by Julia Dahl
“I know it is silly,” she says. “But I think you helped me. You did not steer me wrong.”
I don’t ask her if she ever asked the me in her head if she should come back to us; or even just send a letter saying she was alive. I will ask her, though. Someday.
As we get up to leave, Aviva waves at the woman behind the counter.
“Excuse me,” she says, handing the woman her phone. “Will you please take a picture of me and my daughter?”
* * *
By the beginning of May, I am back working shifts at the Trib, but I’m out on the street again, not in the office. It’s better for everybody. Mike doesn’t have to be reminded of my breaking-news betrayal by actually seeing my face, and I get to return to what I really like about this job: new people and new places. Iris gets promoted to assistant beauty editor and I invite Van Keller to the bar where Brice throws her a party. We’ve stayed in touch since Roseville. He keeps me updated on the appointment of a new police chief and stepped up efforts to engage with the Jewish community, and I “vouched” for him with Nechemaya and the rebbe. He arrives at the bar with a friend and we all have a nice time. There is an attraction, but for now, at least, neither of us acts on it.
The next afternoon, as Iris and I linger over bottomless Bloody Marys at a Park Slope brunch place, Aviva calls and invites me upstate for Shabbos dinner.
“Sammy wants to meet you,” she says.
When I hang up, Iris is grinning.
“What?”
“Your face changes when you talk to her.”
“No it doesn’t,” I say, but I know she’s right. Aviva and I have been developing a kind of relationship via text message. She sent me pictures of the yellow house when the contractor finished with it, and she updates me on Sam and Ryan, who have moved in. Sam has some fairly complicated legal issues to settle. Carrying and shooting an illegal firearm—even at a man in the midst of the mass murder of children—was a violation of his parole, and although Aviva says the prosecutor appears willing to find a solution that does not involve prison time, Sam has to be extremely careful about what he says and where he goes until, as she puts it, “the ink is dry on the paper.” She orders a subscription to the Trib and when she sees my byline, she writes. Her texts are formal, like little letters: Dear Rebekah … And she always signs her name at the end: Aviva. I read the messages over and over again. I find myself daydreaming about her. Replaying our talk in the ice cream shop; replaying the way it felt when she put her arms around me that first time. I’ve started having dreams where I run to her, and I know she’ll be there. I run and she catches me, sweeping me up into her arms like I’m a child. The best part of the dreams is the sense of safety I feel, and the surprise of that safety. Like, Look, she was here all along. People say that parents fall in love with their children when they first set eyes on them. Could the reverse be true, too?
“I’m happy for you,” Iris says. “I feel like, maybe, this is the start of you really moving on.”
“Growing up,” I offer.
“Yeah?”
“I guess it took actually seeing her to understand why she did what she did.”
“Do you think you understand?”
“I think she got born into the wrong life. Who knows what that does to a person? I guess I can’t ever really understand, but I think it’s possible that if I was in her shoes—if I’d been raised how she was raised—I might have done the same thing.”
Iris looks hard at me. “I don’t think you would have, Rebekah. I don’t think so for a second.”
I call Saul the next day to tell him about Aviva’s invitation, but he knows already.
“I’m going, too,” he says. “Can you get off work a little early? I’ll drive us both.”
Four days later we battle Friday traffic along the West Side Highway and across the George Washington Bridge.
“Everybody going home for Shabbos,” says Saul, nodding to the minivan creeping beside us. The driver is wearing sidecurls and a black hat.
“I wonder if he’s going to Roseville,” I say.
“Perhaps,” says Saul.
“Do you ever think we could have stopped it—if we’d moved faster with Pessie?”
“Do you?”
