Like No Other

by Una LaMarche

  “Where are we going?” I ask groggily. It’s Tuesday, a school day. Could I still be dreaming? Did my brain just replace the nightmare with something really mundane to calm me down?

  “Oh, to Monsey,” Rose says breezily as she opens my drawers and begins pulling out tops, skirts, and balled-up tights. “To see Aunt Varda.”

  I swing my legs over the side of the still-made bed and smooth my wrinkled skirt over my knees, pinching the flesh just to make sure I’m awake. “Since when were we going to Monsey in the middle of the week?” I ask, and Rose frowns into the mirror before spinning around with a sympathetic smile.

  “Since last night,” she says. “After all the drama. Mom and Dad thought it would be good for you to get away today, for everyone to cool off. And besides, Varda hasn’t met the baby.”

  “Is Jacob going?”

  “No,” Rose says quickly, looking away and busying herself with continuing to pack my things. “Now come on, either take a shower or get dressed. We have to be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”

  I reach to my waist to roll down my stockings, but then I remember I’m not wearing any, and the shame of last night’s interrogation rekindles its embers in my stomach. I wonder what Rose knows, how much her husband has told her, and what she must think of me despite her outwardly sunny disposition. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk on the way to Monsey, I think as I slip past my sister and into the bathroom. I’m desperate to be cleansed, even if it’s just on the surface.

  • • •

  When I get downstairs, dressed in the outfit Rose left on my bed for me—a fancier-than-usual silk blouse, a black skirt and jacket, and, of course, thick, opaque tights that stick to my damp legs in spots—I find my mother scuttling Hanna, Miri, and Amos out the door for school. The three of them pause in the doorway to stare at me, and Hanna raises her hand in a meek wave.

  “See you guys tonight,” I say, trying to sound normal. But I know they heard everything. When I get back later I’ll have to find a way to explain it to them from my perspective and make sure they aren’t scared.

  Miri turns her face up to my mother and frowns. “But I thought you said—”

  “Time to go!” my mother cries nervously, cutting her off and ushering them outside, shutting the door behind her with a bang.

  “Bye,” I mutter after them. During my shower I steeled myself for another confrontation, but I never thought my own mother would just ignore me. I look to my father, who’s sitting at the table next to Zeidy, eating oatmeal and sipping from a big mug of coffee as he reads the Yiddish paper. Neither of them look up, and Shoshana’s whispers about Ruchy Silverman ring in my head: “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  Rose lifts Liya from her swing and kisses her nose. “Go ahead and eat something, Dev,” she says. “The van’s outside.”

  “The store van?” I ask, confused. “Why aren’t we taking the Camry?” Rose and my father make eye contact, and some unspoken message passes between them.

  “Because . . . Mom needs it,” Rose says. “For errands.”

  “Who’s driving us?” I ask, and another silent communiqué shoots over my head.

  “Dad,” Rose says, as if this should be obvious.

  “Dad,” I repeat incredulously. Our father tolerates our aunt, but the idea that he would volunteer to spend the day with her—her plus a colicky baby and his disgraced daughter—without my mother to serve as a buffer is unlikely. “Don’t you have to work?” I ask him. Rosh Hashanah is only a week away, and the high holidays always coincide with my father putting in twelve- or fourteen-hour days at the store.

  “I didn’t realize you were my employer, Devorah,” he says gruffly, still not looking at me. Zeidy pushes back from the table abruptly and shuffles into his room, which used to be a screened-in back porch until my grandma passed and he moved in, along with his arthritic joints that can’t climb stairs.

  “What’s wrong with Zeidy?” I ask. “Does his chest still hurt?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” my father says. “He’s very upset by what you did.”

  It feels like an open-hand slap, intended to leave a mark. I can understand my parents and Jacob wanting to punish me, but my sweet, doting zeidy? The one who always winks at me and tells me I’m his zeeskyte, his sweetheart, the spitting image of my grandmother? I swallow the tears climbing my throat and turn to Rose. “I’m ready,” I say. “I don’t need to eat.”

