Except that this couldn’t wait. Not another minute. “I just want to talk to him,” I repeated. Mom and Dad gave each other another look, and then Mom stood up and sighed.
“Honey, let’s head down to the cafeteria for ten minutes. I saw a salad earlier that didn’t look terrible. Leah, will you be okay for ten minutes?”
That was literally what I had just asked for, but I knew if I said that, Mom would get mad at me for giving her attitude. “Yes,” I said impatiently.
“If … You know, if there’s any trouble, the nurses’ station is right out there. Pressing this button will call them.”
“Okay.”
It took them longer than it should have to leave; they kept looking over their shoulders at me like I was going to explode or something. I was going to explode if they didn’t get out of here, but from annoyance.
Finally, they were gone. I listened to their footsteps go all the way down the hall, and then I took my mom’s chair beside Zaide. I gently took his hand and held it between both of mine. It was cold. I held it tighter to warm it up, wishing I had four hands so I could warm his other one, too. Except that there were all the tubes and stuff coming in and out of that one. My stomach did a flip-flop.
I turned my attention to his face. He was squinting blearily at me. “Zaide, it’s me,” I said. “Leah. Your great-granddaughter.” And since Matty and none of the faraway cousins were here, I went on with, “Your favorite great-granddaughter.”
He stared at me a moment longer, his eyebrows knitted together. But then his face relaxed, and his head gave a little bounce. A nod from a lying-down position. “Rosie,” he said. “Rosie, of course I know you.”
Rosie? Who was Rosie?
I would just have to roll with it. I had only ten minutes. Less than ten minutes now. I hoped he would remember what I had to tell him. “Look, Zaide,” I said. “This is important, so try to remember. Do you remember when you told me about the golem? The whole story about sixteenth-century Prague or whatever, and how you found it and made your own?”
He just squinted at me again and frowned. I guessed I had to take that as a yes. “So, I actually found the remains of your golem in the garage,” I said. “And it was a stupid, stupid thing to do, but I made my own. It was Elsa. You met Elsa. You thought her name was Maria.”
Zaide’s face collapsed in on itself. That was the only way to describe his expression. I shouldn’t have mentioned Maria.
But now it was too late. “The golem,” he said. There was a sob thick in his voice, one long and extended, like it had no beginning or end. “I made the golem. After all that happened with Maria, the golem attacked us. That’s the end of every golem story, you know. They turn on their creator.”
My blood seemed to freeze. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“The golem of Prague went on a murderous rampage in the Jewish section of the city when the rabbi lost his control.” Zaide’s voice was a mourner’s dirge, the way we say the Kaddish to remember those who have died. “Maria was my friend, though she was not Jewish. This was the 1930s, when the Holocaust was unfolding and such friendships were rare … and discouraged. Maria’s family was kind, but her neighbors supported the efforts to kill all of us. Do you know how many Jews died in the Holocaust, Rosie? Our population a hundred years ago was higher than our population now.”
His voice shuddered. “I had feelings for her. One night, Maria and I kissed. Her neighbor saw. Maria spoke up in my defense, but her neighbor shouted for his friends to come and kill me for the crime of defiling a non-Jewish girl with my Jewish lips. The golem was supposed to save us.”
“But it didn’t,” I said, dreading what was sure to come next.
“It didn’t,” Zaide said. “I told the golem to defend us, but it turned on us instead. It killed…” Now his breathing shuddered, too. “The golem looks for loopholes in your rules, wherever it can find them.” I’d certainly noticed that. “I told it to protect us from the non-Jews. And Maria was a non-Jew. It did not matter, that we did not need protecting from her. It killed her anyway.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if sharing the news still hurt, however many years ago it had happened. “The non-Jews thought it was us. And in a way, it was. It was my fault. The rest of us had to run, or they would have killed us all.” Zaide paused for a moment, letting the gravity of his words sink in. “And it was lucky we did, or we would all have been killed in the Holocaust.”
I had no idea what to say. I mean, I was actually at a loss for words. There wasn’t anything I could say to make that hurt better.
“You should not have created a golem, Rosie,” Zaide said, his voice grave now.
Tears pricked my eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. I just wanted to help. I wanted to make it so you didn’t have to leave, so that Mom and Dad wouldn’t send you away.” I sniffled. “Though, it would have helped if you’d told me about the murderous-rampage thing and how they always turn on their creator. Maybe you should have mentioned that? Anyway. Now I have to stop her before she can do something bad, like yours did. She’s threatening me because she wants to be beautiful and popular, no matter what. Remember at Passover? I’m afraid she’s going to hurt you, Zaide.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.” He raised the arm I was holding and flexed it. Despite the seriousness and the sadness hanging over the room right now, I couldn’t help but laugh. “I pull plows with this arm. If someone came after me, I’d jump out of this bed and wrestle them to the ground.”
I wondered who Zaide was in his head. He must be thinking he was still young and strong, pulling plows. Maybe in his brain it was sixty years ago. Sixty years ago, he would have been thirty-three, running his chicken farm, raising his three young kids.
Rosie. That was it. My grandmother Roslyn, the one I was named after. Zaide’s daughter. My Zaide thought I was her.