“I think about it a lot,” I say, which is kind of an understatement. I think about it all the time. I replay every interview, every phone call, every Google search. In my dreams, I see Connie and Nan at the truck and the truck is bigger than it should be. And instead of taking the wheelchair out of the back, I see Connie take out the AR-15. He laughs and I think, But it looked like a wheelchair! How could I have missed it? What I haven’t told anyone is that I’ve developed a sort of—how should I say it?—response to pickup trucks. I have this feeling that they’re coming to get me, like that demon car Stephen King wrote about. Twice since the shooting I’ve been sent to cover pedestrian death scenes. The first one was an eight-year-old boy on the east side of Prospect Park. Kid ran into the crosswalk after his scooter and a woman in an SUV turned without looking. His parents watched the whole thing. A couple weeks after, it was a man who worked at a fix-a-flat on Flatbush. He was opening up at 6:00 A.M. when some drunk doing sixty-five in a sports car, after a night who knows where, lost control, jumped the curb, and pinned him against the storefront. The second driver fled the scene, but the woman who killed the kid stopped. I pitched Mike a story about pedestrian fatalities, and I now know that around 130 people get killed in the city each year while “crossing the street.” For whatever reason, this, plus the memory of Connie’s truck, combined inside me to create an almost instant anxiety attack almost every time I see a pickup. I think: here he comes. I go hot and cold; heart stopped for a moment. A year ago, the fright would have knocked me out. I’d have thrown up, or run home. Now I’m learning to right myself, by myself. I don’t know if I’m getting stronger, or just harder, but either way I have found that I can I keep working. Keep walking. Sometimes, yes, I take a pill. I went back to Anna—the student psychiatrist at Columbia—and she asked me if I thought the “he” coming to get me in the truck might be the guilt I feel about my role in Roseville. I thought that was a good question.
I don’t say any of this out loud to Saul. I haven’t even said it to Iris. And yet, perhaps they know.
“There is a lot of guilt to go around,” he continues when I don’t elaborate. “But I don’t think much of it rests on your shoulders.”
We ride without speaking for a while. The trees along the parkway that were still bare a month ago are popping green now. When we pass the sign announcing the exit to Roseville, Saul breaks the silence.
“We all played a role, I think. I could have found your mother years ago. It only took a few phone calls. I did not make those calls because I felt she would come to me—to us—when she was ready. But she was waiting for us.” He sighs. “Perhaps if I had been in her life sooner I might have helped her with Sammy.”
“Do you think you’ll be in her life now?”
“I would like to be,” Saul says slowly. “I think she would like me to be. But you are the most important thing to her right now. You and Sam. And if you are uncomfortable with our … being in each other’s lives, she has made it very clear that that is her priority.”
I guess I’d always sensed that Saul’s relationship with Aviva might have been romantic. I didn’t ask for details, though, and he didn’t offer. He’s still not offering, exactly, but I suppose there’s time for that.
“So,” I say, “I’m, like, your potential cock block?”
Saul shakes his head, smiling. “I wish you didn’t talk like that, Rebekah.”
“You sound like my dad,” I say.
“Your dad,” Saul says, “is a smart man.”
Aviva answers the door and the first thing I notice is that she has cut her hair. It’s not as short as mine, but instead of falling down her back like it did when we met, it now ends just above her shoulders. She sees me looking and brings her hand to it, se
lf-consciously.
“What do you think?” she says.
“I like it.” My own hair has grown through the original buzz cut and the secondary pixie cut into an awkward kind of preteen boy’s ’do. It keeps wanting to part on the side, and because it’s so thick it puffs out instead of falling down over my ears and neck. Iris is helping me experiment with gel, and she says that in a couple months she can get me in at a fancy salon that’ll make it look better. We’ll see.
“You inspired me,” says Aviva, smiling.
“You could be sisters,” says Saul.
Aviva waves off his compliment and opens her arms for a hug.
“I am so glad you agreed to come visit,” she says. “Saul told me you are very independent. I do not want to intrude on your life. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to … get to know you.”
