Days of Wonder

by Caroline Leavitt

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Caroline Leavitt returns with a tantalizing, courageous story about mothers and daughters, guilt and innocence, and the lengths we go for love.

As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love—yearning, breathless love—that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her life was unexpectedly upended when she was accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, an imperious superior court judge, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. When she learns she’s pregnant shortly after sentencing, she reluctantly decides to give up the child. 

Ella is released after serving only six years. While she is desperate to turn the page on a new life, she can’t seem to let go of her past. With only an address as a possible lead, she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, determined to get her daughter back. Forced to hide her identity and complicated past and live in a constant state of deception, she finds that what she’s been searching for all along is a way to uncover and live with the truth. Yet a central mystery endures: neither Jude nor Ella can remember the events leading up to the attempted murder—that fateful night which led to Ella’s conviction. 

For fans of Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace and Allegra Goodman’s Sam, Caroline Leavitt’s Days of Wonder is a gripping high-drama page-turner about the elusive nature of redemption and the profound reach of love. 

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

April 2018

Ella stepped through the prison gate, blinded by the sun and the hard blue of the sky, frantically searching the crowd for her mother. At twenty-two, she still felt so, so young, but certainly not the fifteen she had been when she had first arrived here. Freed as if from a box, she stumbled forward but kept her eyes on her feet. If she fell, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get up.

Ella clenched the paper bag containing her belongings—everything except for her old cellphone, which the police said they were keeping indefinitely. She craned her neck and rose on tiptoes, searching past the cameras, the shouts, for her mother.

The air felt buttoned too tight about her throat. Colors vibrated, knocking her off balance. The gaping sky looked as if it might swallow her. What scared her the most were the news vans, the reporters rushing toward her, their voices like thorns. Ella. Ella. Ella, they shouted. Ms. Levy. Ms. Levy. And then Mrs. Levy—that one aimed at her mother, Helen.

Though she was surprised by the media’s presence, their frenzy was nothing new. They had roiled up public opinion against her from the start. The New York Times had blared: QUEENS TEEN PLOTS MURDER OF UPPER EAST SIDE JUDGE. The New York Daily News had been even worse: QUEENS KILLER-CUTIE’S ATTEMPTED MURDER. BOYFRIEND’S DAD FED TOXIC TEA. REDHEAD CAUGHT RED-HANDED.

Back then, after the incident, not a day had gone by that she wasn’t in the papers, that there hadn’t been TV trucks parked on the street at her mother’s home, or reporters hounding her mother, shouting at her, picking at her past to find the juiciest morsels, acting as if Helen were to blame too—because in their view she had been a rule breaker with no morals, a single mother who had been banished from her Hasidic community when as a teen she had gotten pregnant. The media searched through everything, finding pictures of Ella from Help, her high school literary magazine, and from the French club, which she had joined to strengthen her résumé. The papers had published photos from Ella’s Facebook account, along with the messages she had so carefully crafted—especially those she’d put on Jude’s page, including the one she regretted most: I’d do anything for you.

“Ella!” a reporter now shouted. Ella avoided her gaze. “Ella!” someone else cried. “Hey, Red!”

And that was when Ella saw Helen pushing through the crowd, her spine stiff, dressed in heels and a blue business suit, her hair covered by a scarf that also obscured much of her face. “I’m here,” Helen said, and even though it was a warm spring day, she guided Ella into a raincoat with a hood, pulling it over Ella’s face as she led her to the car. Ella tried to ignore the reporters banging on the roof of the coupe. They were acting as if she didn’t deserve to be free at all; and what terrified her more than their pressuring presence was that maybe, just maybe, they were right.

“How do you feel now?” a woman with a microphone shouted. “Has justice been served? What will you do now? Are you going to try to find that boy?”

That boy.

Another reporter jammed his body against the front of the car, shouting and pointing at Helen. “How much did you really know? How could you let all this happen?”

