The Light of the World, page 13
She said she wanted to show me something and pulled me along through the crowded station. I was still dressed for the ball game and looked out of place among the well-dressed folk of Midtown. Wren had the loveliest flush of pink to her freckled cheeks after we’d left, and it had only grown deeper as we traveled into the city. She took my hand then, standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Station, and pulled me through a door that I had never seen before.
I cannot explain what she showed me in words because there are no words that could ever do such beauty justice. At first, all I saw was blackness. Wren pulled me deep into the darkness, so far down that I could hear the subway making its journey above us. How she’d found this place I have no idea, and I was terrified we would be discovered trespassing.
Wren told me not to worry, that everyone who might discover us was out at church or watching the Yanks play in the later game. She spoke in the hushed, reverent voice that my mother uses when she’s speaking in church. It calmed me until I asked where we were. We were somewhere under the station, she wasn’t sure which side, maybe Seventh Avenue.
There is a room far beneath the city that holds three doors that open up into paths of light. Upon the wall is painted a plume of flames that rises up into the darkness and chases away the shadows.
Wren pulled me inside the space, her fingers clutching mine. She gestured up at the ceiling with a wide sweep of her arm. This is her sanctuary, she explained. It is apparently the only place in the city where she feels safe.
And I did not think to ask her why then, as her hand was in my own and the darkness didn’t seem so black.
Chapter 11
The Hidden Room
The mystery only seemed to deepen as Eva read further in her grandmother’s journals. She had a few theories as to what the relationship was between Mary and Wren, but she kept them to herself as she read. She almost felt afraid to voice them for fear of what might happen if they were spoken out loud.
What if her grandmother had been in love with Wren? What if she had fallen in love with this girl and it had destroyed her?
The questions kept piling up, each one more unsettling than the next. She turned the pages eagerly, heading into late June in search of the entry that had to be the key to all of this. The city was gripped in a heat wave in the diaries, and her grandmother was falling in love. It struck Eva as odd that her grandmother, in six months of very detailed diary entries, had never once explained who Wren was. She was a close friend, obviously, and Eva was pretty sure her Gran was crushing on her something fierce. And then there was the date. Eva wasn’t sure what to make of that. And Wren was a mystery. Eva knew next to nothing about her, except that she seemed nervous in crowds, and that she had freckles across her nose and long blonde hair. It wasn’t much to go on.
It was lunch time, and Eva was in the back room of Mr. Bertelli’s shop. She was bored, killing time since she had already finished her soup and tiny salad made from the dregs at the bottom of the pre-made mixed greens bag she’d bought a few days before. She was going to have to get groceries soon, there was no food in the apartment. She’d eaten through most of what was still edible in her grandmother’s pantry already.
“A room under Penn Station with three doors, huh?” Taking the pen that she’d been chewing on, she wrote down the location on the list that she’d tucked into the front cover of the diary.
She was settling into a routine. Every morning, she woke up and sometimes caught herself expecting to hear her grandmother banging around in the apartment’s small kitchen, putting the kettle on and making breakfast. Mornings were the worst for Eva because before she took her medication, everything seemed so much louder. The visceral feelings of loss and longing for her grandmother’s presence were enough to set her curling into a ball and sobbing. She had to struggle to find the motivation to get up sometimes, to make herself take the pills that would quiet everything down to the point where she felt that she could function again.
It was troubling that she was still struggling with this, and that she couldn’t bring herself to let her grandmother’s memory go. Liv told her that everyone grieved in a different way when they had drinks together two weeks ago. Perhaps this was just a part of her process.
She didn’t mention it to her parents when they called to check in. They were thrilled that the job at Mr. Bertelli’s was working out so well for Eva, and happy that she was able to find a group of friends who seemed interested in helping her get more meaning out of the diaries. She didn’t mention the light of the world to her father again. Mr. Schultz, who insisted on being called Theo, was fixated on it enough for Eva. She didn’t need her parents’ deciding to get involved as well.
This was her life now, at least until the apartment was sold. She did the same things every day. And no matter how interesting it was to spend time with Theo and Liv and occasionally Al, when he wasn’t busy with his graduate classes in photography, her life had fallen into the hum-drum of adulthood she used to rail against when she was in high school.
It showed how little she knew back then.
Eva found that she liked ease of it. Routine was simple, and it was predictable. There was something about it that kept her feeling sane, with none of the spontaneity that had thrown her so much in college. She liked this new set of events that had come to rule her daily life. Eva liked steadiness because it was less likely to surprise her. Her grandmother had been steady, right up until the moment that she’d passed away.
Grief was a strange thing. It twisted into her subconscious and festered there. It was as if a part of her were missing, and it was a deep and aching wound. She couldn’t stomach the loss. There were reminders of her grandmother everywhere in the apartment. Even when she was trying to focus on other things at work, Mr. Bertelli would share a humorous story that cut into Eva unexpectedly. She had to find a better way of coping with the loss.
