Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  Adam neared some kids standing in a circle and had a feeling about them. Peeking out of the corner of his eye as he passed, he found he was right: a boy with brown skin and bleached yellow hair doled out pills. Adam stopped. “That X?”

  “Yeah. From Tokyo.”

  “I’ve never done X.” He edged toward them. “Done everything else, crack, smack, but never ecstasy. Not a huge rave scene in the States.”

  The teens nodded as if they met crack smokers all the time. These were the kind of kids who thought cool meant never being impressed.

  “You want to try?” A girl extended an arm swathed in friendship bracelets. In her open palm was a yellow pill stamped with a blue butterfly, like something he might have found at The Sweet Life, the candy store on Hester Street, back when he used to get his fix from Nerds and gummy worms.

  “Does it make you hallucinate? I never do anything that makes you hallucinate. I fucking hate hallucinations.” Adam hoped the girl would say yes.

  She shook her head. “No. It’ll just make you feel good. Really good. You won’t fucking believe how good.”

  How many hours were left until he was back in his room with the four beers? Five hours? Maybe more. He could crawl into the uncaring wheat and white-knuckle it. That’s what he should do.

  The girl retracted her hand.

  “Okay! I’m in.”

  She dropped the yellow butterfly pill in his palm.

  “Banzai!” said the platinum blond boy, and they all tossed a pill into their mouths.

  Adam pulled out the remnants from his stipend, worried he might not have enough for the pill, but the boy waved him off. “Forget it. It’s on us.”

  “Aw, man, thanks.”

  “Just spreading the joy.”

  Adam walked on, waiting for the pill to kick in. He felt bad about taking it, so he hoped it took effect soon, wiping out that guilt, too. He leaned against the silo. Still nothing. The pounding base came through the cement walls. He checked his watch. Ten minutes. He started walking again. Probably an old pill. Or fake. The stupid kid had been ripped off, believing the dealer’s bullshit about Tokyo.

  He rounded the silo to where the cars were parked, feeling a slight tingling at the base of his ribs. He stopped to concentrate on it. The tingling spread so fast, surging up his spine, blooming in his chest, his head. The wheat and the parked cars and the night sky, they all, just like that, lost their menace. How could he have seen wheat, which fed people—only made them happy—as anything but good? What the hell could be bad about wheat?

  He reentered the silo with explosions of joy going off inside him like fireworks. Holy shit, this stuff was good. Smiling, he leaned against the concrete wall and watched the dancing people. Look at them! Human beings—how he loved them, flaws and all. The love didn’t come from the X; no, it merely allowed him to feel the love that was always inside him, buried under the dread. And didn’t it feel like the crowd loved him, too? Or rather that each person in it would love him if given the chance? He even had the feeling his grandfather was looking down on him with love. Forgiveness. No. He couldn’t bring Zayde into this. Leave Zayde out.

  He spotted Ulya talking to an absurdly handsome guy, and he didn’t hate him, wasn’t jealous. Not one bit. Who cared if he was so tall Ulya had to crane her head to make eye contact? That guy had his own problems. His own heartache. We all had our stories, Adam thought, closing his eyes and concentrating on the electronic beats pulsing under his feet. The beats traveled up his legs and through his groin and out the top of his head like the mild spasms preceding an orgasm, except there was no climax. The currents just kept rolling through him.

  When he reopened his eyes, Ulya was no longer talking to Mr. Handsome but dancing again, swarmed by guys trying to groove near her. He watched her dance close to this one and then that one, never giving any of them too much of her time. Her dancing nirvana was mesmerizing, hips going round, hands in the air, short skirt riding up her thighs. She burned so brightly everyone else seemed to dim and disappear. Soon only she shone in the middle of the silo.

  “You guys ready to go?”

  Ofir had startled him. “Go? Now?” He pulled a stalk of wheat from Claudette’s hair, and she turned in embarrassment.

  “It’s three a.m.”

