“I don’t think I can look one more person in the eye and tell them I’m okay,” Emaline told Lydie as they sat in the kitchen with their beads. “Why does everyone keep asking me how I am? I’m horrid, that’s how I am. Can’t people see that their smiles and their greeting-card wishes only make it worse? Can’t they give me a little privacy instead of casseroles?”
One of the earliest callers this morning had been Mrs. Lingstrom. She brought a jar of peaches she’d put up over the summer. Emaline thought George’s mother looked a little ill or might even have been crying. She didn’t mention it, though—she didn’t want to get into a conversation. She was just relieved that George wasn’t with her. She couldn’t face him, not right now.
When the knock came shortly after noon, Emaline ignored it, hoping whoever it was would just leave their package on the steps and go. But a minute later, the knock sounded again. Reluctantly, Emaline got up and peeked through the lace curtains in the living room. “It’s the Thompson twins,” she whispered to herself. Vanessa Lee and Virginia Lou, from her class at school. Vanessa held a picnic basket on one arm, and both girls were smiling. Apparently, they didn’t know that everything worth smiling about was gone.
Emaline didn’t go to the door. Instead, she went back and sat with Lydie in the kitchen, resuming her beading despite the repeated knocking. “Pay no attention,” she told her cousin. But the knocking only got louder.
“Let me get rid of them,” Lydie said. She went to the door, bracing herself for the hard slap of the Thompson twins’ cheerfulness.
“Hi, ladies,” Lydie said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to answer. We were—”
“That’s all right,” Vanessa said brightly. “We’ve got something for Emaline.” From the size of their basket, it was probably a complete supper. More food that would go uneaten.
“I’ll take it to her,” Lydie said.
“Oh, but we were really hoping to see her,” said Virginia. “Just for a minute?”
“Good morning, Vanessa, Virginia,” Emaline said, walking from the kitchen doorway to her cousin’s side.
“Emaline,” they cooed. One of them said, “You’re all we’ve been thinking about. The only thing.”
Emaline raised her arms to receive the basket, but instead of handing it to her, the twins stepped apart.
Behind them stood Daisy.
DAISY!
Daisy was back! Mud plastered her legs and arms, and a red trickle marred her chin, but she was alive and safe and very much home.
While Lydie shrieked, Emaline could only stare. Her eyes grew glassy and large, and her mouth trembled as her hands flew straight out to her sister. “Daisy!” she cried, crossing the threshold. She scooped her sister up and carried her inside, burying her face in the little girl’s hair.
Daisy’s golden eyes got wet, and she started to sob. Her knees, skinned and as filthy as if she’d spent the last twenty-four hours crawling on the ground, dug into Emaline’s sides. The girls squeezed each other tightly, then tighter still, until Daisy gasped for breath.
“Thank God,” Emaline sighed, rocking and twirling and looking like she was winding up to go airborne.
“Em,” Daisy said through her tears. Her tangled hair smelled of grass. “Em, I got lost.”
“I know,” Emaline said, although that wasn’t exactly true. She hadn’t known whether Daisy was lost or stolen or dead.
When Emaline picked a few pieces of dried leaves from her sister’s hair, Daisy winced, “Ouch!” and rubbed the back of her head.
Emaline felt Daisy’s head. “Hey, you’ve got an egg here. What happened?”
“Dunno. I—don’t remember.”
“You’re bleeding too,” Emaline said, pointing to her chin, but when she wiped the red liquid, she found it was sticky and smelled sweet. “Cherry or strawberry?”
“Strawberry—licorice, from my friends,” she said, craning around to see the twins.
“How’d you know I was lost?”
“Everyone knew, silly,” Virginia said. “Everyone’s been troubled sick over you.”
Daisy frowned. “Is Mommy mad?”
“Of course not,” Emaline assured her. “She’s going to be very, very happy. I promise.”
“I wanna see Mommy,” she said, and then she started to cry again.
“I’ll take you right upstairs to her. But Vanessa, Virginia, how—where—did you ever find her?”
“To tell the truth,” Vanessa said, “we weren’t actually looking for her. She found us. We were going to have a picnic over to the point after church.” She raised her basket as evidence. “We’d just biked to the edge of the woods and were spreading out our meal, and there she was, right at our blanket. A little ragged and plenty hungry, but walking on two feet. All the way out to the point—imagine! She’s got a couple pieces of my pie in her now.”
Emaline tried to grasp Vanessa’s words, but they were too crazy and mixed-up. “Daisy, Daisy,” she asked, “what happened in those woods?”
Daisy shrugged. “I got lost. I couldn’t get out. It was dark, and I couldn’t get out.” She shuddered and laid her head heavily on her sister’s shoulder.
Lydie asked, “Didn’t you hear the people out there hunting for you?”
