“Great-Grandma Elnora,” Ava said.
“You remember her?” Aunt Elena said.
“Only from stories. Enough to know that she’d never have used plastic slipcovers.”
“Exactly.”
“Are you saying that since Great-Grandma Elnora was anti–plastic slipcovers, that’s why Grandma Rose loved them?” She took the thought further. Since Great-Grandma Elnora believed in magic, was that why Grandma Rose hated it? Was that why Grandma Rose had flipped out when Ava pretended to sprinkle magic fairy dust over her bingo cards?
“Huh,” Ava said. “So, if my knee-jerk reaction is to be the opposite of Natasha and Darya, then I’m still letting them say who I am, basically.”
Aunt Elena looked surprised. “You are one smart young lady.”
Ava tried not to be offended. “Thanks. I’m still not planning to use slipcovers, though. Now that that’s settled, what secret are you keeping?”
Aunt Elena grew sober. She placed her hands flat against her thighs.
“Your mother thinks I forgot about Emily just like everyone else. She thinks that I . . .” She faltered. “That I remembered our middle-of-the-night discussion, but not the actual girl we discussed. Emily.”
“Go on.”
“The next morning, after Klara climbed Willow Hill, after Emily wasn’t there to meet her, that was when everything got so messed up.”
“I thought the Emily-disappearing part was when things got so messed up.”
“Yes, just . . . let me tell this my own way.” She raked her hand through her hair. “Just as your mother never told anyone but me what she wished for, I’ve never told anybody—anybody—what I’m about to tell you.”
Yikes, Ava thought. Did she want to know?
“The next morning, at breakfast, everybody congratulated Klara on winning the Academic Olympiad,” Aunt Elena said.
Ava nodded, digging her fingernails into her palms.
“Klara asked about Emily. Everyone said, ‘What? Who?’ Vera, my parents—they acted as if they had no idea who Klara was talking about.” Aunt Elena looked as shaky as Ava felt. “I played along. I was confused. I was scared! If it was a practical joke, it made no sense. My parents weren’t the sort of people to make practical jokes.”
Aunt Elena glanced toward the back of the apartment. She lowered her voice. “Your mom pulled me away from the breakfast table. She dragged me into the kitchen and gripped me by the shoulders. She gripped me so hard.”
“And?”
“‘You remember her, don’t you?’ she said.”
“My mom said that, to you,” Ava clarified.
“When I didn’t answer, she shook me and said, ‘Elena. Do you remember Emily?’ I did, and I admitted it. But no one else did. Not at school, not the waitresses at Rocky’s, no one.”
“Wait,” Ava said. “Just ten minutes ago, with the cookies. We were all talking, and Mama said that you didn’t remember Emily that next morning.” Ava regarded her aunt. “Mama told you to forget what she’d said in the middle of the night.”
“That evening, your mom pulled me into her room and shut the door,” Aunt Elena said. “Her eyes, Ava. Her eyes were so wild. And she was thirteen. I was only ten! She said, ‘We’re the only ones. We’re the only ones who remember her, Elena. What are we going to do?’”
Aunt Elena swiped at her eyes. “And I thought, ‘We? What are we going to do?’ Because I didn’t wish Emily away. She did!”
“She didn’t ‘wish Emily away,’” Ava said. “You know she didn’t.”
“Same difference,” Aunt Elena said, and she sounded like a child.
Ava sat with it all. She stared at her aunt. She finally said, “You changed your story? Mama thinks she convinced you that you’d never had that conversation about Emily. But really, you convinced Mama that you’d forgotten Emily, just like everyone else?”
“It wasn’t as if I could bring Emily back.”
“You left Mama all alone.”
“Klara left Emily all alone!”
“Did she? What does that even mean? Nobody has a clue what happened to Emily!”
Aunt Elena visibly made an effort to gather herself. “I tried. I told your mother I didn’t remember Emily, yes. But I searched for Emily. I tried finding her father, your dad’s dad who lives in California.”
“Grandpa Dave.”
“We didn’t have the internet back then. There were phone books at the library, but California is a big state. Still, I found four hundred and fifty-seven listings for David, Dave, or D. Blok. It took time, but I called them all.” She made a funny sound. “Oh, and we didn’t have cell phones or data plans or any of that. I couldn’t use my parents’ phone. They’d see the calls on the bill. So I used pay phones, the most out-of-the-way ones I could find.”
Ava saw a girl her own age—no, younger—enclosed in the glass box of an old-fashioned telephone booth. Ava had never seen a real telephone booth. In the picture in her mind, young Aunt Elena wore a dress like Laura Ingalls from the old TV show Little House on the Prairie, which Ava had seen reruns of. Young Aunt Elena wore her hair in plaits and rose on her toes in black lace-up boots, hooking her finger into the holes of the rotary dial seven times, rotating the wheel to the stopping point, swoosh, before letting it return to starting position, click-click-click-click-click.
Actually, ten times, because of the California area code.
Actually, eleven times, because in the olden days, didn’t people have to dial “1” before long-distance calls?
“It took me two years to call all those numbers,” Aunt Elena said.
“What?! That’s ridiculous!”
“No. Long-distance calls were expensive. On a weekday, it cost eighty cents to make a three-minute call to California. My allowance was two dollars a week. I earned money babysitting, and my mom could never understand where all that money went to.” She gave a slight shake of her head. “Chewing gum. I told her I spent it on chewing gum.”
“You didn’t find him,” Ava said flatly.
“I never reached a Dave Blok who was the father of Nate and Emily Blok, no,” said Aunt Elena. “I couldn’t rule out the possibility I’d missed him. People didn’t always pick up. Some people never picked up. I could have
