Believe

by Sarah Aronson

  And I had been acting just like her.

  I told Lo everything. I told her that Emma was dying and that she ran away from home because she wanted to be left alone to make her own decisions about life and death. “I called Roxanne. I thought I could save her. I told her everything I knew about Emma, so she could find her parents and get Emma help. But now, I’m not so sure I did the right thing—not for her. I think I took everything she wanted away from her. And the worst part is, Emma doesn’t know anything. They could be on their way.”

  Lo grabbed her purse and bolted for the car. “If they get to her first, they’ll treat her against her will. There won’t be anything we can do.”

  All the way there, I called the hotel, but Dave’s line was busy. Lo kept her eyes on the road. “We may be too late.”

  I begged her to drive faster. “I don’t know if I can stop it, but I need to explain.”

  FORTY-ONE

  There were two police cars in front of the Hotel Bethlehem. There was also a news van. Roxanne stood outside the entrance talking into the camera, describing what happened inside, just moments before.

  Already, there were gawkers.

  Click, click, click, click, click.

  “Dave Armstrong, pastor and well-known speaker, has been hiding an underage cancer patient against the instructions of her parents. After receiving an anonymous tip, we called the police and found her here. Her parents have been frantically searching for her for months.”

  I thought I’d said no press. I thought we had a deal.

  As Roxanne continued to tell the story of finding Emma’s parents and telling them she knew where their daughter was, Dave walked out in handcuffs, flanked by police. One of them told him to walk as quickly as he could to the patrol car. The other hid his face with a pillowcase.

  Just behind them, two officers walked with a woman and a man and Emma.

  This wasn’t what I thought it would look like.

  I thought they would embrace her. I thought she would be relieved. The ending was supposed to be a happy one: parents and daughter reunited, daughter healed to live a long life, to tell the world how it was wrong to hide from your family and even more wrong to give up on life.

  I wanted to tell her how important she was to me—how all I wanted to do was heal her—it was the perfect happily ever after.

  But this wasn’t a story. It was my world. The camera was rolling.

  Click, click, click.

  Roxanne, of course, reported my arrival. “Janine,” someone shouted. “What do you know about this girl?”

  I knew I only had a moment. I grabbed Emma and pulled her back into the hotel lobby. Her eyes were cold. She stood on the marble stairs so we could see eye to eye. “Why?”

  “Because it was the only way I could help you. But trust me, I didn’t …”

  “You didn’t what? Think about what would happen to me? Think about what I wanted?”

  I begged her to forgive me. “I did this because you helped me. Because I want you to get better.” I told her that sometimes, the ends justified the means; sometimes someone had to take responsibility and do what needed to be done. Even though this was a big mess—and I knew I should’ve done it differently—running away had been wrong. Giving up had to be wrong. I said, “You need treatment. There isn’t anyone here—including you—who believes you can get better any other way.”

  I gave her the hamsa. “Take this,” I said. “So you know I’ll always be there for you. So that when you’re better …”

  She threw it on the steps, and I heard it crack on the floor. I picked it up. The stone was glass. It now had a thin white line down its center.

  Emma walked away, and I followed her outside. The cameras turned on us—I didn’t care. I tried to shove the hamsa into her hand. “You have to take it. It represents luck. And healing.” I followed her all the way to the street and the car that was waiting for her. “Her name was Karen Friedman. She died after a suicide bomber blew us all up.”

  Emma stood with her parents and stared at the cameras, but she wouldn’t look at me. “Whatever happens next, I didn’t want this. I should have been given a choice. You should have let me make that choice.”

  Then she turned around and sat in the back of her parents’ car.

  Her mother shook my hand. “Thank you.”

  I gave her the hamsa. “Please take it. It’s for protection. I hope it gives Emma the healing hand she wanted.” Emma looked small in the back of the car. She looked scared. I said, “I hope someday she will forgive me. Even if she can’t, I will be glad she’s alive.”

  She shook her head and finally looked at me. “It doesn’t matter what happens next.” Her eyes glared at my hands and made them burn. “You had no right. I will never forgive you.” She slammed her door shut.

  FORTY-TWO

  On the way home, the phone didn’t ring. We didn’t talk. Every time Lo started to say something, I turned and looked out the window.

  I didn’t need a lecture. I knew what I did was wrong. But I couldn’t imagine letting her die.

  When we pulled into the driveway, Sharon stood on the grass. I ran past her, away from Lo, up the stairs to my room. I gathered up all my pictures—the ones of my parents as well as the shots of me, Abe, Miriam, and Dan—and put them in a drawer. Then I folded up my remnants and put them away, too. I shoved Annie into the closet. I covered the sewing machine with an old throw. I picked up the retrospective and ripped it to shreds.

  Slow and heavy steps approached. Sharon said nothing about the mess. “Roxanne called.” Emma was on her way to a hospital in Philadelphia. Her surgery was scheduled for first thing Monday morning. “It was the right thing to do,” she said. “Your heart was in the right place.” Hearing her say it didn’t help.

  I lay on my bed. There were clouds in the sky. One looked like an eagle. I didn’t cry. Instead, I decided to walk to the farm.

