She paused. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, maybe acknowledge that we were in similar situations, but we weren’t. So I just kept chopping and swiping my pile of fruit and nuts to the side. Chopping and swiping. Chop and swipe.
Mom sighed again. “Leah, Zaide is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Have you heard of Alzheimer’s?”
I shrugged. I had heard of Alzheimer’s—Julie’s grandfather had it. But I let my mom explain it anyway. Maybe then she’d have to admit that Zaide didn’t have it.
“Someone who has Alzheimer’s starts out by forgetting little things,” Mom said. “Then bigger things. Names, places. They can get confused easily. They might go to the grocery store and get disoriented and panic, or they might go out for a walk, forget where they are, and wander into the street.”
That didn’t sound like Zaide. And even if it did, that was why I kept the golem around. As long as she did her job, Zaide wouldn’t panic at the grocery store or wander into the street and get hit by a car.
Mom was busy saying something about how he needed supervision and that the nursing home they were looking at was actually a pretty nice place, which was obviously a lie. “We all need to be on the same side in this, Leah,” she finished. When she said your name a lot, that’s when you knew she was serious.
But I could be serious, too. “I’m on Zaide’s side.”
If she kept sighing like this, she was going to fill the entire room up with carbon dioxide, and we were going to suffocate to death. “The only reason we haven’t moved Zaide yet is because he refuses to go anywhere,” she said. “But he can only do that for so long. We’re going to take him to the doctor, Leah.” My name again. “Leah…” Double name. Extra serious. “Please understand that we’re not trying to hurt Zaide or hide him away somewhere. This is for his own good. The facility is very close by, we can still visit him whenever we—”
“But it’s not on the same block. I thought that was why we moved here in the whole frigging place.”
“I don’t appreciate your language, Leah.” I hacked through an entire apple, imagining that if I chopped hard enough I could stop this entire conversation from happening. “And yes, we did move here to be closer to Zaide. Which was good because your father and I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten. I’m glad we’re here to take care of him.” Her voice wavered a bit. “You know, he and Bubbe Ruth were more parents to me than grandparents.”
I did know that. My mom’s parents, my grandparents, had died in a car crash when she was fifteen. She and Uncle Marvin had been adopted by Zaide and Bubbe Ruth.
“But still,” I said. “We could just have him move in here. It’s easy. He can just—”
“It’s not easy, Leah!”
I jumped at the snap in my mom’s voice—bad idea while you’re holding a knife. I faced away from her, curling into myself.
When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I’m sorry for snapping at you. But you have to understand: None of this is easy. I’ve been spending hours every day with Zaide or working on plans for his care. Work is getting so busy, and I haven’t gotten to spend as much time with you as I want. If he moved in here, keeping him safe would be a full-time job, one I’m not trained for. Do you understand?”
I knew that if I said no, she’d get upset. So even though I thought—no, knew—that she was wrong, I said, “Yes.”
“Good.” Her footsteps creaked on the floor, got louder. She was coming closer. “Wow, Leah!” A hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed. “I think you’ve chopped enough for three Passovers. You can stop!”
I blinked down at the cutting board. She was right. All the fruits and nuts I’d chopped were overflowing the wood surface and spilling off onto the counter. I set the knife down. Took a bow.
She laughed. A small laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. It made me feel good. “You know what? Let’s take the extra and use up our bread before Passover as well. Charoset French toast it is.”
I was right about two things: We needed the golem, and charoset French toast was delicious.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BY THE TIME I RETURNED to school on Monday, last Friday’s lunch seemed almost like a dream. Maybe it had been a dream. And when I told Isabella that I couldn’t go over to her house today, she would cock her head and squint like she was trying to remember what my name was.
No, it’d be worse. I imagined what would happen when I walked into the cafeteria: I’d move to sit at her table, and Isabella would cock her head and squint like an alien was trying to sit there.