“Will you ever make tea again?” another reporter called.

Helen’s mouth twitched.

“What about a garden?” yet another reporter shouted. “Gonna try to grow more foxglove, are you?”

Helen got in the driver’s seat and locked all the doors, ignoring the slap of hands on the windows, the way fingers left prints, like evidence.

“Bunch of vulturous jerks,” Helen said. “Buckle your seatbelt, please.”

Ella did, trying to make herself as small as possible, burrowing down, and then Helen pressed on the gas and jerked the car forward until the reporters got out of the way. Their shouts continued to bounce against the windows.

“Are you happy now?” a woman called after them.

“Screw the whole lot of you,” Helen muttered.

To Ella’s relief, the media parade didn’t follow them for very long. The whole drive to Brooklyn, Ella stared out the window, stunned at the world. How easily people strolled the sidewalks, the young girls busy living a life that she had missed, all of them ambling in and out of shops or just plunking themselves down on a bench, tilting their faces to the sun and taking this wide-open life for granted. The Free World. That’s what they had called it in prison, but everyone knew you still wouldn’t really be free if you didn’t have the right persona, the right chances.

Did she? Would she?

She didn’t know how she felt about going to live with her mother. Right now she needed her, but Helen’s apartment wasn’t really Ella’s home. Helen had moved twice while Ella was in prison, trying to get away from the media and the threats, first deeper into Queens—from Flushing to Bayside—and then deep in Southwestern Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, a place Ella had never seen.

“Your whole life’s ahead of you,” Helen said now. “Such a miracle! No probation, no parole. Isn’t that something? A clean slate!”

Ella wasn’t so sure. “I’m still a felon,” she said.

Even after crossing the Hudson, it took them an hour to reach South Brooklyn. The neighborhoods blurred into one another, and they finally arrived in Bay Ridge. (Bay Ridge! Who lived in Bay Ridge?) Maybe she wouldn’t have to be on such high alert here, Ella thought as she cracked open the car window. She might be left alone.

They drove by the Alpine movie theater, specialty grocery markets, and an array of people, mostly teens or families, walking on the scrubby sidewalks. She thought she heard people speaking in Russian, or maybe it was Polish. And then there were bars and lounges with signs advertising happy hour, and just a few doors down, a mosque on one of the corners. She could see the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the bay and the harbor. In prison, she had known every corner of her cell, every pockmark in the prison hallways. But here, she didn’t know what to make of what she saw, or how to feel about it.

“Want some music, honey?” Helen said as she switched on the radio.

Ella had had a radio in prison and mostly listened to the news, but the stories had all sounded as if they were happening on another planet. There had been snipers in Georgia. A school shooting in Indiana. An outbreak of E. coli.

Helen punched a preset and unleashed Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” Ella had danced to that song when they’d told her she was getting out, her cheap commissary radio blasting. Now she didn’t feel like dancing, didn’t feel anything but guilt.

“Want it louder?” Helen asked, and Ella shook her head. The world was too loud for her as it was, which was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. Through her open window, she could smell an exotic mixture of curry, garlic, and something she couldn’t identify but that made her mouth water.

They drove past large homes, with stone facades and slate roofs, and then drove farther down Fifth Avenue, where most of the shops had Arabic signage. The streets were busy with women in hijabs, one of whom had tucked her cellphone between the fabric and her cheek so that she could talk hands-free while she pushed a stroller. There were all these new stores that Ella didn’t recognize. People were talking to one another in English, but when she tried to latch on to a word, it sounded like a foreign language she could no longer speak. How would she ever know what to do, what to wear, or even how to act?

They passed falafel stands and red-sauce pizza joints, and all the smells and noise and color filled Ella with wonder—but then her heart sank when Helen turned down 70th Street and the view morphed into something straight out of that old movie Saturday Night Fever. Ella was swept back to a different time, with Helen on the couch, watching, laughing; a time when they shared experiences. The buildings here were mostly dilapidated three-story multifamily homes, many of them displaying American flags.

