Free Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff

mother had something wrong with her heart. It was too big. She died right in Poppy’s bedroom on a sunny day.” She took a breath. “I think that’s an all right way to die, but it’s not all right that I don’t remember her.”
    “A picture?” he asked. “You have a picture?”
    “Poppy has a book with her pictures, but they’re blurry, and I don’t know what her voice was like. You know?”
    She could see his teeth chewing on his lower lip. She opened the paper bag from Gram: two sandwiches, Spam, apples, Social Tea cookies.
    “I hate this,” she said, handing one of the sandwiches to him. “Gram does too. After the war we’re never going to have one can of Spam again. And Poppy says if we have any left in the kitchen cabinet, he’s going to throw them right in the ocean.”
    Albert had a mouthful of it. “I like this,” he said. “I like everything. My grandmother, Nagymamma, loved to cook for me. She said I was her best . . .” He closed his eyes, trying to think.
    “Customer,” Lily said, watching him nod, as she tried to get her mouth around the word. “Nahj . . .”
    “It means big mother, grandmother. The
Nagy
part just means big.”
    Lily took a tiny piece of Spam and tossed it into the water. “For the fish,” she said. “They probably don’t like it either.”
    “You know my mother is dead too, and my father,” he said.
    Both, she thought. She couldn’t picture what it would be like with Poppy dead. So terrible . . .
    “They are dead because they had a newspaper. They wrote bad things about Hitler and the Nazis. And their friends would give out the papers. They were caught one day. The Nazis came to the house . . .”
    Lily let out her breath. She didn’t want to look in his eyes, but she couldn’t help it, she glanced at him quickly, but he didn’t look as if he would cry. He was squinting at the water, his eyes dry. “Nagymamma came for me, for Ruth and me, just before they came to our house. And there was no time, not one minute. We did not say goodbye, my mother was running into the kitchen, trying to burn small pieces of paper at the stove, and she looked over her shoulder and told us, ‘
Szeretlek
,’ and then she looked back because the stove was hot and she was almost burning her fingers.”
    Lily was biting her own lip, chewing on her lip, watching a small fish tear a piece of the Spam, and then another . . .
    “It means ‘I love you,’ ” he said before she could ask. “But if they loved us, they would not have done that, they would not have bothered with newspapers. And we do not even know what happened to them. Nagymamma just got a postcard from the police that they were dead.”
    “Oh, Albert,” Lily said, thinking how angry he looked, thinking she was angry too. Poppy should have stayed home.
    “And we went to Austria, Ruth and me, in the back of Mr. Kovacs’s car, and then across to Switzerland. Mr. Kovacs promised he was going to sneak us all the way across Europe. In Switzerland Ruth was sick with”—he touched is face—“marks.”
    “Chicken pox?”
    He shook his head.
    “Measles.”
    “Yes, and we had been traveling for so long, and Ruth had a fever, a big fever, I knew it. I could not tell anyone.” He shook his head, and Lily could see him making fists of his hands.
    “We still had to cross the mountains into France,” he said. “Mr. Kovacs was pretending we were his children, and the Nazis were there, right there.” He was almost breathless, telling her. “We had to get to the ship that would take us to America.” He stopped for a moment. “I was afraid they would not let Ruth go.”
    Lily couldn’t look at him. She tore off another piece of Spam for the fish, and the crust of her bread.
    “In France she was so thirsty. Her face was red, and she was burning.” Albert stood up, balancing himself on the rock, watching the ship, a little closer now. He pointed to the end of the jetty, across the water. “Ruth is in