by Una LaMarche
I wipe Liya’s face and set her down in her bassinet while I wring out my curls in the sink (I choose the dairy sink, which seems if not very palatable then at least technically correct), letting the running water drown out her screams. Then I take a deep breath and use the hall phone to call Shoshana.
“Is that the baby?!” she cries when her mother puts her on the line. Then: “She sounds upset.”
“Yes, either she’s hungry or tired or she hates me,” I say with a sigh. “Maybe all three. Want to come over?”
“I’m supposed to set the table.”
“That takes five minutes,” I plead. “I’m literally covered in throw-up, and I can’t make Liya stop crying. Please, Shosh? I need you!”
“Isn’t your zeidy around somewhere? Newborn babies love old men,” Shoshana says, audibly examining her nails. “Maybe it’s because they look so much alike.”
“Thanks anyway,” I say miserably, and hang up. I know I should feel grateful that Rose and Jacob trusted me with their tiny preemie, but it’s hard when my once-colorful sister is a barely ambulatory zombie and her formerly tolerably if obnoxiously arrogant husband is suddenly acting like some villain of Victorian literature, appearing around corners in dark robes, drumming his bony fingers like he’s plotting to destroy me.
Once she has my attention again, Liya cries with renewed energy, her little pink fists clenched in despair. I pick her up and kiss her tear-streaked face, knowing that there is only one person I could call who would be here in a heartbeat to help me with whatever I needed. And I don’t even know his number.
I feel awful about the last time I saw Jaxon, when he tried to give me the CD outside the restaurant. I could tell he was hurt that I didn’t want him to talk to me out in the open. And after what we shared on Monday I can’t blame him; it’s hard to go back to pretending to be strangers after having such an amazing afternoon. I can’t stop thinking about it, either—I play it over and over in my head instead of sleeping—and of course I want to see him every day. But he still doesn’t seem to understand what’s at stake for me. If even one person from the neighborhood sees us talking, my life as I know it will be over, and there’ll be no chance for us to sneak out ever again. I even hid the red Converse at the back of Isaac’s closet after he left for yeshiva on Tuesday so that just in case they were found they couldn’t be traced to me.
But I know I’m being the worst kind of hypocrite. I told Jaxon we can’t leave any trail, and yet I’m the one who made a Facebook page for the express purpose of the forbidden act of writing to him, a page I had to link to my father’s business e-mail account so that I could activate it and prove I wasn’t a robot. I deleted the “Welcome to Facebook!” e-mails that popped up right away, but it was the middle of the night and I was desperate and sloppy, so now I have to sneak up to the study three or four times a day just to refresh the inbox and cover my tracks if necessary. I should just delete the account, but then I would have no way of contacting him, and closing that window would mean resigning myself to—
“Ahhhhhhgggggghhhhhhhhhh!” Liya screams, interrupting my train of thought to conveniently remind me exactly what I have to look forward to if I cut off contact with Jax. Not immediately, of course, but two years down the line, this could be my baby that I don’t know how to take care of, and I would be just as alone, only in a different and unfamiliar house—an apartment, probably, cramped and dark—decorated with useless, expensive wedding gifts, like the handcrafted hourglass someone gave Rose and Jacob from the MoMA store.
But maybe not. That photo of Ruchy and her family at the hospital swims up through my consciousness. Ruchy, who made the dangerous choice. Ruchy, who seems not to have gotten what she “deserved,” according to Jacob, but what she wanted for herself. What she consciously chose. Not that I would ever let myself get pregnant, not even with Jaxon’s baby. But maybe we could re-create the rest of that photo. Maybe . . . maybe . . .
I bounce Liya faster, whisper-singing the lullaby my grandmother used to sing to us when we were small: “How the winds are laughing, they laugh with all their might . . . laugh and laugh the whole day through, and half the summer’s night.”
When Jaxon and I kissed on that bridge I felt like the world was limitless, spinning out to infinity in all directions, making anything seem possible. Now three days later I feel like the world could fit inside that ugly MoMA hourglass that Rose keeps on her bedside table, and I’m drowning in the sands.
