by Julia Dahl
She picks up my plastic bottle of anti-anxiety pills and shakes it, smiling.
“I know this,” she says. “This is for when you get too upset. Too …” She waves her hands around. “I have lots of this. I have other pills, too. All kinds. Blue and pink and white and yellow. Big ones and little ones and sometimes I take them when I’m not supposed to. Do you ever do that?” She is talking very fast. “Sometimes I take too many. Rivka always counts my pills. ‘Miriam, Miriam.’ She likes to say my name because it makes her prettier. We are not sisters, you know. I was the one who asked Tatti to take her in, when her mommy died and her crazy father was crazy. Then we were like sisters. We did things girls do. Silly things. What did we know? She did not really know me, Rivka.” She giggles. “You are Rivka.”
Miriam bows her head forward and pulls off her wig. What is underneath looks much like what was above, but messier, frizzier, streaked with gray. She puts the wig on the ground and fluffs up her hair.
“Itchy,” she says.
She is still holding the pill bottle. She is also holding a pair of scissors.
I try to say “Miriam,” but the sound that comes out is just a grunt. A quiet grunt. The sidewalk isn’t fifteen feet from the wall of the garage, but grunts at that pitch aren’t going to bring anybody running.
Miriam twists open the cap of the pill bottle and shakes the ten or twelve pills that are left into her palm.
“I can take some?” she asks. But she’s not really asking. She smiles and then nods, and says, “Yes. I feel very anxious. Do you know that word? That is the word they call it. My mind is spinning. I should take some.”
Miriam takes an empty plastic bottle from the recycle bin and goes to the far corner to fill it at the slop sink. I need to get the scissors away from her. Without those scissors I can survive. The weak spot is my feet. They’re tied, but not as well as my hands. She used electrical cord. If I can slip one leg out, I can probably use my foot to push the cord off the other leg, and then I have motion.
“Rivka was very devout when we were girls,” says Miriam once she’s filled the bottle. “We used to talk about our wedding day. And our husbands. We hoped we would marry a man who studied Torah all day. A man who devoted his life to Hashem.”
She rolls her eyes and then tosses my pills—all of them—into her mouth and takes a long drink of water. Ten of those pills probably won’t kill her, but if I can keep things calm for twenty minutes, they might knock her out. After she swallows the pills, she stands up and starts walking toward me.
“And we would show him our devoutness by shaving our heads. We practiced putting on my mother’s snood, and her wigs. Rivka’s mother did not wear a wig and Rivka wanted to wear one, like my mother.” She is standing behind me now, her hand stroking my hair.
“But Rivka was a liar. She was not devout at all. She was too vain to shave after her wedding.”
Miriam gathers my hair into her hand and pulls my head back. Her face is inches from mine. I can communicate only with my eyes and I know that all they show is fear.
“Rivka was afraid, too,” she says, looking down at me. She pulls tight and then she starts to cut. I can hear my hair rip, and I can feel the way the blade tears through it, nicking the base of my scalp. Rivka Mendelssohn was bald when she died. Freshly shorn. Getting all that hair off with scissors would have taken a long time. I wonder if she died in this garage. I wonder if, someday, Miriam will look back and it will seem like one time in her mind.
“After Shoshanna died, Rivka became like everyone else. They think I don’t notice. They think that they can send me away and that I will return and I will forget. They think I can’t see what they think of me. But I can always see. I can see inside them all. Rivka said that she forgave me. She said that she knew it must have been an accident. That she shouldn’t have burdened me with her child’s care. She said she should have been more sensitive about how I might feel about all her children. Because she was blessed with so many, and poor Miriam couldn’t even get Hashem to give her one. But she did not understand. She did not deserve her children. When I saw what she was doing—the shame she was bringing to my family, to my brother—I could not bear the whispers anymore. Everywhere I went, they were looking at me. Talking about the zona in the Mendelssohn home. As if it was my fault. I must have infected her. But I was never unfaithful. I am not as pretty as Rivka but I had my chances. And then I saw that Heshy had fallen under her spell. How could I be expected to bear that? In the same house?”
