Like No Other

by Una LaMarche

  “Well,” my father says slowly, “we don’t know yet. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Or her.” Thank you, Daddy, I think, regaining my composure. He can be intimidating sometimes, and scary-silent, but my father has always been fair. I have crystal-clear memories of him dividing up the last slice of my eighth birthday cake into seven equal slivers with a protractor so that none of his children would feel favored or denied.

  “You’re right, I know you’re right,” Jacob says, nervously scratching his beard. “I just can’t understand. Seven weeks early, after seven months of no complications . . .”

  Oh. I nearly crumple with shame as I “count” the last place setting. Of course they’re not talking about me; they’re talking about Liya’s birth. And why shouldn’t they? That’s the huge news today, not my getting stuck in an elevator. What has gotten into me? Why am I obsessing about it? It was nothing.

  Except it wasn’t.

  I ignore my inner voice and take the chicken from Rivka to set on the blech, the metal stove covering that keeps food warm once the sun sets and we aren’t allowed to use electricity. While I’m in the kitchen, I turn on the faucet in the left-hand sink, cup the cool water in my shaking fingers, and splash my face until my cheeks go numb.

  • • •

  Sundown falls at 7:33 PM, so we’re all seated around the big, rectangular dining table that Zeidy’s father built back in Ukraine and transported to New York in pieces on a steamship—the same one that brought Zeidy and his eight siblings to the United States—by 7:15. I snuck in a shower just under the wire and have my limp, wet hair tucked behind my ears, dripping onto the back of my shirt. In my house we’ve always sat men on one side, women on the other, so Jacob, Isaac, Niv, Amos, Zeidy, and my dad sit across from Rose, Hanna, Rivka, me, Aunt Varda, and Miri. My mother takes the head of the table, which evens things out and also makes sense since she has to lead the blessings anyway.

  It has already been decided that instead of the usual nine candles, we will light ten tonight, one for the baby in addition to the seven for each of us kids and the two requisite Shabbos candles. My mother lights the first two, then Rose lights two, and then me, Hanna, and Miri, in age order. Once the tiny wicks are flickering in the otherwise dark house, casting us all in an amber glow, my mother stands and holds her palms out over the candles, drawing her hands in toward her face three times, as if beckoning the light. She covers her eyes and recites the blessing:

  “Baruch a-ta A-do-nay Elo-hei-nu me-lech ha-o-lam a-sher ki-dee-sha-nu bi-mitz-vo-tav vi-tzi-va-noo li-had-leek ner shel Sha-bbat ko-desh.”

  We have to stay silent until my mother removes her hands from her eyes, which we’ve learned over the years is entirely dependent on her mood. If she’s happy, she’ll drop them almost immediately, but if she’s upset she can hold out for a good two minutes. The idea is that she’s using the quiet time to pray, so I guess the more she has to pray about, the longer she takes. Tonight is a two-minute night, and I wait it out trying in vain to pray for Liya instead of thinking about Jaxon.

  When I was three I had to have surgery—nothing major, to have my tonsils removed—and as a reward for being brave, my mother took me to see Annie on Broadway. This was a big deal; hearing a woman sing in public is usually avoided as part of tz’ni’ut, but since Annie was played by a ten-year-old I guess my mom was able to rationalize it. According to her, I was very, very good during the whole show, but I hated it whenever Annie left the stage for any reason. “Where’s Annie?” I would demand, holding my mother’s face in my tiny hand. “Where. Is. Annie???” That’s what my brain is doing right now, only with Jaxon. Where is he? What’s he thinking? Does he wonder about me, too? I stare down at my plate as though the answers will appear, swimming up to the porcelain surface like letters in alphabet soup.

  Finally, my mother drops her hands and we all shout, “Shabbat Shalom!” and turn to hug anyone within arm’s reach. I leave a wet splotch on Aunt Varda’s sweater.

  After kiddush, the blessing over the wine, and the ritual hand-washing and the ceremonial breaking of my lopsided challah braid, it’s finally time to eat, and my nerves must be burning extra calories, because I’m starving. I demolish three pieces of challah, slurp down a bowl of chicken soup, and eat two servings of potato kugel before most of my family members have even filled their plates.