• • •
My nerves are so shot from Liya’s incessant strangled cries that I’m actually relieved when Jacob lets himself in at five thirty. It’s early for him to be getting home—normally he studies until just before dinner—but I don’t question it, especially not when he takes the baby from my anxious embrace and holds her close, bouncing and humming for all of sixty seconds before she quiets and falls gratefully asleep in his arms (but not before sending one last defiant fart in my direction). I’ve never seen Jacob successfully comfort another human being before. Maybe fatherhood is changing him. One can always hope.
“Thank you,” I whisper, moving toward the stairs to take a much-needed shower.
“Devorah, wait,” he says, in a voice that makes me freeze in fear. Jacob never talks to me when there isn’t someone else nearby to ensure that yichud isn’t being violated. I turn to see Jacob lay Liya down in the swing.
“Should I get Zeidy or Amos?” I ask innocently.
“Frankly,” he says, giving me a hard stare, “I don’t think you’d want them to hear what I have to say.”
My blood runs cold. “Okay,” I say evenly, staying where I am, clutching the banister so hard the white bones of my knuckles press up against the skin. “What is it?”
“I know.” Jacob sits on the couch, folding his hands in his lap and giving me a look that defies me to ask him what he means.
“You know what?” I have no choice but to play along.
“I know you’ve been seeing that boy,” he says. “I saw you with him.”
“You couldn’t have,” I say with a laugh. “Your eyes must be playing tricks on you. It might be time for some new glasses.”
“Don’t,” he says sharply, standing up and taking a step toward me. “I was on my way to the store on Tuesday to talk to your father when I saw you leave at a few minutes past four. I also saw you look around to make sure no one was following you. So—”
“You followed me,” I finish hollowly. My chest is starting to feel tight.
“Smart girl,” Jacob says. “Yes, I followed you down Union Street and saw you meet him at the corner of Nostrand. I saw you lean in to him.”
I want to protest and to make up another lie, but my brain feels stunned and sluggish. All I can do is shake my head slowly.
“You saw him in the hospital last weekend, didn’t you?” Jacob continues quietly. “I knew it was fishy that you took the stairs. And I’m sure I heard you talking to someone.”
“No,” I say, but my weak voice gives away the lie.
“You left your family, your sick premature niece, to run around with a schwarze,” Jacob whispers, the words tinged with hateful venom. Suddenly I feel like I can’t breathe.
“Do you have any idea what this means?” Jacob asks. “Not just for you but for all of us? The shame we would all suffer if this got out? What it could cost the business? Your father’s standing in the community?”
“Please, Jacob, I’ve done nothing,” I say with what I hope is believable conviction. “All I did was talk to him.”
“Good,” he says. “I hope for your sake that’s true. Because if you’re lying, you do realize that no self-respecting Chabadnik is going to want you for a wife, not even with that pretty face. They’ll have to find someone out of state for you, someone with a limp or a lazy eye or some other defect lowly enough to qualify him for damaged goods.”
Jacob wipes his hands on his
trousers like he’s just touched something slimy and gives me another of his penetrating stares. I know. The words are still echoing in my head. How could I have ever thought I could get away with this? How could I have been so careless and stupid? If I had only waited to meet Jaxon somewhere it would be safe, instead of risking everything in broad daylight . . . and for what? For a selfish glimpse of the boy I’m falling for so hard just the sight of him makes me light-headed?
“I hope it goes without saying that you are never to see him again,” Jacob says, a self-satisfied smile playing on his lips. He is relishing this moment, I can tell. “Unless of course you’d like me to share what I know with your father.”
He walks off into the kitchen, and I finally let my hand slip from the banister, where it falls, shaking, at my side. Now that Jacob knows my secret, I have no options left. I know what I have to do, and it breaks my heart. Tears spill down my cheeks as I climb the stairs two at a time up to the study, where I erase every trace of our correspondence, wiping the computer’s memory clean and wishing that someone could do the same to my heart.
