The Choice

forsake our marriage in order to take Marianne to America. However
painfully, I had been willing to sacriĕce our family, our partnership—
the very things Béla had been unable to accept losing. And so we
began our new life on an unequal footing. I could feel that though his
devotion to us could be measured in all that he had given up, he was
still dizzy from what he had lost. And where I felt relief and joy, he
felt hurt. Happy as I was to greet our new life, I could already feel that
Béla’s loss put a dangerous pressure on all the unknowns ahead.
So there was sacriĕce at the heart of our choice. And there was also
a lie: the report from the medical examiner, the X-rays we had pressed
inside a folder with our visa applications. We couldn’t allow the ghost
of Béla’s old illness, his TB, to deter our future, so Csicsi had posed as
Béla and gone with me to the medical examiner. We now carried
pictures of Csicsi’s chest, clear as spring water. When the naturalization
officers cleared Béla for immigration, it would be Csicsi’s body and
medical history they legitimized, another man’s body they determined
to be sound.
I wanted to breathe easily. To cherish our safety and good fortune
as miracles, not guard them close and warily. I wanted to teach my
daughter conĕdence in where she stood. ere she was, hair whipping
around her head, cheeks red from the wind. “Liberty!” she called,
pleased with her new word. On a whim I took the paciĕer that hung
on a ribbon around her neck and threw it into the sea.
If I had turned around, I might have seen Béla caution me. But I
wasn’t looking. “We’re Americans now. American children don’t use
paciĕers,” I said, heady and improvising, tossing my daughter’s one
token of security like it was parade confetti. I wanted Marianne to be
what I wanted to be: someone who ĕts in, who isn’t plagued by the
idea of being different, of being Ęawed, of playing catch-up forever in
a relentless race away from the claws of the past.
She didn’t complain. She was excited by the novelty of our