I laid my cheek down on the bed beside Zaide’s own head. This close I could see the marks of age on his face: the brown sunspots, the pockmarks from bug-bite scars. His nose arching high and proud from his face. I sighed. “What am I supposed to do?”
He couldn’t turn all the way over to his side, not with the cast and all the tubes, but he did turn his head so that he was looking directly into my eyes. A little bit down at me, actually, because his head was propped up on a pillow. It didn’t feel like he was looking down on me, though. Zaide would never look down on me, no matter how short I was. Which was very.
He said, “You have to fix it, Rosie. You started it, and you have to end it.”
I sniffled. My eyes were welling up. I hoped they wouldn’t well over and make spots on Zaide’s sheets. “But that’s how this whole thing started. I was trying to fix everything, and I just made it all more of a mess.”
“That’s life.”
His pronouncement was so frank and so nonchalant that I burst into laughter. And tears. There were definitely going to be water spots on Zaide’s sheets. It took a second for my laughter to subside, and then he went on.
“That’s what life is, Rosie. There are some things you can control and some things you can’t. Some things you can fix, and that you should fix, and some things that you can’t. Life is all about figuring those things out for what they are, and being patient and accepting of the things outside of your control.” He sighed. “I’m still learning that.”
I sighed in response, fluttering the corners of his pillowcase. I wished I could climb into the bed and hug him, but I was afraid of jostling those tubes or hurting him in his cast. “But how do I know what I can fix and what I can’t?”
“You don’t.” Again, his frankness brought on a slightly hysterical bout of giggles. “You don’t always know, Rosie. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you have to try and fail. Sometimes you have to try and succeed. And sometimes there’s a little voice inside you trying to speak the truth, and you have to listen to that voice.”
I didn’t know what voice he was talking about.
&n
bsp; Yes, you do, insisted the voice.
I went to shut it out again, then stopped. He was right. I’d had this voice trying to talk to me this whole time, this voice from my conscience, and I just didn’t want to hear it. I’d thought of it as a traitor.
Zaide can’t be on his own anymore, Leah. You know it. You just don’t want to know it.
I took a deep breath. “How do I…? If there’s something I know I can’t change, but it’s something awful, how am I supposed to try to accept it?” Accept that my Saturday afternoons with Zaide and Jed and Matty were over. That Jed and Matty would never be as close to me as they were right now. That Lexy and Julie were making new friends and having a life without me that I couldn’t be a part of. That Zaide would never be the same again, and that eventually he would die. And eventually my parents would die. I knew it was—hopefully—a long time off, but I still couldn’t help the cold feeling in my chest.
“It’s something you need to learn for yourself. It’s different every time.” He was silent for a moment. “It’s still something I’m trying to learn after all these years.”
After Maria? After his family had been driven out of their home and people tried to kill them for no other reason than that they were Jews? He couldn’t control that. He couldn’t control any of that. He just … we just had to live with it. I guess there was no other option. We do what we can to change what we can, and otherwise we just have to deal with it.
“Thank you, Zaide,” I said. I closed my eyes and nestled deep into the sheets.
“I love you, Rosie.”
I opened my eyes in surprise as a cold, frail finger trailed down the bridge of my nose. I had to fight the urge to yank my face away—I didn’t want to jar any of the tubes or hit his cast. But just drawing attention to my stupid nose had ruined all the peace I was feeling. I jerked away.
“What’s wrong?”
I said nothing. I didn’t even want to dignify this … this stupid appendage with a response.
“Is it your nose?” he said gravely.
How did he know? I nodded into the sheets.
He sighed. “You know, your mother has the same insecurities,” he said. “You have her nose.”
Bubbe Ruth? And Grandma Roslyn? I’d seen pictures of both—they hung in our house—but from when they were way older than I was. Sure, their noses weren’t small, but they weren’t as big as mine, as the nose I got stuck with from Zaide. Though they weren’t really that different looking, I guess. Their noses were high and regal and proud, and they fit their faces. It made them look high and regal and proud, too. Like the coins of one of those old Roman emperors. Or empresses.
“Your mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” Zaide told me. Then stopped and considered. “Is. She still is. But when I saw her, Rosie? She was my neighbor when we came to the States. I saw her in the hallway of our building, and I stopped short in my tracks.”
Beautiful? Not with this nose. He must have been more senile than I thought.
“She hated her nose. What she didn’t realize was that it suited her.” He scratched his chin. It sounded like paper tearing. “She would not have been suited with an ordinary nose. That nose was hers, the nose that was passed down from noble farmers dreaming of Jerusalem and their ancestors, the priests in the great temple. Strong and confident, and she always knew what she wanted. She was a big person, and she needed a big nose.”
He poked my nose at the tip. “And you, Rosie? You’ll grow into it.”
That was something my parents sometimes said. You’ll grow into it. Meaning that, I guess, my face would get bigger and my nose wouldn’t and somehow they would balance each other out.
But it didn’t sound like that’s what Zaide was saying. Somehow I felt like he was saying I needed to grow on the inside to be worthy of this nose. To be worthy of the nose of ancient priests and Nazi fighters and Bubbe Ruth and Grandma Roslyn. That someday I would be strong and confident and big enough that I’d need a nose like this to lead my way.