Chapter 16
Jaxon
SEPTEMBER 12, 4:30 PM
Standing on the north side of Eastern Parkway looking across the seven lanes of traffic bisected by two broad, paved walkways dotted with benches and lined with elm trees still in their leafy summer prime, it’s a little hard to feel the sense of foreboding I know I should be feeling.
It’s not like I haven’t crossed the parkway before—hell, Wonder Wings is on the other side, so I’m over there three times a week at least—but there’s a difference between just crossing over and really going in. If I had to sit down and map out territory, us versus them, I’d say that between Eastern Parkway to the north and Empire Boulevard to the south, between Nostrand to the west and Utica to the east, that’s the Hasidic Crown Heights. And then everything west of Nostrand and north of Eastern Parkway is black Crown Heights. Or was black Crown Heights. The hipster contingent has taken over a lot of the commercial streets, and now you can’t go two blocks without running into some up-its-own-ass artisanal shop with a name that’s just two random nouns thrown together with an ampersand. Satchel & Dove. Twig & Petal. Those are the places where you find out there’s such a thing as boutique tarragon mayonnaise and that a baby onesie can legitimately cost sixty dollars.
But even though strangers of different backgrounds and skinnier jeans have seeped into our neighborhood, we still don’t cross Eastern. Mom always told us the Hasidics liked to be left alone; that was all she would say. And it seemed true. I remember seeing families on the subway, clustered together, all in dark colors and long hems like they’d stepped out of some old painting, or in the Botanic Garden, little boys with yarmulkes running around crazy like any other kids, but if they got too close to us, their mothers would swoop in, ushering them away with whispers in another language. But then sometimes we would see the Mitzvah Tank, that big beige Winnebago driving around with boys and men jumping out to ask people if they were Jewish, and ask our parents how that figured into the whole being-left-alone thing.
“They want other people to join them, but only if you convert to their religion,” Mom would explain.
“Why don’t they ever ask us?” Ameerah asked once, and my father just said, “We’re the wrong color.” That was the end of that discussion.
“Jax!” Ryan calls, hopping out of the subway station brandishing his skateboard and a giant Nalgene bottle. I hope it wasn’t a mistake to bring him, but if I’ve learned one thing from the movies it’s that you don’t go into uncharted territory without backup. In fact, it’s usually the wingman who ends up getting killed in some over-the-top gory way, like getting impaled on a fence post. I decide not to share this nugget of trivia with Ryan.
“Hey, man,” I greet him. “I thought we decided no skateboard. In the interest of stealth.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But then I thought, what if we need to make a quick getaway?”
“‘We’?” I ask as we cross the first lane of traffic. “Is that thing a two-seater?”
“Good point. Well, I can go get help, at least.”
“That’s comforting, Ry.”
Yesterday we Googled the area around Devorah’s house and found a bakery on the corner that we can use as our cover. We’re going to browse, pretending we’re looking for a cake for my sister’s birthday. After that, we’ll walk past her house a few times and check it out, and if it feels safe, Ryan will ring the doorbell and create a distraction so I can run around the back and try to find Devorah’s window. I even brought some pebbles from Tricia’s mini Japanese rock garden so I can do some old-school romantic gesturing. But I hope I won’t have to use them. I’m hoping she’ll answer the door.
As we’re waiting at the light to cross the center section of through traffic, two Hasidic men stop next to us. They’re a little older, both with mustaches, short beards, and glasses. I stick my hands in my pockets and try to look casual, just as Ryan sticks his water bottle in my face and yells, “Hydrate!”
Yup, this was definitely a bad idea.
• • •
Two blocks past Eastern Parkway, anyone else who looks even remotely like us has disappeared, and Ryan and I are officially lost in Chabadland. Suddenly all the names on the Kingston Avenue store awnings are Jewish: Weinstein’s Hardware, Kesser Cleaners, Mermelstein Caterers. The dudes from the crosswalk are a few feet ahead of us now and keep looking back as if they’re surprised that we’re still behind them. In fact, everybody we pass seems to let their eyes linger on us for a beat too long. And it’s not just in my head; Ryan notices, too.