Perhaps she was, by obsessing over her grandmother and her relationship with Wren. Perhaps she could find Wren, or her grave, or her children, or something. Perhaps she could track down someone who would be able to tell her what her grandmother meant when she’d told Eva time and time again that the light of her world had gone out.
Once her salad was done and the Tupperware was rinsed out, the afternoon passed quickly for Eva. There was a delivery, and she spent the better part of the afternoon carefully checking bunches of bananas for spiders before Mr. Bertelli shooed her out the door at four-thirty on the dot. “Have a good night,” he called after her, holding the door open with one broad palm for a tiny old woman wearing a kerchief over her stark white hair.
It had cooled off significantly over the past two weeks since that scorching-hot Labor Day when she’d gone to meet Theo for the first time. Walking down the shady side of the street, Eva was almost cold. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans, balling them into fists and hunching her shoulders against the stiff breeze that whipped up the street.
Her bag thumped against her leg, and the wind caught her apron and almost tugged it clean away from where she’d tucked it into her bag. It was getting darker earlier now, which meant that Eva couldn’t linger in the back room of the bookshop for as long as she might want to without risking the ire of her parents, should they ever discover what she was up to.
Her mother would lose her mind if she knew that Eva was out much past eight o’clock. Eva made a point of calling them at ten or so every night and saying that she’d turned all three of the locks and put the chain on and that no one was getting into the apartment through the front door. It was a little passive aggressive and immature, she knew. She had lived in the city for a year now with no problems, but her mother still insisted on speaking to her as though she were a child when it came to safety.
Perhaps she was just afraid of what Eva might do when left alone, which was ironic as this whole plan of Eva living in her grandmother’s apartment was, according to Eva’s father, her mother’s idea.
In Eva’s search for the answers locked inside her grandmother’s diaries, Theo had turned into a valuable resource. He knew everyone in the neighborhood, and had some dealings with Eva’s grandmother later in her life. He was grumpy and unpleasant, but he was able to produce information out of nowhere that was both pertinent and useful to their continued search.
He and Al ran the bookshop as a father-son team with Al handling most of the customer interaction. Liv was there to help out while she looked for a subject for a master’s thesis in women’s history. They were an odd little trio, but Eva could not be more grateful for them.
Al was all kinds of charming distraction, even if he was not really interested in the diaries at all. Liv was a flat-out enigma to Eva. She couldn’t get a read on her. One moment Liv would seem absolutely fascinated by the diaries and the next she’d appear to be overcome with a melancholy that gripped her whole body.
Eva knew that melancholy well. It plagued her too, but Liv never said anything about living with depression. Eva would sit in the back room of the bookshop and watch the transformation come over Liv. She would disappear outside, chain-smoking on the bookshop’s front stoop and scowling up at the sky where it was visible between the buildings across the street.
There was a bleakness about Liv when she looked up at the skyline. “I’m sorry,” she said when Eva followed her out one night. “I just need a moment sometimes.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Eva.” Liv exhaled smoke from her nose. “It’s just a silly thing. I feel so bad for her.”
Eva tilted her head to one side, leaning against the sun-warmed brick next to Liv. “You do?”
“She was in love with her best friend. It’s tragic.”
“That sounds like something Al would say.” Eva shook her head. Al had taken a peek at a few of the entries that they were focusing on and announced that there was some seriously lesbian crushing going on. “But I think you’re right.”
“Does that bother you, that your grandmother might have loved someone other than your grandfather?”
Eva shook her head. “Not really. He died before I was born, but everyone says that she just about tolerated his presence. Everyone in the family thinks she did it because that was what was done.”
Liv put her cigarette to her lips. “I wonder.”
It was that same melancholy that Eva felt if she thought too long and hard about her grandmother, but there was no personal connection. Liv was great with the other parts of their research into the life and times of Mary Oglesby. She’d found an old list of residents of Mrs. Talbot’s boarding house with the help of Kelvin Stanton, who worked at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and a few late nights down in the archives, herself.
She’d returned on the third night with a coffee from the bakery up the block clutched in one hand and a photocopied list written in nearly indecipherable handwriting in the other. Liv presented the list to Al and Eva. She’d done it with a flourish, pointing to one name in particular.
“I found her.” Her tone was triumphant. There was Eva’s grandmother, plain as day. Liv went on to produce more documents from the folio in her bag. Mrs. Talbot’s personal account of her residents showed that Mary paid her rent on time and that the only complaints that were ever fielded by Mrs. Talbot about her revolved around her penchant for stealing the newspaper after a girl named Judith who lived a floor above her was done with it.
“My Gran did that until she died.” Eva laughed when Liv had leaned in close to read the photocopied ledger over Eva’s shoulder. Liv smelled like cigarettes and summer, honeysuckle with a smoky overtones that reminded Eva of the times when she and her parents had gone camping in western Connecticut when she was very young. It drove Eva almost to distraction to be that close to Liv, who had absolutely no respect for Eva’s personal space, situating herself so that Eva couldn’t escape without some rather awkward brush pass. It was clearly flirting. Clearly.