  “Are we being timed?” Niv jokes.

  “I like a girl with a healthy appetite,” Zeidy says, laughing and refilling his wine. “Go on, zeeskyte, ess.”

  “More like fress,” Isaac chimes in, and my brothers snort. Fress means to eat like an animal.

  “Enough,” my father says, and everyone quiets. There are rules for dinner conversation on Shabbos that include no fighting.

  “Devorah,” my mother says gently, giving me a pointed look. “Leave some for Rose, please. She needs her strength.”

  “No, Mama, I can’t.” Rose grimaces. “I’ve lost my appetite. I just want to be with her.” She looks around the table, her eyes wet. “I’m sorry, this was a mistake.”

  “There is nothing we can do,” Jacob says stoically. “Visiting hours have almost ended. And I don’t think it will do you any good to spend the night on a waiting-room chair.” He tears off a chunk of challah and hands it to my father, who passes it to Rose. “Please,” he continues, making the word sound hard and impatient, the opposite of polite. “Have some bread, at least. You have to eat for your milk to come in.”

  Rose cringes but takes the food silently and holds it in her lap.

  “Good girl,” my father says gently. But I wonder if he can see what I see. I wonder if any of them do. Rose might be being “good,” but she’s not being Rose. My sister has always been the quiet one during big family gatherings, but this is different, and scary. It’s like she’s empty.

  I study my mother’s face in the flickering candlelight. Her stone-colored eyes are big and bright behind her glasses, her smile easy and genuine as she gazes proudly at my dad and around the table at the big family she’d always wanted after growing up one of only two daughters (I once asked her why Grandma Deborah never had more children, but my mother just bristled and told me it was no one’s business but Grandma’s and G-d’s). Obviously I didn’t know my mother before she was married, so I don’t know if a switch flipped in her; if a light went out, like it seems Rose’s has. She has always been charismatic and commanding and intolerant of what she calls blote, which translates roughly from Yiddish as bullshit. But one of the cruelties of teenagehood is that you’ll never know what your parents were really like at your age, and they’ll never accurately remember—not enough to empathize, anyway . . . maybe just enough for pity.

  “Where is the baby sleeping?” Miri pipes up, and we all look to Rose, bracing ourselves for her to lose it completely, but amazingly, she comes to life, laughing as she wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes with her wrist.

  “She’s in an incubator, tsigele,” Rose says. The Yiddish word for “baby goat” has been our nickname for Miri since she came home from the hospital colicky and brayed like livestock for six months straight.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a little bed that keeps her warm and protected until she’s big enough to go outside.”

  Miri smiles and takes a bite of chicken, seeming happy with this answer, and Rose pops the challah into her mouth, reaching for another piece. My mother and father exchange a glance of relief.

  “If you ask me,” Jacob says—though clearly, no one has—“she could have come home today. She’s a good size for a preemie, she’s breathing on her own, she’s eating . . . Keeping her ‘for observation’ is just an excuse for them to take more of our money. Why should we trust that doctor? She’s not our doctor.” He doesn’t mean Dr. MacManus wasn’t Rose’s prenatal ob-gyn; I can tell he means that she’s not one of us. Not a Chabadnik. Translation: not to be trusted.

  Rose�
��s face crumples again, and my mother rushes to comfort her.

  “She was very respectful,” I say. “Wasn’t she, Rose?” Jacob glares at me.

  “She was fine,” Rose says quietly, dabbing her eyes with a napkin.

  “Exactly!” Jacob cries, banging his fist on the table and almost upending Isaac’s wine. “Fine. We shouldn’t pay eight thousand dollars for fine.”

  “Jacob,” my father warns in a deep and weary voice. Money and business are not discussed on Shabbos.

  “Rivka’s friend just had a baby,” Niv says. “She used a midwife from Park Slope. They had a home birth, right in the living room.”

