The Light of the World, page 8
As soon as it came, though, it faded away into nothingness. A crowd of stern-faced men walked by us then, and Wren went silent and distant. She seems almost skittish around other people or in large crowds, like a frightened lamb. I didn’t notice it on the train when I met her, but I am almost certain that she was reading to calm her nerves. Her fingers tangled up in something around her neck as she pressed herself against the wall that overlooked the river. I asked what her cross looked like when the men had passed and we were alone again. I gestured to her necklace when she did not follow my question. Wren looked at me, sadness in her sharp green eyes, and shook her head. She said she wore no cross, and refused to speak any more about it.
It bothers me that she cannot open up to me about this. Our friendship is still in its infancy. Maybe this is knowledge that comes with time. I wonder what could have befallen Wren to make her so scared to be around people.
Perhaps in time, she will tell me more about her reasons for doing many of the queer things that she does.
Chapter 6
The Proposal
Eva’s phone rang at eight-thirty the next morning. She glowered at the picture of her father smiling brightly on the screen before finally sliding her finger across to answer with a sleepy grunt. She hadn’t slept well, and it was too early for her thoughts to come together in any sort of coherent fashion.
“Hey E, you awake?” His voice sounded bright and hopeful, almost like a puppy. Eva made what she hoped was an affirmative noise and rolled over onto her back. A spring dug painfully into her lower back and she shifted, her hips jerking upwards and her legs getting even more tangled in the sheet. The couch groaned under her and Eva kicked free.
“Sort of.” She sounded as if she were underwater. Her head hurt. She needed to take her medicine. Eva sat up, happy to get away from the evil spring of pokey-back pain. “What’s up?”
“I just got out of the meeting with your grandmother’s lawyer,” her father explained. He sounded breathless, as if he were walking quickly. Judging by the ambient noise in the background, he was probably somewhere in Midtown. “I’m heading over there. I thought maybe we could get bagels and I could tell you about the meeting.”
Eva rubbed a sleepy hand over her face, catching a smear of drool and some early-morning eye gook. Gross. “Is mom still coming?” She wasn’t awake enough to make plans yet. She needed coffee and her meds. Then, maybe, she could be human again.
“Not today, hon,” her father answered. His heavy breathing stopped and the noise around him grew louder as the conversation lulled. Eva was about to ask why, when her father continued, “She’s got to set up her classroom today, and this meeting was the only way I got out of helping with the third clean-up project in as many weeks.”
“Slacker.” Eva slumped back onto the couch. Her mother’s school would be starting up soon, and Eva was trying to pretend she wasn’t looking forward to it. Her mother being busy after a long summer of being home would be good for the entire family. Lord knew Eva needed a break from her mother’s adamant denial of her daily struggle with depression. “Okay… so you’re… you’re taking the subway, right?”
“Yeah, it should be like twenty minutes or so. Start getting ready,” he said teasingly. “Wouldn’t want to catch you halfway through your process.”
Eva scowled. He really did know her too well because it would take her far longer than a mere twenty minutes to be ready to face the day with so little sleep on the uncomfortable couch. “I’m about to go down into the station, so I’m gonna lose you, but I’ll shoot you a text or something when I get to 25th Street so you can be sure to have pants on.”
“Dad, it was one time,” Eva protested. Once, he had walked in on her fixing her hair in her underwear and hadn’t let her live it down since. If she were a boy, it wouldn’t have been an issue, but fathers were weird about their daughters, and Eva’s father was no exception to that rule.
“Uh-huh,” he answered, his tone highly skeptical. “I didn’t raise you to be a nudist, kid.”
“Dad!” Eva shrieked into the phone.
He laughed and hung up, leaving Eva sitting in the silent apartment. She got up and headed to the bathroom, where she showered quickly and did not linger in front of the mirror getting ready.
