Alison was beyond exhausted. Not only from the lack of sleep, but from the emotional turmoil of the last twelve hours. She was walking up the steep hill to her dad’s house, perched high at the end of a cul-de-sac.
The house was elevated from the street, and there was a long staircase up to the front. Last year her Grandpa Y had turned the bottom floor into a separate apartment for Alison, with her own side-door entrance off the driveway on the south side.
Alison was thrilled. She’d adored her grandfather from the moment they met at the airport the day she arrived in Canada with her father. They’d just got through passport control and customs and walked out into the hall packed with anxious friends and relatives waiting for passengers from all over the world when, without warning, a short, surprisingly muscular man with a magical glint in his green-blue eyes rushed up and wrapped his arms around her.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” he said in his warm, laughing voice. The way he held her somehow made Alison feel for the first time since her mother died that she was at home. She soon nicknamed him Grandpa Y.
His wife had died a few years earlier, and Ari was their only child. Ari’s surprise discovery of Alison, his unknown daughter in England, meant that for the first time in his life Grandpa Y had a grandchild.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors he’d been through in his long life. He’d grown up in a small town in central Poland. Half of the four thousand people who lived there were Catholic, the other half were Jewish. The two groups got along without incident for centuries, until the night in September 1942 when the Nazis arrived. Grandpa Y’s first wife and two children were murdered, along with all the other two thousand Jews. He and one other man were the only ones who survived. In 1945, when the American 82nd Airborne liberated the concentration camp he was in, he weighed eighty-five pounds. After three years in a displaced persons camp in Austria, where he met Ari’s mother, they arrived in Canada virtually penniless. Despite all this, Grandpa Y was the most positive and wisest person she’d ever met.
Alison climbed the three flights of stairs to the front door. She’d called ahead to tell Grandpa Y that she was on her way home, and he was sitting at the kitchen table. He’d made her lunch: a tuna-fish sandwich, which he’d cut in half on a diagonal, a pickle, and fresh pot of tea.
She hadn’t realized how hungry she was, but just the smell of the food made her stomach churn. She was starving. She picked up half of the sandwich.
“Eat, eat,” he said. “I saw you on TV. Congratulations. You were the first reporter on the scene.”
“I was lucky,” she said, polishing off the first half of the sandwich in a few bites and reaching for the second half.
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in luck.” This from a man who’d survived three years in the camps. “Drink some tea,” he said. “I made it the British way.”
That was a running joke between them. He liked instant coffee because it was the first thing the paratroopers who freed him had given him to drink. Alison’s mother was a tea fanatic. When she lived for a year in Toronto with Ari, she’d taught him the “correct method” to make a pot of tea. Alison had shown Grandpa Y how to do it the same way.
He poured the tea, and she watched the steam rise. When he was done, she cradled the cup with both hands, the warmth comforting.
“I saw you reporting from the protest,” he said.
“They were angry at the police.”
“I could see that on the TV.”
“Do you think Dad will be upset at me for covering this?”
“Why? It’s your job. That young doctor you interviewed is quite dynamic, isn’t he?”
Yes, dynamic. That’s the word. That’s what had attracted her to him. She’d spent two hours with Burns at his clinic and watched how he treated his sad and broken patients with remarkable kindness. How could Grandpa Y be so smart to see she liked him?
“He took me to his medical clinic for the homeless today. He’s very committed,” she said, polishing off the second half of the sandwich. “You won’t say anything to Dad if I see him again?”
“Never,” he said.
“That’s why I love you,” she said, after crunching into the pickle. “I never knew there was this much poverty in Toronto. It all seems so very hidden.”
“It all seems so very hidden?” he said, echoing her British accent. He was a great mimic. Said he learned it in the war. “The poverty is not hidden from your father. A police officer sees all sides.”
She sipped her tea and put the cup down. She had to screw up her courage to ask him a question she’d been afraid to ask since they’d met.
“The tea is lovely,” she said.
“You’re a good teacher.”
Maybe she wasn’t ready yet to ask him about something that meant so much to her.
Before she could say a word, he reached across the table and took her hand. “Your mother was a good teacher too.”
She exhaled. Tears clouded her eyes.
“You knew her? I was afraid to ask.”
“I was waiting until you did. Did I know your mother? Of course!”
“But—”
“Ari didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“I know but—”
“My wife had early onset of Alzheimer’s. Some days Ari would come to visit us and she’d scream at him, thinking he was a Nazi guard.”
“He couldn’t leave you alone with her.”
Grandpa Y shrugged, a shrug that said: This is life, what are you going to do about it? You have to get on with things.
“Dad never told me any of this.”
“Why would he burden you with it?”
She had one more question. The toughest one. Grandpa Y was still holding her hand.
“The answer is yes,” he said, before she could speak. “Your father loved your mother. I know she loved him. You never have to worry about that.”
She hadn’t cried since her mother died. Now she couldn’t stop. Grandpa Y waited patiently.
“Grandpa Y?” she asked him at last. “Did you like my mum?”
“Me?” he said, laughing. That warm laugh of his that she had come to treasure so very much. “Like her? Did I like her? I loved her. I told Ari to go with her to England, but he wouldn’t leave. It was the biggest mistake in his life.”
Her parents loved each other. She was conceived in love. She wasn’t sure why it meant so much to her, but it did.
She got up and bent over to kiss his cheek.
He pulled her close for another one of his hugs. This one was tighter than ever. “The Nazis took them all away from me,” he whispered, his lips close to her ear, “then God gave me you.”