by Una LaMarche
“Sabbath starts at sundown,” she said. “They can’t work or drive or turn on lights until nightfall tomorrow.”
“Damn,” I say, and she laughs, genuinely this time.
“Damn is right,” she says. “I couldn’t do it.” She turns to leave but then pauses, giving me the kind of look you might give a lost puppy on the street. “They might come Sunday,” she says. “It’s a popular visiting day, especially after their schools let out. Good luck!”
So here I am. Hiding in a stairwell on a Sunday afternoon because I was dumb enough to think she’d come alone, and we’d have one of those slo-mo embraces like you see in movies when one character runs through an airport to stop another character from leaving, and somehow nobody gets Tasered by a rogue TSA agent.
I’m expecting her to come through the door, so when I hear footsteps on the stairs below me I whip out my phone and pretend to be on a call, in case it’s a doctor or nurse or someone else who might want to stop and frisk me.
“Grandma’s doing all right,” I assure the imaginary person on the other end of the phone. And then I see her, looking up at me like I’m crazy from the landing in between floors, those gray eyes big and searching beneath a mass of unruly curls.
“What are you doing here?” she asks flatly, not moving.
“I was . . . looking for you,” I say, putting my phone back in my pocket and trying to figure out something new to do with my hands, which suddenly feel like big bricks of cement.
“Then why are you talking about your grandma?”
“That was . . .” I start to explain, and then think better of it. She’s already wary of me. “It’s nothing,” I finish.
“So,” she repeats, still not budging from the landing, “you’re here looking for me.”
I nod.
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Truthfully?” I ask, just as it occurs to me that the truth makes me sound like a stalker, “I’ve been here on and off for a few days. Just in case.”
“Jaxon,” she says with a sigh, exasperated, but her face visibly softens and she takes a step forward, her hands leaving the railing. “Why didn’t you just come meet me on Wednesday if you wanted to see me?”
“My sister needed to get picked up,” I say, so relieved to have a chance to plead my case that the words tumble out too quickly, too inarticulately. “It got sprung on me. And I couldn’t tell you, so I needed to see you so I could tell you that I’m sorry. And that I want to see you. Again. I mean, this doesn’t really count.”
“Why not?” Her hands are on her hips, but she’s almost smiling now; I can see it in her eyes.
“Because . . . we don’t have any privacy,” I say, “and your family’s waiting outside the door. And I’m not wearing my special outfit.” She smiles and starts to climb the stairs. Progress.
“What special outfit?” She raises an eyebrow.
I grin. “You’ll see it when we have our date. That’s incentive.” She takes another step.
“You want to go on a date?”
“Absolutely,” I say, walking to the top of the stairs with my palms out. “Please give me another shot.”
She breaks eye contact. “Jax, I like you, but—”
“Uh-uh, no buts,” I interrupt. “You like me. I’m gonna hold you to that, it’s on the record now.” She bites her lip to stifle a smile, which is exactly what I need to give me the balls to keep going. I take a deep breath, feeling the words swell again and knowing I’m powerless to stop them. “And I like you. More than like you, actually. And I hear it when you tell me this can’t happen, but I still can’t let it go. And even if I could . . .” I shrug helplessly. “I don’t want to.”
She looks at me like I’m crazy again and shakes her head. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know I’ve never felt this way about anybody,” I say, grabbing the railing, gathering my courage. “And I know I don’t care if you’re different from me. I mean, aren’t we past that? The Civil Rights Act and shit?”
“I wish it was that simple,” Devorah says, climbing one step and whispering now, like she’s afraid someone’s listening in. We’re only a few feet apart, and I can see her free hand trembling by her side. “But it’s not. I’m not allowed to date anyone.”
“Why not?” I say, knowing the answer. I just want her to say it out loud, so she can hear it.
“Because,” she says, getting flustered, her cheeks flushing crimson, almost the color of the roses I bought for her, and just as beautiful. “It’s the way I was brought up. It’s a sin. I have to wait.”
