The Fifth Passenger

and memoirist who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Picture a woman with dark, curly hair, lively eyes, an easy smile, a woman you might pass on the cobblestone streets of Cambridge and imagine that she has had a simple, lovely life. But Joanna's life has been shaped by an enormous secret. It a family tragedy that she was shielded from until well into adulthood, a secret that cast a long, sad shadow over her childhood. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is

family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I was born in the Hudson River Valley in a town that a lot of people know. It's sort of a popular town outside the city called Nayak. So Nayak sits on the river sits on the Hudson River. It's a very beautiful, beautiful place. It's a place that you know, Manhattan Night's like to come visit for the day.

There are wonderful restaurants and beautiful shops and lovely walks along the river, seafood restaurants, boats, that kind of thing. It's a lovely place to live. Kids all walked to school there at sort of a utopian place. So I was born in this town and my father had a dental practice in the town. And when I was about three, for reasons that were were not quite clear to me, my family moved to a few towns over. We moved

to a very different place. We moved inland to the kind of mountains a few miles up from nyack Um to a very very tiny town called Pomona that was more a very new town. It was kind of a fake town that catered to people fleeing the city as they did in the seventies, and was filled with brand new, modern glass houses. We moved to one of these houses, a very large house that was kind of surrounded by forest.

It couldn't have been more different than nyak which was this tiny The ancient town where the houses are very close together, and we knew all our neighbors and kind of ran back and forth between their houses and this new town Pomona, the houses were sent much farther away, and you couldn't see your neighbors. And in retrospect, I realized that was what my parents wanted. They wanted privacy,

they wanted to be anonymous in this town. At the time, I didn't understand it, And what I did understand was that this felt like a kind of scary, strange place to me. And I also understood that my mother was sort of unhappy in this place, and I didn't understand why.

You know, I would walk into the kitchen and find my mother crying, or I would do some small thing that didn't seem at all like a big deal to me, like take my security blanket out of the dryer on my own, or said this this really happened, um, and my mother would you know, go crazy and start screaming at me in this sort of hysterical way and grow so angry at me that I truly couldn't understand it. Um,

you know, screaming get away from me. I can't look at you, I can't see you get away from me, and as a small child, I spent a lot more time with my father. There's a way in which, you know, some people maybe are just by nature kid people, and some people are not. And my father just was a kid person, and he just loved doing stuff with me. And so my childhood, when I think back on it, and as I as I experienced it at the time

as well, had these kind of polarities to it. I have such vivid memories of being of kind of trapsing around this giant cold house, not quite knowing what to do with myself, or sitting by myself playing with my million barbie dolls, um wishing that my mom would sit on the floor and play with me. And then also have these memories of going to the park with my dad, going to this lake nearby and feeding duck. Joanna has a much older sister, Amy, who no longer lives at home.

By the time Joanna is a toddler, this is familiar to me. I grew up that way too, the feeling on the one hand of having a sister and on the other of being alone, surrounded by the eyes of all your toy animals, your barbies, staring back at you, I had those barbies to army of barbies, army of barbies who are like your friends and only friends or so would feels exactly making up stories for them and so Um. Yes, So I did grow up feeling like an only child. So I had an older sister who

was eighteen years my elder, Amy. I didn't really understand where she lived or what she did. Amy Um basically graduated from college by the time I was born, and in a way, the role she played in my life was more of an aunt, a kind of fond but distant aunt. She would occasionally come to our house on my birthday, you know, give me a little present. She would often show up at her house unexpected. So I

didn't I just didn't understand. And I think, if I'm really honest, which I'm sorry, I often try to kind of, I will be honest here and say I really often try to sugarcoat our life and make excuses for everyone. But the truth is I'm sort of struggling that to cry here. You know, I I was just filled with longing. I wanted I so badly, just wanted her to be a sister, sister too, despite her age to come back and live with us and be there every day. We're going to take a quick break, we'll be back in

