Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “There are two men here to see you,” she says tightly.

  18.

  Ava

  1989

  Heart thudding in her ears, Ava twists the bedroom doorknob. Her intention at first is to just crack the door a little, but the button lock has barely popped before the door flies open with enough force that she has to leap back to avoid getting hit.

  Her daughter stands in the threshold, arms crossed over her chest, her smooth face pink with annoyance. “My God,” she huffs, pushing past Ava into the bedroom. “What took you so long?”

  Ava licks her lips again. “I’m sorry. I was a little distracted.”

  “Distracted? Or deaf? I have to be back at the park in five minutes!”

  “Which park?” asks Ava reflexively. “Not Tompkins, I hope?” Over her vocal objections, Sophie and her friends have taken to congregating in Tompkins Square Park, currently home to half the city’s homeless population.

  “We’re just hanging around outside it.” Striding into the master bathroom, Sophie stares down at Ava’s overflowing laundry bin for a moment before picking it up with a sigh. “I thought you said you were doing laundry today.”

  “Before dinner,” says Ava, distractedly wondering if she can clear the box and letters from the bed before her daughter turns back around. But before the thought is even complete Sophie has the bin in her arms and is making her way back into the bedroom with it.

  “So Erica’s sweatshirt’s still dirty then,” she is saying.

  “It’s just a sweatshirt,” Ava reminds her mildly.

  “Yes, but it’s not mine, and I promised her I’d take good care of it.”

  Reaching the bed, her daughter drops the basket at its foot and begins rifling through its rumpled contents. Ava watches warily, until it strikes her that Sophie’s less likely to notice the letters if Ava herself isn’t staring at them obsessively. Turning back to her drafting table, she takes a swig of cold coffee while feigning interest in her abandoned Mutter Trudi illustration. In reality, though, she is seeing not the wiry-haired old witch but Ilse’s blue eyes, narrowed against the sun. Dummes Mädchen. What on earth is the matter with you now?

  Everything, Ava thinks wearily. She still feels utterly disoriented—as though the past hour’s revelations have severed her connection to her life the way an axe might cut through a ship’s anchor, setting it adrift.

  It’s not just the sheer selfishness of Ilse’s actions that has left her stunned: the empty justifications, the self-imposed blindness, the continual, cynical prioritization of personal gain over principle. Nor is it even that Ilse made these confessions not to Ava, her own daughter, but to a woman she hadn’t seen for four decades; a woman she’d betrayed in the most callous of ways. It’s also the voice of these pages; the fact that the person they reveal is a complete stranger to her own daughter. Affectionate and confessional, nostalgic and reflective, anguished and surprisingly, sharply humorous, she is someone who has been almost completely absent for Ava’s entire life.

  “What was in the box, by the way? What are all these?”

  Glancing up again, Ava sees with dismay that Sophie’s attention has indeed shifted from the laundry to the open carton and scattered letters.

  “Nothing,” she says quickly. Shit. “Well, not nothing. But nothing you need to worry about.”

  She takes a step back toward the bed. But already it’s too late: Sophie has scooped a handful of the envelopes up off the coverlet. “Renate Bauer,” she reads. “Who’s that?”

  “I have no idea.” Ava fights to keep her voice even. What she wants to do is to leap across the room, to snatch the pages from her daughter’s grasp as she’d once snatched dangerous items from her chubby toddler fists (topless bottles of baby aspirin; dusty ant traps; on one heart-stopping occasion an X-acto knife, capped but potentially lethal). But it’s as though gravity has trebled its grip on her body.

  “163 Eldridge,” Sophie is reading. “That’s, like, a couple blocks away, right?” She is turning the top envelope over in her hands now. When she registers the return address her eyes narrow.

  “They’re from Oma,” she says, a new intensity in her voice.

  The word Oma seems to break Ava’s paralysis: she begins making her way back across the room. “Yes.”

  “If they’re for Renate Bauer, why are they here?”

  “I don’t know.” Reaching the bed, Ava holds out her hand. “Can I have those, please?”

