The only thing I could see in the hallway now was the mirror. Like every other mirror in the house, it had been soaped for the shiva, and so, instead of the half-reassuring, half-terrifying blur of movement I usually glimpsed there, I saw only darkness, barely penetrated by the single butterfly nightlight plugged in beneath it.
Reaching over the edge of the bed, I found my sweatpants and pulled them on under my nightgown. Then I sat up, too.
“Why do they soap the mirrors?”
“Because the Angel of Death might still be lurking. You don’t want him catching sight of you.” Martin turned his head my way, and a tiny ray of light glinted off his thick owl-glasses.
“That isn’t why,” I whispered.
“You make the ball?”
“Duh.”
With a quick smile that trapped moonlight in his braces, my brother slid out of bed. I flipped my own covers back but waited until he reached the door, poked his head out, and peered downstairs. Overhead, the vent pushed a useless puff of cold air into the heat that had pooled around us. In the foyer, the clock tuk-ed.
“Voices,” I hissed, and Martin scampered fast back to bed. His glasses tilted toward the vent. I grinned. “Ha. We’re even.”
Now I could see his eyes, dark brown and huge in their irises, as though bulging with all the amazing things he knew. One day, I thought, if Martin kept reading like he did, badgered my parents into taking him to enough museums, just stood there and watched the way he could sometimes, he’d literally pop himself like an over-inflated balloon.
“For what?” he snapped.
“Angel of Death.”
“That’s what Roz told me.”
“She would.”
He grinned back. “You’re right.”
From under my pillow, I drew out the sock-ball I’d made and flipped it to him. He turned it in his hands as though completing an inspection. Part of the ritual. Once or twice, he’d even torn balls apart and made me redo them. The DayGlo-yellow stripes my mother hoped looked just a little athletic on his spindle-legs had to curve just so, like stitching on a baseball. And the weight had to be right. Three, maybe four socks, depending on how worn they were and what brand mom had bought. Five, and the thing just wouldn’t arc properly.
“You really think we should play tonight?”
Martin glanced up, as though he hadn’t even considered that. Then he shrugged. “Grandpa would’ve.”
I knew that he’d considered it plenty. And that gave me my first conscious inkling of just how much our grandfather had meant to my brother.
This time, I followed right behind Martin to the door, and we edged together onto the balcony. Below us, the grandfather clock and the double-doored glass case where our Roz, the tall, orange-skinned, sour-faced woman grandpa had married right after I was born, kept her prized porcelain poodle collection and her milky blue oriental vases with the swans gliding around the sides lay hooded in shadow. Beyond the foyer, I could just see the straightened rows of chairs we’d set up for the week’s last mourner’s Kaddish, the final chanting of words that seemed to have channeled a permanent groove on my tongue. The older you get, my mother had told me, the more familiar they become. Yit-barah, v’yish-tabah, v’yit-pa-ar, v’yit-roman, v’yit-na-sey . . .
“You can throw first,” my brother said, as though granting me a favor.
“Don’t you want to?” I teased. “To honor him?” Very quietly, I began to make chicken clucks.
“Cut it out,” Martin mumbled, but made no move toward the stairs. I clucked some more, and he shot out his hand so fast I thought he was trying to hit me. But he was only flapping in that nervous, spastic wave my parents had been waiting for him to outgrow since he was three. “Shush. Look.”
“I am look . . . ” I started, then realized he wasn’t peering over the balcony at the downstairs hall from which Roz would emerge to scream at us if she heard movement. He was looking over his shoulder toward the mirror. “Not funny,” I said.
“Weird,” said Martin. Not until he took a step across the landing did I realize what he meant.
The doors to the hags’ rooms were open. Not much. I couldn’t see anything of either room. But both had been pushed just slightly back from their usual positions. Clamminess flowed from my fingertips up the peach fuzz on my arms.
Naturally, halfway across the landing, Martin stopped. If I didn’t take the lead, he’d never move another step. The clammy sensation spread to my shoulders, down my back. I went to my brother anyway. We stood, right in the spot where the mirror should have reflected us. Right where Grandpa died. In the butterfly-light, Martin’s face looked wet and waxy, the way it did when he had a fever.