“Maybe we should have worn darker clothes,” he says under his breath. And it’s probably true that Ryan’s neon green T-shirt decorated with cartoon panda bears doing tai chi isn’t helping our cause. But we would have looked even stupider trying to blend in, like two high school exchange students auditioning for a production of Fiddler on the Roof.
“How does it feel to be a minority?” I ask him as we pass a big store called Judaica World.
“Fine,” he says—the only answer that a privileged white kid can give to that question without getting a beat-down.
I keep my chin tucked in, eyes on the ground, the same stance I have when I pass by the guys from my neighborhood who laugh and call me Urkel because I wear a big backpack and don’t hang out on the street all night smoking Kool XLs—and by the way, we need a new black nerd archetype; also, when are these wannabe gangstas watching reruns of Family Matters? But here, on the other side of Eastern, no one says a word to us. There are no jeers, no jokes, no names called out. Just eerie, observational silence, punctuated by the occasional scrape of Ryan’s skateboard dragging on the pavement as he loses his grip.
“Should I be on the lookout for anyone?” he whispers as we wait at the light at Carroll Street.
“The only one besides Devorah who knows what I look like is her brother-in-law,” I say, keeping my voice low.
“What does he look like?”
“Oh, you know, black hat, black suit, beard, glasses, look of distrust,” I say. “Knock yourself out.”
He laughs, but what Ryan doesn’t know is that I’m secretly terrified. Like, run-screaming-in-the-other-direction terrified. Stalking a girl’s house is messed up to begin with, but stalking a girl’s house when her family is historically programmed to hate you must be some kind of sick suicide mission. It’s my only hope of seeing Devorah again, since she seems to have cut off all communication with me (and it can’t be because she doesn’t feel something, too; I know she does), but it’s seeming riskier by the second. What am I going to say to her if I see her? And if she wasn’t willing to talk to me on the street outside a fast-food restaurant with no one around, do I honestly think she’s going to have a heart-to-heart with me outside her home, with her parents right inside? These questions all make perfect sense to
my brain, but that’s not the part that’s in control now, driving me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, each step taking me farther and farther down the rabbit hole. I miss her so much that it’s starting to physically hurt. My heart’s got the reins now, and all it wants to do, apparently, is find Devorah and spill its entire contents at her feet. Failing that, I have a plan B ready in my backpack, but I don’t even know if it’s going to work. There might not be enough wind.
As we approach Crown Street, I slow down. Devorah could literally appear any second, and I know I need to be ready, although the only thing I’m really ready for, thanks to the crazy adrenaline pumping through my system, is to use the bathroom. I practice what I’ve decided should be my opening line: I’m sorry, but I love you. I could even cut out the first three words if I have to.
“There!” Ryan cries, and I nearly have a heart attack before I realize he’s just pointing out the bakery. I’m way too jumpy; I’ve never felt this raw before, like my nerves were hanging off the outside of my body. I know love is supposed to make you vulnerable, but how anyone can actually live like this long-term is beyond me.
We get coffees from the rheumy-eyed old man behind the counter but then are ushered out the door before we can even carry out our cake-hunt cover story, because it’s almost five o’clock, and he has to lock up before sundown. I could kick myself for planning this stakeout for a Friday. Of all the days to show up unannounced at Devorah’s door. And if I can’t talk to her today she’s off the grid (even more than usual) for the next twenty-four hours. Awesome.
“I guess we’ll just have to loiter here like normal riffraff,” Ryan says as we stand pointlessly in the still-strong late afternoon sunshine.
“Well, we can’t wait until it gets dark,” I say. “We have to get home for dinner.”
“We could go in there,” Ryan says, pointing his Styrofoam cup in the direction of a little store across the street that has its door propped open.” I glance at the awning and wish I had some kind of J.R.R. Tolkien invisibility cloak.