a moment. What Joanna didn't realize was that there was an entire tragic history surrounding her sister Amy. Sometimes Joanna would walk in on her mother crying or looking horribly sad, and she would ask what was wrong, because Joanna presumed that she she must have done something wrong that her mother's sadness had to do with her. In general, I knew not to ask anything of more depth than what's wrong,

you know, to not kind of probe at all. And as an adult it's actually been I'm forty six years old, and it's still very very hard for me to probe deeply, to ask my mother difficult questions or to tell my mother difficult things. But it also is difficult for me to talk I realized to talk to other people, to kind of probe deeply into other people's lives, and it's affected my friendships. There's this way in which I was kind of raised in this environment of just pretending that

everything is fine. This is the work of a lifetime, isn't it. Sometimes we're able to look back, or we're forced to look back. And see all the ways in which our childhood selves have formed the adults we've become. Especially when we discover a secret that has been kept from us, we can look back and see the isolation, the loneliness, the walking on eggshells that we once had to do. And finally we understand all the ways we

were shaped by the unsaid. Because here's the thing. We feel the things that are hidden from us, they live in our bodies, in our bones, but as children we don't understand. It's only later that the piece has fallen a place. And for Joanna, one of those pieces was a trio of portraits that hung in her childhood home. One was a boy, dark hair in a style that dated the portraits, neatly parted on the side and kind of brushed to the side. It was sort of nineteen

fifties look, though I didn't quite understand that. I just knew that this was a different thing from a different era. And then there were two girls who did not look like at all. One girl had dark brown hair and bright green eyes and kind of olive skin, and um was looking at the artist in a very kind of I don't want to say ferocious because that's too extreme, but a kind of bold way and smiling, but not a smile of joy, a kind of smile of engagement.

More and um an intelligence. There was a fierce intelligence to this girl, really captivating. And then the third one was also a girl younger who had beautiful blonde hair, kind of ash blonde um that kind of curled softly to her shoulders, and bright blue eyes and a much kind of softer expression on her face. She looked kind of shy, almost kind of bashfulled. Both girls were matching blue ribbons in their hair. The children were of indeterminate age,

like it wasn't quite clear to me. Maybe the older girl was on the cusp of adolescence, like ten or eleven, maybe twelve. The other two kids, it wasn't clear. Um, they weren't little kids, but nor were they teenagers. So these portraits um sort of gazed down at me for a lot of my day as I watched TV, as I did everything, and I had no idea who they were of I honestly thought that they were art. We had a lot of art in her house, uh, you know, a lot of original art of all from all different eras,

all different types. I told myself that these were just beautiful paintings, and so what did I do with this? I I loved them, and I would gaze at them. I would sit there on the sofa. I was a huge reader, and I spent a lot of time just lying on the sofa eating an apple, and I would kind of gaze at them and make up stories about them in my head. And I would when I read books, I would kind of imagine the characters as as looking like these kids. Joanna also recalls a mysterious photograph in

a home that has no family photos at all. There's one picture in Joanna's dad's office, a place he retreats to to smoke his pipe and do paperwork, of a family, but whose family. These people are strangers to her still, they pull her in and she knows in a bone shaking way that she'd better not ask about it. But when she's about ten years old, her need to know wins out. So finally, one day, after contemplating it for a very long time, I said, who are these people

in the photo? And my father said, you you really don't know who these people are? And I said no, But I felt there's a horrible guilt, This horrible guilt because and I thought, I guess I should know who they are. And he he said, even sort of incredulous, and he took the photo from me, and he pointed to the woman in it and he said, that's your mother.