  On my right, Rivka takes a break from slowly and methodically picking the crispy top bits off her square of kugel and nods politely. She’s very nice but doesn’t talk much; Niv tends to speak for her, presumably because of her accent—Rivka’s family moved to Brooklyn from Ukraine when she was fourteen. Her grandfather is a rabbi there, which impressed my parents when Niv was looking for a bride. But I wonder what Rivka was looking for in a husband. My middle brother is fine as brothers go—a bit bossy and juvenile but not cold like Jacob or oblivious like Isaac—and yet, just like Jacob said, fine isn’t enough. Not for the rest of your life, anyway.

  I look over at Rose, who is staring into her lap, pale as a ghost, lips cracked and eyes red. I can’t believe that this woman is the same brave big sister I looked up to and aspired to become for more than fifteen years, the one whose braces seemed so beautiful and sophisticated to me that I approximated them with strips of tinfoil on my own straight teeth. Maybe it’s not fair to blame Jacob entirely; after all, she just pushed a human being out of her body without pain medication. But there’s a spark that’s gone from Rose—not just gone, but seemingly taken from her against her will. I take a bite of my bread and say a silent vow that I will never let that happen to me.

  With Jaxon it wouldn’t. The thought takes me by surprise, so much so that I swallow too quickly and nearly choke.

  “I told you not to eat so fast,” Niv says, and laughs. Jacob just looks annoyed that I’ve interrupted the conversation.

  “Well,” my mother says once I catch my breath. “A home birth would be dangerous seven weeks early. Too much risk.”

  “True,” Jacob says. “But for the next one, I would feel much better staying in Crown Heights, with our people to take care of us.”

  “We’ll see,” my father says vaguely.

  “What we need is more Hasidic doctors,” Isaac cracks. Since secular schooling is frowned upon—too much opportunity for insidious outside culture to seep in—there are few doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in our community, or in any of the Hasidic sects.

  “What we need is a fence,” Niv says, and the boys laugh.

  “Maybe all of the goyim could move to Manhattan and let us have Brooklyn,” Jacob adds.

  “Or we can kick the soccer moms off Staten Island,” Isaac says, and laughs.

  “You’re all being imbeciles,” Zeidy grumbles, and I want to give him an air high five like Jaxon taught me. But of course I keep my hands on my knife and fork.

  “No one is going anywhere,” my mother says loudly, a forced smile stretched wide across her face, the equivalent of a flashing yellow light warning her children to cut it out before she loses patience. “We live where we live.”

  “And I have an easy way to avoid dealing with outsiders,” my father adds. “Ignore them.”

  “But what if you can’t?” Hanna asks, refilling her grape juice. “What if you get stuck with one?” I catch my breath. I don’t know if this is coincidence or if Jacob has taken it upon himself to tell everyone where I was during the blackout.

  My father chuckles, brushing crumbs off his beard with his napkin. His full, wide cheeks are rosy with wine. “How, my dear, would you get yourself stuck with one?” He doesn’t know. A good sign.

  Hanna casts a sidelong glance my way. “I don’t know,” she says, picking at her salad. “What if you met in some way through forces outside of your control, almost like it was fate?” Hanna is the hopeless romantic of the family. She’s also the most outspoken opponent of our parents’ no-TV policy, since it means she can’t watch movies to feed her fairy-tale fetish.

  “Like if an elevator stopped!” Miri nearly shouts, so excited that she has information to contribute to the grown-up talk. “Like with Devorah in the hospital!”

  I glare across the table, first at Jacob and then at Amos, not sure who has betrayed me.

  My father turns to me and sets down his fork. “Devorah, enlighten me. What’s this about an elevator?” Jacob smirks. He didn’t tell my father after all, but he clearly set me up by telling Amos. Okay, fine, I decide; if that’s how he wants to play, I’ll play. I smile sweetly at him and prepare to unleash my secret weapon, which is that regardless of the spark that was lit in that elevator, I am Devorah “Frum from Birth” Blum, and as far as my family knows I am nothing if not a virtuous daddy’s girl.

  “Abba,” I say calmly, invoking my childhood pet name for him, “after I helped Rose through her delivery and checked on the baby in the NICU, I couldn’t find Jacob anywhere, so I decided to look downstairs. While I was on the elevator, the power went out, and I was trapped with a boy my age.”