  My father gets up and pulls on his blazer, and Rose puts a pink knit cap on Liya’s head, inciting a bout of screaming. I’m stroking the baby’s cheek as I walk out the front door, which is why I don’t immediately see Jacob, or my mother, waiting on the other side of the threshold. But then Jacob’s thin fingers close over one arm and my father grabs the other, and suddenly I’m being all but carried down the front steps toward an idling van, driven by a man who is instantly, chillingly familiar as he turns to look at me. It’s Jacob’s Shomrim friend, Moshe, the one with the mole. The one who beat up Jaxon.

  “No!” I cry out, but it’s useless now; it’s obvious I’m going into the van whether I like it or not.

  “It’s all right, Devorah,” my mother calls after me. “This is for the best, you’ll see.” I crane my neck to look back at Rose, whose chin is trembling as she joins her daughter in tears.

  “Where am I going?” I shriek. “Don’t send me with him! I hate him!”

  “You’re making a scene,” Jacob says quietly. “Do us a favor and leave the family one shred of dignity, will you?”

  “Daddy, please,” I beg, but he still won’t meet my eyes, even while he lifts me into the van, buckling me in as Jacob holds me down.

  “You’ll be fine,” he says curtly. “We’ll see you next week.” And then he slams the door.

  Panic blinds me as I lurch for the door lock, forgetting that I’m strapped in. I fumble with the seat belt, but my fingers feel thick and clumsy. I try to breathe in, but it feels like someone is sitting on my chest, and I gasp for air like I’m choking.

  “Relax,” Moshe says from the front seat. “You’re only making it worse.”

  There’s no room for worse, I want to tell him. This is the bottom. But I can’t waste what little breath I have. He shifts the van into drive and is pulling away from the curb when I hear muffled shouts from outside and then someone banging on the window.

  “Open the door! Open this door!” Rose is yelling. “I’m coming with her!” Through the tinted window I can see her struggling with the door handle, jerking it up and down so hard it sounds like it might break off.

  Moshe steps hard on the brakes, and Jacob runs up to the front window on the passenger side, yelling, “Don’t stop, just drive! I’ll handle her.”

  “Don’t you dare let him leave without me!” Rose screams—the first time since her labor that I’ve seen her exhibit any force of will. She shoves a manicured finger into Jacob’s chest. “If you don’t get out of my way, I’ll make you regret it for the rest of your natural life.” If I wasn’t having a panic attack, I would laugh; even in her wilder years, Rose has never been this aggressive. It’s like watching Gandhi upend a dinner table.

  “Fine,” Jacob says, stalking away from the car and back toward the house. “Do what you want. Abandon your child.”

  “It’s three hours round trip,” Rose shouts back over her shoulder as Moshe unlocks the door and she swings it open. “I think she’ll live. There’s a bottle in the fridge; you just have to warm it on the stove in a pot of water.”

  “Rose,” my mother calls from the stoop, “Devorah is fine. Rabbi Perolman will take excellent care of her, and—”

  “She’s not fine, she’s scared!” Rose cries. “She’s my sister, and she’s scared out of her mind. I don’t blame her, either, the way you’ve been treating her. Devorah stayed with me during the scariest experience of my life, and I owe it to her to do the sa
me.” She pulls the door shut, panting, her normally wan cheeks glowing a radiant pink. “Okay,” she says to Moshe, “now you can drive.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper, my breathing starting to return to normal.

  “Anytime,” Rose says as we pull out into the street, leaving Jacob to express his helpless, angry pantomime to my stupefied parents. Now both of their eldest daughters have gone off the derech in less than twenty-four hours.

  “So where are we really going?” I ask as the van rumbles down Crown Street.

  “To Monsey,” she says. “That wasn’t a lie. There’s a Chabad house there for teens who need”—she looks down at her lap—“guidance.”

  “So I’m going to Hasidic rehab,” I say.

  “Something like that.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Dad made the arrangements. But it sounds like you’ll be back by Rosh Hashanah.”

  “Shanah Tovah,” I say sarcastically, and Rose gives me an odd stare.

