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differently—the headstone that had arrived and the newspaper obituary on the refrigerator, the one with its possibly wrong birthplace.
    When Carole had set the safe key on the kitchen table a few weeks before, Darby had been sure the shadows she felt every night would finally be vanquished by truth. But that didn’t happen. The documents, papers, and photographs only resurrected greater secrets. And with them came two paths—bury the past and concentrate on the present, or seek the answers from yesterday.
    When faced with this decision at different stages of her childhood, Darby had turned away from the past. She had her own life of volleyball tryouts, new makeup, hairstyles, “What are we doing this weekend?” and “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Only once did Darby look toward the questions that sometimes arose.
    She’d watched the TV miniseries War and Remembrance on her bedroom television. Before Darby’s eyes, the beautiful character Natalie, played by Jane Seymour, was reduced to a starving animal with fear alive in her eyes. Natalie endured a concentration camp. Darby knew that word. Part of her family had died in places like the one shown on the screen. Finally she asked her mother about it. But Carole was angry she’d stayed up late for the entire week, even grounding Darby from her bedroom television—that act alone showed something more in her mother’s anger. Darby was rarely grounded and never from the TV. Grandma Celia took her aside and told her it was good she now understood what family members had endured, but they would not speak of it again. Only the Austria of Grandma Celia’s childhood was told. The good, adventurous stories, not the terrifying ones that marched in time with Nazi boots. And so Darby discarded her questions, her curiosity abated. Something terrible had happened, but she didn’t want to know, didn’t need to know. She wasn’t any different than her friends. Tammy Dodd’s dad had fought in Vietnam. Michelle Ingalls had a grandpa who died in Korea.
    In high school, Darby had received a C- on the Holocaust unit of history, though she usually received As and Bs. She’d forged her mother’s name on the report card and also performed her one and only act of skipping school the day her class watched a documentary with real footage of a concentration camp. Years later, when a friend invited her to watch Schindler’s List , Darby had other plans. It wasn’t exactly that she was avoiding the subject. But after the intense reaction from her mother and the silence of her grandmother over a television miniseries and simple questions, Darby had received the unconscious message that looking back was not good—until Grandma Celia’s letter.
    So she picked up her luggage and said good-bye to Grandma’s empty room. She was leaving on a jet plane. And though Darby knew she’d be back in three weeks, the next line in the song kept echoing through her thoughts: “Don’t know when I’ll be back again.”
    San Francisco International Airport was like a city in itself. She had to carefully follow the right exits and get in the correct lanes without being run over by a shuttle bus or taxi. Her mother gave advice as they looked for a parking place close to the international terminal and Lufthansa Airlines.
    Darby had been there a few times to pick up friends, but she preferred the smaller airports in Redding and Sacramento for any trips that required air travel. The farthest she’d gone was New Mexico for a photography conference and Montana to visit a friend. Darby suddenly wondered about her old friend Tristie Grant in Columbia Falls, Montana. She’d received a nice sympathy card from the Grant family, and though distance in both miles and lifestyles had pulled their friendship apart, Darby knew she could always call her college friend and have a ready ear to listen. If only someone like Tristie was traveling with her, then perhaps the knot in her stomach wouldn’t be