So, did you win?” Grandpa Fred asked.
Dad and Jaime and I were back in New York, and I knew Grandpa would appreciate the story Ethan told that girl. I made sure to tell it to him while my mom was busy with something else; she wouldn’t have appreciated it at all. We never talk about my adoption—a major reason I’m so nervous to tell her what I want for my bat mitzvah.
“I lost,” I told Grandpa.
“No!”
“Yeah. I won a few games, but she took the match. I kept double-faulting.”
“Eh,” Grandpa said. “You gave her the story of her life. One day she’ll tell her grandkids she won against a Williams.”
I laughed. “I guess I did her a favor.”
“That’s right.” Grandpa patted me on the shoulder. “You did a mitzvah.”
The sounds coming from the second bedroom started getting louder, and Grandpa’s smile turned into a frown. My mom and her siblings were arguing again. My dad had said there’d be a different vibe here after shiva, and he was right. Instead of sobbing or being somber, now everyone was fighting. Over Grandma Anna’s stuff.
“Why do you need a sterling silver gravy spoon?” Aunt Jess asked my uncle Dan.
“I’m an adult,” Uncle Dan said. “I might host dinner parties.”
“Oh yeah?” Aunt Jess snorted. “In your cabin in the woods? Who’s going to come, grizzly bears?”
“Better than biker dudes who look like grizzly bears.”
“My friends do not look like grizzly bears!”
My mom stifled a laugh. When Aunt Jess turned to glare at her, Uncle Dan tucked the big silver spoon in a side pocket of his cargo pants. It was so heavy it made the whole pant leg droop. Uncle Dan wasn’t wearing a belt, so he had to grab the waist to keep his underwear from showing. Now my mom laughed at that. Jess whirled around and shook her head at Dan. “That is exactly why you shouldn’t get all the valuable things.”
“Jess,” Mom said seriously. “There’s a whole closet of valuable fur coats that you don’t want any part of.”
“That’s right. Because fur is murder.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking that,” Dan said. “It’d be like making a coat out of one of your hairy biker friends.”
Jess lunged at Dan, and my mom jumped in the middle, and Grandpa sighed and said, “Excuse me, Imani. My grown children are acting like toddlers.”
I had no desire to watch the fight unfold, so I decided to go back to my own inheritance. Even though there seemed to be no instructions as to who could claim the expensive things like fur coats and gravy spoons, Grandma Anna did specify that certain things were meant for her great-grandchildren. Jaime got an ancient baseball glove and a collection of marbles in a small wooden box. My cousin Isabel, who’s only five, got the stuffed bear that always sat on a high shelf above Grandma Anna’s bed. And I got a big box of chemistry equipment. Some of it was really old, but some looked brand-new. I chuckled, picturing my eighty-five-year-old great-grandmother wearing safety goggles, conducting experiments in this small, musty apartment.
According to Grandpa, her will also stated that us three great-grandchildren were to inherit all of her books. When I first heard that, the lump from the funeral returned to my throat, and this time it was about Grandma Anna. We didn’t visit her that often, but whenever we did, she’d stock the living room bookshelf with books just for us. If it had been the kind of shiva where people shared happy memories of the deceased, I’d have shared that whenever we arrived at Grandma Anna’s apartment, she’d first sit us at her kitchen table and say, “Eat.” Once we were full, she’d lead us to the living room bookshelf and say, “Read.” Those two words were among the only ones I ever heard her say. Grandma Anna was pretty quiet, around me and Jaime at least. She definitely never talked about being adopted, if she was. Maybe that’s where my mom gets it.
I have to say, we kids handled our inheritance more responsibly than the adults. Isabel wasn’t there, so I got the teddy bear down from the shelf and placed it carefully in a corner. (It could have used a spin—or two, or five—in the washing machine, but it was so old, it would probably come out as a pile of stuffing, and I was determined to treat Grandma Anna’s belongings with more respect than the grown-ups.) Jaime and I had already put aside some books for Isabel too: all of the ones with pictures and a few novels we thought she’d enjoy when she got a little older. Then, while the adults were arguing about jewelry and china patterns, we had gone through the living room bookshelves, making four piles: “Imani,” “Jaime,” “Talk about,” “Donate.”
All that was left was the big bookshelf in Grandma Anna’s bedroom. It was stuffed to the max. Grandma must have been quite the reader.
“Hey, Jaime,” I said.
“Yeah?” I found him in the kitchen, drinking some flat ginger ale from a bottle that had been in Grandma Anna’s fridge. The lack of carbonation didn’t bother him. Neither did the fact that it belonged to a dead person. Boys.
“Let’s go through the books in the bedroom,” I said.
“Are those for us too?”
“Grandpa Fred said yeah.”
“Is there anything good,” Jaime asked, “or just boring grown-up stuff?”
I held out my hands. “How should I know? That’s why we have to go through it.”