She squirmed into a pair of cut-off jean shorts that she’d shoved into her backpack two days ago when she’d returned to her apartment to get some more clothes and to say hello to her roommates. Her parents were paying her rent for the month, and she really hated that all her roommates had to know about their doing that. They were all right, but she had no space to breathe at all in her tiny apartment. Staying here was a much-needed break from people even if it did come with long hours spent with her mother.
Eva checked her phone. The weather app said it was going to be close to ninety degrees today, which meant that it would probably be closer to one hundred in the stairwell and on the street. Her dad probably wanted to walk places with her today, or lug heavy furniture down the narrow stairs. Eva wasn’t about to sweat her butt off for his sake.
She was just lacing up shoes when there was a quiet knock on the door followed by the sound of keys jingling. A moment later, the deadbolt turned and the door cracked open. Her father stuck his head around the door, one hand covering his eyes. “Everyone decent in here?”
“No, Dad,” Eva replied in a deadpan voice. “I’m showing a scandalous amount of ankle.” She finished tying her shoe and got to her feet.
He pulled his hand from his eyes and tugged at his collar. He was wearing a tie and carrying a suit jacket over one arm, and he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves to combat the heat that already gripped the borough. “Thank god for air conditioning,” he said, pushing the door shut with a dramatic sigh and leaning against it, pretending to be breathless and parched.
Eva rolled her eyes, tucking her phone into her purse and fishing out her sunglasses. She perched them on top of her still-damp hair and smiled slyly at her father. If he was going to tease, she could tease back.
“It’s hot out?” she asked mildly. “Maybe you shouldn’t have worn a wool suit.”
“Scorcher,” her father answered. “And don’t you start on the suit thing. You know very well that it isn’t my choice, but I have to pretend to be professional. Sometimes.” Eva watched with a carefully affected disinterest as he deposited his jacket over the back of her grandmother’s favorite armchair. He tugged his tie off completely and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket after rolling it into a neat ball. “But yes, it is grossly hot out.” He shook his head. “And the city smells like hot garbage and piss.”
“Par for the course, then,” Eva answered. She grinned at him. “How was the meeting?”
He gestured toward the door and Eva nodded. “It didn’t go quite how I’d wanted it to, E,” he explained as he locked the door behind them. The staircase was hot and stuffy. It felt as if they’d just walked into an attic, and as they descended, their feet made the floorboards groan as they hurried down. “Mom’s lawyer is a great guy, but I don’t think he saw this coming, or if he did he totally failed to mention it before now.”
“What do you mean?” Eva asked.
Outside it was cooler, but not by much. A gentle breeze blew at Eva’s damp hair and sent a shiver through her.
“It’s a lot more complex than your mom and I initially thought.” He pointed up the block. “Do you want to get a bagel?”
“Sure.”
“Awesome, I’m starved. Anyway, because I’m Mom’s only living heir, the estate’s got to go through probate for a while—at least three months—in order to establish that there aren’t any other judgments or liens against her estate.”
“Gran paid all her bills though.” Eva kicked a rock and watched it skid off the sidewalk and crash into a parked car’s hubcap.
“She didn’t pay the hospital bill after she died, and we’ve got to wait on them to bill her insurance and then for her insurance to bill us before we can do anything at all. The lawyer doesn’t think it’ll take more than six months, but with New York property law? Anything’s possible.”
“I see.”
She felt like a child. She had no idea death came with so much attached to it. Things she wouldn’t even have thought of a month ago.
“On top of that, there’s settling the estate tax.”
“Gran wasn’t wealthy.”
“Uncle Sam will get his due.” Her father shook his head. “He always does. They’ll settle the hospital bills and any other debt Mom has in probate and then we can sell the apartment.”
They turned the corner and cut across the street. Traffic was light between the morning and lunch rush.