  • • •

  We pick up speed as we get out of Crown Heights, barreling into the staccato traffic of Atlantic Avenue that swarms around the big brown beehive of the Barclays Center and then races down toward the waterfront. When we turn onto the access road for the Brooklyn Bridge, Rose takes my hand and squeezes it gently.

  “I’d like to apologize for Jacob,” she says.

  I lean my forehead against the glass and close my eyes, shrugging her off. “Too late,” I grumble.

  “I know he can be difficult,” she says—the understatement of the year—“but believe it or not he’s just trying to do what he thinks is right. What he believes.”

  I look at my sister in horror. “You’re defending him?”

  “Of course I’m defending him,” Rose says quietly. “I’m his wife.”

  “You’re my sister,” I say.

  “That’s different,” she says.

  “Right, because why side with your own flesh and blood who you’ve known for sixteen years when you could side with a stranger you met last year.”

  “He’s not a stranger, Devorah,” she says with a frown. “He’s my husband.”

  “But he was a stranger. Before you met him. Before you married him.” I can’t help myself. “Before you changed.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a totally different person around him,” I say angrily. “You used to speak up for yourself. Now he just pushes you around. You’re like a zombie.”

  Rose blinks back tears. “You have no idea what I’ve been through this year,” she says. “Being pregnant and caring for a newborn is incredibly draining. Plus that week in the NICU was the worst week of my life. I’ve been sleep-deprived and depressed . . . No one tells you how hard it is.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, and I feel terrible. It occurs to me that I haven’t asked Rose how she’s been doing, not once, since I met Jaxon.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “And Jacob’s not a bully,” she continues. “Not to me anyway. He can be argumentative, but he has a soft side, too. You’ve seen him with Liya.”

  “Whatever,” I say with a sigh. “You wouldn’t defend him so much if you saw what they did to Jaxon’s face.” I wish there was some partition I could close to keep from seeing the silhouette of Moshe’s wiry muttonchops. Every time I look at him I feel sick to my stomach.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t,” Rose concedes. “And I can’t speak for all of the Shomrim. But at his core, Jacob is a good man. He’s just trying to help.”

  I bite my tongue and stare out at the Brooklyn skyline across the East River as we fly up the FDR Drive. I can never tell my sister that I think she married the wrong person, no matter how much I want to. “Okay,” I say, unconvinced.

  “You know, I remember when you used to get horrified when I read teen magazines and talked about boys,” Rose says, folding her hands in her lap and twirling the wedding band on her left ring finger around and around. “If you want to talk about people changing, the Devorah I used to know would never approve of what’s going on with Jaxon.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  “So what changed?”

  “The only thing that changed,” I say slowly, “is that I met him. And if circumstances had been different and I had never met him, then we probably wouldn’t be here. But it was like I had been looking down at the ground my whole life, and he was the first person to point my chin up to the sky.”

  Rose looks at me with pity. “I’m sure he’s a very nice person,” she says. “But the novelty will wear off.”

  “He’s not a novelty,” I snap, sorry that I even tried to explain. If Rose is too blind to see the truth of her own marriage, there’s no way she could ever understand the beauty of what I have with Jax.

  “Dev, he’s not even Jewish,” Rose says gently. “You had to have known from the start that it was never going to work out.”

  “But that’s what made it possible,” I say. “If he had been Hasidic he never would have spoken to me, and I never would have had the opportunity to talk to someone so different.”

  “Different is overrated,” Rose says, sounding exactly like our mother.

  “Really?” I ask. “You’ve never, ever even thought about anyone outside?”

  “Not in that way, no.”

  “And if you could choose from all the men in the world you would still pick Jacob as your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I say, sitting back, giving up. “Then I’m glad you’re happy.”

  We sit in silence for a moment as we pass through the thick block of tollbooths that lead out onto the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey.

  “Why aren’t you happy?” Rose asks quietly.

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out,” I say.

  “You have so much to look forward to in life, Devorah,” she says, leaning back in her seat and lolling her head toward mine. “You’re beautiful, smart, and kind.” She pauses, and cocks an eyebrow. “Most of the time, anyway. Everyone adores you, and you make good grades on top of it. I don’t know why you think you have no options.”

  “Because I don’t want to be a housewife,” I say.

