The year I turned sixteen was 1884. It began cold and crisp, the rampant wind tugging playfully at hair, skirts, and anything else light enough for it to lift. Spring was far off, but as I stood on my front step that first day of January, I felt renewal in the air. Here, in this new year, things would get better for everyone in my family.
My family, consisting of my father, my mother, my older sister Eustacia, and I, had moved to New York the past year. Eustacia was twenty-two, a grown woman, yet she stayed with us to help take care of our mother. Our mother had lost her third child, an infant son, several months before, and since the tragedy she had slowly begun to recede from the world. Our father was much too busy to be bothered with his ailing wife. He fancied himself an inventor, and tinkering with strange machines was his passion.
With my mother distant, my father occupied, and my sister busy, I often found that I had a great deal of free time left to me. When first we arrived I was too timid to wander very far from home, but as time wore on and my boredom grew, I found my feet taking me further and further from home. After a while I became very familiar with the city and many of its inhabitants. There was a funny little man who peddled peanuts on the streetcorner (at the age of seven I had learned the hard way that I was very allergic to peanuts), and a woman with a pet monkey who often browsed the shops. A pet monkey! Imagine that! The only pet I had at home was my cat, Mittens, but I thought she was better than any monkey.
It was during one of my wanderings that I first met the man who would change me so. I was strolling down the street as I had so many times before when he backed out of a shop so abruptly that my occupied mind had no time to register his presence. I bumped into him, but he hardly seemed to notice. It was only after I had apologized that he even looked at me.
“You. Do you know of a good, tall tree?” he demanded of me. Despite the perfect English he spoke, there seemed to be a sort of lingering accent that momentarily distracted me. Bewildered, I replied, “Er—there’s one in the park, I think.”
“The park!” he exclaimed in an anguished tone. “That’s what everyone tells me, the park! I have been to the park! The trees there are of average height!” He shifted something in his arms, and I saw that they were full of coils, wires, and various other things that looked as if they had come from my father’s workroom.
“Well, I am sorry,” I retorted, “but as I’ve only lived here a few months I can hardly say I know every tree in New York, can I?”
I might as well have been talking to the coils in his arms, as he was no longer paying any attention to me. He turned and walked off after that, not once looking back.
The encounter had been very strange, but I was hardly perturbed by it. This was New York, after all, and quite a few strange characters made their homes here. I neither knew nor cared who the man was or why he wanted a tall tree, and that was that.
I arrived home that day to find Eustacia rushing about the house in a harried manner. The food she was cooking was beginning to burn as she rushed to clean as much of our house as she could. Her light hair, normally sleek and perfect, was straggly and falling out of the bun she kept it in.
“There you are!” she snapped at me. “Start cleaning! We’re having company for supper and Father’s only given me a half hour’s notice!”
Beginning to wish that I hadn’t returned home so soon, I set to work cleaning the place. There weren’t very many of us, and I spent as much time as possible away from our house, but there was still a good layer of dust on almost everything.
“Who is coming for supper?” I wondered aloud as I dusted off our mother’s old clock in the livingroom.
“One of his inventor friends, of course,” Eustacia said with annoyance. I knew that she didn’t consider Father to be any sort of inventor, and saw his passion only as a tedious hobby she had to clean up after. “He’s a foreigner who recently came to America. I can’t remember his first name, but his last name’s Tesla.”
My imagination instantly thought up an image of what the inventor must look like. I imagined him to be my father’s age, stout and good-natured, with a mustache and a thick accent. I found myself quite eager to meet this man, who I imagined would be boisterous but very kind.
When the house was cleaned to Eustacia’s liking, I hurried up to my room to make myself look presentable. I had a soft, blue dress I wore on special occasions, and it was this one I put on. After tying a ribbon in my dark hair, I admired my reflection in the mirror. I was a bit on the gaunt side, like my mother, and had green eyes, like my father. I looked nothing at all like Eustacia, who was a full-bodied woman with golden hair and brown eyes. Her beauty had boys lined up and vying for her affections, but to my knowledge she had never given any of them any attention. As for me, the only boy who had ever shown me any sort of romantic attraction was John Apple, a boy who kissed my cheek when I was eight.
When I returned downstairs, I was mildly surprised to see my father among us even before supper was ready. He normally spent almost all of his hours in his workroom, which was really a shed. His official job was to write for the local newspaper, but I knew without anyone telling me that his job wasn’t going well.
“Ah, Estelle,” he said when he saw me, and ushered me into the front hall. My father always called me Estelle now, rather than Stella, as he used to when Mother was with us and things were happier.
“Is Mother coming down?” I asked as casually as I could, because I felt I should say something to him. Father paused and glanced from me to Eustacia, who suddenly looked much older as she bent over the oven.
“No, not tonight. Maybe tomorrow she’ll feel up to it,” he said with forced cheerfulness, but I wasn’t one to delude myself. Mother hadn’t joined us for a meal since Eustacia’s last birthday. My own was in three days, and I had been preparing myself for her absence on that day for a while.
Eustacia and I each had our own instructions on what to do once the man arrived. I was to greet him in the hall, take his jacket, and lead him into the dining room, where Eustacia would seat him and serve him his food. The two of us were then to take our own plates to the kitchen and eat while Father and the foreigner talked business. Eustacia loathed the kitchen, which she complained was bare and uninviting, but I found a private comfort in its warmth and smallness. The dining room was much too stiff and formal by contrast, and I secretly was glad of the meals that were excused from it.
The instructions were simple enough to follow, and I was of every mind to do so. However, when three light knocks hailed upon the door and I opened it, a cheerful “Good evening, Mr. Tesla,” ready to spring from my lips, I found that a large obstacle had been thrown into my path.
“You!” I exclaimed, and then clapped my hands to my mouth. I could hear Eustacia suck in a breath from the dining room, and knew I would be treated to a lecture from her that night. I didn’t mind, though. I was too distracted, too fascinated, by the fact that Fate had seen fit to bring the strange tree-seeking man to my front door.
