Page 15 of Counting Backwards

A moment later, Gram emerged in a thick cranberry-colored parka that reached nearly to her shins, along with a matching wool hat.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Gregory.” The doorman nodded at her. “You need a cab today?”

“No thank you, Jonathan,” she answered as her eyes landed on me. “I’m just going for a walk with my granddaughter.”

“Well, you button up now,” he told her. “It’s a cold one.”

She nodded at the man and readjusted the knitted scarf around her neck as she made her way toward me. After a quick kiss on the cheek, she took hold of my elbow and directed us toward Third Avenue.

“You’re sure you don’t want to find a coffee shop or something?” I asked, just as the wind picked up around us.

She shook her head. “I need the fresh air,” she said, “and it’s better if no one can listen in on our conversation.”

“This sounds serious,” I said playfully as we walked in tandem.

She shot me a stern look, effectively wiping the grin from my face.

“Yeesh, sorry,” I said, feeling a bit like a reprimanded teenager. “What’s this all about?”

We turned north on Third Avenue, heading uptown. “The case I told you to look up...” She trailed off, as if she’d forgotten what more she wanted to say.

Another senior moment, I worried. But then I noticed the way she was squaring her shoulders and raising her chin, like she was building up her nerve.

“There’s something I need to tell you. You talk about wanting to live up to your family’s legacy. Well, now’s the time you can. Youshould know about your great-grandfather’s connection to that girl, what he did for her.”

***

That night, I sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed surrounded by scattered papers. My computer was open in my lap as I clicked through the pages of yet another website about immigrants’ rights. I’d wasted too much time that afternoon thinking about how my great-grandfather wasn’t who I’d been led to believe but was, in fact, so much more. I’d always assumed I knew his whole story, all the ways in which he’d sacrificed to help others, but I’d only known one chapter of a much longer story. Now I saw with new eyes why my dad, who’d been so successful in corporate law, always put my mother’s family on a pedestal.

At the sound of the apartment door opening, I glanced at the bedside table. My view of the clock was blocked by an empty Chinese take-out container, but I knew it was nearing midnight. Reaching up, I removed the rubber band that had been holding my hair in a haphazard bun. Mascara had surely pooled beneath my eyes in tired smudges, and I had grease stains on my t-shirt from where I’d dropped a forkful of lo mein. I wondered fleetingly if any women had attended the client dinner from which Vance was now returning. All of them would have been more put together than what he was about to find waiting for him.

When he reached the bedroom, his eyes scanned the area. “It looks like a war room in here.” In addition to the piles of papers and greasy take-out packages, there was an empty bottle of Diet Coke lying sideways in the middle of the carpet, a bag of Twizzlers open on a pillow, and a few fortune cookie wrappers by my feet.

“Yeah.” I stood to start gathering up trash. “I guess I was kind of in the zone.” The mess that had accumulated testified to how out of sorts I’d been, thinking about the innumerable ways I couldscrew up Isobel’s case. “No one ever said I did my best work on an empty stomach, right?” I swiped at the duvet with my empty hand, wiping away stray crumbs.

“Yeah, but who are you and what did you do with my neurotic wife?” he joked as he started to unbutton his dress shirt.

“Sorry. It’s been so busy at work with Hannity Blue,” I said, referencing the corporate (a.k.a. paying) client who had been monopolizing my time for a securities litigation. Even with Dustin Ortiz doing more of the heavy lifting than I frankly would have expected from a reformed deadbeat like him, our whole team had been underwater with it. “And I have Hydeford in the morning. It’s like the more I learn about immigration, the more I realize I don’t know. The body of law is enormous, and it’s all really complex. Making heads or tails of it has been an undertaking for me.”

Vance shook his head slightly. “And you have an actual degree in the laws of this country. Imagine how confusing it must be for people who are trying to come here for the first time.”

“If you do absolutely everything right when you first arrive in the US, the rules are kind of clear,” I said, pausing for a second to wonder if even that much was true. “But once you make one error as a noncitizen, even something small like failing to file a form on time, it triggers all these other laws that seem to have endless possible interpretations.”

“It couldn’t have been this complicated back in the ’40s when my grandparents came over, right?” Vance asked as he sat on the edge of the bed and began removing his shoes.

One of the first things I ever learned about Vance was that his father’s parents survived Auschwitz as teenagers. It was because of Vance’s grandparents and the horror they’d experienced in Poland that he was so adamant about holding on to his Jewish heritage and raising his own kids Jewish. He’d told me as much long beforehe proposed. His grandparents were also the inspiration behind his podcast and the hours he spent recording episodes that helped reunite families with their heirlooms.

His entire identity was wrapped up in what his grandparents had suffered, in the stories they’d told him when he was a child. Over time, he’d shared some of the stories with me. I’d heard the bone-chilling account of how his grandmother had watched her own mother and sister get shot by a guard after they were caught reciting a Hebrew blessing over the body of a prisoner who’d died in her sleep. His grandfather, I learned, had been subjected to medical experimentation he refused to discuss, but whatever happened had left him with a significant limp for the rest of his life.

Normally, I was very attentive when Vance spoke about his family and how important they were to him. His attachment to family was one of my favorite things about him. But now I didn’t want to focus on his grandma and grandpa Singer, not when I’d learned only hours earlier that my own great-grandparents had lost so much as a result of Grandpa Harry’s efforts to help another person. I’d never known. I couldn’t say what trait motivated a person to put the needs of others so far before their own, but I hoped I’d inherited it too, that I could live up to that example.

I hadn’t decided yet whether I’d share the new pieces of my family story with Vance. My great-grandpa had risked his reputation to help a defenseless girl, and it had ruined him. Vance wouldn’t want to hear about anyone in my family being considered a failure, even if it was for all the right reasons. He’d only worry about how it would reflect on us, on him. Whatever fault he might find with what Grandpa Harry did, I didn’t want to hear it. So instead, I took my leftovers and the small pile of trash and carried them out to the kitchen.

When I returned to the bedroom, Vance glanced up at me from where he was still sitting on the bed, scrolling though his phone.

“There’s more to this pro bono case,” I said, lowering myself onto the gray bouclé chair in the corner of the room. “I think some medical abuse might be going on inside the facility. I’m hoping I’m wrong.” Then I spoke aloud the decision I had reached hours earlier: “But as Isobel’s only advocate right now, I feel like I need to pursue this some more.”

Knowing more of my own history had brought the situation at the detention center into clearer focus. The idea that a woman in custody had been subjected to a medical procedure without her full consent, and possibly for nefarious reasons, in the twenty-first century! It was almost too awful to consider. And now, given what Gram had shared, I felt enormous responsibility to help prevent such travesties from ever happening again. So consider it, I must.