“I remember when I was a kid,” Eva said, and found herself staring into Liv’s intense gaze, only inches away. “Old Mr. Sorrenson would get into these insane arguments with her because she’d get up super early and steal the crossword page out of his copy of the Times every morning.”
“And what did your grandmother say about that?” Liv was leaning forward, her hair hanging in perfectly straight lines down her back and spilling over her shoulders like a river of yellow silk. She tapped her fingers on her chin and shifted her weight to the other elbow as she asked Eva the question. Eva couldn’t look away from Liv’s fingers. Her breath caught in her chest, watching how they played subconsciously with her lower lip as she read.
“She told him to prove it.”
They both laughed and Eva was able to push away the distracting thoughts of Liv’s lips.
They were a strange little band of historians. They were a hodgepodge of people with different approaches to life who did not match at all. Even between Al and Theo, there were stark differences. Al, according to Theo’s grumblings, took after his mother rather than Theo. Liv was the unifying force between them, keeping everyone on task and on track, never wavering in her pursuit of the research. They were perfect, really, and Eva was growing comfortable and content within the space that they’d created for her.
It had been a long time since Eva had friends like this.
The friendship spilled out of the research project and into the sphere of Eva’s life that she’d thought she was going to have to manage on her own. Her parents were happy that she was working at Mr. Bertelli’s shop, and they were happier still to hear that Eva had managed to rope Al and Liv into helping her peel off the wallpaper in the apartment hallway. It was the first step in the restoration project that Eva promised her parents she would start on, once she got settled into her new routine.
It was fun stripping down the wallpaper armed with putty knives and wet sponges that Al found in the basement of the bookshop. They spent an afternoon listening to Eva’s grandmother’s old 45s and revealing a battered-looking wall beneath the yellowing wallpaper. It was a wall that should never be allowed to see the light of day again, they decided, so Al promised to come back the next weekend and help Eva plaster it smooth.
“I had to do the same thing in my bedroom when I was a kid,” he explained as he shoved bits of wallpaper into a trash bag. “My mom wasn’t exactly handy and my dad, well, you know how he is.”
Liv laughed. “He’s a walking disaster.”
“But in a good way,” Eva assured Al.
Eva liked Al; he was quiet and took pictures with his phone constantly, trying to capture the beauty he saw in everyday life. He’d shown her a few of his pictures, the ones that were still on his phone. After some needling, Eva convinced Al to give her his Instagram username, only to find that she was not the only one who was just a little bit smitten with his beautiful photos. She paged through comments from girls who didn’t seem to realize that Al wasn’t particularly interested in having them fawning all over his photographs. He replied to critiques and other artists mostly, and also to Eva. It gave her a small feeling of triumph whenever she got a notification on her phone. Perhaps she was being immature for liking that. Perhaps she was just grateful that Al was her friend and paid attention to her. It was really that she was happy someone cared about what she had to say enough to respond to it.
The bookshop was empty when Eva pushed the door open. It was just after five o’clock. Al was sitting on a stool behind the counter where his laptop was set up and a digital SLR was plugged into it with a carefully coiled USB cord. His knees were scrunched up against the counter as he typed away, looking like a dreadlocked and annoyed frog.
“Get any good shots today?” She walked across the front of the store to lean over the counter and look at his screen upside down from above. She couldn’t tell what he’d taken a picture of from that angle; it just looked like a bunch of blurred lines and squiggles.
Al shook his head. “This is the worst assignment.” He groaned and it reverberated around the bookshop. He ran a hand over his face, his eyes narrowing as he wiggled his finger over the laptop’s track pad and made an adjustment to the color saturation of the image. “How the hell do you photograph light?”
“No idea.” Eva shrugged.
“I get it on a fundamental level, and like, technically, but that isn’t what the assignment is about. I swear, either the professor is trying to see how stupid we are or wants us to take advantage of the late-summer shadows to get some interesting black and white shots.” Al tugged at his hair, clearly frustrated. “I just don’t know.”
Eva tilted her head to one side. Light… She tapped her bag and grinned at him, an idea starting to form. “Maybe we can find this place my Gran described in her diary. Apparently there’s this place that she was taken to—a room where there are three doors that open up onto paths of light. My Gran was usually pretty awesome at describing things, but she said that she couldn’t find the words. Apparently it’s absolutely beautiful.”
He inclined his head and scratched at his sideburn for a moment, sighing dramatically before tipping his laptop closed. “Anything’s better than this shit. Where is it?”
“Under Penn Station.”
Al groaned again, this time long and drawn out. “Like they’re going to let a guy who looks like me anywhere near the inner workings of a place that busy.” He shook his head, adding in an undertone, “Racist-ass cops.”
“Maybe your professor could pull some strings?” She had no idea where the place was, only that it was under the station somewhere and that it probably was not on the Seventh Avenue side, which probably meant that it was either under The Garden or close to it.
“If you can actually prove it exists, sure.” Al shrugged his shoulders in a resigned way. He smiled tiredly at Eva before turning his attention back to his camera. “Until then I’m applying rainbow pastel filters to see if I can salvage something good enough for class.”
