  I still don’t understand how Helen had this. What Jake means is, Why didn’t we know more about our grandmother?

  She told us the things she wanted us to know, Ashley writes, feeling bad for how little she’d wanted to know about Helen before.

  * * *

  By Tuesday afternoon, there are no more visitors. As the light around them fades, the Millers sit in Helen’s living room, ready for their final night together to be over. The family who shares a porch with Helen has made them one last meal, shepherd’s pie, which Esther cuts and leaves on plates for the Millers.

  “You all did a good job,” Esther says as she’s leaving. “Most families don’t make it through the shiva without old resentments rising up.” The Millers can’t tell if she’s joking. Esther smiles at them, genuinely.

  “Well,” Ashley says once Esther has disappeared down the sidewalk, “I read that we’re supposed to end the shiva with a drink. I know I could use one.”

  She searches the kitchen cabinets, finding only brandy. Ashley pours each of them a glass.

  “L’chaim.” She raises her glass. The Millers repeat the toast, clinking their cups.

  Ashley makes a face as she struggles to swallow her drink. “It tastes like cooking brandy.”

  Jake downs his in one shot and laughs. “Beck, remember when we used to sneak mugs of this?”

  Beck smiles. “Just as bad now as it was then.”

  “Tastes fine to me,” Deborah says, finishing her glass and pouring another.

  With each glass of brandy, the Millers cringe less until the brandy almost tastes good. As the amber liquid hits her tongue with its caramel sweetness, Beck imagines the next morning when they return to their separate lives. Will they be better for this time together? Families closer than the Millers have irreconcilably disbanded over will disputes, forever estranged and angry. If they fight over the diamond, there will be lawsuits and mediators and years of legal battles. It would never end. It would define their lives. It would ruin them all, more than they are already ruined. It would be the opposite of what Helen had wanted.

  Beck puts her half-full glass on the table and races upstairs to find the diamond hidden inside a pair of rainbow tube socks in the back of her old closet. She unfolds the socks, and the diamond falls into her hand. It catches the light and fragments of rainbow shine. Beck hears Helen’s voice, her accent burnishing each word: This is the right thing to do.

  “I know,” Beck says to the diamond. “But it won’t be easy.”

  And she knows what Helen would say. Nothing right ever is.

  The Millers stop whispering when Beck reappears downstairs, watching her with a mix of suspicion and eagerness.

  “Look,” she says, putting the diamond on the table between them. It catches their breath again, just how unfathomably large it is. “I don’t want to keep fighting.” What she means to say is I’m sorry, but it isn’t in her blood to reconcile with an apology.

  “And we do?” The frustration rises in Jake like bile.

  Beck shakes her head. She’s already regretting what she’s about to say. On a legal pad, she writes, Family Settlement Agreement. “Forget the will. We’ll draft a new agreement where we all split the diamond. Deborah, too.”

  “What?” Jake and Ashley say at once.

  “No way,” Jake adds. He jostles his leg, trying to remain calm.

  “That’s my deal, 25 percent for each of us, take it or leave it.”

  “Why should we split with Deborah?” Ashley asks.

  “We shouldn’t,” Jake says.

  Deborah doesn’t look at her children as they argue her fate, stung by Ashley and Jake’s dismissal, which pales beneath the pride she feels for Beck. She stares at the words Beck has written on the lined yellow paper: Family. Settlement. Agreement.

  “This is a family heirloom,” Beck argues. “Deborah is part of this family. We split evenly or not at all.”

  Jake can feel his nails digging into his palms, thirsty for blood. “What about the house? We should split that evenly, too.”

  Deborah is about to interject when Ashley frowns at Jake. “Just let her have the house, Jake.”

  Deborah watches her eldest children communicate without words. Jake glares at Ashley, who holds his stare.

  Jake is the first to look away. “Please don’t bankrupt the house.”

  Deborah is about to protest that she would never, but she cannot make this promise. Instead, she says, “I’ll do my best to take care of it.”

  Beck finishes drafting the agreement and drops it on the table for them to read. “Once we sign this, we’re relinquishing our right to dispute the will. This agreement states an even split.” She looks at her family. “There’s one condition. We don’t sell the diamond unless everyone agrees.”

  The Millers nod, their skin tingling at the thought of so much money. For Ashley, it’s the sensation of diving into a perfectly cool pool on a hot day, the relief of a safety net. For Jake, it’s the dizziness he felt when his agent called to tell him he sold My Summer of Women. For Deborah, it is like listening to a foreign language, a series of sweet sounds she doesn’t understand. These emotions, the fantasies that blossom in their wake, are short-lived. Beck isn’t finished.

  “And we don’t sell until we find out how Helen had this diamond.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to find out?” Ashley asks.

  “I don’t know,” Beck admits. “We should try to find out quickly, though. It makes me nervous, having something so valuable and not knowing if it’s legally ours. If the wrong people find out about it, we could lose it like that—” She snaps her fingers.

  The Millers commit their promise to paper. They will find out how the diamond came to be Helen’s. They will begin researching immediately. Pen poised above Beck’s makeshift agreement, Jake sees the power of this as a camera shot, but he shakes it away. He’s already written that movie, the one where the Millers learn to forgive each other, and it ruined everything. He won’t write that movie again. Instead, if th
ey can discover how Helen had the diamond, he’ll write that script. It isn’t the movie he initially pictured; it’s better. Whatever secrets this large yellow stone holds of Helen’s, it’s the story he needs to tell. He’s certain of it.

  “I still don’t understand how Helen had this,” Ashley says, signing her name beneath her brother’s. “It literally makes zero sense.”

  Beck usually hates when people say literally—they almost always mean it figuratively. Today, she agrees with her sister. It makes less than zero sense, less sense even than voluntarily splitting the diamond with her family. It’s counterintuitive. Illogical. Yet here on the table between them, the diamond sits, heavy with stories it can never tell. With truths they may never be able to find. Still, they sign their names on the Family Settlement Agreement, vowing to each other that they are going to try.

  Part Two

  Six

  Beck’s low heels click on the marble floor as she crosses the lobby of Federalist Bank. While the Millers have agreed that the local, family-run chain is the perfect place to keep the diamond, Beck can’t fight a mounting sense of dread as she follows the manager through a series of steel doors into the vault. Helen hid her money in coffee cans and potpourri satchels across the drawers and shelves of the house on Edgehill Road. She set the Florentine in a brooch that she kept in her dresser. Even if this is the safest place to store the diamond, Helen would never have entrusted it to a bank.

  They stop inside a windowless room lined with floor-to-ceiling safe-deposit boxes. The manager puts her key into one of the locks on the box Beck has paid for, indicating to Beck to insert her key into the other keyhole.

  “Just put it back when you’re done and ring the bell.” She points to the button on the wall and slips her set of keys into her pocket. Before she walks out, she adds, “And remember the two copies of the key I gave you are the only ones. We don’t keep a copy here. So, don’t lose them.” The heavy door thuds shut behind her.