She looks up, but her face is angled down, like she’s girding herself for a slap, and I realize that she is afraid of me in a way I have never been of her. Her abandonment made her frightening to me, a ghost that punched me in the face every time I thought of her. If she did it once she could do it again. But it didn’t occur to me that as the one who was wronged, the one from whom forgiveness is sought, I have tremendous power over her. She knows what it is like to miss me, but not to be rejected by me. Some part of me still hates her, and a bigger part of me is still afraid of who she really is and how she might hurt me again, but she is no longer a monster or nightmare spirit poisoning me with the mystery of where she is and why she left. She is, just like me, only a woman trying to carve out a little space for her dreams.
“That sounds good,” I say, smiling hard, pushing my mouth up as I try to control my face, which is threatening to fold and let free a lifetime’s worth of sobbing. Sobbing I’d rather do alone.
Aviva ushers us into the living room where Isaac is sitting in an old leather armchair, picking at a plastic grocery store platter of cheese and crackers and fruit. White gauze is still wrapped around his arm—I imagine he’ll be changing bandages for a while—but he looks otherwise healthy, and happy to see us.
We hear footsteps upstairs and down come Sam and Ryan. I didn’t expect my uncle to look like the Haredi men in Borough Park or Roseville, but neither did I expect him to look so utterly different. His strawberry-blond hair is gelled into an inch-high Mohawk and he has the chest and arms of a devoted body-builder. Ryan’s look is All-American—he’s grown a neat goatee and his jeans look pressed—but Sam is almost punk. He has several earrings in each ear, and is wearing a leather wrist cuff and threadbare David Bowie t-shirt. His Adam’s apple is prominent, straining the pale skin on his neck.
“You’re my niece,” he says.
“I am,” I say.
Sam tries to smile, but he is clearly miserable; his shoulders hunched over and his face a blotchy, pimpled mess, red from stress and lack of sleep, I imagine.
“Thank you for not writing about us,” he says.
“Of course,” I say.
“Not of course. You didn’t have to do that. I mean, you don’t know us. It’s your job.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “You guys had enough to deal with.”
Aviva and Saul smile at me. They sit next to each other on the sofa.
“Sit down, Sammy,” says Aviva, patting the cushion next to her.
Sam remains standing. He looks at Ryan.
“Sam and I have something we want to tell you,” says Ryan.
“You start,” says Sam, his eyes on the floor.
“It’s my fault,” Ryan says.
“Shut up,” says Sam. “You know it’s not. Just tell them.”
Ryan inhales. “It was back in December. Sam had only been back from prison a month or two. We went out one night and when we got back we had a really bad fight.” He looks at Sam. Sam, if it’s possible, looks even more unhappy. I wonder what the fight was about. “We’d taken E, which didn’t help. Sam slept on the couch and the next morning we were both just wandering around the apartment like zombies, trying to feel better. He turned on the TV and that shooting, the one in Connecticut where all the kids died? It was all over the place.”
“Newtown,” I say. After the copy girl had thrown up in the office, I was sent to the Upper East Side to sit on the apartment building of a man whose daughter was a teacher at the school. They sent stringers to every address of every relative they could find in the city. My guy didn’t come home until after my shift was over. I heard his daughter survived.
“Right,” he says. “We both kinda got sucked in.”
“Me more than you,” whispers Sam.
“Whatever,” says Ryan. “It was nonstop. You know? The pictures of the kids running and screaming, like, all in a line. And that girl on the cell phone the exact moment they tell her that her sister is dead. I tried to get him to turn it off, but he kept saying we had to watch.”
“I felt like, those kid are in pain and the least we could do was pay attention,” says Sam. “I started thinking about how nobody really paid attention to me back then. I was, like, if one of those little goyish kids on the TV came home and said their teacher was making him suck his dick his parents would go to the cops. But in Roseville they just pretend it didn’t happen so nobody who wasn’t Jewish would say anything bad about the community.”