And then he pointed to the man in the photo, who was also smiling and laughing and looked very happy, and he said, you and that handsome devil is me. And then he pointed to the teenagers, the children in the photo, and he said, this boy right here is your brother Mark. And so one of the people in the photo who I had perceived as being a girl, was a boy who had very long hair and you know, kind of delicate features. Um, and I suddenly went the minute he said boy, I realized, oh my gosh, that

is a boy. I hadn't realized it, but in my mind was reeling because of course I didn't know that I had a brother. And then he went on and said, in this girl right here, that's your sister Amy. You know your sister Amy, And I said yes. And then he pointed too the other girl, the third girl who had could have blond, curly hair, and he said, and

this beautiful girl is your sister Anita. And his voice broke, and it never seen my father cry and all my father was always happy, and it just kind of held me close to him, and you, I just said oh. And he helped me for a long time, and then I it was my bedtime and I said good night and I left. So in all the years between that first conversation Joanna and her father had in which he told her of her brother and sister, those pastel portraits on the family room wall, they never again spoke of

her siblings, Anita and Mark. If people asked Joanna if she was an only child, she would respond that she had one sister, a much older sister. She just didn't allow herself to go there. In a way, she unconsciously conspired with her parents to allow the secret to go back into its hiding place. After all, this is a secret kept not only by Joanna's parents, but by her entire large extended family. If you think about it, it's kind of amazing Joanna never learned more about her siblings.

Think of the many many cousins of Joanna's, the aunts and uncles, the satyrs, the thanksgivings, the reunions, the Mother's day lunches. Not one mention of her vanished brother and sister. Was it a conspiracy of silence? Did my parents ay to my whole family, we don't want Joanna to grow up with the specter of the lost children? Is that

what happened? Or was it just kind of an unspoken rule in my family, a very talkative, kind of stereotypical Woody Allen movie Jewish family in which people were always talking and arguing. Was it just an uns oken rule that no one was ever going to talk to me about this? I still don't know. It's one of the things I'm struggling to find out. I know my mother very much did not want me to be tainted by this tragedy or to feel like a replacement child in

any way. She's told me this explicitly, that she didn't want me to be known as the girl whose brother and sister died, or the girl whose parents had this horrible tragedy happened to them. She wanted me to be my own person, free from the burden of this tragedy. And I really I respect her so much for that. I understand that I do, I really really do. The only clues that Joanna has as to the fate of her siblings is when as a child she eavesdrops on

her mother's telephone conversations. My mother, almost every evening, like so many mothers of her generation, would spend the evening talking on the phone to her friends and so. Then she would sit in her bedroom using her blue rotary dial phone talking dif friends, and I would be reading or watching QV and I would catch these glimpses of the subject. I would hear these these little bits and pieces of things. And one of the things that would often jump out at me, probably because the tone of

her voice changed, would be this term the accident. So she would say, you know, oh, we weren't at that wedding that was right after the accident, or oh, I didn't do X y Z, you know with the synagogue that was right after the accident. I just couldn't do anything at that time, or oh I lost touch with so and so after the accident, I just couldn't see her anymore. So my child brain started to realize that there had been there the accident meant something to do

with my brother and sister. It took some time, but I made the association, though I was, of course afraid to ask what the accident was, and I developed a whole story in my head it which was that my parents had been driving a car. I imagined it as the car that we had at that point, which may have been a giant chevery cabrief classic um. And it had been snowing, and they had been in an accident

on the highway and something had happened. I couldn't envision the actual accident, but I would lie in bed at night and kind of run through this scenario, the story of my parents driving the car in the snow and some sort of accident happening that resulted in my brother and sister somehow dying. Um. And it would somehow simultaneously terrify me so that I couldn't fall asleep, but also comfort me so that I could. But I of course never asked what the accident was. Imagine growing up without

critical information about your family. Imagine creating your own story, one that feels satisfying enough and survives into adulthood until someone shatters that story. That is exactly what happened in two thousand ten. Joanna is married and the mother of two young kids. Her first book, a novel, is about to come out and paperback and one of her first events is at a small independent bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey.

When she gets there, the audience is packed a great thing, obviously, and there are quite a few staff members lined up to greet her. So I was going down the line as if I were at a wedding, shaking their hands. And I get to this one particular man and he shake my hand and tears welled up in his eyes, and he, with his voice breaking, said to me, can get very nervously. Can you do you come with me? Could you? Could you come with me for a second. Could you just come to the office for a second.

