PREFACE
Aunt Sophie is the hollow-cheeked stick figure in the stained hospital gown staring at me from her cot – pink eyes squinting – as if I’m an hallucination. A scarlet woolen scarf is coiled around her neck, and her tiny right hand has vanished inside a gigantic black glove that is cupped on her lap, the leather palm facing up, like a grafted gorilla hand.
Though Sophie will hunt through her sheets and pillows for the missing left glove over the next week, and though she will insist on my demanding its return from every nurse on the floor, it will remain forever lost in the undergrowth of University Hospital.
It’s a Friday morning in mid-December in Mineola, New York, eighteen miles due east of Manhattan. Sophie had a heart attack four days ago. Her husband Ben – my mother’s older brother – is long dead, and they never had children. Sophie’s closest blood relative, a nephew named Hans, lives in Berlin, but I’ve had no luck reaching him or his wife. So it’s pretty much up to me to help out, especially since my mother is in her eighties and no longer driving. I’ve just flown in from my home in Boston without telling my aunt I was coming. I own a garden center in Lowell and business is slow in the winter; I can stay through Christmas if need be.
“Is that really you?” she asks with disbelief when I reach her doorway.
I rush to her with the urgency of a boy who learned – while sitting in her lap – that rose blossoms could be picked from behind my ear. Every childhood needs a magician and Sophie was mine.
She doesn’t open her arms. Not even a smile. I press my lips to her cool forehead. In the past, even trembling with a fever, she would have held me tight.
“Ich bin …” She speaks German.
“English,” I tell her.
“Help me drink some orange juice. I’m dying of thirst.” She points to the white styrofoam cup on her tray. Her skin is as pleated as crepe paper. She’s down to ninety-six pounds, the head nurse told me on the phone. Apparently, she’d stopped eating a week before her heart attack, her appetite taken away by one of her depressions. “Not an ounce of fat on her,” the nurse had added, as if she were describing the extra-lean