So I was paralyzed with dread. I stood outside the crush of the kids trying to get into the lunchroom, pretending to flip through my folder so I didn’t have to go inside. I didn’t want to take the chance of missing out with Isabella, but I also couldn’t handle the withering humiliation of going over there, being turned away by Isabella and her friends, and then having to slink back to the Three Ds, all three of whom would be looking at me with immense pity.
I jumped when an arm slung itself over my shoulder. “Leah!” someone said into my ear. I leaned away, disliking the feel of people’s warm, moist breath tickling my ear. But I realized belatedly that this person’s breath was none of that. It was dry as stone.
I pulled back to find the golem standing there. I didn’t think I’d ever been this close to her before … well, outside the night I’d built that little body of dirt and mud. Her skin was so smooth—I didn’t see a single pore. It was like a doll’s plastic coating.
“Hello, Elsa,” I said. I waited for her to pull back, but she didn’t move. Those nearly gold eyes regarded me calmly.
“Hello, Leah.”
Most human beings have striations in their eyes. Blue eyes aren’t entirely blue; Matty and Jed have streaks of green and brown and gold. My own eyes look totally dark brown from far away, but when I look at them up close in the mirror, they have little splotches of light brown and green and even some yellow, which is cool, and when I was little, I thought it made me part cat. (My mom dashed those hopes quickly.) The golem’s eyes had none of that. They were a pure, unchanging brown gold.
“Are you coming?” the golem asked.
Something made me hesitate. Maybe it was the look in her eyes. Or to be more specific, the absence of one. No kindness and no malice. I had no idea whether she was being genuine or planning something cruel. I didn’t know why I was thinking it right now, but I imagined her sitting down at Isabella’s table and looking up and laughing that there was no room for me.
“I guess.” Because whether I trusted her or not, I’d made her. I deserved whatever was coming.
The cafeteria was bustling, as usual. Most kids were either already seated or lined up near the kitchens at the far wall waiting for their food. The Three Ds brought lunch every day like I did, so they were already at their table. My eyes landed on them out of habit, and my heart fluttered. The three of them were staring at me unblinkingly, like one of those scenes in the movies where people turn into zombies and they’re about to dive on you and eat you. In an attempt to break the awkwardness, I waved in their direction. They didn’t wave back. Just stared.
I nearly collapsed in relief when we got close to Isabella’s table and I realized that the same two spaces had been cleared on the bench. Still, I didn’t whoosh out all the worry until we’d actually sat down and nobody shouted at me to go away.
Instead, Isabella actually turned to me and smiled. “Hey, Leah.” She’d gotten my name right! “Today still on?”
Okay, Leah. You can make it through this conversation without saying anything stupid. “I actually can’t today,” I said. I tried to make it sound like an apology. “Or tomorrow. Maybe another day this week?”
I’d as good as told her that I had better things to do than hang out with her, so I expected her to counter. To say that another day this week didn’t work because of course she also had better things to do than hang out with me, but maybe some other time?
Instead
, she nodded. “Friday works for me!” she exclaimed. The other kids around us, including the golem, were silent. I couldn’t read any expressions on their faces. Maybe the Three Ds had actually turned into zombies, and now these kids were all turning, too. “I have a student government makeup day from when we had those snow days. You’ll take the late bus home with me.”
I nodded along. It hadn’t been a question.
“Okay, cool,” Isabella said. She clapped her hands together. “What should we do? Maybe we should do each other’s hair! Let me see your hair.”
Again, it wasn’t a request. Before I could even bow my head, her hands were tangled in my curls. I swallowed back a cry of pain at the pulling and just bowed my head farther, giving her easier access. I had no idea what she was looking for, but her hands explored all the way over my head, practically giving me a scalp massage. It felt weird.
Her hands lingered on my head for one last second before pulling away. I lifted my head. My whole scalp tingled now. I was pretty sure my curls were messed up, too. You can’t really comb your hands through curly hair without it becoming a big mass of staticky frizz. But that was okay. Isabella’s hands had made it a big mass of staticky frizz, so it was basically a badge of honor. A signal that I’d been chosen.
