Wunderland(117)
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.