“It could be more than a year, judging by what I’ve been told by the lawyers.” Eva’s father let out a quiet groan. They skirted around the small cluster of tables that were jumbled out in front of the bagel shop. People, perhaps students, sat outside with iced coffee dewing in Mason jars. If she strained her ears, Eva could hear them tapping away on their expensive laptops under the shade of bright red and yellow umbrellas.
“Really?” Eva pulled the door open and was immediately hit with the warm, salty aroma of freshly baked bread. There was a hint of onion in the air, and Eva smiled, the onion bagels were still warm. They were her favorite. “That’s terrible.”
Eva’s father tapped his chin thoughtfully. “It’d be terrible if the property had to remain vacant, but since Mr. Bertelli’s offered you a job, why don’t you stay there? We can come by on the weekends and give the place a fresh coat of paint and redo the kitchen floor, but this way there’d be someone in it, and you’d be living rent-free so you could actually start to save money.” He flashed her a wry grin. “Provided, of course, that you think about going back to school, which it sounds like you were doing anyway… so—”
Eva’s eyes widened and she turned to stare openly at her father. “Are you serious?” she squeaked. She was trying not to shriek with joy in the middle of the crowded shop, but it was a close thing. She was practically vibrating with excitement and her face felt as if it were about to split in two, she was smiling so broadly.
He grinned at her. “Yeah. Mom’s lawyer said that it’s better if the property is occupied anyway, and the property taxes for the year are already paid. This would only be until probably April of next year…”
Eva flung her arms around her father, hugging him tightly in spite of the fact that they were both hot and sweaty “It doesn’t matter, it’s perfect. Thanks, Dad!”
The awkward hug was cut short when the guy behind the counter cleared his throat loudly. They sprang apart and Eva hurriedly placed her order before turning to her dad. “Do you want coffee?”
“Iced, please,” he answered.
They moved down to pay for their orders. A few people were ahead of them. Eva chewed her lip, thinking about her grandmother’s diaries and the extra time that living in the apartment would give her to read them and try to make sense of the why of them.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Yeah?”
“Did Gran ever talk about the diaries I found? Or what she did when she was sixteen and clerking for that lawyer?” Eva wondered if maybe it was just that she’d never asked the right questions, and that was why her grandmother had never told her about her young working years.
“I can’t remember her ever talking about her childhood beyond her father being shell-shocked from World War I. Why?”
“The journals are from that year.” Eva stepped aside so her father could pass the guy at the register a twenty. “I can’t get over how different she is.”
“How so?” her father asked. He accepted his change with a harassed smile that showed all the lines in his face. Eva was again reminded that he was so much older than many of her friends’ parents. Two generations of having children later in life meant that Eva’s family was exceptionally long-lived. Her grandmother had been absolutely ancient, creeping her way past the century mark with little fanfare, and her dad was well on his way to doing the same. He was graying around the temples and starting to look his age.
“Well, she just… There was always something about Gran, this great shadow of loss. From what you’ve told me, it was there in your childhood as well. When she wrote these diaries, it isn’t there. Like, at all.”
“Maybe it happened after they were written. That’s most of her lifetime, E.”
“You know as well as I do that that isn’t how it works. She was basically an adult, and there’s nothing that indicates she had it too.”
“Maybe she was just better at hiding it,” Eva’s father suggested as they collected their bagels and Mason jars of iced coffee and slowly maneuvered their way to an empty indoor table. Eva wasn’t going back outside until she had to. “She did live through an awful lot, your grandmother.”
“Maybe.” Eva shook her head. “The other boxes that I found were all cheap, you know, actual shoe boxes, but this one was different. It was one of those photo archival boxes that they used to sell back in the ’80s. I think that they’re acid-free or something like that, to preserve what’s inside. I think that whatever it was happened in the year contained in those diaries.”
“What year?” Eva’s dad asked suddenly, his lips pursed together as though he were remembering something vitally important.
“Uh… 1925.”
“She was just a kid then… Not that she ever spoke about her childhood.” He sipped his coffee. “I remember she said once that was the year that the light had gone out for her.”