  Ignoring the gesture, her daughter continues shuffling through the papery stack. Then she stops again, and Ava sees to her horror that she is studying Bernard Frankel’s note. “Who’s…”

  “I said give them.” Leaning across the bed, Ava rips the paper and envelopes from Sophie’s hands.

  Her daughter jerks back as though she’s been slapped. “What the hell, Mom?” Stunned, Sophie stares at her mother with her grandmother’s ice-blue eyes. “What is wrong with you today?”

  “I’m sorry.” Breathing heavily, Ava begins gathering the envelopes back up again. An ocean seems to be roaring in her ears. “I just—you weren’t listening. But I’m sorry.”

  Her daughter is still staring at her now, her lips in a tight, pale line, her eyes narrowed the way they are when she works out math problems.

  “LLP,” she says. What does that mean?”

  Ava takes a deep breath. “It’s how lawyers sign things.”

  “Why is Oma’s lawyer writing you?” Sophie asks slowly.

  Standing up fully, Ava faces her daughter, the letters pressed against her chest. She can’t think of a single thing to say.

  Sophie’s blue gaze hardens. “Read me the note,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Read me the lawyer’s note.”

  “It’s in German,” says Ava, stalling.

  “So translate it.”

  “There’s really no need…”

  “Read it,” Sophie repeats, in a low, even voice that—just like her late grandmother’s—carries ten times the power of any shout.

  Ava hesitates. Then, trapped, she sinks back onto the bed. Clearing her throat, she begins reading, aware that her voice is trembling. “Dear Ms. von Fischer: As your mother’s lawyer and designated executor of her estate, I regret to inform you that your mother—Ilse Maria von Fischer—passed away on the twelfth of April, after a long battle with uterine cancer…

  “In April?” Sophie interrupts, incredulous. “Oma died last month?”

  “Yes.”

  “But…” Her daughter has both hands pressed to her forehead. “But you told me she died in a car crash. When I was a baby.”

  “I know I did.”

  Outside on the window ledge a mourning dove chooses the moment to release its throaty warble. Ava desperately wishes she and the bird could trade places; that she could sing her bereavement and take flight.

  “So…I’ve had a grandmother?” Sophie asks, at last. “For my whole life, until just now?”

  The tremble in her young voice is so audible, so devastated that for a moment Ava wants nothing more than to pull the girl into her lap; something she’d done so often, so naturally in years past. (When was the last time? When had Sophie stopped allowing it?)

  “There were reasons,” she says desperately. “I can explain. I just…”

  But her daughter cuts her off. “I don’t have time now.” Her tone is stony, her face closed like a book. “I have to go. I have to go meet Erica.”

  “This is more important than your friends,” says Ava.

  “Oh, really?” Her daughter laughs a short laugh that sounds more like a sob. “At least my friends don’t lie to me.”

  “Sophie!” Ava races after her. “I wasn’t lying. Not really. I was only trying to protect you.”

  “Protecting me by lying to me?” Sophie’s hand is alread
y on the doorknob. “You’ve got a funny idea of protection. Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised by that.”

  Ava stops, stung. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.” And stepping into the hallway, Sophie slams the door in her wake, leaving Ava frozen in place.

  As the front door’s deadbolts are thrown back in rapid succession (klunk klunk klunk) Ava remains where she is, frozen in dismay. She’s right, she realizes, as the front door thunders shut again. Oh my God. She’s right.

  Stunned, Ava stumbles back to the cluttered bed. The guilt feels as though it’s coursing through her very veins. She’s right. She’s completely right. For all her excoriation of Ilse for lying about Ava’s parentage, and for all of Ava’s pledges to be an entirely different kind of parent, in the end she has repeated the exact same sins of her mother. She has lied. She has kept Sophie from her own story.

  Sinking to her knees on the coverlet, Ava peers over the dust-coated air conditioner, down onto the sleepy Saturday street. Spotting Sophie’s slim form turning onto Second Avenue—not strolling, this time, but nearly running, vest flapping with each violent step—she briefly contemplates throwing up the sash to shout after her, even though this would send the entire air conditioner crashing into the street. She refrains only because she realizes that calling after Sophie will only hasten—and perhaps prolong—her flight.

