The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  This was my fault. All my fault.

  I had to confront the golem. I had to make it stop.

  But I couldn’t leave Zaide right now. Both in a literal sense—my parents were here, and it wasn’t like I could drive myself—and a metaphorical sense. He was hurting, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave him alone in this awful place. So we sat there all day. When Zaide woke up, we told him jokes and reminisced about old family memories, and when he drifted off, we traded trips to the cafeteria for chips and ice cream bars. We stayed and we stayed and we stayed because that was what family did.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WHEN UNCLE MARVIN SHOWED UP, he told us to go home. “Are Matty and Jed coming?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “They’re going to come tomorrow. Guys, go home. I’ll take things from here.”

  Our car ride home was silent, aside from the DJ laughing on the radio. “Can you—” I began, but my dad didn’t wait for me to finish before pressing the off button and plunging the car into blissful silence. I looked out the window and imagined rain streaking down the glass like teardrops. In reality it was a clear night, the moon high and bright above because Mother Nature had no decency.

  I was grateful for the silence. My hands balled into fists at my sides. I was going to find the golem. She’d betrayed me. She’d been mean, and she’d threatened Zaide, and she hadn’t listened to me, which basically meant that Zaide’s breaking his hip was her fault. Her. Fault. My nails bit into my palms.

  And she’d been doing this by pretending to be someone from Zaide’s past. Someone it hurt him to think about. Why? Zaide was so gentle and kind. What could this person have done to him? I’d ask the golem a few questions, and then I would return her to the dust.

  Mom and Dad went right up to bed at home, claiming to be wiped out. If you asked me, Mom just wanted to cry. Which she could have done in front of me, because I kind of wanted to cry, too. But no one ever asked me.

  So be it. I had to find the golem.

  I strode quickly down the sidewalk, the bright light from the streetlights overhead bathing me in warmth. I waved at the dog walkers, then walked up Zaide’s driveway. The door didn’t open.

  Right. He wasn’t home, so it would be locked. I dug my keys out of my pocket. It took me a few tries to wrestle the old, heavy door open with the key. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually used it before.

  Zaide’s house felt dark and small without him in it. Though he hadn’t done any cooking in it today, it still smelled of chicken broth and steamed whitefish. I breathed the smell in deep, letting it flow through me and comfort me. Zaide would be back. He just had to heal. Jed had broken his arm once after jumping on the bed, and all he had to do was wear a cast for a while. That was the arm he pitched with today. You’d never even know it had been broken.

  It’s different for really old people, that traitorous part of my mind whispered, but I shut it down. I didn’t need to listen to it right now.

  “Elsa?” I called. I turned, taking in every inch of the house I could see from here. The gleaming stretch of the table. Zaide’s newly neat desk with the rolly chair. The red velvet couch. The glimpses of bedrooms revealed by their open doors.

  No golem in sight. No tendrils of brown hair reaching out from under the couch or table or bed. “Elsa?” I called, taking a step toward the kitchen. She didn’t seem to be in there, either. “Elsa?”

  If she wasn’t here, then where could she be? I turned in another circle, then collapsed into Zaide’s rolly chair. Hopefully she wasn’t at the hospital. Could she be at Isabella’s house or something?

  I pushed off, and the chair whirled me in a circle, whirling my thoughts around with it. The chair slowed to a stop, but I pushed off again, sending me around and around so fast that the base of the chair rattled like an earthquake was coming. “Woo!” I cried. I couldn’t believe Zaide had never let us spin in the chair before. That he kept something so much fun from us.

  The room was a blur. Blurry table. Blurry desk. Blurry table. Blurry desk. Blurry girl—wait. I slammed my feet on the floor, bringing the chair to a lurching stop. For a moment the world around me kept on spinning, but as soon as it stopped, I jumped to my feet. “There you are,” I said to the golem, who was standing in front of the table, her arms folded. Her face was in shadow.