  “Three a.m.? You’re shitting me.” Adam referred to his watch. He couldn’t believe it. This drug made an hour pass in a second. It made sense, he supposed, time flying being the downside to happiness. “Okay, I’ll get Ulie.”

  As he walked toward her, he found it wasn’t as if the other dancers had disappeared; they had. Ulya was one of a handful of stragglers still dancing. How long had he been watching her? She must have danced nonstop for hours. When he tapped her on the shoulder, she spun around, hair stringy with sweat, black eyeliner smudged into shiners. He pointed at the exit where Ofir and Claudette stood waiting to go, framed by the tall rectangular doorway like a painting, the wheat and starry sky behind them.

  Ulya flapped her green T-shirt for air. She had enjoyed the party, done nothing about the brooch. “I loved dancing.”

  Adam smiled. “Yeah, I could tell.”

  She stood still—paralyzed, it seemed to Adam. “I loved being young and free.”

  “Love, not loved, my little babushka. You need to work on your verb conjugation.”

  Driving away from the silo, along the path of trampled wheat, no one spoke. When they turned onto the country road, Ulya snuggled up to Adam. His high was wearing off but not yet gone, and her head fell onto his chest like a pebble into a pond, setting off concentric ripples of love and horniness. He had heard ecstasy heightened your sense of touch, but hadn’t experienced it, since no one had touched him the whole night. No one had touched him, really, in months.

  “Can I see that brooch?” Ulya zigzagged her finger across Adam’s stomach.

  Adam, emboldened by her attentions and the X, said, “You know where it is.”

  His stomach tightened as she traced her finger down to the front pocket of his jeans. “Here?”

  He nodded and sucked in his breath as she squirmed her hand inside. Her being so close was excruciating. It felt like if she didn’t touch him, he would implode, and if she did, same thing. He wheezed. “To the left.”

  Ulya knew that wasn’t the brooch on the left. Did he have a hard-on? She’d assumed he was too out of it. She bit her lips and thrust her hand deeper. Adam emitted a small groan as she whisked out the brooch.

  She held it up to the window. “Wow. It really is amazing.”

  Ulya had a theory that sometimes it was best to make a show of having the desired object in your hand. She did it shoplifting all the time, made certain the saleslady noticed her oohing over a dress, trying on a pair of earrings, parading around from one mirror to another with the silk scarf. Sometimes she would even ask if the scarf looked good on her so the saleslady would let down her guard, thinking, well, she can’t possibly be planning on stealing it.

  Adam pointed. “Those little things are pomegranates.”

  Even in the pale light the gold gleamed like something out of a fairy tale and the gemstones were blazing pools of color. On a school trip to Moscow, she and her fellow classmates had pressed their faces against the display cases in the Kremlin, goggling the Romanov jewels—the gold crowns encrusted with diamonds, the emerald earrings a princess wore shortly before her execution. Sitting on dusty velvet, it all looked so lifeless. What a difference there was between seeing a jewel in a museum cabinet behind a thick pane of glass and holding it in your hand, out in the breathing, sweating, struggling world.

  “Can I put it on?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Come on. For a second.”

  “For a second.”

  Adam pinched her baggy T-shirt and pierced it with the gold pin. As he pushed the stiff pin under the hook, he felt Ulya’s breast against his knuckles. When he sat back, Ulya continued her show, leaning forward and tapping Claudette. “Look! Have you ever seen anyt
hing so magical?”

  Claudette considered the brooch. “The blue stone is very big.”

  Ulya scrambled to come up with her next move. Could she open the door and roll onto the road? She could run into the fields before they had a chance to stop the car. She might be too hurt, though, to run, not to mention the damn baby. Maybe she could ask Ofir to pull over so she could pee and then make a break for it. But how could she evade all three of them? Especially barefoot or in five-inch heels? None of them were in great shape—a lush, a disabled boy, and a freak—but still, the odds were against her. What if she pretended to lose the brooch? That was an idea . . . But how? They were stuck in a car. It was a long shot, but her only option was to make Adam forget about the brooch long enough for her to say goodnight and disappear into her room.