As they got closer to her apartment, Helen kept up a cheerful patter about what would come next.

“This won’t be forever. We can sit down together, think of where we can move,” Helen said. “Maybe to the middle of the country? Or what about some small town upstate where we can change our lives? Anywhere but here, right?”

“I can’t think about anything yet,” Ella said. “I’m a little shell-shocked.”

“Of course you are, baby.” Helen patted her hand. “We have all the time in the world.”

Helen slowed by a three-story dirty redbrick building. Three lidless trash bins and a green skateboard kicked upside down graced the tiny patch of lawn.

“Here we are,” she announced. The sidewalk was crumbling and there weren’t many trees, but as soon as she parked, Helen seemed to come alive. She drew Ella into the building, a dark entrance hall with three mailboxes and a rubber-padded stairway. “You get used to the climb,” she said, leading Ella up two flights of stairs, puffing a little when she got to the top. She opened the metal door onto a two-bedroom apartment with carpeted floors the color of a tongue depressor.

Ella immediately felt as if the walls were moving toward her, yet somehow there was too much space, too many things to look at: books tossed on the couch, clothes breeding on chairs, tissue dress patterns puckered with pins on a side table. In prison, Ella had kept her small cell spare so that it would seem larger—or maybe it was just to give herself a sense of control. She had cleaned it obsessively, trying to find some semblance of pride.

She moved to the kitchen and spotted the familiar vintage diner clock, ticking loudly. She had looked at it every day growing up, but now it seemed different, like one of those what’s wrong with this picture games she and Helen used to play. Her hand trailed over every surface. She opened up the cabinets. There were the cups she had painted in grade school, garishly glittery—the ones that Helen said she loved but had insisted were too pretty to use. But the fancy French roast coffee Helen used to buy was gone, jars of instant Nescafé in its place. Helen used to cook, but now the cupboards were stacked with Campbell’s soup and packaged noodles. Other things were either broken or missing, like the chair with deep blue paisley upholstery that Helen had loved.

She roamed toward the back of the apartment, where she saw a small blue bedroom with a big double bed that was surely Helen’s, a patchwork comforter spread across it. She passed another room, probably a second bedroom, but now with shelves full of dress patterns, a long cutting table, and a sewing machine by a window. Through the window, she could see a small backyard, all scrubby grass and an anemic-looking tree.

“I fixed up the bedroom for you,” Helen said.

“What? No! It’s your room—”

“That living room couch pulls out!” Helen said. “And it’s comfortable.” She touched Ella’s face. “I bought new sheets for you, and I sewed the comforter myself. I wanted everything to feel just right for you.” Her mother’s face was so bright, her eyes so sparkling, that all Ella could do was nod. “There are clothes for you too, in the dresser.”

Ella moved to the window and looked out on the street. No one was there, but she could hear the quiet now, as if silence had a deafening sound of its own. And then she heard some kids screaming with laughter, from blocks away, and she thought how amazing it was that they could laugh like that without looking over their shoulders, searching out danger. It was startling to think that they could just live in the world.

“Come, sit down,” Helen called. “I want to show you something.”

Ella stiffened when she saw the computer on the dining room table, an iMac instead of the semi-broken PCs she’d had access to in prison. She’d always had someone standing over her, supervising.

Helen waved as if at a fly. “I use it for designs,” she said. “To see what’s trending out there.”

“Okay,” Ella said.

“This? This is for you,” Helen said, tapping the mouse. A new page opened, showing the special investment account she had started the day Ella was incarcerated. Forty dollars a week taken from her job managing a dress shop in Queens, and now, after all these years, the account had grown to twelve thousand dollars, a small fortune, enough to allow them to start over. Helen had bookmarked sites about different cities: Santa Fe in New Mexico; Gloucester in Massachusetts; small towns in upstate New York, near an actual lake where they could swim, which made Ella think about the Woodstock house that Jude’s family had owned.