My phone rings, and Miriam stops talking. It rings again.
“Who is that?” she demands. She runs to where she’s dumped my purse out and picks up my phone. She does not answer, just stares at it as it rings. “Who is this? It is a blocked number.” It is also, I decide, my chance. I tighten my stomach muscles and throw my weight backward. My head hits the floor and I twist sideways. I’m still tied to the chair but I try to whip around. If I’m a moving target, it’s harder for Miriam to just pull her arm back and stab the shit out of me. I am not going to die in this fucking garage. Miriam hurls my phone at my head, but misses. I tense my stomach again and swing my hips forward. My thighs collide with her calves, knocking her off her feet. We’re both on the ground now. I turn my head and she’s right there, her pale, ugly face, her yellow fingernails. I’ve startled her. She looks down at her hand, and then presses it to a spot on her lip that’s broken and bleeding. The scissors are on the floor just above both of our heads.
I toss my weight counterclockwise, knocking my knees into her head. She grunts and curls forward into a ball while I push backward, scooting toward the scissors to try to kick them away and put the chairback between myself and Miriam. Did I tell anyone I was coming here? I forgot to call photo. Larry knows. But he’s not going to worry soon enough. I focus my mind on my right foot. If I point my toes inside my boot and pull up with my ankle, I can wiggle some room in the loop holding my foot to the chair leg. I point and point and it feels like the muscle holding my foot onto my leg might snap. I point and push, hearing Miriam next to me crawling toward the scissors. And then finally I feel a give. I kick at what I now see is a simple double knot around my left ankle. Four, five, six kicks and then there’s enough space to push the loop to the end of the chair and off. Miriam stands up. She holds the scissors in front of her, pointing at me.
My legs are free, but I’m still tethered to the chair so I can’t actually stand. I scoot backward along the floor. Miriam is gripping the scissors with both hands, pointing them at me like she’s protecting herself.
My phone rings again; again, Miriam is startled.
“Who is that!” she screams, and begins backing into the opposite corner, toward the sink.
“Don’t come any closer,” she says.
And then I hear it: footsteps. Boots.
“Miriam!” calls a male voice.
“Get away!” screams Miriam.
“We’re coming in!” shouts the man. A kick, and the door swings open.
It’s Aron Mendelssohn. Behind him is Detective Darin Spinelli, holding a gun.
“Drop the weapon!” Darin shouts at Miriam.
But if Miriam hears him, she doesn’t act like it. She wipes her eyes with her bloody hand and charges forward with the scissors in front of her. She takes less than three steps before Darin blasts her. One, two shots to the chest and she falls like a bag of bricks.
Aron Mendelssohn runs to me and kneels down, frantically untying my hands. “Are you all right?” he asks, grabbing my arms, turning me, examining me, and then suddenly, pulling me to him. Holding me, and murmuring, “Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Miriam does not get taken away by the Chesed Shel Emes. Aron Mendelssohn objects, but he is handcuffed on his own sofa and he doesn’t seem to have much energy. The police, not the Shomrim, take custody of the body of the second woman to die at the Mendelssohn house in a week.
Darin gets his gun taken away, and I am wrapped
in a blanket and put in an ambulance. I have lacerations, a concussion, and possibly a broken bone and some torn ligaments in my right foot. My hair is mostly gone.
Tony and Iris are at the hospital within hours. My dad and Maria get on an airplane.
It is dark outside when Captain Weber and another detective come to question me. They say that the police found Rivka Mendelssohn’s blood and hair in the garage. They say they want to exhume her body, but Aron Mendelssohn, who is in custody, is refusing to give his permission.
“We’ll get around him,” says Weber. “It’ll just take a few days.”
“Why is he in custody?” I ask.
“For now, we’ve booked him on illegal disposal of a body,” says the detective. “We have surveillance video of his car going into the scrap yard the night Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was dumped.”
“What is he saying?”
“He’s not saying anything. He lawyered up. But he’s got a lot of explaining to do before he sees sky.”
