Echoes

But just at that time, her mother began to confuse her. Not only did her mother go to church every day, sometimes more than once, but she went to a synagogue occasionally, too. It was a large imposing one filled with what looked like substantial people. She took Amadea with her once on a day she referred to as Yom Kippur. Amadea found it fascinating, but a little scary. Her mother had sat looking riveted, as she stared at an older woman. The woman appeared not to see her. And that night, in their living room, Amadea found her mother staring at a lap full of framed, faded old pictures.

“Who are those people, Mama?” Amadea asked softly. She loved her mother so much, and for three years now, she felt as though she had lost her. In a way, the mother she had known and loved had vanished with her father. There had been no laughter in the house since he died, except when Amadea played with Daphne.

“They're my parents and sister and brothers,” Beata said simply. Until that day, Amadea had never heard a word about them. Her father had once told her that he and her mother were orphans when they met each other. She loved hearing about the day they met, and how they had fallen in love, how beautiful her mother had looked on the day they were married. She knew they had met in Switzerland, and lived there with cousins of his until she was two, and then came to the house she knew and had grown up in. She still went to ride at the stables sometimes, but it made her sad now and miss her father. Her mother had long since sold her pony. Gérard and Véronique said she was always welcome, but she knew her mother didn't like it when she went there. She was afraid that something would happen, as it had to her father. Amadea stopped going so as not to upset her mother, although she missed it.

“Did they all die?” Amadea asked, as she saw her mother staring at the faded pictures. And then Beata looked at her strangely.

“No, I did.” She said nothing more then, and after a while Amadea went back to Daphne. She was a happy child of five, who thought the sun rose and set on her older sister. Amadea was like a mother to her.

After that first time when she took Amadea with her, Beata went back to the synagogue every year on Yom Kippur. It was the day of atonement, a time to contemplate past sins, and to allow God to judge you. She brought her children up as Catholics, and profoundly believed in what she taught them. But she still went to the synagogue once a year, and each time she went she watched them. Her whole family. They were always there, the men seated separately from the women. And each year, she took Amadea with her. She never told her why. It was too complicated, she felt, after all this time. She and Antoine had always told her their families were dead. Beata didn't want to admit she'd lied. And as part of all that, she never told either of her daughters she had been Jewish years before.

“Why do you want to go there?” Amadea asked her, intrigued by it.

“I think it's interesting, don't you?” Beata never offered any further explanation, and Amadea admitted to her best friend when she was fifteen that she thought it was creepy. But there was no question in Amadea's mind, ever since her father's death five years before, her mother hadn't been normal. It was as though the shock had been too much for her, and Amadea sensed correctly that she wanted to be with him. She was only thirty-eight, and still beautiful, but she was waiting to die now, and Amadea knew it.

When Amadea was sixteen, Daphne was eight, and that year Amadea had promised to take Daphne to her ballet class on the one day of the year that her mother went to the synagogue, on Yom Kippur. She was relieved to have an excuse not to go. She didn't know why, but she always found it depressing. She much preferred joining her mother in church, and lately Amadea had been praying to know if she had a vocation, like her friend's sister. She hadn't said anything to anyone but she was beginning to think so.