Bob from the coffee shop had helped her try to make sense of the letters at least.
‘I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,’ he advised her. ‘You don’t know what your grandmother’s motives might have been for keeping the truth from you. There are a lot of missing pieces here.’
Ella looked at him with anguish. ‘It’s not just Mimi. If my parents were alive, why didn’t they come back for me?’
Bob hugged her. For someone so abrasive, and downright rude at times, Ella could be deeply sensitive, almost like a child.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
‘How could they leave me there, for ever? And why did they stop writing? The last letter was sent the year I turned eight. Do you think they stopped because I never replied? Do you think they thought I didn’t love them?’
‘No,’ Bob said fiercely. ‘I’m sure they didn’t think that. Look at your dad’s letters to your grandmother. He knew she was the one keeping their letters from you. He knew that she’d lied to you about the car crash.’
‘And why was he the only one who wrote?’ Ella asked angrily. ‘What about my mother? Where was she all those years? Where is she now?’
‘Look,’ said Bob. ‘These are all good questions. But the only way you’re going to know anything is by finding out the truth for yourself. It seems to me the first thing you need to know is whether they’re still alive.’
Bob had been so kind, as usual, and so practical. Ella wished she had his facility for breaking problems down into manageable parts. And he was right – she did have to take charge and discover the truth for herself, somehow. But something held her back. In her more honest moments, she realized that the ‘something’ was fear.
Tapping the code into the panel outside her building, Ella slipped inside and climbed the creaky three flights of stairs to her attic apartment. Once inside she removed her shoes and placed them exactly symmetrically against the wall, as was her ritual. In front of her, the living-room-cum-kitchen was just as she had left it a few hours ago: neat, ordered and Spartan. The white Formica table gleamed like something out of a pathologist’s lab, an impression only enhanced by the pervasive smell of bleach countertop cleaner. A single, bright red armchair faced the television, also dusted to within an inch of its life, with the only other furniture in the room a functional Ikea bookcase, on which a variety of novels and self-help books were stacked in strict, color-coded order.
It’s eleven o’clock on a Monday morning, Ella thought, shifting her weight awkwardly from foot to foot as her panic returned with a vengeance. What do I do now? Growing up on the ranch there was always a job to be done, and a time for everything. In the city it was different. There were no guns to clean or rabbits to skin or fences to mend. To fill the days, one needed a job. A made-up purpose. Up until today Ella had had one. But now the terrifying prospect loomed of ‘free time’; of long, structureless hours in which the voices in her head would be free to run rampant. They were already playing now, on low volume. A male voice had started reciting strings of numbers the moment Ella walked into the building. Maybe the doctors are right? Maybe it is stress related?
Moving aimlessly through to her bedroom, Ella sat at her desk and flipped open her computer, resisting the urge to open the drawer containing her father’s letters. Last night she’d spent more than three hours obsessively studying the postmarks on all the envelopes Mimi had saved. The letters had come from all over the globe: Pakistan, Greece, South Africa, Fiji. My parents explored the world together, knowing I was stuck in that cabin, completely isolated, grieving a death that had never happened. In the beginning, Ella had taken her father’s side, blaming her grandmother entirely for the ‘cruel lie’ she’d been weaned on. But as the days passed she couldn’t avoid the harsh truth that her parents had also been complicit. They knew where I was. And they never came back.
What Ella had to do now, and urgently, was to find another job. She couldn’t allow the letters to consume her, not until her own life had stabilized. Scrolling through the positions listed on monster.com and the Berkeley alumni website, her heart sank. Even for the desk-bound, research or coding jobs, employers wanted ‘outgoing’, ‘charismatic’ staff with ‘proven people skills’. Ella’s academic credentials were stellar and she was always invited to interview. But that was where things inevitably went wrong.
‘Tell us why you want to work for Humperfloop Industries?’ the bright-eyed HR team would ask her.
‘To earn money,’ Ella would reply truthfully. This usually prompted laughter, but then that would be followed by other, trickier questions.
‘What are your passions?’ a middle-aged female interviewer at a tech start-up once asked Ella. ‘Apart from coding.’
‘Apart from coding?’
‘Yes,’ the woman smiled. ‘We’re looking for well-rounded individuals. People with more than one string to their bow.’
Ella’s palms began sweating. All the responses she’d practiced were about coding. What sort of ‘passions’ did the woman mean? Bob had warned Ella vociferously never, ever to mention sex in these encounters. But what did that leave her with?
‘I like … coffee cake,’ she said at last.
The woman looked blank. ‘Coffee cake?’
‘I can shoot a deer from three hundred yards,’ Ella blurted. The interviewer’s horrified face told Ella at once that she’d made a misstep, yet some death-wish prompted her to follow up with: ‘I can gut fish!’
‘Very interesting. Well, thank you, Miss Praeger. Please, see yourself out.’
Landing the Biogen job a year ago had been nothing short of a miracle. Ella was pretty sure she’d only got that because Gary Larson fancied her. But now she’d lost it, thanks in part to her stupid headaches, which weren’t getting any better and would probably ruin her chances at her next job, if she ever got one.
Don’t be negative, she told herself. Healthy people turn their lemons into lemonade.
This time she would do better. She would follow Bob’s example and break the problem down into small steps. Step One: get better at interviews.
Standing up, she positioned herself stiffly in front of the mirror. Many people had told her that ‘tone of voice’ was important, as well as body language and eye contact.
‘A pleasure to meet you!’ Ella gr
inned at her reflection, proffering her right hand. ‘I’m Ella Praeger.’