Chapter Two
My father died in a car accident when I was fifteen, but I don’t remember it, because my mother undid it.
She was forty-seven when she used her silver ticket.
The holy grail of gifts. All the women in my family get one, a single do-over.
A chance to go back and make a different choice, unfurl a coil.
My great-grandmother was a good student, and a quick study, and she started working in her father’s shop when she was just five years old.
Her mother suffered from migraines and was bedridden most of the time, and so Irina would do the deliveries for her father.
They were always late at night, as it was the safest time to be out, and being small—and young—she could slip by unnoticed.
She’d been taught to hide and could conceal herself behind nearly anything, if need be.
One night she was out bringing a pair of shoes to the neighborhood curmudgeon—a woman named Hinda who lived just on the outskirts of town.
Hinda was mean to children, scowled at her neighbors, and rarely left the house.
It was rumored that her body was dotted in boils and her hair was made of snakes.
She covered her hair—as many observant Jews did—so no one could be sure.
Nevertheless, Irina’s father gave strict instructions: “Hinda is a paying customer, and she is to be treated with respect and kindness.”
Irina knocked at the door softly. No answer. Then she rapped a little harder. Still no answer. Finally she called out: “Mrs. Hinda?” She clapped her hand over her mouth, worried she had drawn too much attention to herself, but then she heard a shuffling behind the door.
There stood Hinda. Her face was knotted and gnarled; her hands gripped a small cane. She could have been sixty or one hundred and forty-eight. They seem about the same when you’re seven years old.
“What?” she spat.
“I’ve come to deliver your shoes.”
Irina held them up in their paper satchel. They were brown, drabby, Irina thought, but she said nothing of the sort. They were shoes just fine.
Hinda looked at the parcel, then at the small girl.
“I have no money for you,” she said.
Irina furrowed her brow, unsure of how to proceed. Her father was clear that she must collect payment on all her deliveries. But he was also known to keep a ledger of what people owed him. “People need their shoes,” he’d say. Simple as that.
Irina looked down at Hinda’s feet. They were bare.
“Here you go,” she said, and held the package out to Hinda. She believed it’s what her father would have done.
Hinda extended her hands, unsure, tentatively receiving the shoes. She looked at Irina curiously. Perhaps no one had ever been kind to her before. Or at least not in a very many years. Maybe in a whole century.
And slowly Hinda’s face began to change from suspicious to curious and then—illuminated.
“Hang on there, little girl,” she said. “I do have something for you.”
Hinda disappeared for what felt like a long time. It was cold, and Irina wasn’t wearing a coat. She hugged her arms around her middle and waited.
Finally, Hinda returned with a small wooden box.
“Open it,” she instructed Irina.
Irina opened the box. Inside was a silver ticket. It was small, about an inch by an inch.
“What is this?” Irina asked.
“It’s for you,” Hinda said. “In exchange for my shoes.”
Hinda smiled. It was a gruesome sight. Her teeth were mangled and rotted. Irina wished she’d close her mouth.
“It is a special ticket.”
“What for?”
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 in magic 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.