  “Then work,” she suggests. “You could get a job any number of places.”

  “Sure, as a cashier. Not exactly my dream.”

  “Well, you can help run your husband’s business, then,” she says brightly. “Look at Mama. The store would collapse without her.”

  “She doesn’t like it, though.”

  “How do you know? You can learn to like things; it’s not always right away.”

  I think of my childhood distrust of the pale blobs of gefilte fish my mother would cook in a huge cast-iron pot for our Passover seders, and how now the cold, boiled white fish and matzo meal tastes like love incarnate. How high and scary the temple ceilings always seemed, until I noticed the stained-glass treasures hidden between the beams. The first time I saw Jaxon and how I hardly noticed he was even there.

  “I guess I believe in the trust-your-gut method,” I say. “Like how you knew Liya was going to be a girl.”

  Rose smiles faintly. “I know it sounds silly, but even with all of the exhaustion and hormonal changes, being a mother is the best job I can think of having,” she says. “Ever since Liya was born I feel spiritually fulfilled in this way that’s hard to describe. Like, I’m raising a person. I’m teaching someone how to be a decent human being. That’s my job.”

  “Pretty impressive,” I say, without a trace of sarcasm.

  “It’ll surprise you, Dev. You don’t think you’re ready, but then it happens, and you are.”

  I shake my head. “I know I’m not ready. Not now and not anytime soon.”

  “Well,” she says, “maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “Maybe I
won’t.”

  Rose laughs and makes a motion like she wants to throttle me. “Since when do you question everything?” she groans.

  I’ve been asking myself the same thing countless times over the past few weeks. What really caused this avalanche of an identity crisis? Was it as simple as meeting Jaxon in the elevator? Or has it been more insidious, something that took seed years ago and was just waiting for the right time to bloom?

  “I don’t know,” I say as I gaze out at the lush, late-summer trees whizzing past us on the Palisades Parkway. I can only hope that wherever I’m headed, I’ll have time to figure it out.

  Chapter 26

  Jaxon

  SEPTEMBER 16, 7:30 AM

  “Up and at ’em, Cassius Clay,” my mother yells through the door, rapping on it with her knuckles. My eyes flutter open and I try to sit up, but my body screams in protest. My shoulder is stiff and throbbing, my legs seize when I try to move them, and my back feels like I slept on a bed made out of broken bowling balls. Last night filters down through my consciousness in flashes, pieces of a dream I can’t quite make sense of. My synapses have been firing for all of ten seconds and already I’m a physical and emotional wreck; I can’t believe my mom expects me to go to school today.

  “I feel like crap,” I moan from my bed.

  “That’s what happens when you try to live out West Side Story east of Flatbush,” mom quips. “Be downstairs in fifteen minutes, or you’ll be late for your first class.” A second later, my preset iPod alarm goes off, ironically set to play yet another Shirelles classic that fits in perfectly with today’s theme.

  “Mama said there’ll be days like this, there’ll be days like this, Mama said . . .”

  I drag myself out of bed and hobble to the bathroom, where my mother has left a bottle of ibuprofen and the tub of Vaseline on the lip of the sink along with a note that reads, “Apply on all cuts, DO NOT skimp!!” I manage to turn on the shower water with my left hand. It’s too hot, but I’m too sore to bend and adjust the cold-water knob once I’m in there, so instead I just grit my teeth and let the scalding water knead my muscles to ropy shreds, which hurts, but in a good way. I know the Marines have that hard-core mantra “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” and it’s never felt more true than right now. As the boiling water beats down on my back and the gathering steam heals my aching lungs, I start to feel stronger, braver, and clearer in purpose. I have to find Devorah and make sure she’s okay. And this time, I’m not going to try to smuggle her out under cover of darkness. I’m not going to hide behind sunglasses and a hat or stand under her window tying kites to trees to make visual metaphors that only she will understand. Nope, this time I’m going to stand up like a man and tell her I don’t care who knows I love her and that she shouldn’t care, either. We don’t have to hop a train to some upscale beach enclave to be free; freedom is a state of mind. (I read that last quote in my Intro Philosophy textbook, but I still think it applies.)