“It’ll be a whole new world,” Helen said, but Ella couldn’t stop thinking about the old one. “You check out all those places and see what calls to you,” Helen said. “I can find work most anywhere, and maybe you could, too.”

“Maybe,” Ella said. But what jobs could a felon get, even one with a psychology degree? She could be a cashier at the Thrift-T-Mart. Or she could clean houses.

“You could change your last name to Fitchburg, like I did. It’s just paperwork and going in front of a judge.”

“No,” Ella said. “I can’t do that. No more court. Not ever.”

Helen was quiet for a minute. “You can change your first name, too, if you want. The first step to a fresh start.”

Ella nodded. Maybe Helen was right. Maybe it would help her feel more like a new person, if that could be possible.

Ella clicked off the investment fund site and then powered off the computer.

“I’ll go make dinner,” Helen said. “Is pasta okay?”

While Helen bustled about in the kitchen, calling out that maybe, since Ella was an adult, they should have wine, Ella turned on the computer again. She knew what she had to do, and she had to do it right now before it was too late. She quickly typed in the words: closed adoptions through New York lawyers.

Names of attorneys tumbled onto the screen. But which one had Helen used? Her mouth dried. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed stones.

“Rotini or linguine, honey?” Helen called, and Ella felt her heart skittering so fiercely that she thought she might throw up.

“Linguine is good,” she replied.

Next, she entered her name, and there it was—a multitude of articles about her. The latest news articles were about the journalist who had shown up five years into her sentence. Terrance Grapler. She would never forget him—his checkered shirts with solid ties, his hair just a little too long—or how he had helped her. His series on botched cases had stirred up enough trouble in the district attorney’s office that the governor herself had gotten involved. It had been an election year, and the governor had a vested interest in showing that she supported a project that reopened questionable cases. Sixty percent of all confessions were forced, maybe even more, Grapler had told Ella, plus there were a number of holes in her case. He had also found out that the judge who had sentenced Ella to all those years had been getting kickbacks from the prison for funneling offenders into their cellblocks. Ella had already been condemned by the media, which hadn’t helped. She had been charged with attempted murder, as an adult and not a juvenile, even though she had no prior record. Her lawyer, a friend of a friend of her mother’s, had arrived too late, before he could instruct Ella not to say a word. The cops had told her if she just signed the confession and gave up her right to trial, if she threw herself on the mercy of the Court, she’d get much less time than the maximum twenty-five-year sentence. But she received that sentence anyway. Her lawyer, who had no real criminal experience, did not appeal the decision.

When she was arrested, she had been held in a windowless room for nearly sixteen hours while the police badgered her to confess to the alleged crime. Even the way her Miranda rights were read was twisted, implying it was better for her to talk rather than to stay silent until her attorney arrived. Those had all been breaches in procedure, Grapler had told her.

“Plus,” he said, “Judge Stein had a pacemaker. He had a cardiac condition. The doctors I spoke to said he often didn’t show up for checkups, that he’d constantly reschedule appointments. The foxglove could have exacerbated his condition, but he wasn’t in good health to begin with. He was overweight. He smoked cigars and drank. And yet no one checked his pacemaker for irregularities. Even the toxicology report was contaminated.”

“I don’t understand,” Ella had said.

“I’m not saying that’s the truth or that you’re not guilty,” the journalist said. “That’s not what this is about. But let’s talk about justice. You were railroaded into writing a confession and taking a guilty plea. That’s what I mean.”

And then boom, boom, boom again. Because of the technicalities and the governor’s ire, Ella’s twenty-five-year sentence had been sliced down to the six she had already served. She wouldn’t have to report to a parole or probation officer. But she would still be considered a felon out in the Free World, and if she ever wanted to be exonerated, she’d have to go back to court—and who knew what would happen then or how long it would take. And did she want to go through that? No, she did not.

