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Authors: Erica Orloff

BOOK: Illuminated
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My “room”—air quotes there—is what a Manhattan real estate agent calls a second bedroom—meaning it’s not much more than an alcove where someone put up a wall. But it has space for me, and it’s where I search for my mother’s secrets. Uncle Harry has boxes of photos of my mom. He’s my mother’s brother, and I ask him questions about her all the time. I wonder if I am like her . . . because I know I’m nothing like my dad.
My father and I have spent our entire lives avoiding each other—in some ways, it’s perfect for us that he’s never home. During the school year, I lived with my father outside of Boston. Luckily, he travels so much I end up spending half my time with my friend Sofia’s family, or being checked on by our neighbor in the condo across the hall. But summers are my favorite time, reserved for Uncle Harry and his partner, Gabe, and New York City. We usually fit in lots of plays, trips to the beach, and once, even a trip to Toronto.
And
this
summer? I was especially grateful to escape. This threatened to be the Summer of the Stepmother, since my dad had been checking out diamond rings with the latest, blondest girlfriend named Sharon. The whole concept kind of made me want to throw up.
After looking at photos of my mom and chatting on Facebook with Sofia, who was spending the summer at a show choir camp, I fell asleep with the TV turned low.
When I woke up, I stared at the ceiling, then looked at the plasma screen on the wall. A morning news anchor with hair perfectly plastered into place was telling me it was six A.M.
“Argh!” I said to Uncle Harry’s cat, Aggie, short for Agamemnon. He has one green eye and one yellow, and is a silvery Persian who leaves hair everywhere. “It’s summer. I can sleep in.
Why
am I awake?!”
Aggie just meowed and stepped on my stomach before settling down again, purring like a motor. I clicked channels with the remote, too lazy to get up, too awake to fall back to sleep.
About twenty minutes later, Uncle Harry knocked on my door. “You up?” he called.
“Unfortunately.”
He poked his head in my room. “What are you wearing to work today?”
I looked over at my tiny closet, which was open and had my clothes spilling onto the floor. “Um . . . I don’t know. Dressy jeans and a sweater set—it’s so cold in your office, I’m tempted to wear mittens. And since when do you care what I wear to fetch your coffee? I’m your gopher. I haven’t decided. It’s too
early
to decide.”
“What about this?” He flung a bag from Barney’s at me.
I sat up and ruffled a hand through my bedhead mess of curls. I could hear Gabe singing in the shower—“Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” He was once in a revival of
Guys and Dolls.
He had played Sky Masterson. Uncle Harry went to the show twenty times, always sitting in the front row, center seat—which, if you do the math means he spent a small fortune—and he waited afterward with his yellow and black
Playbill
to get Gabe’s autograph at the theater door. It’s a nauseatingly cute “how we met” story. And the rest, as they say, is history.
It’s pretty pathetic when your uncle has a better love story than you’ve had at this point. Being an affirmed member of the brainy club meant my love life definitely lacked something as adorable. Of course, my grandmother still thinks Uncle Harry just hasn’t met the right woman. But at least he knows how to shop.
I peered into the bag, pushed aside the tissue paper, and looked up at Harry. “You’re kidding, right?”
I pulled it out and held up the little black summer dress. It was, indeed, adorable. I glanced at the tag.
“
Three hundred and fifty dollars
? Now you’ve really lost your mind.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve just always wanted to buy an Audrey Hepburn
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
dress, but never had anyone to buy one for. Until you! Come on—don’t you just
love
it?”
I nodded, shocked. It was probably the classiest thing I had ever owned. “It’s gorgeous. Too bad you and a bunch of dusty manuscripts are the only ones to see me in it.”
“You can never look too good for a day with goat skin and vellum.”
I grinned at him. “Thank you. I really do love it.”
After a shower, I let my hair air-dry curly. The weather report said humid—which means there is absolutely no point fighting my hair’s true nature. Something that’s a cross between a Chia pet and steel wool.
I put on some lip gloss and mascara and a pair of black ballet flats—I also don’t fight being five feet three inches. But I’m cheating because really, it’s five feet two, and my hair just adds a little height. My skin is naturally pale, with freckles that I also don’t bother to fight very much, and I have light gray eyes. I looked over at the built-in bookshelves. Uncle Harry keeps a black-and-white framed photo of my mother. She’s looking right at the camera and laughing, her hair blowing in the wind. In the picture, she’s wearing this whole Madonna-in-the-’80s outfit, and somehow, she’s pulling it off.
I wish I knew what was making her laugh in that picture. Uncle Harry doesn’t remember. I look a little like her—different color hair, but the same pale skin. Alas, tanning just leaves me lobster-pinkish. But I think that’s where the similarity ends. Because somehow in every picture of her, she looks like a model, or a bohemian artist, or someone glamorous from a fairy-tale life.
I rechecked my reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door in my room. I almost looked . . . adult. I smiled back at myself and then stepped out into the narrow hallway. It’s lined with posters and Playbills from their favorite Broadway shows—
Guys and Dolls, Contact, 42nd Street, Chicago, Spamalot.
I turned right and walked into their kitchen to make some coffee. It’s a big kitchen by Manhattan standards, tiny by Boston standards, with sparkling stainless appliances and gleaming pale maple cabinets and granite countertops. I started toward the coffeemaker.
“No time, sugarplum,” Harry said. “Starbucks on the way. We’ve got to go.”
Gabe walked over to me.
“Are you wearing a kimono?” I asked him, fingering the blue and green silk.
“Yup.”
“Nice. I’ll have to borrow it sometime.”
“If I were you, I’d never change out of that to-die-for dress. You look gorgeous.”