The bagel was cooling in its basket in front of her, and Eva picked it up, contemplating it before taking a bite and enjoying the warm flavor of hot, crispy bread mixed with cool cream cheese. This place knew how to do a bagel—nothing fancy and certainly not too much cream cheese.
“The light?” Eva asked. She was trying to keep her voice down, as the people in the next table over were looking at them with interest. Eva supposed that it was a curious sort of a conversation.
Her dad shrugged, and when he spoke his voice was quieter as well. “She always called it the light of the world, but I never asked what it actually meant.”
Eva chewed her bagel and wondered if maybe the answer was hidden in the pages of the diaries she had yet to read.
Chapter 7
The Grocery
Time, over the next few weeks, twisted and mutated, alternating between inching forward and racing so quickly that Eva could scarcely keep up. Her mind fell into a haze, drifting, full of half-remembered stories and the words of a sixteen-year-old girl. Her grandmother’s apartment stood empty save for Eva’s memories.
In the late afternoon, the apartment filled with sunlight, but there was a kind of sadness in the light that Eva could not explain. It clung to the faded wallpaper with desperate fingers of sun that could never gain purchase. Instead it shifted, lingering on the lists of little repairs that had to be done in the upcoming weeks.
Eva spent the week leading up to Labor Day weekend frantically trying to find someone to sublease her apartment at the last minute. Thankfully, with colleges starting up once more, there was a huge influx of people who needed cheap places to live and had no time at all to shop around. After her ad had been up on Craigslist for less than three hours, Eva found a guy who looked to be a good fit. Two days later, she found out that he got on well with her roommates and was willing to let her borrow his battered pickup truck to transport her meager possessions to her new place of residence.
It was weird for Eva to load up the truck with her things and leave her forwarding address at the post office. It was a very adult move in a life that had, up until this point, been largely spent attempting to run away from her problems. There was a finality to moving away from her peers to be by herself that set Eva’s heart racing. Could she do it? Would she be able to be alone without falling back into old habits? She liked to think that she was better than those old, tired thoughts, but she felt as though they were to be a constant throughout her life.
It’s just a matter of “adulting,” Eva told herself on Friday as she walked into Mr. Bertelli’s shop. She was mostly settled into her grandmother’s apartment now, her things lining the shelves where her grandmother’s lifetime collection of kitsch and knickknacks had once been. Her books were in the bookshelves, her records on the turntable.
Yet there were signs of her grandmother everywhere. They didn’t pack up the china or the kitchen, and the back closet where Eva found her grandmother’s diaries was still largely untouched. It was a time capsule to a world Eva didn’t think her father was quite ready to unpack.
Mr. Bertelli was overjoyed when Eva pushed open the door to his shop and slipped inside. He beamed at her, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners and his expression jubilant. “Eva!” he boomed. “I did not think you would be coming back!”
Eva stood by a rack of produce, feeling awkward. Now that she was here, asking seemed an impossible task. Her hands were heavy at her sides and she reached out to start tugging at the husk of a coconut. “It’s good to be back,” she started. It was clumsy. Eva’s cheeks burned with the shame of not knowing what to say.
A long, pregnant silence filled the little grocery.
Mr. Bertelli stepped out from behind the counter. His apron was perfectly straight and tied in a neat bow at his hip. He wasn’t that much taller than Eva, and he came up to her and held out his hand. She gave him her hand and he squeezed it gently, a kind smile drifting across his face. “You need to pick up dinner for your parents, right?”
Eva shook her head. “Actually, Mr. Bertelli, I’m here to see if that job you offered me is still available. My family can’t sell Gran’s apartment right away, so I’m going to stay there so that someone’s at least living in the space. I was wondering—”
“If you could work here part time?” Mr. Bertelli pulled Eva into a one-armed hug. He smelled like spices and homemade bread. “That will depend on how good your Italian is.”