“I don’t think he killed her,” I say.
“We’ll be the judge of that,” says Weber. At least he’s dropped the diminutives.
“How did you know I was in there?” I ask.
“The little boy noticed the aunt was missing.”
“Yakov?” I cringe thinking of what that little boy knows. What’s he’s seen in just the past year.
Captain Weber nods. “He told his father and the father called Shomrim. It was just luck that Detective Spinelli was at their mission control interviewing the leader when the call came in.”
I sleep through most of the first twenty-four hours. My head feels huge and delicate, and my dreams are throbbing cascades of faces and hard surfaces and fear: Aviva holding a knife; Miriam trying to dial out from my phone; Rivka Mendelssohn rubbing her pregnant belly.
Iris brings a purple scarf and ties it over my head. She holds up a mirror for me to see, and the reflection is unfamiliar. The white of my left eye is blood red. Black stitches hold my bottom lip together. I am lopsided and swollen everywhere else. I feel weak in my unattractiveness.
Tony does a lot of pacing. Maria spends hours on her phone just outside my room, arguing with their insurance company, which may or may not cover me in New York State. Larry shows up with the paper. There is a short item about a police-involved shooting in Borough Park. My name isn’t mentioned. He tells me they’re going forward with the story about the murdered baby and the cover-up. I’ll have a byline, he says, but Albert Morgan doesn’t want to wait.
“He’s thinks Pete Calloway could scoop us,” he says. “We’re calling it the “‘Hasidic House of Horrors.’”
I close my eyes. All I want to know about the Trib is whether they’re going to help with my hospital bills. Larry says he’ll ask.
When Iris leaves for her office, my dad takes her place by my side, sitting forward, hands ready to hold. The second evening, as the sky goes purple in the window behind him, I catch him murmuring to himself.
“Dad?” I say. “Are you okay?”
He smiles weakly, and puts his hand on mine. My dad is a young man compared to the fathers of most of my friends; he was still in his thirties when I started college. He wears his sand-colored hair a little bit long; it curls around his ears and falls over his forehead. He was just a boy when he became a dad.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” he asks.
“I think I’m okay, Dad,” I say. I’m glad you’re here, I think. I’m glad you’re mine.
“What were you doing?” he whispers. “Why were you all alone?”
I close my eyes. “I made a mistake, Dad. I didn’t see what was happening. I just …” I just wanted the story. I wanted to know. But I don’t say that; he won’t understand.
“I feel like this is my fault,” he says. “All the questions you have, about your mother. And I could never really answer them, could I?”
“I don’t even know if there are answers, Dad,” I say. But even as I say it, I know that I don’t believe it. If I believe in anything, I believe that there are always answers. You just have to ask the right question of the right person at the right time. And my dad, loving and incurious and satisfied in his life with Maria and his children and his church, was never the right person. But the Orthodox women who knew Rivka Mendelssohn, they are. All week, I’ve looked at each of them and asked myself: Is this Aviva? Is she frumpy and kindhearted like Sara Wyman? Guiding others on the path out of the community that suffocates them. Is she timid and unhappy, like Chaya? Married now, bearing babies—grandbabies, even. Accomplished and content like Malka? I want her to be like Rivka: responsible, admired, agonizing over how to balance her long-held beliefs with newfound ideas and emotions. But I don’t think she was. Or is. I think that if she’s like any of them, she might be like Miriam. Beset by an inconvenient, undesirable illness. And in way over her head. I want to tell my father about all these women. About all the things I’ve learned about them. About the new perspective I have. But the stories seem too long to tell now, and so I say this: “I think maybe I forgive her, Dad.”
He looks at me with soggy, hopeful eyes. “Oh, Rebekah,” he says, reaching for me, clumsily wrapping his arms around my bed-bound body. “I’m so glad.” And then we both start to cry. I’m not sure what he’s crying about, or whom he’s crying for—his injured only daughter, or the woman who left us both behind—but me, I’m crying because I’ve finally seen a little bit of the world as Aviva saw it, and it nearly killed me.