  And anyway, what can she say?

  Biting her lip, she stares down at the letters. Then she sweeps them back together and stuffs them into her battered New Yorker tote, along with her wallet. Wriggling into a denim skirt, she slings the tote over her shoulder and makes her way to the bureau mirror. The woman who stares back is a stranger: haggard and ancient. The circles beneath her eyes are shadowy troughs, the sun spots by her graying hairline a spreading crap-colored rash. My God. How did I get so old? How did I let any of this happen?

  Looking-glass Ava returns her gaze coldly but says nothing. Suddenly Ava is so exhausted that she wants nothing more than to crawl back under the covers. Instead, she forces herself to meet her own gaze, unflinchingly, directly. You did this, she tells herself. Now fix it.

  * * *

  Outside she blinks into the late-afternoon light, for a moment flashing back to a terrifying night twelve years earlier: the city wrapped in eerie blackness and stifling heat, Sophie wan and warm against Ava’s lips. Now, in part fueled by the extraordinary things she has just read, Ava feels the same visceral fear; that terrified epiphany of just how tenuous it all is; how everything that anchors her might vanish in the blink of a feverish eye.

  What if I lose her, she remembers wailing to Livi.

  Looking both ways down the sidewalk, she takes a deep breath, clearing her thoughts. Where had Sophie said she was meeting Erica?

  Of course. Tompkins Square Park. We’re just hanging around outside it.

  Ava sets out at a near gallop, taking Allen to East Houston and taking a right, then another left onto Avenue B. As she pushes past the weekend sidewalk strollers—skinheads and punks, college kids and cross-dressers, a young man in tight pink spandex shorts—she scans them for Sophie’s pin-straight platinum hair, to no avail. She scans for it again when she reaches the park, breathing through her mouth to escape the stench (urine, sweat, pot, beer, spoiled milk, and a hundred other notes too rankly entangled to single out).

  In one corner a man drinks from a can of Miller while cooking hot dogs on a black Weber. Tall and tan, he might be a suburban husband presiding over a Sunday afternoon barbecue but for the track marks on his skinny arms and legs. Nearby a woman wearing just a bra and a pair of cutoffs lies on a moldy sofa, an old Village Voice over her face, her bare feet bruised, skeletal-looking, the toes painted a jarring shade of electric orange.

  Behind them, the tents that are the subject of so much vitriol and conflict look improbably innocuous in the afternoon sunlight, their “walls” fluttering in the summerlike breeze like misshapen sails on some surrealist ship of the damned. They remind Ava of the bedsheet forts she and Sophie once built together in the living room, and as she peers inside those open enough to do so, she sees her daughter at age three: twinkle-eyed and giggling, smelling of baby shampoo and baby sweat, her plump arms up in supplication: Hug! Hug! Hold me! Uppah! Was there ever a time when Ava refused? Said: No, Mama’s too tired right now? The possibility strikes her like a body blow now. Stupid, she thinks again: the idea that she’d have ever seen the chance to hold her daughter as anything short of precious and rare. Stupid that she’d ever assumed that Sophie’s love would simply always be there: immediate. Instinctive. Imperative. Stupid stupid stupid.

  After circling the square once more with no Sophie sighting, she cuts back across Ninth, poking her head into Kim’s Video on Avenue A before working her way back down Second Avenue. She hits a Ukrainian diner where Sophie sometimes studies with friends, then the junk-filled thrift shop where she spends her babysitting money. Typical for a summer Saturday, the place is packed with teens who can’t seem to decide whether to dress up as Times Square strippers or Wall Street bankers: lacy bustiers paired with baggy trousers. Bare, boyish chests paired with men’s suspenders. Fishnets paired with oversized pinstriped blazers, the latter reinforced with military-worthy shoulder pads. But Sophie is not among them, and the plump transvestite working the register hasn’t seen her. “I’d know, sweetheart,” the latter confesses wearily, blowing a stream of smoke toward a small forest of candy-bright Pez dispensers. “I have to watch these kids like a hawk.” She wiggles two hands stacked with rings, furred with hair. “Sticky fingers,” she adds, with a grin that reveals two top teeth capped in gold.