  “Here I am,” she agreed. The light reached her body, so I could see she was wearing a new outfit, one that looked like she could’ve ripped it right out of a magazine page: a short denim skirt with a flap in the front over distressed leggings with a tucked-in baggy white shirt that said FREE SPIRIT. The shoes on her feet were snakeskin ballet slippers with silver buckles on top. Where had she even gotten all of these? Had she stolen them? I opened my mouth to ask her, but other stuff came out instead because, right, I had way more important things to worry about at this moment.

  “Zaide is in the hospital, and it’s your fault,” I said. I paused to give those words their proper weight. It wouldn’t be out of line, I thought, if she collapsed to her knees to beg my forgiveness. Maybe even kissed my sharp purple sneakers.

  Instead, she shrugged. “It wasn’t like I pushed him off the ladder.”

  “You were supposed to keep him safe,” I accused. “That means keeping him off the ladder in the first place.”

  She shrugged again. “There’s only so much I can do.”

  “Yeah.” I scoffed. “Like threaten him.” I paused again and waited to see what she would say to that. Whether she’d deny it, or whether she’d be proud of her villainy.

  “Maybe you should ask him about it,” she said.

  “Or you could just tell me whatever you think you know.”

  “I don’t actually know anything for sure,” she said airily. “Not the full story. All I know is that he’s afraid of this Maria person I look like and that he panics when I threaten to tell everybody what he did to me.”

  My shoulders relaxed. I hadn’t even realized, but they’d gotten all bunched up around my ears. “So you don’t know anything.”

  She just raised her other eyebrow. Basically saying, Yes, I do. More than you, Leah.

  I wondered if she remembered any of her past lives. She was made of the same dirt, after all.

  That didn’t matter, though. “Look,” I said, and paused because she’d stepped forward, bathing herself in light. Including her face. I sucked in a breath.

  The side of her face was crumbling. From her ear down to her chin, an inch- or two-wide stretch down the left side had gone brown and crumbly as dirt. The destruction was tugging at the corner of her left eye, pulling it down. The effect was that she seemed to be suffering from some horrible skin disease and a stroke at once.

  She saw me staring. Her lips turned down into a pout. “I’m getting ugly now,” she said. “I can’t be popular and loved if I’m so ugly. You need to fix me.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. I took a step toward her. “I just need to resculpt your face a bit, and you’ll be good as new.”

  She smiled. As she spoke, her shem-stamped tongue came into sight. “Maybe you can even make me more beautiful than before. I’ll be more popular than Isabella Lynch.”

  “Sure,” I agreed again. I tried to make my voice sound as soothing as a lullaby. Maybe I could lull her into falling asleep. That would make this so much easier. “Whatever you want.”

  She continued speaking as she moved closer. Her tongue flashed into view with every word. “Maybe some ombre at the bottom of my hair. Or highlights. Or streaks of green. I think that might look really cool. No—blue!”

  I kept nodding and smiling. If I reached out now, I could touch her shoulder. Another step. If I reached out now, I could brush her chin. Another step. If I reached out now, I could—

  “And my forehead is a little too big, don’t you think? I want a smaller forehead this time, and even higher cheekbones, since my mom is supposed to be a model, and—”

  My hand darted out toward her mouth. I could feel the strange dry c
hill of her breath on my fingertips and—

  Her own hand gripped my wrist with inhuman strength. It clamped on like an iron manacle. I struggled, trying to free it, but even if I managed to escape her iron grip, her mouth was closed now, her head pulled back.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Her voice was deadly quiet and just a little bit muffled, since she was keeping her mouth closed as much as she could.

  There was literally nothing I could say that would make me sound good. So I stared at her mutely, biting my own tongue to keep from shrieking in pain. Her grip was hard. My last year’s gym teacher, who was intense about handshakes and how we’d need a firm handshake to make it in high school and the real world, would have been beyond impressed.

  “You were trying to rip out my tongue.” She answered her own question. “Are you sick of me, Leah? You don’t need me anymore, so you thought you’d kill me?”