“We talked about how growing up for both of us there was this ‘no snitching’ thing,” says Ryan. “How loyalty—like, no matter what—was the most important thing. My dad always said it was better to go to prison than be a rat.”
“What I was pissed about was how adults, like, need to keep kids safe,” Sam says. “I needed somebody to keep me away from him, ’Viva. Or at least to, like, fight back. Kill him, or at least lock him up. But nobody did. That’s what I was saying. They’re pussies.”
“Sammy thought my family was strong. He was, like, your dad doesn’t take shit from anybody.”
“I was a fucking idiot,” says Sam, finally sitting down next to his sister.
For a few moments there is silence. Then Sam says to Ryan, “Keep going.”
“Okay, so he spent all day, like ten hours, on the couch watching the news and getting high. It was my dad’s birthday and there was a party that night. I wasn’t planning on going, but I felt like I had to get him out of the apartment. I’d never seen him so down. When we got there, we both started drinking. Sam went straight to the whiskey. The party broke up around two, I think. We’d gone inside my dad’s place and that’s when Nan started talking about the Jews. She said she’d seen some of them—the ones with the hats—at Home Depot. She was, like, I heard they’re trying to take over the school board down in Rockland County…”
“And I just, like, went off,” interrupts Sam, talking fast now, like he wants to get to the end. “I was so drunk. I was, like, they’re all on welfare and they make the women shave their heads and all the kids get molested because they’re so fucked up about sex.”
“And they loved it,” says Ryan. “They ate it up. My family hates everybody who’s not like them, but they don’t really know anything about anybody else. So when he started talking they found, like, real reasons to hate them. To my dad, Jews were just money-grubbing rats who killed Jesus. Suddenly he’s getting all this detail. Sam kept calling them a cult. He was, like, somebody should wipe them all out. He was drunk. But my dad and his friends loved it. Everybody was, like, yeah. And they just kept talking about it, egging each other on to come up with the most fucked up thing they could think of to strike the first blow, start their stupid race war. Nan was, like, you gotta do something people will remember. She was, like, you can’t just shoot up a school because that’s been done before. And my dad was, like, same thing with a church.”
They both stop talking for a minute. And then Sam speaks: “So I said, a playground. Nobody’s done a playground.”
I open my mouth but manage not to gasp. Sam is shivering. After a moment, he looks at Aviva. She is speechless. We all are.
Sam begins to cry,
and beneath his tears, he whispers, “And Pessie. If I had just left her alone. If I had cut her off … She should have gone her whole long life without ever meeting people like Connie and Hank. But because of me—because she loved me…” He can’t finish.
Aviva wraps her arms around Sam and he wraps his arms around her. He cries and cries and she rocks him. He pulls away and bends over himself, sobbing. Aviva gets on the floor, kneeling before her baby brother, grasping his hands.
“Look at me, Sammy,” she says. “You did not kill Pessie. And you did not kill all those people at the yeshiva. None of us believe this was your fault. You have had more pain in your life than anyone I know, and you will never outrun what you have seen, and what was done to you. But that is not your fault. Our family was happy until I left, Sammy. I broke our family, not you. Not Eli. Not the cook. My selfishness created the world you grew up in. I killed Mommy, not you. Do you understand?” Sam is still crying, but he nods. “But we have been given a second chance. You have been given a second chance. You can stay with me, or Isaac, wherever we go. Or you can move far away. Whatever you do, I will love you. I will know who you are inside.”
“So will I,” says Ryan quietly. He puts his hand on Sam’s back.
Sam wipes his face and nods. “We were thinking we’d like to get out of New York, at least for a while. Go somewhere warm where nobody knows us.” For the first time since he started talking, he looks at me. “We were thinking, maybe, Florida.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Among the best parts of being a published author is the privilege of having very smart people weigh in on and improve your work. I am grateful every day that I can count on my agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan, and Minotaur’s Kelley Ragland to tell me the truth and cheer me on.