“Just finishing up, darling,” Helen now called. “Almost ready.”

Here it was, the last part of her search. She couldn’t help herself.

Jude Stein. She typed in his name. And then she thought, What if he’s changed his name, too?

Are you going to try to find that boy? the reporter had shouted, and yes, yes, she was. She had to try to find Jude, whom she had loved and who loved her back. She wanted to ask him why he hadn’t come to see her or even written to her. Why he had abandoned her.

Just tell me what happened—that was what she always wanted to ask. Just tell me so I know, because you were there with me, and whatever you say, I’ll believe.

The lawyers and the cops had told her that Jude wasn’t allowed to see her, that he had given her up, but she had kept trying, had kept asking Helen when she visited if there had been any news, until Helen told her she had to stop.

But she hadn’t been able to. One-sided conversations played out in her mind. Tell me what happened. Tell me where you are. Tell me why.

He had never answered her letters, never signaled her in any way. She couldn’t bear the thought of how he must have blamed her—how he must still blame her—though it couldn’t be more than she blamed herself. She had told herself over and over to move on, like Helen had wanted. She had never had him visit her in a dream or whisper in her mind. Instead, sometimes, lying on her prison cot late at night, she had sworn that she smelled baby powder, that she heard a baby babbling her name, calling her mama.

The prison hadn’t allowed any internet access, but some people had illegal cellphones, and Ella had traded food from the commissary for a half hour on one of them. She had searched Jude’s old screennames: Botaneasy, Bloomwhereplanted, Hey Jude, Jude the Obscure. She searched for all his old accounts: Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. She also looked at the accounts of mutual friends, just in case they posted a selfie with him. A mention. She hadn’t been able to post anything or to respond to anything. She had only been able to look. And there had been nothing to see.

“Forget him,” the lawyer said.

“You were a kid. He gave you up for attempted murder,” the other inmates would tell her.

No, Ella had said. She believed that couldn’t be right. No, he didn’t give me up. He would never do that to me. We would never ever do that to each other. No matter what.

“Well, he did it. You went to prison, and he went free. And you confessed.”

Let me see him, she kept asking. Let me just talk to him.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you. And you know why.”

Every once in a while, the prison counselor had requested Ella to come see her, and the counselor kept probing. “Do you regret what happened? Do you want to be better, to have a better life?”

“I don’t remember!” she had cried. “How can I atone if I don’t remember?”

“You remember some of it,” the counselor had assured her. “You confessed. And now you need to process it.”

“What if you hypnotize me?” Ella had asked, but the counselor had told her that wouldn’t be admissible evidence, because the mind is as malleable as clay and everyone knows you could tell someone in hypnosis that they are a chicken, and they’d believe it and start flapping their arms like wings.

Remember, remember, the counselor had kept telling her.

I would if I could.

Now Ella heard Helen humming, the way she used to when she cooked. She heard the water running, the fridge door opening and closing, and garlic sputtering in a pan.

She had more time to explore.

But Helen came into the room too quickly, holding up two candlesticks, taking Ella by surprise. “I thought candles would be nice,” Helen said. “You must be starving.” And then she peered at the screen and grew still.

“What are you doing?” Helen said carefully, setting down the candlesticks. When Ella didn’t answer, Helen reached over her and clicked off the computer. “You’re being dangerously foolish. They could throw you back in prison.”

“For what?” Ella said.

“For anything they want.” Helen put her hand lightly on Ella’s shoulder. “You know what they said. You cannot go near that boy again. Not after what happened.” She took her hand away, and Ella yearned for its warmth again. “You can’t possibly still love him—”

“I don’t,” Ella insisted. As soon as she said it, though, she felt overwhelmed by the past, how giant her love had been, how it had swallowed her whole and then dimmed—but it had never really gone away. “I just want to know where he is,” she said.

“Why? For what?”

“I just want to know,” Ella said.

