The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read Online Free PDF Page A

lost his key,” she said, then looked me up and down. “You’re not even dressed. Let’s get you into your costume.” Ruth walked herself around my bedroom, chattering the whole time, poking through my scattered things, until she came upon a mirrored gilt armoire—sized, perhaps, for hiding illicit lovers—and flung it open with a bleat of delight. “Aha!” I was handed a white blouse and dirndl and slowly put them on. I sat very still as Ruth quickly did my hair. A letter lay on the dresser, unopened, and something bade me to pick it up and put it in my pocket. Pay attention .
    “There you are. My little Gretel!”
    I stood at the mirror looking at the fairy-tale girl before me. A dirndl, hair in two long braids, done up in green ribbon. You’re not yourself .
    “And look at me, darling,” she said, fiddling with a device attached to her belt so that her costume revealed itself: all along her skirt, candy canes lit up in bold electric light. “I’m your witch! Now let’s go fatten you up! Ready?”
    I knew that a step outside would take me further still. So, like Alice before the looking glass, I took one more look at my reflection before I said:
    “I’m ready.”
    F OR ALL OF my life, beside the tower of the Jefferson Market, down at the end of Patchin Place where Felix and I used to swing on the iron gates, there had been nothing but an empty fenced garden. And now, in its place, there had suddenly sprung up a huge brick building, lit by the setting sun. From one barred window, I saw what I thought was a twisted sheet, but soon realized was a woman’s arm, as white as a feather; it did not stir the whole time I watched. I was mesmerized, smiling at the dream I was in.
    “What is it, darling?”
    I laughed and pointed. “Look!” I said. “What is that?”
    She squeezed my hand. “The prison. Now come along.”
    “A prison? You see it, too?” I asked, but she could not hear me in the noise of the crowd making its Halloween way along Tenth Street. Something was coming together in me. The change in my city, the change in my room. My long hair, my long nightdress. “Ruth, I thought you weren’t throwing a party.”
    “What are you talking about?” she asked me, pulling me along. “I always throw one.”
    “But you said—”
    “He’d kill me if I didn’t! Be careful, dear, you seem unstable.”
    “I’m not myself,” I said, smiling, and she seemed to accept that.
    We stepped out the gates of Patchin Place, and, very calmly, I pulled out the envelope from my pocket. “Greta Michelson,” it read. “Patchin Place.” My last name had never been Michelson. But it was the postmark that made me stand still in the moving crowd.
    I began to laugh. It overcame me, what had happened. You make a wish . The postmark explained it all.

    T HEY SAY THERE are many worlds. All around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons, and stars. We cannot go there—we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own—like the fairy worlds my aunt used to tease us with. You make a wish, and another world is formed in which that wish comes true, though you may never see it . And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had the key? Because everyone knows this:
    That the impossible happens once to each of us.
    A NOTHER WORLD.
    With fascination, I looked around this version of my life in 1918. Nothing was different from my 1985 Patchin Place except the prison beside the tower. The Northern Dispensary, visible down Waverly, was the same as ever (a slice of brick cake), though at Seventh Avenue rubble was piled everywhere, with some recent, violent construction, and women in high-buttoned shoes and costumed like gypsies or pirate queens made their delicate