  It’s not killing if you’re not real is what I wanted to say. But my voice seemed to have shriveled up. Because for the first time, I really understood that she and I were alone in Zaide’s house. In Zaide’s house with the walls made of brick three feet thick.

  Nobody was going to hear me if I screamed.

  She leaned in. When she spoke, I could smell the earthiness of her breath. “Maybe I should rip out your tongue and see how you like it.”

  My breath caught. I wanted to say something in response, but that would involve opening my mouth. And I didn’t want to take the chance of opening my mouth.

  She smirked. “I thought so.” She pushed me away, letting go of my arm. Again, her strength was inhuman. I went flying backward and would have fallen if the rolly chair hadn’t caught me and skidded.

  Now that she was beyond reaching distance, I could speak. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said, trying for that calming tone of voice again. My mom trying to soothe me after a nightmare. “I was just trying to make you beautiful again, like I—”

  She snorted, stopping me short. “Like there’s even a chance I’m going to believe that,” she said scornfully. “You know, Leah, I might be getting a little ugly, but at least I’m not ugly like you.”

  She took a step closer, casting her eyes over me from top to bottom. I could barely breathe. “Look at that nose of yours. You freak. You can’t even see the rest of your face behind it.”

  I was not going to cry. Not when I knew she was specifically trying to hurt me. So I was not going to let her make me cry. I swallowed hard.

  Definitely not.

  “No wonder you can’t make any friends. Who would want to be friends with a freak like you?” She sneered. She took another step closer. “And no wonder Isabella hates you. You’re hideous. You can put whatever clothes you want on your body—it won’t change that face.”

  Definitely.

  Not.

  I balled my fists, like that might intimidate her and stop her from coming at me. I might also be balling them up at myself. Here I was, trapped in a house with a monster, and I was worrying about my nose. I shook my head.

  I just wanted to make her stop voicing all my worst fears into the real world outside my head. “You can’t kill me,” I said. “They’ll find you. They won’t let you go.”

  She scoffed again. “I know I can’t kill you. Not if I want to keep my life and make it even better. But I don’t need to hurt you to get you to do what I want, Leah. That’s what I learned at the seder. I just didn’t do a good enough job.” She smiled toothily. I was left with the impression that she had too many teeth to fit in her mouth. “Just wait and see.”

  She took a step back. I couldn’t let her go. I lunged toward her, but a shrill ring tore into the air. An alarm? Was something—

  The Christmas lights began flashing overhead, splashing her face and my face and the world around us with bright spots of red and blue and green. The phone. The phone was ringing.

  I focused back on the golem. But there was no golem to focus on. She was gone.

  I swallowed hard again, and it felt like I had swallowed a stone. It landed with a thunk in the pit of my stomach. This was not good. No, this was decidedly Not Good.

  I don’t need to hurt you to get you to do what I want, Leah. Her words ran through my head like a neon marquee sign. What had she meant? She didn’t plan to hurt me, which was good.

  But she’d emphasized that first you. Which made it sound like she wasn’t going to hurt me … but that she might hurt other people. And out of all the people I knew, there was someone frail and old and fragile. If she hurt him, it would hurt me a whole lot.

  I had to get to Zaide right away.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MY PARENTS DID NOT UNDERSTAND my urgency. At this point I would have been willing to tell them the whole story with the golem if I’d thought they’d believe me and not decide I was making things up and that I had to go to bed right now. Since that was not the case, I had to settle for something else.

  “I just have a really bad feeling that something terrible is going to happen to Zaide if we’re not there,” I said. “Like right now. We need to go to him right now.”

  Mom sighed. She was sitting on the edge of their bed wearing her sick pajamas, aka the ones she wore when she had to stay home from work sick. They were big and baggy and the ugliest things I’d ever seen, with brown and red and green plaid, but they’d been washed so many times they were as soft as the insides of my forearms. “We need to get some sleep,” she said. “I know this is a scary time. We’ll feel a little better in the morning.”

  I bristled all along my back. “First of all, I’m not a baby,” I said. “And please? Please, please, please. I’ll feel so much better if we could just pop in on him and make sure he’s safe and maybe hire an armed guard to keep him that way?”