Helen sighed heavily. “You know, honey,” she said slowly, “it’s been really hard for me, too.” She stroked Ella’s hair. “Come on, let’s eat something delicious.”

Ella couldn’t imagine eating anything, but she switched seats from the computer chair to a place in front of the flickering candles. Helen brought out pasta aglio e olio on a platter, and a salad of field greens tossed with chopped pears and walnuts. A celebration dinner.

That night, alone in her mother’s bed, the door as wide open as Ella could get it, she couldn’t rest. She sat up and looked out her window. The room faced the sidewalk, but the street was dark and empty. She shuffled to the living room, where Helen was on the couch, reading. She met Helen’s eyes and then snuggled on the couch beside her. Eventually her eyes drooped shut, and she finally felt safe enough to sleep.

THE NEXT DAY was Saturday, and though Helen was happy (“We have all this time together!”), Ella just wanted her mother out of the house so that she could freely search the internet.

She tried to get time alone. She asked her mother to buy her eight skeins of blue worsted wool and size eight bamboo needles so that she could make a sweater. The prison had offered supervised knitting classes, believing that small motor skills would reduce anxiety, and that it could offer the women a sense of accomplishment. The whole time Ella had been in prison, no one had even thought of using the circular needles as a weapon—but the instructor kept a close count of the needles anyway. Ella had thought she could never do anything remotely crafty, that her mother was the creative one, but she had gone to the class because it had broken up the day, and she could get lost in the sound of the clicking needles. Plus, she had loved the feel of the yarn running through her hands. The yarn in prison had been cheap and all the same color, an odd synthetic green, but after she had made a garter stitch scarf which she shyly gave to Helen during a visit, Helen had begun to bring her more and better yarn—linen, cotton, soft wool—and special bamboo needles with a silky feel to them. Ella had become so fond of knitting that it began to feel like a drug that helped her forget where she was and why.

But today Helen shopped faster than Ella expected. She was home before Ella could really make any progress in her search.

The next day she asked for a box of brown hair color, and again Helen came home too quickly, with a box of color called Lush Chestnut and a new cellphone for Ella with an unlisted number.

“So you can always reach me,” Helen said, and Ella threw herself into her mother’s arms. There it was, another tool of the Free World.

She took the hair dye into their bathroom and, using Helen’s sewing scissors, chopped her orange curls to her chin, then painted on the new color. Forty minutes later, she washed it out. In the mirror, she saw a different person. Reborn a brunette, she thought. All those names the media had called her—Red Hot, Red-Handed—wouldn’t fit her anymore. Her newly dark, cropped hair made her blue eyes look enormous, as if she could see everything she had missed before.

“I don’t think I can get used to this,” Helen said, staring at Ella’s new hair.

“You will,” Ella said, even though she wasn’t so sure herself.

All that afternoon, Ella played with her new phone, roaming the different sites, playing games while Helen floated around her, making it impossible for Ella to concentrate. Surely Helen’s phone would ring, or the intercom would buzz, but things remained quiet. Ella had noticed while growing up that Helen never really had friends because she was always with Ella or at work, but now Ella wondered why her mother hadn’t made any new friends all these years, why she hadn’t seemed to try.

But Ella knew why. It was all her fault.

She felt her mother watching her, smothering her like a heavy coat she couldn’t manage to shake off. When Ella walked into another room, Helen followed. When Ella was in the shower, Helen knocked on the bathroom door and asked, “Everything all right?”

That night, Ella heard Helen quietly glide into the bedroom, then stand there, staring at her. Ella froze, pretending to be asleep until Helen crept away.

THEY SPENT ALL day together on Sunday, shopping for summer clothes and sandals. When a pedestrian accidentally bumped into Ella, she stopped, tense, the way she would have in prison, but Helen took her arm. “It’s nothing,” Helen said quietly. There was too much noise now, Ella thought, too many strangers glancing at her, and when Helen suggested going to eat Chinese food Ella asked i. . .