Isabella pursed her lips. For some reason, she looked disappointed. I had no idea why. She could see what my hair looked like from the other side of the cafeteria. It wasn’t like touching it was going to tell her anything new or exciting.
I had to break the awkward silence. “Hair sounds good!” For some ungodly reason, I pumped my fist in the air. Then I immediately regretted it. My cheeks began to burn.
Elsa saved me. She clapped me on the back so hard she nearly sent my forehead thudding into the table. “That reminds me of the time I was in Paris and I had my hair done by Alfonse de Shampoo, the world’s greatest hairstylist!” she said. “His great-great-grandfather was the inventor of shampoo. He named it after himself. Isn’t that grand?”
I had no idea what to say to that. I was 99 percent sure the golem was making that fact up entirely, much less the man. Then again, maybe her specific grains of dirt had been made into golems before, and one had lived in France. They’d been floating around in synagogues for hundreds of years. Who’s to say that Zaide was the first person to find them?
The golem went on, babbling about how Alfonse de Shampoo had woven her hair—waist length at the time—with crystals and heaped it so high on her head she had to duck to go through doorways. I fought back the urge to ask her if Alfonse de Shampoo was married to Luc de Conditioner, and instead I propped my chin up on my hand and snuck a glance backward at the Three Ds.
They weren’t looking at me. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that. Happy, I figured. I was happy they weren’t thinking about me anymore. It meant they also weren’t laughing at me, at how I once thought I could be a part of their group.
Those thoughts darkened my mind enough that I didn’t do much else for the rest of lunch but laugh along with whatever jokes Isabella made and pretend to believe the golem’s stories. When we all got up to leave for class, a hand like an iron shackle closed around my upper arm. Without straining against it, I knew I couldn’t have moved if I tried.
“Leah,” Elsa said. “I need to talk to you for a second.”
It didn’t seem like I had a choice. I let the rest of Isabella’s group vanish into the ether of the hallway. Then I let the golem pull me behind a quiet stand of lockers. “What is it?” I asked.
“I want to spend more time with my new friends and less time at the old man’s house,” she said. She didn’t move or giggle or twist a strand of hair around her finger the way she had while telling her fanciful stories at the lunch table. Just stared me down from her higher height. “I enjoy being popular and surrounded by adoring people fawning over me and my stories. Not so much cleaning after your zaide and keeping him from running out into the street.”
I didn’t even have to think. I just shook my head. The whole reason I’d created her was to look after Zaide, and I thought I was being pretty nice, actually, by letting her spend some time away from him. “Sorry.”
Something dark flashed over her face, but it cleared. She knew she couldn’t do anything without my permission. “Okay. I would like to ask you something else.”
“What is it?”
“I want to come to your family’s seder,” she said.
“Why?” Lexy had come to my family’s seder one year because her dad had gotten sick and they couldn’t host, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t ever brought guests to a seder before. If I asked my parents if I could bring a friend, they would say yes.
I just wasn’t sure I wanted to. Though it would be a nice thing to do after telling her she couldn’t have what she really wanted …
She smiled at me. All of her teeth looked pointed. I blinked in surprise, then looked closer. Her teeth all looked normal. I must have been seeing things. “I’ve been listening to the old man talk about it for days,” she said. “Do you know he talks to his dead wife when he thinks no one’s listening? When he’s in his right mind, too. Does he think she’s listening down from heaven?”
Hearing that made me heavily, impossibly sad, a weight dragging me down. So I chose not to yell at her for being insensitive but to focus on the factual inaccuracy, which made some of the sadness disappear. “We don’t have a heaven in Judaism, so probably not,” I said. “Maybe he just likes to pretend she’s still there. They were married for, like, a million years. It’s probably hard for him to be alone.”