“You really want to go through those doors?” I whispered.
“Just trying to remember.”
I nodded first toward Mrs. Gold’s room, then Sophie’s. “Pink. Blue.” The shiver I’d been fighting for the past half-minute snaked across my ribs.
Martin shook his head. “I mean the last time we saw them open. Either one.”
But he already knew that. So did I. We’d last glimpsed those rooms the week before the hags had died. Four years—almost half my life—ago.
“Let’s not,” I said, and Martin shuffled to the right, toward Mrs. Gold’s. “Martin, come on, let’s play. I’m going downstairs.”
But I stayed put, amazed, as he scuttled forward with his eyes darting everywhere, like a little ghost-shrimp racing across an exposed patch of sea bottom. He’ll never do it, I thought, not without me. I tried chicken-clucking again, but my tongue had dried out. Martin stretched out his hand and shoved.
The door made no sound as it glided back, revealing more shadows, the dark humps of four-poster bed and dresser, a square of moonlight through almost-drawn curtains. A split second before, if someone had asked me to draw Mrs. Gold’s room, I would have made a big, pink smear with a crayon. But now, even from across the hall, I recognized that everything was just the way I’d last seen it.
“Coming?” Martin asked.
More than anything else, it was the plea in his voice that pulled me forward. I didn’t bother stopping, because I knew I’d be the one going in first anyway. But I did glance at my brother’s face as I passed. His skin looked even waxier than before, as though it might melt right off.
Stopping on the threshold, I reached into Mrs. Gold’s room with my arm, then jerked it back.
“What?” my brother snapped.
I stared at the goose bumps dimpling the skin above my wrist like bubbles in boiling water. But the air in Mrs. Gold’s room wasn’t boiling. It was freezing cold. “I think we found this house’s only unclogged vent,” I said.
“Just flick on the lights.”
I reached in again. It really was freezing. My hand danced along the wall. I was imagining fat, pink spiders lurking right above my fingers, waiting while I stretched just that last bit closer . . .
“Oh, fudder,” I mumbled, stepped straight into the room, and switched on the dresser lamp. The furniture leapt from its shadows into familiar formation, surprise! But there was nothing surprising. How was it that I remembered this so perfectly, having spent a maximum of twenty hours in here in my entire life, none of them after the age of six?
There it all was, where it had always been: The bed with its crinoline curtain and beige sheets that always looked too heavy and scratchy to me, something to make drapes out of, not sleep in; the pink wallpaper; the row of perfect pink powder puffs laid atop closed pink clam-lids full of powder or God-knows-what, next to dark pink bottles of lotion; the silver picture frame with the side-by-side posed portraits of two men in old army uniforms. Brothers? Husbands? Sons? I’d been too young to ask. Mrs. Gold was Roz’s mother, but neither of them had ever explained about the photographs, at least not in my hearing. I’m not sure even my mother knew.
As Martin came in behind me, the circular vent over the bed gushed frigid air. I clutched my arms tight against myself and closed my eyes and was surpris
ed to find tears between my lashes. Just a few. Every visit to Baltimore for the first six years of my life, for one hour per day, my parents would drag chairs in here and plop us down by this bed to “chat” with Mrs. Gold. That was my mother’s word for it. Mostly, what we did was sit in the chairs or—when I was a baby—crawl over the carpet—and make silent faces at each other while Mrs. Gold prattled endlessly, senselessly, about horses or people we didn’t know with names like Ruby and Selma, gobbling the Berger cookies we brought her and scattering crumbs all over those scratchy sheets. My mother would nod and smile and wipe the crumbs away. Mrs. Gold would nod and smile, and strands of her poofy white hair would blow in the wind from the vent. As far as I could tell, Mrs. Gold had no idea who any of us were. All those hours in here, and really, we’d never even met her.
Martin had slipped past me, and now he touched the fold of the sheet at the head of the bed. I was amazed again. He’d done the same thing at the funeral home, stunning my mother by sticking his hand into the coffin during the visitation and gently, with one extended finger, touching my grandfather’s lapel. Not typical timid Martin behavior.