“For what?”
She narrows her eyes, aware that I’m baiting her. “For marriage.”
“You know it’s 2014, right?” I joke, and she shoots daggers at me from underneath those thick eyelashes. She’s getting mad now, but I don’t care. The air between us is electric, and I know she feels it, too.
“Look,” she says. “I know you don’t understand. And sometimes I’m not sure I understand, either, but . . . it’s just the way it is.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t feel anything?” I ask, taking a step down. I half expect her to bolt, but she doesn’t budge. Instead she lets out a slow, shaky breath.
“I didn’t say that,” she says. My heart beats wildly in my chest.
“What about Wednesday?” I say, taking another step. We’re face-to-face now, or would be, if we weren’t on a flight of stairs. As it is, her face is about in line with my ribs. “What if I had made it? What would have happened?”
“I don’t know,” she says softly. I’m towering over her, maybe scaring her. Without thinking, I jump down and around so that I’m two steps below her. She turns and smiles. Our faces are perfectly aligned.
“Was that a date?” I press, grinning. She averts her eyes and says nothing. “Oh,” I say, “so you were just waiting there to tell me you can’t see me, right?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
She laughs nervously. “I said I don’t know, why do you care?”
“Why do I care?” I ask softly, rhetorically, knowing I care way too much already not to freak her out. “Because I can’t stop thinking about you,” I say. “And maybe you’re right and I don’t know you that well, but . . . just tell me you don’t like me that way, and I’ll leave. I swear, I’ll never bother you again.”
We stare at each other silently for what feels like forever, our breathing falling into sync, out, then back in again, like overlapping waves as I watch her eyes flash gray, then blue, then gold, like some hypnotic kaleidoscope. I’m so dumbstruck by Devorah that it takes me almost a minute to realize what this silence means. I asked her a question, and she’s answering. Or not answering. Which is an answer in itself.
“So I’m not crazy?” I murmur. She shakes her head. And it’s too much. I can’t help myself. I lean in, and I kiss her.
I’ve kissed two girls in my life before this moment—two and a half if you count Hallie Fuller’s ear in fifth grade, when she turned her head at the last minute. Both were nice but awkward, a jumble of tentative false starts and unruly tongues and accidental teeth. Don’t get me wrong, I thought I saw fireworks. But it turns out they were just some dollar-store Roman candles. With Devorah, it’s fireworks. It’s the Fourth of July over the Hudson. Everything clicks instantly, and there are no false starts, no wrong angles. Just me tumbling headfirst into her soft mouth and sweet, hot breath, which catches in her throat as I press my lips to hers. I’m afraid to touch her with my hands, not sure how far is too far, but then she raises hers and cups my face, her index fingers tracing my jaw. I don’t know who pulls back first, but I know the kiss ends too soon. Suddenly we’re staring into each other’s eyes again, and this time I do see fear, even though her fingers are still on my neck, digging in like her life depends on it.
I want to tell her it’s okay
, that we’ll figure it out, and that I’m scared, too. I want to confess that I’m falling in love with her. Hell, most of all I just want to kiss her again. But I can’t do any of that, because someone starts to bang on the door to the stairwell. Devorah drops her hands like I’m on fire.
“Go,” she whispers.
“Not without knowing when I’m going to see you again,” I say. The knocking gets faster.
“Devorah?” a male voice calls from outside. Her eyes widen with terror.
“I’ll find you; please, Jax, just go,” she begs.
That’s all I need to hear. I run down the stairs all the way to the lobby, where I throw open the heavy ER door like it’s made of tissue paper. I’ve never felt adrenaline like this before, never felt the air fill my lungs so sweetly or the sun bathe my skin so gloriously. I run all the way home, half a mile, my feet barely touching the pavement, my heartbeat flooding my ears again and again like a bass line that sings, Devorah, Devorah, Devorah.
Chapter 13
Devorah
SEPTEMBER 7, 4:30 PM
“Devorah?” Jacob calls again. “Are you in there?”