  Adam moved for the brooch. “Okay, time’s up.”

  Ulya cupped her hand over it. “Please, Adam. Let me wear it for five more minutes. It makes me feel like a queen.”

  Adam sighed. He felt too good, too high, to say no. He would take it back in five minutes.

  “Queen Ulya,” she said, slipping her fingers into his thick hair. She scratched the back of his head. With the last vestiges of X, it felt like heaven to him.

  Okay, Ulya thought. The show part was over. Time for stage two. From this point on the most important thing was to keep his attention away from the brooch. The radio clock glowed 3:54 a.m. Based on the drive to the rave, they would be back on the kibbutz in fifteen minutes. She could do this. Seeing how much Adam relished the head scratch—much more than she could have expected—she upped it. She ran her fingers right through his hair, from the base of his skull over his crown and down to his forehead and back again. Adam groaned with pleasure.

  She was still fondling his hair when they drove through the front gate of the kibbutz, but Adam wasn’t enjoying it anymore. The high had worn off, leaving him lower than he’d started. A lot lower. His brain cried out, starving for whatever the X used up, serotonin, dopamine, he didn’t know, but he was lucky he didn’t have another one of those fucking butterfly pills. He would have popped it, done anything, to put off this hell for later.

  Ofir pulled up to the volunteers’ section, and Adam and Ulya climbed out the back. The car drove away with Claudette still in it. Ulya couldn’t believe her luck. Adam seemed to have forgotten about the brooch, and her roommate wouldn’t even be around to see her fleeing with it. She folded her arms over the jewels, a bit too high on her chest to look natural, and walked ahead, taking the steppingstones as fast as she could without drawing attention.

  Adam descended the steps, jerkily. He felt like a broken jug glued back together all wrong, pieces missing. In two hours he had to be in the dishroom, ready to scrub jugs and plates for eight hours. How was he going to do it? He called out to Ulya. “Wait up!”

  Ulya looked over her shoulder, readying to give back the brooch.

  At the bottom of the stones, Adam paused with his hands on his waist to catch his breath. “So depressing.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ulya walked on, heart going wild. She veered toward her building. “Goodnight, Adam,” she called, trying to sound natural. “See you tomorrow.”

  She walked the final stretch toward her door, unzipping her vinyl purse. Oh my God. She had it. She had it! She stuck a trembling key in the lock. As she turned it, she heard: “Ulie.”

  Again she looked over her shoulder, careful not to turn her chest to him. “Yes?”

  He stood at the end of her path, shoulders hunched, looking miserable. “Can I sleep in your room? I don’t mean have sex. I won’t touch you. Just sleep. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  She tried to think fast. What would be the safer move?

  “I don’t know, Adam, we only have two hours before work, and Claudette might—”

  He turned away, head lowered. “Yeah, I figured.”

  She pushed open the door to her room. One hundred thousand dollars—at least. Four hundred thousand shekels. A billion Belarusian rubles! Oh, oh. She could send her mother money, so she could fill her cupboards with tea, buy new boots. All she needed was Adam to not remember the brooch for one more minute. Just one minute. That was all she needed to change her shoes and run.

  She slipped inside her room while Adam walked toward his, past the pomegranate tree.

  Pomegranate.

  He dug his hand into his pocket.

  “Wait!”

  Ulya heard him as she was closing the door. Not knowing what to do, she closed it anyway, and then listened to him marching up her walkway.

  He knocked. “Hey!”

  She stood on the other side of the door, breathing as quietly as she could, struggling to think of what to do next.

  “Hey!” He banged hard. “You still have my brooch!”

  She waited to see if, by some miracle, he would go away, decide to deal with it in the morning, but he struck the door with a flat hand. “Open up! Open up!”

  Of course, he wasn’t going away. She hurriedly unpinned the brooch from her T-shirt and stuffed it down her skirt, into the front of her panties.