I didn’t feel like it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING TO Zaide about what he’d told me about my nose. Which was just as well because he quickly began to snore. I sat up and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. I didn’t want my parents seeing me cry and asking me why. So annoying. I went into the bathroom to splash my face with water and hopefully bring the redness down. By the time I came out, my parents were back, coffees in hand. My mom was staring down at her phone, her lips pursed into a frown.
“Everything okay?” I asked so that she couldn’t ask it of me first.
She shook her head absently. “It’s just strange. Uncle Marvin and Aunt Jessie and Jed and Matilda should have been here ages ago. And they’re not texting me back.”
I immediately thought, Car accident, earthquake, lightning strike, they’re all dead. I swallowed that dread—they were probably not all dead—probably—and said, “That’s weird. Maybe there’s traffic and their phones are dead. Or not getting a signal.”
“Maybe,” my mom replied. She began punching buttons on the screen. “I’ll try Zaide’s house. They were supposed to stop by and pick up some of his clothes and things.”
Oh.
Oh no.
I don’t need to hurt you to get you to do what I want, Leah.
When I’d created the golem, I’d been annoyed at Matty and Jed for being in denial. For not helping me. And if the golem had absorbed my feelings on everything else …
She hadn’t come after Zaide. Or my parents.
My mom sighed and pulled the phone away from her ear. “Not answering. Maybe they’re close? Let’s give it ten minutes. Zaide’s house isn’t far.”
We gave it ten minutes that felt more like ten thousand minutes. I chewed on the inside of my cheek the whole time to keep from screaming. Something was wrong. Not just wrong. Very wrong. I felt it in my bones. And the longer we waited, the worse it could be.
“I left my thing at Zaide’s house.” The words jumped out of me before I could fully process them in my head.
“What was that?” Dad asked.
“My very important … homework. Book I have to read,” I invented. “I left it at Zaide’s last time I was there. And it’s due tomorrow. Oh no!”
I was not going to win an Oscar anytime soon, but my fake horrified face was enough to get my mom looking worried. She turned to my dad. “Do you think you could…”
“Say no more.” Dad motioned to me.
I tagged after him as he strode through the hallway, through the reception area, through the parking garage, into the car. “Hey,” I said, once we were on the road. “Do you believe in magic?”
“Magic?” He scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know—that’s a pretty broad category. Do I think there are things that happen that we can’t explain? Sure. Do I believe in wands and spells and abracadabra? Not so much.” He was silent for a beat, maybe waiting for me to explain why I’d asked him that, then gave in. “Why do you ask?”
Because the golem made me wonder what else was out there. If golems were real, and it was possible to create an animated being with some dirt and a scrap of perhaps magic paper, what else was out there? What else was it possible to do with my own two hands? “I don’t know,” I said. “Like you said, there are things out there that happen that we can’t explain.”
“Like dark matter. And dark energy.”
I vaguely knew what those were—parts of space that existed but that we couldn’t see, that we didn’t know what they were. “Right.” Was the golem animated by dark energy? Was Hashem—God—somewhere in that dark matter?
We pulled up in front of Zaide’s house. Dad frowned. My heart skipped a beat, lurching into my throat.
Uncle Marvin and Aunt Jessie’s car was there, parked in the driveway.
“That’s weird,” Dad said. “That they wouldn’t answer the phone if they were here.”
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Each heartbeat pushed thi
ck black dread through my veins, a creeping sense of doom. “You wait in the car while I help them pack up,” I said, already hopping out.
“Don’t forget your book!” my dad called after me.
It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about and another moment for it to stop mattering altogether because I heard Matty and Jed screaming from the garage.
Forgetting that I was supposed to be looking for my book, I raced inside. It was dark in there, and for a moment, I couldn’t see, and then my vision cleared, and there were the various farming machines and old furniture and pieces of Zaide’s life all cluttered together, seething with shadows.
And the screaming. “Help!” Matty shouted. She’d clearly seen me; her eyes were widening, and not just with fear. “Help! Call nine-one-one!”
She and Jed were backed into a corner of the garage, caged in by a jungle of menacing farm equipment with blades and rusty claws. It was dark, so I couldn’t see them that well, but they stood back to back, each of them entirely straight. It looked like they didn’t have enough room to move without slicing an arm or a neck on one of those scary machines.
“Matty! Jed!” I started moving toward them, then stopped. The hairs were rising on the back of my neck. Because obviously this was golem work. These machines hadn’t moved themselves into a makeshift prison.
“Welcome, Leah. I hoped you might come for the party.”
I whirled to find the golem stepping out from behind a bookshelf. She stood a moment in its shadow, as if purposefully prolonging the suspense, before stepping out. I gasped.
The dirt part of her face from before? It had widened. It now took up a full half of her face: Her left eye was nothing more than a glint of black gravel, and her skin was packed dirt sculpted into the vague shape of a human head. She took another step forward, and grains of dirt sloughed off and fell to the floor with the sound of pattering rain.
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