“Remember her hands?” he said.
Like shed snakeskin. So dry no lotion on Earth, no matter how pink, would soften them
“She seemed nice,” I said, feeling sad again. For Grandpa, mostly, not Mrs. Gold. After all, we’d never known her when she was . . . whoever she was. “I bet she was nice.”
Martin took his finger off the bed and glanced at me. “Unlike the one we were actually related to.” And he walked straight past me into the hall.
“Martin, no.” I paused only to switch out the dresser lamp. As I did, the clock in the foyer tuk-ed, and the dark seemed to pounce on the bed, the powder puffs, and the pathetic picture frame. I hurried into the hall, conscious of my clumping steps. Was I trying to wake Roz?
Martin stood before Sophie’s door, hand out, but he hadn’t touched it. When he turned to me, he had a grin on his face I’d never seen before. “Mamzer,” he drawled.
My mouth dropped open. He sounded exactly like her. “Stop it.”
“Come to Gehenna. Suffer with me.”
“Martin, shut up!”
He flinched, bumped Sophie’s door with his shoulder and then stumbled back in my direction. The door swung open, and we both held still and stared.
Balding carpet, yellow-white where the butterfly light barely touched it. Everything else stayed shadowed. The curtains in there had been drawn completely. When was the last time light had touched this room?
“Why did you say that?” I asked
“It’s what she said. To Grandpa, every time he dragged himself up here. Remember?”
“What’s mamzer?”
Martin shook his head. “Aunt Paulina slapped me once for saying it.”
“What’s henna?”
“Gehenna. One sixtieth of Eden.”
Prying my eyes from Sophie’s doorway, I glared at my brother. “What does that mean?”
“It’s like hell. Jew hell.”
“Jews don’t believe in hell. Do we?”
“Somewhere wicked people go. They can get out, though. After they suffer enough.”
“Can we play our game now?” I made a flipping motion with my hand, cupping it as though around a sock-ball.
“Let’s . . . take one look. Pay our respects.”
“Why?”
Martin looked at the floor, and his arms gave one of their half-flaps. “Grandpa did. Every day, no matter what she called him. If we don’t, no one ever will again.”
He strode forward, pushed the door all the way back, and actually stepped partway over the threshold. The shadows leaned toward him, and I made myself move, half-thinking I might snatch him back. With a flick of his wrist, Martin switched on the lights.
For a second, I thought the bulbs had blown, because the shadows glowed rather than dissipated, and the plain, boxy bed in there seemed to take slow shape, as though reassembling itself. Then I remembered. Sophie’s room wasn’t blue because of wallpaper or bed coverings or curtain fabric. She’d liked dark blue light, barely enough to see by, just enough to read if you were right under the lamp. She’d lain in that light all day, curled beneath her covers with just her thin, knife-shaped head sticking out like a moray eel’s.
Martin’s hand had found mine, and after a few seconds, his touch distracted me enough to glance away, momentarily, from the bed, the bare dresser, the otherwise utterly empty room. I stared down at our palms. “Your brother’s only going to love a few people,” my mother had told me once, after he’d slammed the door to his room in my face for the thousandth time so he could work on his chemistry set or read Ovid aloud to himself without me bothering him. “You’ll be one of them.”
“How’d they die?” I asked.
Martin seemed transfixed by the room, or his memories of it, which had to be more defined than mine. Our parents had never made us come in here. But Martin had accompanied grandpa, at least some of the time. When Sophie wasn’t screaming, or calling everyone names. He took a long time answering. “They were old.”
“Yeah. But didn’t they like die on the same day or something?”
“Same week, I think. Dad says that happens a lot to old people. They’re barely still in their bodies, you know? Then someone they love goes, and it’s like unbuckling the last straps holding them in. They just slip out.”
“But Sophie and Mrs. Gold hated each other.”
Martin shook his head. “Mrs. Gold didn’t even know who Sophie was, I bet. And Sophie hated everything. You know, Mom says she was a really good grandma, until she got sick. Super smart, too. She used to give lectures at the synagogue.”
