I wondered if Rebekah felt the same way. Yes,thatRebekah.
At first, I’d thought I was hallucinating when, a few weeks earlier, I’d spotted the name “Rebekah Roth” in the university directory, right there in black and white like any ordinary student. I shouldn’t have been shocked, really. My childhood friend wasn’t dead, after all. She and her family had just fled to the other side of the country after she’d let a slave boy kiss her and touch her boobs in her childhood treehouse. Or at least, that was the story my classmates and I had all spread around in hushed horror at the time, with Rebekah’s presence eventually lingering among us only as a kind of ghostly morality tale. Either way, I hadn’t ever expected to see her again, letalone as a business student at one of the largest, most esteemed universities on the East Coast.
But to my astonishment, here were my shaky hands dialing the number, quickly before my anxiety had a chance to devour my nerve. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was calling. Maybe because after everything that had happened—to us both—it seemed like a sign. I might even call it fate.
Which should have given me hope, but all it really did was make me think about how ifhewere here, he would tease me for believing in it. And then, as usual, sort of start believing in it himself and never admit it.
Shut up. How the hell do you ever expect to function if you’re constantly lost in the memory of someone you might not ever?—
“Hello?” inquired the voice on the other end.
I went suddenly shy. “Rebekah? Bex?”
Silence.
“This is Louisa. Louisa Wainwright-Phillips. Lou. Remember?—”
Remember? Remember how I scrolled past all those evil memes about you without calling them out? How I just watched open-mouthed across the hall while someone scrawled “whore for slaves” in permanent ink across your locker? How I just walked by like you were invisible when I saw you crying on the stairwell?
Fuck. What was I thinking? I didn’t deserve sympathy. I deserved to be shoved under an oncoming Green Line train.
So it didn’t surprise me when Rebekah immediately hung up.
It did surprise me a second later, however, when another call came in—from a different number. I answered it immediately, and this time, I had an idea.
“Ericamuller,” I blurted out.
“Huh?”
“Erica,” I repeated, enunciating more clearly. “Muller.”
A long pause as my heart battered my ribcage.
“I think we should talk,” said Rebekah finally. “Meet me at Café Jennet in an hour?”
And that was how I first stumbled over the threshold of my future workplace on a breathtakingly crystalline autumn day in September, shivering and drawing my cute but totally inadequate gray cashmere cardigan around my shoulders. I knew the wardrobe of a lifelong desert girl wasn’t going to fly in New England, but given my finances, a shopping trip was out of the question. Right now, everything but survival was out of the question.
I’d agonized for weeks about when, where, and how to drop my decision to transfer to a new school on my father, who was scarcely leaving his study these days, even to golf. It wasn’t like before, though. I genuinely did think he was working. He even said he was working. But I was afraid to ask what he was working on, and he’d been volunteering nothing, at least not since we’d hit a wall in the search for Ethan. The database had been no help. Free people who became slaves—either via debt or a felony conviction—were completely disassociated from their former identities, for exactly this reason. Besides, even if my dad somehow found Ethan and could afford to buy and free him, which he couldn’t, he’d be legally barred from doing so—again, for exactly this reason.
Given that blow, it was a miracle that whatever my dad had turned his attention to now was even getting him out of bed in the morning. In any case, I thought it wiser to leave him to it. In the meantime, we would just have to accept that my brother had been enslaved forever and then vanished off the face of the earth, and only a dead man—or at least a man who preferred to be thought dead—knew where he was.
No wonder I was haunted. Day and night. By everything. By Max’s fate, by Resi’s tomb, by electricity, and by having beenburied alive beneath the layers and layers of rock that often had me jerking awake in the darkness with a scream and a name—the name—dying in my throat as if it would remain trapped below unless and until I was addressing the boy it belonged to. And haunted by the faded, reddish-yellow half-moons all over my body, so many that I had to flip my gold-rimmed cheval mirror so I wouldn’t stand for an hour obsessing over them every time I got undressed. Haunted, in full, by the bombed-out bunker I’d once called my life. It had been a good life, too, for a while, at least with the privilege of ignorance on my side. But a person with scars like mine could never live that life again. And I didn’t want to.
In the end, I’d kept it simple, breaking the news at a casual Sunday breakfast by the pool with my father, right after the housekeeper—the only one of the slaves still working—cleared the plates. The old valet was convalescing after a fall, and my father was now valiantly footing his medical bills. As for the maid, I had been saddened but not particularly shocked when my father had announced plans to sell her. At the last minute, though, he’d found an alternate solution: renting her out to a friend from the country club to fill in for their cook, who was also having health problems. To his credit, he’d promised the maid he’d put away a percentage of the money she brought in to eventually free her. But we all knew—like my promise to take her to the ocean, which finally happened thanks to five hours in the Cadillac each way, one night in a kooky hostel in Pacific Beach, and a lot of awkwardness and eye rolling—there were no guarantees. He’d promised something similar to the housekeeper, too, and even finally put the house on the market to raise cash. I was convinced his heart was (finally) in the right place. It was just his wallet that wasn’t.
And neither was his daughter.
“I need to be somewhere else right now, Daddy,” I said. “I need to be someone else. I already am someone else.”
Mourning doves cooed in the palo verdes as my father stared into the depths of his coffee cup for what felt like an hour before responding. “You know I can’t spare a cent right now, Loulou. You’ll be on your own for everything your scholarship doesn’t cover, and Boston is far from the cheapest city these days. And with most of the service roles filled by slaves, a job won’t be easy to find.”
“But, Daddy?—”
“Hold on, Loulou. I’m telling you this just to inform you, not to dissuade you. If you think this is the right choice for you, then—well, I have no doubt that it is.”
“Really?” I asked, blinking in surprise. “You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?”
A smile played on his lips. “I’ve noticed that trying to talk you out of things hasn’t been very effective lately. In fact,” he added, “I’m starting to think that betting on your determination is the safest investment I could ever make.”
