“No,” I whispered. He gave a heavy, shuddering sigh.

“Stani,” he choked, as his eyes filled with tears. “Dysentery.”

Almost overnight, it was as if my brothers had never existed at all. It was one thing for the Nazis to have the power of life or death over us, but this preternatural ability to entirely erase two young men who had meant so much to us? Just like that, my parents had gone from a family of four children to a family of two daughters. Any parent would struggle with the loss—but for a long time, Father was caught in an overwhelming depression. I’d catch him standing in the fields, staring into space, and Mama sometimes had to force him to eat his sparse ration. When Truda, Mateusz and Emilia visited with us on Sunday, Father would sit apart from the rest of the family, staring into space. It was as if he’d given up. I feared that war had taken his sons and his name would no longer continue after he was gone, so he no longer saw the point of carrying on at all. Mama herself was courageous during the day, but I’d wake sometimes at night to hear the quiet sobs she could no longer contain.

All I had left to hope for was Tomasz. I’d always thought of him as my whole world, but when everything else around me became ugliness and grief, I pined for him with an intensity that frightened me. I was furious with God that He had let these things happen to my country, and often during the day I’d promise myself that I would never pray again. I didn’t want to be a Catholic anymore—I didn’t want to be a person of faith anymore—if God would let such terrible things happen, I wanted nothing more to do with Him.

But every night I relented, and every night I made a silent truce, at least with Mother Mary. Just for a moment or two, I put my anger and my confusion aside, so I could plead with her to intercede for me and to keep Tomasz safe.

But I no longer asked my father to ask after Tomasz in the town, and I no longer prayed for news of him. Every other piece of news in those past months had changed things, and never for the better, so I told myself that even deafening silence was preferable to noise if the noise always ended in grief.

CHAPTER 10

Alice

I convince Mom to go back to her house a second time to bring her own iPad in for Babcia. Eddie needs his so we can’t leave it behind, but it doesn’t feel right to leave Babcia without a voice. Mom gets the iPad, then I search for the AAC app in the App store. It’s an insanely expensive app—almost three hundred dollars. Mom grumbles when she sees the price, but she puts her password in and buys it anyway. Once Babcia realizes what I’m doing, she hits the thank you button again and again.

Finally it’s time to go home. All I can think about is getting Eddie settled and pouring myself a nice glass of wine, but Callie greets me at the door, blustering with fury.

“You are not going to believe what happened to me today. It’s an outrage!”

Eddie looks like my child—the same green eyes, the same muddy blond hair, the same essential features. Until his pediatrician put him on risperidone to try to help with his repetitive movements, Eddie even had my slight frame—although he’s thirty pounds heavier now and so that “slight frame” is somewhat hidden these days. But Callie is all Wade and she always has been—she’s tall and broad, and she has the same shade of hair and cool blue eyes. She also inherited his intellect, and his black-and-white perspective on life.

“What is it, Callie?” I ask her with a sigh. She plants her hands on her hips and her chin rises defiantly. I recognize the signs of indignation in my daughter, and I mentally brace myself. What is it today? Did someone dare to suggest she might be wrong about something again? Or maybe a teacher paired her with one of the slightly less gifted students for an assignment? Right on cue, Callie delivers an outrage.

“There was a substitute teacher and she made me do regular class work. Like I was a normal kid! It’s a human rights abuse!”

Eddie drops onto his beanbag in the front room. He rests the dreidel on his lap, and I realize that he’s been carrying that thing all day now. I wish I had asked for that woman’s name from the store, so I could send her a note to thank her. The remote is waiting right where he left it this morning on the right-hand side of the beanbag, so he loads the YouTube app on the television, then navigates to a Thomas the Tank Engine video. He won’t watch those in public anymore and lately at school he’s been reacting violently if the teacher tries to put one on for him. She thinks he’s socially aware enough to understand that he’s probably a bit old to watch them, but he doesn’t have the language to talk to us about that, so he only wants to watch them in private. That nearly breaks my heart. I’m glad he still binges on them at home, just as I’m glad I can leave him be now. He’ll probably watch a half dozen episodes of the show before dinner. I think it’s the Eddie-equivalent of that glass of wine I so desperately need right now.

I look from my son who can’t communicate, to my daughter who can’t help but communicate, and I sigh and grasp for patience. These moments of surreal disparity in my parenting obligations happen periodically and I always manage to navigate them, but I feel my tolerance for this moment slipping through my fingers, and I grapple to get a handle on it. My reserve of patience becomes a life rope I just can’t grasp, and I say the right words but they come out too short, so that I fire the full force of my adult-grade sarcasm at my ten-year-old daughter.

“I doubt it was ‘regular class work,’ Callie. I don’t think they do ‘regular class work’ at an academic magnet school.”

“It was regular work. It wasn’t my advanced program, so it may as well have been finger-painting to someone like me.”

It’s the determined arrogance that gets me. It’s the wide stance of her feet, the hands pinching into her hips, the jutted chin, the way her gaze keeps flicking to Eddie like she’s trying to ram home the point. I’m your highly gifted child, not your special needs child. I deserve better than this because I’m bright, not challenged.

I’m raising a monster, and that sudden realization makes me very angry. I mirror her stance and I say flatly, “One day of being treated like everyone else won’t hurt you, Callie.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand. Dad understands. Dad knows how frustrating it is to have unlimited intellectual potential and to be forced to do coloring-in sheets like a...like a...” She pauses, then she looks at Eddie once more, but this time she lets her gaze linger before she says bitterly, “Like a retard.”

I hate that word so much. It’s the connotations of uselessness that gets me, the imagery it inspires of padded cell institutions and children left behind. The very sound of it makes me see red.

“Pascale!” I snap. “Go to your room, now.”

Her nostrils flare as she stares at me, and then she bursts into tears and runs off up the stairs to her room. Wade appears in the doorway to the kitchen. He’s wearing my apron; a white and neon pink number he got me for Mother’s Day last year. Wade is so tall that the apron barely reaches the tops of his thighs. He’s wearing it over his business shirt and trousers, and he looks completely ridiculous.