  “He was black,” Amos pipes up.

  “Amos!” I yell.

  “Did he try to save you?” Hanna asks breathlessly.

  “That doesn’t matter,” my father says, clearing his throat. “Devorah had no control over her circumstances. What matters is how she behaved, which I know and trust is the right way.” I smile at Jacob again, and he rolls his eyes.

  “However,” my father continues, “the laws of yichud exist for a reason, and we should all remember that when circumstances are within our control, we are bound to obey them.”

  “Otherwise you’ll end up like Ruchy Silverman,” Niv says. Isaac stifles a laugh, and Rivka gasps. My parents seem to freeze in place, and exchange another glance that looks to me to be the opposite of relief.

  “Did something happen to Ruchy?” I ask. I’m truly confused, as Ruchy was in the grade above me at school until the middle of last year, when she left suddenly to go on a trip to Israel. She has the shiniest golden hair and a face like a fashion model; Shoshana and I have spent many hours trying to make ourselves feel better by cataloguing her potential flaws.

  “Niv,” my mother says sharply, “that is not dinner conversation, and certainly not Shabbos conversation.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I take it back.”

  “Did she get hurt?” I ask. As much as I’m jealous of Ruchy, I would never wish harm on her. Well, nothing worse than acne, anyway.

  “She got what she deserved,” Jacob mutters, and my father sets down his fork and shoots daggers in his direction.

  “No,” my father says angrily. “She is fine, and we will discuss it another time.” The end of the sentence comes out like a growl.

  My mother makes a show of changing the subject, and gradually, as my father relaxes, talk turns to the coming school year. But as my family chatters and laughs around me, I retreat into my head, worrying now about two people and where they are: Ruchy and Jaxon. Jaxon and Ruchy. Two figures that my memory renders both blurry and larger than life. Two specters I will probably never see again.

  Chapter 8

  Jaxon

  SEPTEMBER 2, 7 AM

  I’m already awake when my alarm rings, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling above my bed, which look like two crooked parentheses with nothing in the middle. That’s a good analogy for the new school year, too: a big question mark hanging over you that could collapse at any minute. Kidding. Sort of.

  I’ve been grounded since the night of the storm (a Thursday, and today is Tuesday), so I’m actually excited to get up and out, even though my summer-logged brain isn’t used to having
to function this early. Staying in my room can get claustrophobic, since it’s no more than a glorified closet that barely fits a twin bed and a dresser, but that’s the price I pay for having my own space, I guess. Edna and Ameerah share a room, Tricia and Joy share, and of course Mom and Dad do, too. I’m the only one with any kind of privacy in this cramped house where we’re all practically on top of one another all the time, constantly up in one another’s business. It’s awesome to hole up in my room when I have my cell and laptop to listen to music and check Facebook and stream movies, but in my family grounded means no phone, no computer, no friends, no leaving the building unless it’s for work or school, and obviously no basement training sessions. So for the past four days I’ve been trudging through the last of my summer reading list, Invisible Man and Ethan Frome. Both are crazy depressing, so I’ve been taking lots of breaks to read the stash of comics my mom forgot to confiscate from under my mattress.

  I’m pretty sure my parents aren’t that mad at me anymore. I got a huge lecture about the importance of honesty (and skateboard safety) when I got home on Thursday night, followed by the silent treatment on Friday, but after I did the dishes and two loads of laundry and picked up all the socks (thirteen) and hair elastics (seven) strewn around the living room without being asked, they started to forget to shun me by the weekend. Mom even gave me two extra strips of bacon at breakfast on Sunday, although I was still banned from going with the rest of the family to the West Indian Day parade on Eastern Parkway (which I told myself was just as well since it’s flooded with cops, and people get shot or stabbed almost every year). But when they got home, giddy and sunburned, dad slipped me $100 from his shoebox stash to buy some new school clothes. And then yesterday morning mom let me watch NY1 with her, and when I told her (in a fit of shameless ass-kissing) that I wanted to go to journalism school to be like Pat Kiernan, she hugged me and told me I was her favorite son, which is our running joke.