I stay in the hospital a few more days while they monitor me for a possible blood clot. When I leave, Dad and Maria and Iris and I all pile into a livery car and go back to Gowanus. After they get me in bed and my dad and Maria go back to their hotel, I tell Iris to bring in the newspaper. I avoided the article I knew they’d published while I was in the hospital because I knew it would stress me out, but I told Iris to get a copy so I could read it when I got home.
The story about the cover-up is teased on the front page (“Hasidic House of Horrors” in white letters on a red banner) and gets three-quarters of page seven:
INSIDE THE “HASIDIC HOUSE OF HORRORS”:
NYPD TURNED A BLIND EYE AS JEWISH “COPS”
COVERED UP MURDER
By Rebekah Roberts and Larry Dunn
Who you gonna call? Not the NYPD.
A private security force made of members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community tried to keep the murder of both the infant daughter and the wife of the group’s primary benefactor under wraps—with the help of New York’s Finest.
The Tribune has learned that instead of calling 911, relatives of eight-month-old Shoshanna Mendelssohn turned to a group known as Shomrim, which means “guards” in Hebrew, to whisk the child’s body away to a Jewish funeral home and avoid an official police inquiry last year.
The child’s father, Aron Mendelssohn, 49, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Borough Park Shomrim. Mendelssohn’s wife, Rivka, was found dead in the family’s scrap yard along the Gowanus canal last week.
The NYPD allowed a group affiliated with Shomrim to take Rivka Mendelssohn’s body from the scene without examining it for evidence.
“It’s time for the secrets to stop,” says Malka Grossman of Mandel Memorial Funeral Home in Borough Park.
Grossman prepared both Shoshanna and Rivka Mendelssohn’s bodies for burial. In the Jewish tradition, bodies must be cleansed by a member of the same sex.
According to Grossman’s notes, obtained exclusively by the Tribune, both Shoshanna and Rivka Mendelssohn sustained blunt force trauma to the head.
Grossman says she handed her notes to Shomrim with the belief that they would be turned over to police.
But the NYPD says they never saw her notes.
“For years, top brass have let the Orthodox police themselves,” says a department official. “It’s all political. They vote in a bloc. They contribute to campaigns. They want to be left alone.”
The Borough Park Shomrim decli
ned to speak with the Tribune.
Last year, the group received more than $25,000 in funding from the City Council.
Aron Mendelssohn has been charged with improper disposal of a body. Mendelssohn’s sister, Miriam Basya, 30, was shot by police on Tuesday after threatening an officer with a pair of scissors. Police tell the Tribune that they believe it was Basya who murdered both Shoshanna and Rivka Mendelssohn.
“There is violence in the Orthodox community, just like any community,” says Sara Wyman, founder of a Manhattan-based support group for the ex-Orthodox.
“Many would rather keep this unpleasant side from the outside world.”
Police Commissioner Donald Evans told the Tribune that, in light of the Mendelssohn case, the department planned to “clarify” the relationship between the NYPD and Shomrim.
“It’s a good story,” says Iris.
“Not exactly thorough,” I say. I’d like to write some follow-ups. Look into the “hospital” where Miriam was sent. Interview Baruch. Maybe profile Dev and Suri, and Sara Wyman. But not now.
I go to bed early, and the next morning when Iris goes to work, Tony comes over with coffee and bagels.
“How’s Darin?” I ask. “Have you seen him?”
Tony nods. “He’s okay. He’s on desk duty, but he says that’s normal after a shooting.”
“Had he ever shot anyone before?”
Tony shakes his head. I take his hand and squeeze it.
“I know you were looking out for me when you told him about Saul,” I say. “I’m sorry I got so angry.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I’m glad I did it, considering. But I’m sorry. I broke your trust.”
I smile. “Your big mouth probably saved my life.”
“Listen,” he says, “I wanted to explain about my mom.”
I almost object, but I’d like to get to know him better, and what’s going on with his mom is clearly a major part of his life.
“She isn’t always like that. She has Alzheimer’s.”