I’m pretty sure he’ll hear me if I move, but I can’t stand still. I feel like I’m on the Cyclone at Coney Island, back before it reopened, when it was so jerky and screechy you had to hold on for dear life or you thought you really might fly out.
That kiss. I can’t believe it just happened. My lips are still tingling—is that normal? And there’s a weird, fluttery feeling in my chest, which gets worse (or better, I should say, since it feels like floating) when I think about how I could feel his breath on my neck. As I walk on rubbery legs to the fourth-floor landing, it occurs to me that maybe I’m not on the roller coaster after all; maybe I’ve already fallen off. Maybe I’m suspended in the popcorn-scented air over the boardwalk, about to come crashing back to earth.
“Hi,” I say as calmly as possible as I step back out into the hallway outside the NICU, coming face-to-face with a frustrated-looking Jacob. It’s all I can do to keep from trembling uncontrollably; I’m sure he can tell. My face must be bright red, my pupils dilated, lips swollen from the shock of being used for the first time for what it seems like they were designed to do; after all, why eat or speak or whistle when you could do that? I put my hand up to my face as if I’m scratching an itch, covering my mouth, which feels like it might as well be a three-story neon sign flashing the news of my sin across Times Square.
“What were you doing in there?” Jacob demands. “I came out to look for you and heard voices.”
“I . . .” For a second my mind draws a blank, but then a lie comes into focus; I’m getting very good at coming up with them now. “I was afraid to take the elevator,” I mumble. “And there were some orderlies talking on the landing downstairs.” I hope I’m reading my lines right and sounding casual. I feel like my own understudy. Tonight, I think maniacally, the part of Normal Devorah will be played by Off the Derech Devorah.
“Hmmm.” He squints at me for a second like he’s trying to see through me, but then seems to let it go. “Well, the others are already waiting down the hall. You missed your chance to hold the baby.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Usually when I apologize to Jacob I’m secretly calling him names in my head, but this time I’m sincere. There’s so much that I want to escape, but being part of my niece’s life isn’t part of it. I’m ashamed that my selfishness has caused me to miss a moment I’ll never get back—even if it also created a moment I’ll never forget.
As I walk back to the waiting area, following a good ten feet behind Jacob, I realize for the first time that what I’m doing with Jaxon can’t be undone. If I keep seeing him, I’ll have to keep lying, or worse, reveal to my parents that I’ve ruined everything they’ve hoped for me. Devorah, the frum princess, who would make any shadchan’s job easy—gone. Devorah, the doting daughter, eager to please and quick to obey—gone. I will just become another cautionary tale whispered to teenagers around the Shabbos table: You heard what happened to Devorah Blum. Don’t end up like her. She kissed a black boy, and then—
“There she is!” my mother says, standing up as I round the corner.
“You missed it,” Miri squeals. “The baby burped and threw up all over Rose!”
“It was sick,” Hanna says, just as Amos says, “It was great!”
“What did you eat?” Mom asks, studying my face. “You look better.”
“Oh, um . . . an apple,” I mumble, not realizing the parallel before it’s too late. Like Eve, and look how well that turned out.
“There’s a blush in your cheek,” Zeidy says, reaching forward to poke me in the arm. “You look just like your grandmother when we would go dancing.”
“She climbed the stairs,” Jacob says dismissively.
“Why?” Amos asks. “Just because you didn’t want to get stuck on the elevator with a—”
“Amos,” my mother warns, and I take the opportunity to change the subject.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to Rose, who is cradling Miri, stroking her hair as gently as if she were Liya. “I wanted to see her. My stomach”—(my heart)—“had bad timing.” She smiles serenely.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You were the very first person she met; I don’t think she’ll forget you. And besides, the doctors say she can come home next week!”
“As soon as she gets to five pounds, one ounce,” my mother says, clapping her hands.
“Which is only three ounces away!” Rose beams.