Jaime took another swig from the ginger ale bottle. “Let’s play with the marble thing I got instead. Want to have a competition? It can be me, you, and that old teddy bear.”
There he goes with the kid stuff again. I’m in junior high. Why would I play marbles with a stuffed animal? “No,” I said, “I want to see what’s on the bookshelf. We have to figure out who gets what.”
“You’re not fun anymore.” He frowned, twisted the cap back onto the bottle. “Go do the books. The bear and I will play marbles without you.”
I was annoyed for about half a second before realizing I didn’t care. I’m lots of fun when I want to be, so whatever. And it’d probably be easier to do the books on my own anyway. This way I’d be sure to keep anything cool for myself. Who knows, there might be some information about her past in there—maybe even her adoption papers. Maybe I’d find something about Grandma Anna’s adoption that I could use when asking about my own. Maybe it’d give me the courage to actually do it too.
Armed with purpose, I walked to the bedroom and piled up some dictionaries to stand on and tackle the shelf from the top.
This collection was more varied than the one in the living room. There were worn classics, newer novels without a single crease, and a range of stuff in between. I decided to keep every Agatha Christie book—there must be something to them if Grandma Anna owned twenty. She had a decent number of chemistry books, which I decided to keep too, to go with my new set of beakers and burners. Some books were in other languages; I recognized French and what I guessed was German or maybe Dutch. Cool, I thought. Was Grandma Anna learning new languages? Or maybe she still knew them from when she was a kid in Europe. I tried to think back to my fourth-grade project on Luxembourg, but I couldn’t remember what language they speak there. (Could I be part French or German or Dutch? If I hadn’t been placed for adoption, would I speak a different language? If I found my birth parents, would we even be able to communicate?)
The third shelf down had a bunch of old user’s manuals for outdated technology, which were funny to read. How to program your VCR, how to load “film” into something called a Polaroid camera . . . When I pulled out a guide to “using your new icebox,” another book fell to the floor. It was small and thick, and the cover was solid, though faded, black. I picked it up. The binding was soft but flat, like a couch cushion that had been sat on for too long. A frayed green ribbon hung from the top. My heart fluttered and my fingers knew to handle this book gently. It clearly wasn’t a user’s guide. It wasn’t like any of the other books on the shelf.
The cover stretched and creaked as I opened it, as though nobody had done so in years. I felt like I was in one of the fantasy books from the other bookshelf, about to discover a portal to some magical world. But the page I opened—a random one, in the middle—had no stardust or spells, just small, careful writing. The cursive letters were precise, every line straight and every loop perfectly circular.
I ran my hand over the old paper until my eyes stopped on a familiar word. A name: Anna. It was at the bottom of the page on the right, the way you’d sign a letter or a diary. My fingers jumped back as though the ink were hot.
A diary! I thought. Oh my God, I found Grandma Anna’s diary.
I went to the very first page, hoping to confirm my hunch. It had a date in the corner from 1941. But the rest was in a different language. The letters were normal—well, normal for English—but they formed words that I had no way of translating. But that random page I’d found first . . . that one hadn’t been in this strange language, had it? I turned the pages one by one, careful not to rip anything. Page after page of this other language. Just when I was starting to doubt whether I’d been right about seeing English at all, the strange writing stopped. There was one blank page, and then the writing started up again, this time in English. The date was the same as on the very first page and it began:
22 August 1941
t. 1950
Dear Belle,
All my life I’ve shared with you. Before we were born, we shared Mama’s belly, splitting the resources so equally we weighed the exact same amount at birth. The story of our arrival was our bedtime story for years and years. How the doctor didn’t realize there were two of us until nine minutes after I was born, when you followed me into life. (How you have always loved a good surprise!) How in those nine minutes, Mama and Papa had already named me Annabelle. How they were so shocked at your arrival, they didn’t think to invent a second name. Instead, they split mine in two. I became Anna, you Belle.
“Imani!”
I snapped my head up and the book shut.
“Pizza or Greek for lunch?” Grandpa asked from the doorway.
“Um. Pizza, I guess. No mushrooms.”
“No mushrooms,” he repeated. “You finding anything worth keeping?”
“Maybe,” I said, my face making the world’s most awkward smile.
“Great. I’m going to go order the pizza.”
Grandpa left, and I swallowed, wondering if this diary was rightly his. He was Grandma Anna’s son, but she did leave me (and my brother and cousin) all of her books. Then again, this wasn’t an ordinary book. I don’t have a diary, but if I did, I wouldn’t want anybody reading it. Even if I was dead, though? Even if my great-granddaughter had a pressing reason to learn about my past? I don’t know. I do know that I wouldn’t want my grandkids fighting over it like money-hungry monsters.
I obviously needed more time to figure this out. I wasn’t going to tell anybody just yet. Unfortunately, that meant I wouldn’t be able to look at it until I was back home, away from people who might barge in at any moment and ask what I was reading. For now, I was going to keep this secret between Great-Grandma Anna and me.