Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

missing after a few years, after he had been a good grandson, a good person, so long his grandfather would be forced to forgive him. He also figured chances were good the old man might die without ever finding out. But it had never occurred to him that finding the brooch missing would give the old man a full-on heart attack. That it would kill him.
    The music stopped. Adam waited with the note in his hand for the boy to start up again, but he didn’t. 3:32 now. The music may have sent him up the stairs, but at least it had sympathy. How did people live with such coldhearted silence? He refolded the note along its worn creases and returned it with his passport to the top drawer. He couldn’t get in the bed though, not yet, not with his heart racing like this. He paced with Golda watching him.
    Someone special. The wrong hands. Only after the ambulance—no strobes necessary—carried Zayde away, and he was left standing alone in the middle of their family room, did he remember his grandfather telling him about “the wrong hands.” Remembered wasn’t the honest word, more like couldn’t forget. He did remember before stealing the brooch, but he could forget, could push it out of his mind. Now it was all he could think about: his grandfather sitting on a bench in Seward Park, repeating with cross-eyed intensity that the brooch couldn’t end up in “the wrong hands.”
    What else could he remember from that story? Almost nothing. Fourteen, finally old enough to hear about the brooch, and what did he do while his grandfather was talking? Daydream about his new girlfriend Monica, who told him on the phone that afternoon that she wanted to wait until they’d been together a year before losing their virginity. He kept imagining pulling off her pink velour pants while his grandfather told him a story that may have involved Buchenwald. Had it? God, he hoped not. Sometimes when he tried to remember the story, he got a flash of rubble. Rubble as far as the eye could see—but that could just be a weird connection his mind was making because maybe there had been construction that day in Seward Park. He never got up the nerve to ask his grandfather to tell the story again. The only thing he could remember for certain was thepart about “the wrong hands,” how he had to make sure the brooch didn’t end up in them, and he only remembered that part because the old man said it four or five times.
    Adam climbed into the bed, where Golda hurried to burrow under the blanket and snuggle against him. What Dagmar had begrudgingly wished for his grandfather, that he would find another special person for the brooch, never happened. For the rest of his life, decade after decade, it remained in the felt bag with that goodbye letter. What did Bobbe, his wife of twenty-some years, think of him never giving her the brooch? Did she even know about it? As for their daughter, Adam’s mother, it was no mystery why it never went to her: she would have sold it before Adam had the chance to. Adam’s hands had turned out to be the wrong hands.
    The only way to make sure the brooch ended up in the right hands was to leave it with the one person his grandfather had ever wanted to have it, the one person he had ever found worthy. It wouldn’t undo the past, Adam understood that, but it was both the least and the most he could do. There was only Dagmar. He had to find her.

Z iva watched her new charge roll a lychee around in her palm. The two women were sorting the little red fruits, seated on upturned plastic crates on the edge of the orchard. Ziva found the girl beyond irritating. Not only did she inspect every lychee for a full minute before tossing it into either the good crate or the bad crate; more often than not, she would retrieve the lychee and reexamine it. The same little drupe! One time she caught her inspecting the same lychee three times. And always with a distracted look in her