The tears come unexpectedly, as if they’ve been spring-loaded, waiting for this bit of good news to bring relief to what’s come to feel like a permanent ache deep in my bones.
“Zeeskyte,” Zeidy laughs, “what’s wrong? This is a cause for celebration.”
“Hormones,” my mother whispers, as if I’m not right there.
“It’s not hormones,” I say, sniffing, wiping my eyes with my shirtsleeve. “I’m just happy.”
“We can all see that,” Jacob says quietly, almost to himself, and as the rest of my family moves in to embrace me, all I can do is look over their shoulders at him, a dark shadow puppet in his black suit against the bland beige hospital walls, and wonder if I was wrong. Maybe he can see through my lies after all.
• • •
It’s two AM, and I can’t sleep. I used to have bouts of insomnia in middle school, but that was when Rose still shared my room. In the clutches of that acute but somehow unidentifiable anxiety, as I would listen to the faint thrum of night traffic drifting in from Eastern Parkway through the cracks in the windows, the sight of her chest rising and falling beneath the blankets just a few feet away never failed to calm me. But now I’m on my own. And I know exactly what’s making me so anxious.
The rational part of my brain keeps telling me what Shoshana told me over lunch last week: I do not have a choice. This is not one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to leaf through in the library on rainy weekend afternoons; there is only one path to take, and that is to forget about Jaxon and get back to the only life that I know, which has been plotted out for me long before I was even born. In this life, I will go back to school and to work at the store, make good grades and braid challah every Friday, celebrate the high holidays and usher in a new year with apples and honey, a new year that will see me turn seventeen and enter my senior year of high school. Before I know it I’ll graduate and it will be two Junes from now, and as the streets fill with the sounds of children playing on the hot cement my parents will meet with a matchmaker and will pick a boy to become my husband. And then I’ll be married and will choose a wig—long and sleek and black like Rose’s—and move into an apartment that’s probably less than five blocks from where I’m lying right now, stock-still, with my covers up to my neck and my eyes wide open with worry. I try to imagine what it will feel like to share my bed with a strange man. Will I be
able to choose when I want to touch him, or will I be at the mercy of his urges? Will I like the way he smells? Will his smile light up his face like a slow sunrise, or will he be like Jacob, gruff and moody? In the life I have set out for me, my husband seems like the only unknown variable.
And then there is the irrational part of my brain, the part that tells me to go find Jaxon and lie with my head in his lap in the park, listening to his jokes and watching his eyes flash with warmth and laughing until I can’t breathe. This story is much more unfinished; in fact, I have no idea where it will lead. I know only that in this alternate reality, I will have Jaxon. He is the only thing I know for sure. The only nonvariable.
I told him I would find him, and I desperately want to make good on that promise. But all my life I’ve been told that there is nothing for me outside the Chabad community, no opportunity for any happiness in the greater world. I only wish I knew if this were true.
And then it hits me, as I stare up at my ceiling: One floor above me, there is a way to find out.
I leave my slippers on and the hall lights off, creeping like a burglar up to my father’s study, taking care to skip the creaky step at the top of the stairs. As usual, my parents’ bedroom door is shut tight, which means I’ll have at least a second of warning if one of them gets up to use the bathroom—long enough, at least, to shut the laptop.
As I pry it open with delicate fingers, a chime rings out, causing my heart to lurch. I spring to my feet in case I need to abandon my mission, but after a few seconds with no discernible movement from the next room, I gingerly sit back down and squint into the bright blue screen littered with tiny icons. Once again, I open the web browser and type a name into the search bar. But this time I enter a full name: Ruchy Silverman.
The very first link that pops up is a Facebook profile. I know about Facebook, mostly thanks to the fact that when I was in ninth grade, my school made us all sign a form pledging not to use it, and anyone who got caught with a profile got fined $100. I don’t know if Ruchy had a profile back then, but apparently she doesn’t care now. And why should she? I click on the bright blue text and hold my breath.