  All the equipment was gone. No one stood outside the nursing home. The streets were quiet. Already, I couldn’t remember what it had looked like when there was a farm and a tree and my friends.

  Now the land was clear. The vegetables were all gone. The tree was a stump. It was almost level with the ground.

  I turned around and went home. I wanted to be close to the phone. Emma would be in surgery soon.

  I tried to pray. I thought good thoughts. I almost wrote Emma a letter, but the only thing I could think to say was, “I’m sorry,” and “I hope you get better.”

  I called the hospital, but no surprise, her parents wouldn’t take my call. The nurse explained that it wasn’t personal. Emma’s family had left a message to tell all well-wishers that they would release a statement when the time was right. In the meantime, no visitors. No friends.

  What felt strange (even though I shouldn’t have been surprised): Dave wouldn’t answer my calls either. And Miriam and Abe were totally AWOL. Her mother told me they were taking the week to look at colleges—a last-minute decision—nothing personal. She rambled for a while. She thought I knew.

  On the third day with no news, four boxes from Israel showed up on my doorstep. Three were addressed to me. One was for Lo. I brought them one by one to my room. They were heavy.

  I decided to get it over with.

  In the first box, I found my mom’s jewelry and, wrapped in bubble wrap, a small glazed sculpture of a girl sitting on a stool with her legs crossed. She looked like she was thinking about something important. My mother’s initials were carved into the bottom.

  She also had a pretty impressive button collection. Mostly political things and ribbons for different causes. Some with those empowering sayings people like to post to pump themselves up.

  Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

  The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

  Couldn’t disagree with that one.

  In the second box, I found my dad’s files. Photograph after photograph from his papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania as wel
l as national magazines. Some of them were boring, but some made me pause. Especially the faces.

  There were also pictures of us. One was in a frame decorated by a few remaining stale Cheerios. There were glue marks where some of the Cheerios and decorations had disintegrated or fallen off.

  Pretty soon, my entire floor was covered with ten years of bubble wrap, newspaper, and memories.

  Lo walked up the stairs with some archive boxes and empty scrapbooks. She picked up some of the photos and sat in the window seat to look at them. She didn’t ask about the sewing machine. Or Annie. Or where my fabric was. Later, she didn’t make a single sarcastic comment when, lucky for me, the president made a major announcement about the economy, and Emma’s story was reduced to a few words on the endless news crawl at the bottom of the screen. That happened sometimes. Sometimes your story broke at the right time. Sometimes it happened when there was something actually newsworthy to report. If that happened, it was forgotten.

  At the end of the day, we sat in my room and talked.

  Lo couldn’t believe that my grandparents had collected so many clippings. Every story my mother ever wrote; every picture my father ever took. In the bottom of the second box we found an article about my mother’s assignment and a notice announcing the event at the synagogue. It was circled in red pen. I said, “I wonder if they were planning to go see us?”

  The house was really quiet. I looked up at the skylight. There was nothing to see. No moon. No stars. Just black sky. “Should I have kept my mouth shut? Let Emma die?”

  Lo looked at the clippings all over the floor. We heard the doorbell ring, then the door slam. It was Sharon. “Okay to come up?” she yelled.

  “Okay,” Lo called back. Then she got up from the window and sat on the floor next to me. “I think there will be days when you’ll regret what you did.” (I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about Emma.) “But there will also be days when you can be proud that you did what you thought was right, even though it would have been easier to do nothing.”

  Something good must have happened, because when Sharon walked up the steps, I didn’t recognize her. Usually, her footsteps were tired. Today they were quick.

  She took her seat in the window. Everyone liked the window seat. It was comfortable and cozy at once.

  “We need to talk to you,” Lo said. They had an important announcement to make.

  “Are you moving in?” I guessed.

  They smiled. “Yes. If it’s okay with you.”

  I said, “Of course it is,” and “Oh my God,” and “I’m so happy.” As they hugged each other and me, I wondered if they had to do this, if they felt that they needed each other close to take care of me.

  Then she looked around—at the empty boxes and memorabilia. “You guys have been busy.”

  I said, “We have one box to go. We can do it now. Or later. I’m not in a rush.”

  Lo said, “Let’s do it now.”

  Together, the three of us opened the last box. This one looked like it was meant for Lo. It was filled with old clothes. A bunch of T-shirts with Hebrew lettering. Lo gave the orange one to me. “I think I stole that one out of your mom’s closet.” There were also pictures of both Mom and Lo when they were in the army. In most of the pictures, they stood to attention, but some were more casual. I found one picture of Lo cuddled up with a boy, which sent everyone into fits of giggles. She told Sharon, “That’s Eitan.” I was confused. Lo told me, “I almost married him. In a funny way, he was a lot like Abe. A good friend. But in the end, nothing more.”

  In the press, a week is an eternity. In high school, it’s even longer. When I went back to school, everything seemed different. There were no reporters. Ms. Browning didn’t say anything about my portfolio. No one asked me about Brian. I thought that was a good thing. A step in the right direction.