  “HEY!” He pounded on the door, likely waking up every volunteer. “Open the fuck up! If you don’t open up right now, I’m going to kick the fucking thing in!”

  Ulya opened the door and feigned irritation. “I was in the bathroom, Adam.” She glanced down at her chest. “Oh . . . Oh, no.”

  “Oh, no, what? Give me the brooch.”

  She raised her head, tried to look as shocked as possible. “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Before she had a chance to nod, Adam shoved the door and came at her so fast she stumbled backward, heels slipping under her.

  “What do you mean gone?!”

  Adam no longer felt tired or depressed. He was pure panic. He clutched Ulya by the arms and drove her back until he had her pinned against the far window, its concrete sill jabbing into her back.

  “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  The violence in Adam’s black eyes startled her. She didn’t think he had violence in him, not after his encounter with Farid. But she had been wrong. She could feel in an animal way that she was in danger, that if he found the brooch on her, he could kill her. She had been scared while stealing before, but not like this.

  “It . . . must have fallen off . . . in Ofir’s car.”

  “Then we’ll have to go get him.”

  “But it’s so . . . late. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Adam squeezed her arms so hard, her hands numbed. She prayed that he didn’t lean against her, didn’t feel the brooch against her pelvic bone.

  Spittle hit her face as he shouted: “It’s not Ofir’s car! The whole kibbutz uses that fucking car. We have to get it NOW!”

  She stammered, “O-o-okay.”

  He let go, allowing her heels to return to the ground and the blood to rush back into her arms. She followed him toward the door. It wasn’t working, pretending the brooch had fallen off. He wasn’t going to let it go until he found it. And she couldn’t keep it on her body any longer. It was too dangerous.

  She trembled as she closed her door, not daring to take the time to lock it. Adam ran for the steppingstones. Dizzy with fear, she thrust her hand down her skirt and hurled the brooch at the grass.

  “Adam!”

  He turned. “What? We have to hurry.”

  “Maybe . . . it fell off after I got out of the car. We should keep an eye on the ground. Look here in the grass first.”

  “Look fast.” He jogged down the stones. “Fast, fast, fast.”

  Adam moved the grass around with his feet while Ulya searched on her hands and knees. She figured it would be better if he found it, but it was getting harder to wait for that with him screaming ever more loudly: “Where the fuck is it? Where is it?”

  “What’s that?” She pointed at gold glinting in the blades behind him.

  He whipped around. “Wh
ere? Where?”

  She crawled over and picked it up, hoping she looked genuinely relieved, happy for him.

  Adam grabbed it, clutched it to his chest. “Oh my God. I would’ve killed myself.”

  Ulya rose from the grass. Without another word, Adam turned for his room, and she watched him walk away with the brooch. She had come so close. For a minute, it had been hers.

  She headed back to her room. She would have to try again, and next time not let the threat of violence deter her. She was running out of time. Adam might get kicked off the kibbutz any minute; and even if he suddenly got his act together, she had another clock to beat. Soon it would be too late to have an abortion. If she wasn’t careful, in a few weeks she would be poor and pregnant and living in an Arab village with dusty Coke bottles and donkeys.

  She closed her door and slipped out of her heels. The floor felt cool against her feet, sore from all that dancing. She climbed onto her bed and, sitting with her back against the wall, lit a cigarette. As she rubbed her feet, like she used to do after a night out in Mazyr, the memory of Adam’s rage started to subside. Instead she pictured the tall, handsome man, the infatuation on his face when he struck a match for her cigarette. God, it was fun. Everyone’s eyes had been on her tonight.

  She blew smoke.

  Could that part of her life really be over?

  For the first time in months, Claudette rolled over to turn off the alarm and found she wasn’t covered in sweat, that her T-shirt wasn’t glued to her clammy chest. The breeze coming through the window was fresh, the sunlight mellow, and the oscillating fan stood still. She was supposed to stay for the summer, and the summer was coming to an end. It was the first week of September. At home she would be pulling on wool stockings. Would they let her remain here through the winter?