“Lectures about what?”
“Hey,” said Martin, let go of my hand, and took two shuffling steps into Sophie’s room. Blue light washed across his shoulders, darkening him. On the far wall, something twitched. Then it rose off the plaster. I gasped, lunged forward to grab Martin, and a second something joined the first, and I understood.
“No one’s been in here,” I whispered. The air was not cold, although the circular vent I could just make out over the bed coughed right as I said that. Another thought wriggled behind my eyes, but I shook it away. “Martin, the mirror.”
Glancing up, he saw what I meant. The glass on Sophie’s wall—aimed toward the hall, not the bed, she’d never wanted to see herself—stood unsoaped, pulling the dimness in rather than reflecting it, like a black hole. In that light, we were just shapes, our faces featureless. Even for grandpa’s shiva, no one had bothered to prepare this room.
Martin turned from our reflections to me, his pointy nose and glasses familiar and reassuring, but only until he spoke.
“Miriam, look at this.”
Along the left-hand wall ran a long closet with sliding wooden doors. The farthest door had been pulled almost all the way open and tipped off its runners, so that it hung half-sideways like a dangling tooth.
“Remember the dresses?”
I had no idea what he was talking about now. I also couldn’t resist another glance in the mirror, but then quickly pulled my eyes away. There were no pictures on Sophie’s bureau, just a heavy, wooden gavel. My grandfather’s, of course. He must have given it to her when he retired.
“This whole closet used to be stuffed with them. Fifty, sixty, maybe more, in plastic cleaners bags. I don’t think she ever wore them after she moved here. I can’t even remember her getting dressed.”
“She never left the room,” I muttered.
“Except to sneak into Mrs. Gold’s.”
I closed my eyes as the clock tuk-ed and the vent rasped.
It had only happened once while we were in the house. But Grandpa said she did it all the time. Whenever Sophie got bored of accusing her son of kidnapping her from her own house and penning her up here, or whenever her ravaged, rotting lungs allowed her enough breath, she’d rouse herself from this bed, inch out the door in her bare feet with the bl
ue veins popping out of the tops like rooster crests, and sneak into Mrs. Gold’s room. There she’d sit, murmuring God knew what, until Mrs. Gold started screaming.
“It always creeped me out,” Martin said. “I never liked looking over at this closet. But the dresses blocked that.”
“Blocked wh—” I started, and my breath caught in my teeth. Waist-high on the back inside closet wall, all but covered by a rough square of wood that had been leaned against it rather than fitted over it, there was an opening. A door. “Martin, if Roz catches us in here—”
Hostility flared in his voice like a lick of flame. “Roz hardly ever catches us playing the balcony ball game right outside her room. Anyway, in case you haven’t noticed, she never comes in here.”
“What’s with you?” I snapped. Nothing about my brother made sense tonight.
“What? Nothing. It’s just . . . Grandpa brings Roz’s mother here, even though she needs constant care, can’t even feed herself unless she’s eating Berger cookies, probably has no idea where she is. Grandpa takes care of her, like he took care of everyone. But when it comes to his mother, Roz won’t even bring food in here. She makes him do everything. And after they die, Roz leaves her own mother’s room exactly like it was, but she cleans out every trace of Sophie, right down to the closet.”
“Sophie was mean.”
“She was sick. And ninety-two.”
“And mean.”
“I’m going in there,” Martin said, gesturing or flapping, I couldn’t tell which. “I want to see Grandpa’s stuff. Don’t you? I bet it’s all stored in there.”
“I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Martin.”
In an instant, the hostility left him, and his expression turned small, almost panicked.
“I’m going to bed,” I said again.
“You don’t want to see Grandpa?”
This time, the violence in my own voice surprised me. “Not in there.” I was thinking of the way he’d looked in his coffin. His dead face had barely even resembled his real one. His living one. His whole head had been transformed into a waxy, vaguely grandpa-shaped bulge balanced atop his bulgy, overweight body, like the top of a snowman.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 34