  At the end of the day, I waited for Miriam at her locker. For her, time had changed nothing. She didn’t want to talk. “You need to leave me alone,” she said. “A lot has happened.” We didn’t need to make a list. We both knew what she was talking about. “Being friends with you—it’s never been easy. You say you don’t want to be famous, but if anyone ever—for one split second—forgets who you are and what you lived through—you make sure they remember.”

  My head spun. That was not what I was expecting. “I’m sorry, Miriam. Please. I’ll change. I’m clueless. I need my tripod. I do want privacy. This is Samantha’s fault. I think she’s the one who leaked those photos of me.”

  She laughed. “It isn’t your tripod. It’s ours. It was ours.” She grabbed her stuff. “And don’t blame Samantha. She is a good friend. You should have given her a chance. I know for a fact she had nothing to do with those photos for the retrospective.”

  That got me. “How do you know?”

  She dropped her arms and looked me straight in the eye, so I knew she was serious. “Because I was the one who gave them the pictures.”

  I shook my head. “No you didn’t.”

  She said, “A few weeks ago, that reporter showed up at my house, and she showed me what she was going to print about you. She said you were wasting your life; you were a disappointment to the world. She said that after being saved from the rubble, you owed it to the people who died to be a better person.”

  “It was a ploy,” I said. “To get you to talk.”

  “And what if it was? If she was going to write an article about you, I wanted it to really be about you—the real you. The way she talked about you—she didn’t know you.” She looked tired—like she was explaining something easy to a child. “Maybe she was religious. Maybe she admired your parents. In any case, I gave her the pictures. I told her who you really were. A great friend. I told her that you were totally there for me and Abe.” She paused, took a deep breath. “I wanted to tell the world that you were more than a survivor and that someday, the world would hear more from you—when you were ready. I wanted everyone to know that we don’t care whether you’re famous or not. You lost your parents. You were injured. I wanted that woman to understand that you didn’t deserve what she was saying.”

  “You know me.”

  She slammed her locker shut. “I wanted everyone to know you. That’s why I did what I did. But since, then, I’ve been thinking. I think I said all that, even though the truth was, you have never been that great a friend. What I said was as unreal as what she was going to write. I described the friend I want you to be.”

  I said, “I can be her.”

  Miriam turned to go. “I hope so.”

  FORTY-THREE

  When I got home, I called the hospital for what felt like the fiftieth time—still, they wouldn’t tell me. I called Dave—but he still wasn’t picking up my calls either. CNN said he’d been released on his own recognizance.

  So I called Roxanne. No matter what I did, she’d always pick up the phone. “Is she recovering?” I asked.

  Roxanne sounded tired. Morose. I could hear a lot of noise in the background. People talking. Phones ringing. She told me she was putting me on hold so she could find a quiet place to talk to me.

  Sappy music played. Then a voice: “Next week, be sure to watch Roxanne Wheeler as she tackles …”

  “Janine. I’m sorry.” Now I could hear her better. She still sounded upset.

  “It’s okay. I can stand being on hold.”

  That made her sigh. “No. It’s not that. I thought you knew. I assumed Armstrong had called you.”

  “Knew what?”

  Roxanne told me to sit down. I said, “She had the bone marrow transplant. Right? She should be in recovery. She should be getting stronger.”

  “That’s not exactly true.”

  Bone marrow transplants were complicated things. Emma had been steadily improving until she contracted an infection. It was pretty common, but in this case, not good. Emma wasn’t strong. She got weaker and weaker, so that the doctors had no choice. They induced a coma. Roxanne made sure to tell me that Emma’s parents
didn’t blame me. She said, “There’s no way to predict things like this.”

  I was confused. “What do you mean, I’m not to blame?”

  Roxanne said, “If she dies.” There was silence for a long time. “They are going to remove life support. She is very weak.”

  I asked, “Can I see her?”

  Roxanne didn’t think that was a good idea. “There is nothing more you can do. You don’t need to come in. And forget about that exclusive—it won’t be necessary after all.” And then she hung up.

  It might not be “necessary” for her, but right now, it absolutely was for me. I asked Lo, “Can you give me a lift to the bus?”

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  When I told her, she wasn’t happy. But she wouldn’t stand in my way either. “Get in the car. I’ll give you a ride.”

  I had something to say.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Roxanne Wheeler had one excellent poker face. When I walked into her office, she looked like she wasn’t expecting me. Like she didn’t know her little game of chicken would work like a charm, like she didn’t think I was capable of getting myself down the Blue Route to Philadelphia.

  “You’re just like your dad.”

  “You knew my dad?” I wondered what she knew—what I could have known all these years.

  She must have realized what this sounded like, because her voice got softer and kinder. “Right after I graduated, I interned for his magazine. When he walked into the room … everyone stopped and paid attention.” She patted my shoulder. “He was bigger than life. A great, great man. His death was such a tragedy.”

  I asked her to tell me more about him—if he was a good boss or a hard ass, but her internship was short and that’s all she had to say. She asked, “So what do you want? I told you …”

  I told her not to bother pretending she didn’t want me to show up. “I know what you said, but I need to make a statement.” She didn’t blink. I straightened out my shirt and skirt. “Are you game?”