So I went with him, and we got to the office and he was actually sweat adding really profusely, and he handed me some water and was kind of hunting and hawing, and then finally he said, I'm Jonah Zimless, and he sort of looked at me. I'm not really conveying. He said it to me in this kind of pretendous way, you presuming that I would know who he was, but I did not. And and then he said I'm the

owner of this bookshop. And I thought, oh no, this is going to be a terrible thing about my book he's telling me he's the owner of the bookshop, and all of these thoughts were raising through my mind. But then he sort of looked perplexed, and he said, you don't know my name. You don't know who I am. And I said, no, I'm you know, I'm sorry. He said I was your brother Mark's best friend. And that was when sort of the tears really let loose, and he said, my family lived, we were neighbors in Nayak.

I was your brother Mark's best friend, and I was in love with your sister Anita. And then he just fawn started crying and we sort of sat there. I started crying too. I had never met anyone who knew my brother and sister, because of course I did. All my cousins, my aunts, and uncle's family friends, they all did,

but they didn't speak of them to me. So I had never been in this situation before with someone who was a peer of my brother and sister and knew them really well, and for who like who had sort of suffered a loss himself, you know, to use the contemporary parliance. And he just started talking about the accident, about our town, Nayak, and how the accident had affected our town, but he I didn't understand anything that he

was saying. He was naming people's names and discussing repercussions and all sorts of things, but I didn't know any of this. And he kept saying, I know you know this, and I knew you knew this, and I finally said, I just I I need to tell you something. I actually don't know anything. And he looked at me a little bit like I was crazy, and I explained, I said, you know, I know that I have his brother and sister, but my parents have never ever talked to me about them.

And I don't even know what happened. I I sort of know that there was an accident, but I don't know what that accident was. And he was so stunned, I mean, his jaw dropped open, and he just kind

of stared at me for a very long time. And you know, then he of course said what I guess any empathic, normal person would say, which was he was like, oh god, oh God, And he felt horrible, and it was clear that he didn't know how much to say to me, like he wanted to talk to me about all this, but he didn't necessarily feel that it was his place to tell me about this horrible tragedy in my own family. He basically said, you know, this was a tragedy for the whole town. The whole town was

in mourning, the whole town was affected by it. And then he said, you know, I know there was obviously a tragedy for your family. I'm not in any way comparing our grief and sorrow to your family is. I'm not. Please don't think that I am. This conversation between Joanna and Jonah is the first of several talks they have in which the horrific truth of the accident that killed her siblings slowly reveals itself. On that first evening, she's so shaken by the conversation that she sits in the

office of his bookstore sobbing. Later, he contacts her again and makes himself available to her should she want to know more. Jonah also asks Joanna if he can put her in touch with others, some people from Nayak who want to connect with her. It turns out that there was a world of people affected by this accident. They've spent their lives devastated by it talking about it all the while. Joanna's family moved into their glasshouse and lived in complete silence. We're going to take a quick break.

Here are the bare bones of what happened. In June of nine, the year before Joanna's birth, her parents went on a vacation to Grand Bahama Island to celebrate their anniversary. It was not a trip Joanna's mom wanted to make, but her dad convinced her that it would be fun. They left Mark and Anita, both middle schoolers, along with Amy, a high school student, in the care of their maternal grandmother, Pearl, a sweet, sweet person, but not someone who could necessarily

control teenagers. Before their trip, Amy had turned seventeen and they had given her a car, a red Mustang convertible. Amy decided to take her younger siblings, along with a family friend named Rachel Finer, to the beach in Westchester and then passa blee to a rickety old amusement park called Ride plain Land. So this was a Sunday night at the end of June. It was a beautiful day out and you know, it got dark very late at

that point. Nayak is a pedestrian town. It's a real, as I said, utopian, old fashioned American town where kids play in the streets. There's not a lot of traffic. There were tons of families and kids in the town, and at this time, there were all of these kids playing on their lawns, you know, having barbecues, all sorts of stuff was happening. As Amy and the kids drove along Broadway, a large sedan that had gotten off the thru away from a different exit, crashed into the convertible.

