Irina was feeling tired now, and impatient. She longed to be home with her father, for a piece of bread and a warm bed.
Hinda laughed. It was an eerie laugh, and it made Irina shiver.
“Undoing the past,” she said.
And then she slammed the door in Irina’s face.
Irina looked at the small wooden box, then cracked it open to check the silver ticket inside.Undoing the past.What did that mean? And how would Irina ever find out?
She went home hanging her head. She had no money in her pocket, which meant her mother would not get the plums she loved from the market the next day. Her father would not be able to buy meat from the butcher or more leather for the next week’s repairs. She practiced what she would say, how she would tell them.
When she arrived home her father was in his shop. “How was Mrs. Hinda?” he asked.
“She could not pay,” Irina said. She was next to tears.
“Did you give her the shoes?”
Irina nodded. Her father smiled.
“Good,” he said. “People need their shoes.”
“She gave me this.”
Irina thrust the box at him. He opened it.
“My,” he said. “She really must be fond of you. Next time we go, we’ll bring her some apple cake.”
Her father hugged her and sent her off to bed. All through the night Irina held that box. She held it pressed between her palms, and even when her eyes finally drifted closed, her fingers did not break their grasp.
The next morning she came downstairs to find her mother rocking at the kitchen table. Her father was gone. Taken. Their worst fear realized.
Irina crept into her father’s shop to see it completely turned over, robbed of anything of value, most especially, its keeper. She felt a pulling in her chest. She was young enough to believe inmagic but old enough to have experienced the realities of war. You could only be so young in eastern Europe. She knew if her father was gone now, he would never return.
She left her mother and climbed the stairs. She opened the box. Once again, she pressed the silver ticket between her two palms.
There is something about being a child that makes it easier to believe—and that is what happened. She thought of a time before. She thought of the previous day. She thought of her father’s dirty apron and oiled hair and thick beard. She thought of his blackened fingers and long, toothy smile.
And that is how she used it, this gift from Hinda that was now more valuable than any payment could have been. She turned them back to the day before, to when he was still there.
That same night, on Irina’s guidance, their family hid in the small attic above Irina’s room. The shop was looted but nothing of value was taken—because nothing of value was there. The ticket was a miracle. Her father’s belief in her, the second silver dollar.
“You saved us,” her father would tell her. “You brilliant, blessed child.”
Irina kept the wooden box, now empty of the ticket that had come in it, in that attic room that had saved her. She took it with her when she came to America, too. Afterward the ticket reappeared in the wooden box with each woman born. There was a new one when my grandmother wailed and stretched in Irina’s arms, and another when my mother came in the middle of the first California snowstorm in thirty-five years. And then mine. Tucked in the safe at 31382 Broad Beach Road. Never touched.
I knew from a young age I had this ticket. And I also knew that things I could never imagine now would come into my life, and it was my job to decide which of them all was worthy of taking back.
CHAPTER THREE
I open the door, and my dad barrels inside. “I need to charge the car. Did you guys ever install that EV line?”
“Dad, it’s pitch-black out.”
He shrugs and then looks at me. “I knew you’d be up.”
My dad and I have always been insomniacs. I think I’ve clocked more hours with him than any other human being. For us, 3:00 a.m. might as well be noon. When I was a teenager I would wander downstairs to find him pouring cereal or buttering toast. We’d play Rummikub or read. Sometimes we wouldn’t even talk, we’d just orbit each other.
Dad empties his pockets on the counter—tissues, wallet, keys, a pack of mints, and then gets down a mug and helps himself to the coffeepot. He’s not a tall man, used to be five foot nine on a good day and is now probably hovering just above five seven, his curly black hair topping the last half inch.