  Ava blinks, close to tears. “I’ll come back later,” she manages. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime,” says the cashier kindly. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  And then, as Ava turns away: “Hey. What’s your accent, baby?”

  “Danish,” Ava says. She doesn’t turn back.

  * * *

  Outside she leans against the riotously painted wall. This is pointless. It’s like trying to find a lost earring on the can-littered Coney Island beach. What she really wants to do is to sink down onto the sidewalk, next to the homeless girl parked there with her backpack and a pit bull that looks nearly as drugged out as its owner. Instead, Ava reaches into her bag for the granola bar she has remembered she has and has no interest in consuming herself. “Here,” she says. “I’m sorry I don’t have more.”

  The girl takes the green-wrapped square into a filthy-looking hand. She looks nonplussed.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she says, her tone implying that this is perhaps the worst insult she can think up at the moment. Ava stares down at the brat, torn between slapping and hugging her before forcing herself to resume her search.

  Heading back down Second Avenue, she passes a piano shop, a nail salon, another vintage clothing store with windows showing faceless mannequins in fur-collared coats, blankly oblivious to the summerlike heat. At the corner of Third Street a man urinates against a graffiti-scrawled wall while his German shepherd shits behind him on the curb. A young woman in a headscarf pushes her stroller past them both quickly, her green eyes fixed resolutely ahead.

  As the light deepens, the streets begin to feel not like Ava’s beloved home city but a gauntlet lined by shadowy, sharp-edged edifices, structures whose sole purpose is to make her feel as small and worthless as she knows she is. She wends her way back toward Second, so tired she can barely see where she’s going. Stupid, she thinks again. Stupid to even have tried to find her. But what else can she do? She has to find her. She has to fix this. I’m sorry, baby, she thinks. I’m so sorry. The thought brings her back to one of the many desperate pleas in Ilse’s letters: Perhaps one day, she had written her former friend, just perhaps, I might summon the courage to come and see you and Franz in New York. I have so many things I need to
tell you. But really, in the end only one thing that matters:

  I am sorry.

  I am sorry.

  I am sorry.

  As her mother’s words fill her head there’s an overpowering urge to take the 1956 envelope out again, simply to prove to herself that she read its stunning contents correctly. Rummaging in her purse, Ava slows to a stop, frowning as she retrieves the yellowing missives. 1946. 1948. 1976. 1962…she pulls the whole stack out, shuffling through it like a pack of cards. She’s finally found the one she’s looking for and is about to open it when something makes her glance at the building she’s standing in front of, its title cheerfully pronounced in a hand-painted sign: Eldridge Street Baptist Church.

  She peers up the block and then down it. Thinking: How the hell did I get here? Had her subconscious hijacked her as she stumbled along in her panicked daze? Because this is it: the very street where Renate Bauer lived, according to Ilse.

  And for all Ava knows, she might still be here.

  Feeling as though she’s in a strange dream, Ava stares at the top envelope, then looks at the brass-plated numerals on the building across the street: 163 Eldridge.

  It’s most definitely a match.

  She is crossing the street without quite realizing she’s decided to do so, drawn to the address like a fly to a flystrip. It strikes her suddenly that perhaps this is where Sophie came—after all, she’d read the address too. Is it possible that in her fury her daughter abandoned Erica and the park and went to find out for herself the truth Ava had denied her?

  163 Eldridge is a cinder-block-style building of five floors and fifteen units. It is neat and well kept; through the window the tiled lobby gleams, and the brass trim on the banister looks newly polished. There is nothing unusual or even vaguely eye-catching about it. In fact, Ava has probably walked by it hundreds of times, never once suspecting that one of its residents might hold the answer to every question she’s ever had.