“Thanks.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed him good-bye. “I liked the shower-chorus today.”
“You could hear me?”
“Every note.”
Harry playfully rolled his eyes. “He’s a show-off. He knows darn well we can hear him.”
After an elevator ride down forty stories to the lobby and a stop on the corner, Starbucks in hand (I would perish without my coffee—it’s life juice), Harry and I walked through jostling morning crowds—but not toward the auction house.
“Where are we going?”
“To Dr. Sokolov’s apartment.”
“I thought he would come to the auction house so he could see it. Isn’t this the kind of find you medieval scholars live for?”
Harry leaned his head back and laughed. “Impossible, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
“He’s got agoraphobia.”
I tried to remember which phobia that was.
Harry glanced over, “He never leaves his brownstone.
Ever
.”
“Ever? Does he work?”
“He does research and writes. He lectures a satellite class—beamed into the classroom at NYU. He also does podcasts. Technology is a friend to people like him. And people bring books to him. Or in my case, I’ll be sending video.”
“That’s weird. Not leaving the house. How does he get food?”
“Callie, honey. This is New York. Everything is delivered.”
I thought of the thirty deli, Chinese, Italian, Indian, and even Ethiopian menus in the junk drawer in the kitchen. “All right, then, there must be
some
things he has to leave the house for.”
“Maybe. But he has an assistant.”
We hailed a yellow cab and about ten white-knuckle-defying, near-pedestrian-hitting minutes later stood outside a four-story brownstone down in Greenwich Village. On either side of the street, trees stretched toward sky, their leaves arching over the road, trying to escape their concrete confines. Two long, sleek black limousines double-parked outside other brownstones.
“This street is beautiful,” I said, climbing out of the cab. “It’s a part of New York that feels secret.” I looked up at Harry.
“That building is where a certain A-list actress lives. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been here and spotted Uma Thurman. Oh, and my big crush, Anderson Cooper. Saw him on his bike here once.” He nodded toward a three-story brick building across the street. “I think some famous writer lives there. Anyway, Dr. Sokolov is, as they say, old money. His family has owned this brownstone for a hundred years or more. Since back when horses and buggies drove through here. Oh, want a fun, gross fact from history?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It has to do with the brownstones. The reason they’re multiple stories is so way back when, the rich could live on the top floors away from the stench of horse manure. It was—”
“Stop right there,” I groaned. Sometimes, Harry’s love of history is just a little too graphic for me.
I looked up and down the street and wondered what it would be like to live there. The street was serene, and I felt transported to another time. I could even hear birds chirping in the trees. I faced Dr.
Sokolov’s door. A small sign by the bell said SOKOLOV & SONS, ANTIQUARIANS. Harry pressed the doorbell, and it chimed deeply.
The door—fourteen feet high, polished to a sheen, and probably inches thick—swung back, but instead of some agoraphobic old book expert, I found myself face-to-face with the most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen in my life. I think I turned ten shades of scarlet.
“Hey, Harry.” He smiled at my uncle, revealing two deep chasmlike dimples in his cheeks. Then he stared at me. And I thought I felt him stare through me. Or inside me. I took a small step backward and bumped into Uncle Harry.
“Calliope, this is August Sokolov. The esteemed Dr. Sokolov’s assistant—and his son.”
“Hi,” I managed to breathe.
There was a long silence. In that time, I noticed his eyes were green and his brown hair curled a bit at the collar of his shirt. And he had an earring—a yin-and-yang symbol. And a scar in a little horseshoe shape near his left eye. He stared at me. Then he blinked and said, “Come on in. My dad’s waiting.”
I stepped inside, Uncle Harry behind me. As August led us through a marble-floored foyer, I glared over my shoulder at my uncle as we walked past paintings and even an honest-to-God suit of armor.
What?
Uncle Harry mouthed silently, too innocent for words, batting his eyes.
But I kept glaring.
Audrey Hepburn dress, indeed. He was just a little too obvious. He could have warned me, at least.
August ushered us into a huge study with ceilings eighteen feet high. The walls were lined with bookshelves, which in turn were filled with book after book—most of them leather-bound and ancient-looking. A tall ladder with a hook on the top and wheels at its base used to reach the uppermost shelves leaned against the far wall.
A man in a rumpled white shirt sat behind an immense desk surrounded by papers and file folders, silver-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. He stood the minute we walked in, revealing equally wrinkled, coffee-stained khakis. He resembled August, right down to his longish hair and high cheekbones, only older. And messier.
“Harry.” He beamed. “Is it true?”
Uncle Harry nodded. “I saw the words myself. So did Callie. My niece. Callie, this is Professor Sokolov.”
“Call me Peter.”
I said hello and stood by trying not to look at August as Uncle Harry launched into the story of the palimpsest—and soon they were poring over old books. I didn’t want to look bored. But really, after twenty-four hours of palimpsest talk, I felt like I could have told the whole story of the manuscript by heart.
August came and leaned close to me. “In about one minute,” he whispered, his breath hot on my neck, “they will be so involved talking about their work that they won’t notice we’ve left. Come on, let’s go to the garden. I promise to be more interesting.”
I glanced at Uncle Harry. He was describing the palimpsest in detail to Professor Sokolov. A bomb could have exploded next to him and he wouldn’t have noticed.
I nodded and followed August through the house and out a set of French doors to a garden filled with roses in shades of red, pink, yellow, and a pale purple. In one corner, a small pagoda-style greenhouse stood, its glass fogged from the humidity inside. In another corner an enormous aviary rose skyward.
“Wow,” I exhaled.
“Better than medieval manuscript talk, right?”
I nodded. “The manuscript is amazing, though, even if I don’t know much about it,” I said. “I saw the hidden words.”

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