Joanna researches the coroner's report and discovers that the kids weren't killed on impact, but were gravely injured. So this accident, you know, which was just brutal, it was loud, you know, the impact was heard literally throughout the town. That's not just a kind of thing to say like, it was actually heard throughout the whole town. And people came racing out of their houses in their backyards. And and these are all people who knew everyone involved and saw these children,

I mean young teenagers, children. My sister was child, my brother was fourteen, as was Rachel in the street, you know, essentially dead and um, the finders who lived right there, it's so horrible. They were waiting for Rachel to come home, waiting for her, getting angry. You know the parents were getting angry, thinking where is she, Why isn't she home yet? Why isn't she home yet? What's wrong? They thought she was going to be back butch earlier, and they heard

the accident and they went running out into the street. Yeah, there are some secrets that, even when revealed, unpacked, understood, will never fully be put to rest. How can a loss, this violent and profound, one that affected an entire town and devastated two families ever be made Okay, time heals all wounds, it is said, or God doesn't give us more than we can handle, or my personal favorite, everything happens for a reason. These are the things well meaning

people say to those who are grieving. We don't like to acknowledge that there are some wounds that will always remain at least somewhat open, that it is our job to bear them, to transform them slowly over time by making meaning out of them, something Joanna is doing. And the writing, research and reporting of this story she has never known, and it haunted her all the more because of not knowing. Healing all of us back as in

honestly pretty unbearable. I have three kids now. They are fourteen, ten and three and it's simultaneously is causing me to remember so much about my own childhood, which then of course forces me to think about how I am as a mother and makes me so conscious of every choice that I make while simultaneously feeling strangely vulnerable, you know, sort of remembering all of these moments from my own childhood when I felt so alone and afraid, or confused

or sometimes happy. Honestly, just but just remembering my way back into my childhood is a really profound thing to do as a parent, particularly a parent with kids at these very developmental ages. Also my son and daughter being about the ages that my siblings were when they were killed. I have been doing this research very very slowly, because each time I uncover something, it just eviscerats me in a matter that I was not prepared for. You know,

I have a history as a journalist or reporter. You know, I've done a huge amount of research for you know, fiction projects, for my last memoir project, and I thought, I'm ready for this. I'm ready to to sort of lay bare these secrets. I'm ready to kind of talk about all this with my family. But maybe you're never ready. Can you imagine a world in which you had never known this, where the secret remained very in those portraits on the wall. You know, imagine a past in which

you would never ask the question. I mean, do you in any way I wish that you didn't know this? Maybe a little part of me does and wishes that my relationship with my mother and my sister could be less complicated. You know that, because my relationship with my mother, whom I love dearly and I love like in this animal love, and you also feel so protective of in so many ways, But my relationship with her is very fraught, and I just wish that it could be less complicated.

So it's not so much that you wish you didn't know the secret as that you wish the secret had never existed. Yeah, I either wish I had never existed, or I wish that maybe they had. But the truth is you can never truly shut the door. Right. Here's Joanna reading from the manuscript of her upcoming memoir. Where do I start? How do I begin? How do I

tell a story that begins before my birth? Or rather I should say the story that resulted, grim and improbable as it sounds, in my existence, it's a story that now I'm called upon to tell this explanation of my life, of my family, of how I came to be. Nearly every day, every time someone innocently asks do you have brothers and sisters? Or are you from a big family?

But there's no easy answer, no response that won't lead to further questions at best, or at worst make the inquirer uncomfortable or horrified, or sad or filled with regret that she'd brought up such painful memories. There's no answer that won't lead to an awkward social moment, a tragic silence within a gay part, and after the shockwas off, there will still always be more questions, questions I can't necessarily answer. I'd like to thank my guest, Joanna Raykoff.

You can find out more about Joanna and her books at Joanna Rakoff dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share with us, you can get in touch at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.

For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,