  “Leah.” Dad was leaning against the doorway to the bathroom. He’d skipped shaving, I guess, so the bottom half of his face was covered in a dark brown shadow of stubble. “Nobody is going to hurt Zaide in the hospital. I promise you that, okay?”

  I swallowed down my frustration. “You don’t know that.”

  “Leah.” This was Mom, reaching for her nightstand. “Uncle Marvin is still with Zaide right now, I think. Why don’t we give him a call? We can make sure Zaide is okay?”

  Great. So the golem would hurt Zaide and Uncle Marvin. “Fine,” I said. It was better than nothing, I supposed.

  According to Uncle Marvin, everything at the hospital was fine. There were even security guards on every floor to keep anyone suspicious out. Not that they would stop the golem, who could golem magic herself wherever she wanted. “I’m going to spend the night,” he told me. “So anyone coming after Zaide will have to go through me!”

  I tried to console myself with that. Even if the golem was extra strong, she was still my size. She’d have a lot harder time fighting her way through Uncle Marvin without making a loud commotion than if she just attacked poor Zaide asleep in his bed.

  “And I’m going in tomorrow morning,” Mom said. “Dad will pick you up from school and take you, too. So we’ll see him tomorrow, all right?”

  My shoulders sagged. My whole body sagged, actually. I’d never felt so helpless. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Thus passed a sleepless night. I was just about to drift off when my eyes popped open. It wasn’t like the golem had specifically said she was going to hurt Zaide, just people who weren’t me. What if she meant my parents? I couldn’t exactly keep watch over my parents all night, so instead, I lay in my bed and listened hard for any sounds out of the ordinary. At some point I must have fallen asleep, because the ordinary sounds included the usual overhead flight of a flock of owls with wind chimes for wings. But I woke up in the morning to find my whole, healthy parents in the kitchen drinking coffee, so it all turned out okay.

  At school, I shrank into the background as much as I could, and I’d wised up to the monitor in the stairwell during lunch, who let me up to the second floor when I told her I was meeting a teacher up
stairs. Lunch in the bathroom had never been so depressing. (Or smelly.)

  After the last bell, my dad met me outside. “How was school?”

  “Fine,” I said. Was it actually possible to answer that question any other way? It wasn’t like I was going to be like, Actually, it was terrible. I ate lunch in a bathroom today. How was work? I bet you didn’t eat lunch in a bathroom.

  We spent most of the trip in silence. I leaped out of the car as soon as we parked, but I didn’t get very far, since I had to wait for Dad to leave the parking garage with me. I vibrated with impatience the whole trip up to Zaide’s floor. I had to see him to know he was okay. I had to … I held my breath as we walked down the hallway. Dad wasn’t walking fast enough, so I forged ahead, not fast enough to get yelled at for running, but definitely faster. Just a few more doors—there was the sad kid in the cast, there was the woman staring at the blank TV, and there …

  There was Zaide. Lying down in his bed, his eyes open, talking to Mom. I heaved a great sigh of relief. He was okay. Well, as okay as he could be with a broken hip. But at least the golem hadn’t made things worse.

  Yet.

  I had to warn him. Given that Elsa had been made from the same clay as his golem, and he was the one who’d told me about it in the first place, he was probably the only adult who would believe me. That meant I had to get Mom and Dad out of the room.

  I could try to trick them into getting me something from the cafeteria or somehow find a way to lock them in the bathroom, but the thought of all that tired me out. To be quite honest, I was getting sick of lying. “Mom, Dad,” I said. “Can I have a minute alone with Zaide? Or ten minutes, actually. A minute is too short.”

  They exchanged a look. To be quite honest again, I was getting sick of people exchanging looks with each other over my head, too. “Please,” I said. “I just want to talk to him.”

  Mom stood up from where she sat at his side and crouched down beside me so that her mouth was at my ear level. “You know, Leah, he’s not entirely lucid right now,” she whispered. “You might want to wait until later.”