Leaving was simple. They walked to the train station, the old man handed him his rucksack of clothes and effects. The train arrived, Joseph boarded, sat beside a window, touched the glass where his grandfather’s hand touched the other side, the train whistled, started to move slowly, slow enough to let his grandfather walk beside it, Joseph watching the old man stand at the end of the platform. 

The Ukrainian fields opened out full and spread the sky wide with light, hours of empty hills and trees, endless farms and land, the rivers and port, the sea. Leaving was easy, the raw movement of it, and all of that turned blue with distance and time, as blue as the voyage across the ocean, nothing but shades of blue for days on days, days and blue as heavy as the drone of engines and sea and stories he would hold and carry like souvenirs, another world entire.

Leaving was easy, and Joseph would have stories to survive—gifts to give—like the one about the woman who had the baby she was bringing to America. Just the word alone—America—it came to you then like a dream and a promise big enough to hold everyone who shared it. They left from Danzig on board a tired, half-sunk ship called The Estonia. He was 20 years old, according to the ship’s manifest, his eyes brown, hair brown, a worker. The story went on about how Joseph—Józef, on the manifest—would help the woman with the baby, and get them food, find fresh water, bring it to them. He never knew the woman’s name, but the way she looked?

“But her face,” he would say, “it had the sea in it.”

He would describe the texture of the sea—old, gray, unstable—and her face was the same. He could tell how the rain falls into the ocean, resisted and replenishing at the same time. And these visions of the voyage, Joseph trying to explain, trying to say how, below deck, the woman would breast-feed the infant beside him, how she held the child, sang to it, and how, one morning, he realized the child had died. 

The baby was dead and the woman kept humming, holding it close like a doll, and the next day, when she learned that he knew, she stopped pretending to suckle her child. She emptied some of her things on the metal floor, swaddled the baby in a white blanket. When the moon was bright as the sun over the cold and windy night, the two of them took the baby, and they, together, performed a funeral. Joseph read from a Bible by the light of the moon, she prayed and let the bundle fall away. They threw handfuls of water toward the sea, like dirt into the earth. 

He could tell that story. He could continue it to the end, because it was true and had happened just as he told it, how the woman, right before his eyes, in a simple, graceful moment, curled herself over the ship’s rail, overboard and down into the water. Joseph would say how he would not have been surprised, if, when the boat had moved on, he had seen the woman trying to stand on the unsure surface of the waves, such was the tension of the sea that night.

There was nothing anyone could tell Anna that she didn’t already know about loss and the nature of making-do. She was five years old, her sister eight, when it started snowing and her father was all that she heard. He would die shoveling, his youngest daughter there in the living room, coloring with crayons, the cold air streaming into the open front door of the house.

That had been Bayside, Queens, a different world entire. Soon after this, her mother lost the wood shop and sold the little brick house in Bayside with everything in it. Ellen took the girls back down in the world to Greenpoint, a basement apartment with bars over the windows. Nothing remained of Bayside but a pair of blue china swans and a carved rabbit, a family ring, a handful of photographs in a hatbox in the closet.

Anna would remember rubbing lemon oil into the arms and legs of the furniture, all of it made by her father. And she’d remember Orchard Avenue and the woodshop with the skylights and that milky glass, the drum roll of lathes, the racecar whine of saws. She could go on and on like this—the rifle stocks for the Army, the smell of lumber, the sweet taste of the dust, the glue pot of horse hooves, the adding machine in his office with its accordion buttons, its sidearm, its cheerful bell inside. As unreal as a snapshot—surviving how? arriving to her why?—and she could almost remember him crouching before his work, the lathes and forms and his little cap, as she and her sister arrived to visit.

It all seemed like a life she’d heard about or read about somewhere, a happiness against which she could measure her own life now. All of her life she would wait for the worst to happen, as if this was the fidelity she would keep to her father. Every single decision, every single choice, all of it could be traced back to this one original suffering.

Her sister, her mother, her father, Bayside—all these losses felt like so many thefts to Anna. And with Bob all but gone now, too, who was left for her, besides the boy? Who would listen now? Or care? Or worry?

Her friend Rosemary in Petaluma? Her niece in Staten Island? The girls from work? She used to be a person surrounded by friends, but she got married and moved away and that list of Christmas cards began to slowly disappear. The potlucks, the card games, she wondered how she could have been so careless and let so many friends fall away, let herself become the type of woman who had no one to get a cup of coffee with.

My mother passed them on to me,
These keepsake things I so adore.
It’s such a happy list you’ll see.

That wonderful, wounded quality,
All angers and hurts that came before.
My mother passed this on to me.

Her own father dies almost endlessly,
And my father’s death the rhyme restores.
It’s such a happy list you’ll see.

She holds this sad fidelity,
Of letters and pictures in a drawer.
My mother passed them on to me.

All this hatred’s just a love so deep,
Because everything’s an either/or.
It’s such a happy list you’ll see.

I’m sorry, never meant to be so nasty,
all ache and anger and nothing more.
But my mother passed this on to me,
It’s such a happy list you’ll see.