217 Babel Street | The Penthouse
Her 78th birthday. Lulu gazed through the wide bedroom window, smoking her breakfast – her own inimitable roll-up. She reclined on the rosewood chaise longue in what had once been her mother’s room, remembering another birthday morning long ago when she had perched there. The morning of her 16th. The morning when her mother had informed her that Erich Mendelsohn was not in fact her father.
The blood had run from her cheeks and her stomach had lurched, as it had the time she’d ventured alone, without an escort, onto the Waltzer on the pier.
“Now Lulu,” her mother had chided, “I never told you he was your father.”
You never told me he wasn’t! But she couldn’t breathe a word. She couldn’t talk back, she couldn’t contradict, she couldn’t protest, for her mother had never learned how to sign, or even how to read Lulu’s early, doomed efforts at signing. It was her mother’s way of punishing her – for Andreas. On the day of his death, on the day that Lulu’s voice forsook her, on that catastrophic, clattering downfall of a day, her mother had abandoned Lulu forever in the locked room of her own silence.
And on her 16th birthday: “Of course Mr. Mendelsohn is fond of you, liebling. Enormously fond.”
Not his daughter. Not even his illegitimate daughter. She had never had his smile after all.
Sweet, sixteen-year-old Lulu felt something black swirl through her, something as black and unstoppable as ink through water.