Maybe it would be good for him to be around a bunch of other old people if the assisted-living facility is nice, some traitorous part of my mind whispered. I shut it down quickly.
“Anyway, from all he’s been saying about it, it sounds fun,” she said. “And he said it might be the last one. So I want to make sure I get in on it.”
He was saying it might be the last one? Okay, I wasn’t just shutting that traitorous part of my brain down, I was expelling it. Next time I blew my nose, it was coming out. I couldn’t let this be the last seder Zaide ever hosted. I wouldn’t. Where would we go instead? We couldn’t all fit in our dining room, or Matty and Jed’s dining room. And where would the out-of-town cousins stay?
It didn’t make any sense.
“Leah?” the golem said sharply, and when I looked back at her, her eyes were black. I took a step back and closed my eyes, willing them to turn back to their usual brown gold when I opened them, but … no. They stayed black. Black all the way through, no whites at all, dull and hard. Like someone had scooped her eyeballs out when I wasn’t looking and replaced them with stones. Those eyes focused on me, and it was like they could see under my skin, and my insides curdled, and I had to make them stop, and—“Fine,” I said. I closed my eyes a little bit too long. This time, when I opened them, hers stared back clear and calm and golden brown. I sucked in a deep breath and wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans.
“Good,” she said sweetly, turning to go. “I’ll get back to the old man now. Can’t wait for tonight!”
The feeling those eyes gave me stuck around for the rest of the day. A cold, sticky, heavy feeling.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what foreboding felt like.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHATEVER IT WAS, THAT CREEPING feeling wore off by that evening. The seder left nothing but excitement behind. Excitement that wasn’t even dampened when Elsa showed up at our door holding a box of jelly rings. “I found these in the Passover section of the store, so my mom said I should bring them,” she said. She smiled up at my parents, revealing a pair of deep dimples in her cheeks, so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. Had she always had dimples?
“Thank you, sweetie.” My mom took the box of jelly rings from her. “These are Leah’s father’s favorite.”
My favorite Passover dessert, too, though, to be fair, since you couldn’t use flour in Passover desserts, a favorite Passover dessert was li
ke a favorite rainy-day beach. How could you go wrong with firm rings of tart jelly coated with chocolate, though? Or anything coated in chocolate, really?
We walked over together, carefully carrying the casserole dishes and giant bowls half the meal was in. Mom and Dad had to go back to carry the rest, but there wasn’t enough for me and Elsa to do a second round, so we stayed behind. The first ones there.
I eyed Zaide carefully. “Zaide, you remember my friend Elsa, right?” This was a dangerous game. I had no idea if clearheaded Zaide was aware that someone had been living with him, keeping him safe. If he’d spotted her hair under the bed.
Zaide flashed the golem a toothless smile. “Elsa, it is good to see you.” He didn’t call her Maria. He didn’t panic. He acted like he was seeing my old friend Lexy at that past seder.
I let my shoulders relax. This would be fine. This would all be fine. “Elsa moved in recently down the street,” I said. “She’s not Jewish, but I told her about Passover, and she was interested in checking out the seder.”
“You are always welcome,” Zaide told her. “Any stranger is welcome at our table on Passover.”
“Like Elijah,” I said, and he laughed. We were supposed to crack the door on Passover for the prophet Elijah to come by and drink the goblet of wine left for him on the table. I wasn’t quite clear if Elijah was supposed to be a ghost or a skeleton or what. When Matty and Jed and I were little, we always got gape-mouthed in awe at how Elijah’s glass was empty by the end of the night. A couple of years later we realized that Zaide was the one who drank it. What a betrayal.
“You can help set the table,” he said to me. “Just be careful with the good china. Don’t drop anything.” I nodded to show I understood, then Elsa trooped along with me to the kitchen, where we piled our arms full of plates and silverware. Mom always argued that we should use paper plates because it would be so much easier to clean up, but Zaide was firm about using the good china. He said it didn’t feel like a holiday without the good china.
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