“I hid,” she said, “ ’cause Mommy told me about strangers. I hid good. They went away. But then it was too dark. I had to wait till daytime to come out, and then I saw Virginia and Vanessa—and lots and lots of food.”
“Were you scared?” Emaline asked.
“A little.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“I didn’t have any dreams.”
“Were you so cold in that bit of a coat?”
“A little.”
Emaline ran her hand down the front of Daisy’s coat. She could feel her ribs and her hard little belly through the fabric. At the pocket, something soft bulged out. She reached in and extracted, of all things, Daisy’s underpants wadded into a ball. “Hey,” Emaline said, “why aren’t you wearing your panties?”
Daisy blushed. “I climbed over a fence with pointy things,” she said, holding the panties up so Lydie and the twins could see the rip. “I’m thirsty.”
“You come with me then,” Emaline said. “We’ll go see Ma and then you can have whatever you like all day long. But first, I think you owe our friends here a big thank you.”
Daisy looked hard into Vanessa’s face. She studied Virginia’s poodle curls and faux pearl earrings. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but only yawned. Then she tightened her legs around Emaline, reached forward, and shut the door in the twins’ face.
“Daisy,” Emaline said, reaching for the door, “that’s not nice.”
“No!” Daisy pushed her sister’s hand away from the knob and held the door closed until she heard the twins’ footsteps going down the porch stairs. Then, when she was satisfied that the door wasn’t going to fly back open, she relaxed. “I want Mommy.”
Emaline carried her mud-crusted, tear-stained, candy-drizzled prize upstairs, with Lydie following. Daisy pushed open the bedroom door with one foot and then climbed down from her sister’s arms and tiptoed over to the bed. Her mother was sleeping heavily, her pillow half off the bed and her rosary at her side.
“Mommy!” Daisy shouted. “Mommy, I’m home!”
Emaline had to go over and give her mother’s shoulder a little shake. First one eye opened—slowly and with effort—and then the other. Mrs. Durham was still trying to focus her vision when Daisy jumped on her. “Mommy! Mommy!”
“Daisy?” she said quietly, very quietly, afraid of waking herself if this was only a wonderful dream. “Daisy! My darling!” She grabbed hold of Daisy and sobbed so hard the bed shook.
Emaline sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing the back of the little girl with the torn stockings and matted hair.
“I’ll call Mother,” Lydie said after a while. “Get her to tell the radio station and the police.” But they didn’t hear her.
When Lydie checked on them just before heading home, Daisy was nestled against her mother like an extra layer of skin, and Emaline had one arm tucked around her sister’s waist. The three of them mirrored each other’s deep-sleep breathing and held each other like they’d never let go.
It didn’t take long for the good news to spread. At the Sit Down, Tiny the cook had just snapped on the radio when Daisy’s return was first announced. He shouted through the pass-through for everyone to hear, “The girl’s been found!”
His announcement was met with a dumbstruck hush.
“Dead or alive?” Gus called back to him.
“Safe and sound,” he said, and then a sigh swept the diner.
Jed Pike, sitting with his wife at the far end of the counter, was the first to break the glad chatter that followed. “I’m not resting so easy,” he said, biting into an apricot Danish. “No way.”
The weight of his voice sucked the bliss right out of the room.
“Whaddya mean, Jed?” Gus pointed his cigar at him. “There still trouble?” He hardly cared about the answer, though. He’d gotten his liquor supply without a hitch, and that’s all that really mattered. The liquor supply that was going to buy him a fishing boat or a Buick or maybe that trip to Lake Placid he’d always wanted to take.
“I still say those Jews had her,” Jed said. “I bet they just let her go ’cause they knew they were about to get pinched. That’s what I think, and you’d all be fools to think otherwise.”
Before anyone could respond, the sleigh bells jangled, and Frenchie LaRoux walked in. “Morning, folks,” he said, “or I guess it’s afternoon. You hear the news?”
“Just,” Gus said, pouring Buzzy Degon a refill on his coffee.
Frenchie took the last empty stool at the counter. “Didja hear the girl’s panties were missing when they found her?”
Silence. Groans. More silence.
“Those pigs,” Eaton Lorado spat. “Those dirty pigs. You know, they’re gonna be hiding in that church of theirs all night tonight, thinking it’s gonna blow over. Well, it’s not, and they’d better pray for forgiveness while they’re in there.”
“Amen,” said Jed, and he took another bite of his Danish.
Jack’s necktie was too tight, so he kept tugging at it as he walked between Harry and his father, with Martha and his mother a few steps ahead. They were on their way to Kol Nidre, the evening Yom Kippur prayers. They moved fast and kept glancing behind them, even though the dirt roads were empty.
This was the first time they’d been out on the street since last night. They’d spent the whole day waiting—waiting for the trooper to call the rabbi or stop by their houses and say it was a terrible mistake, waiting for Fred Dimock, editor of the Massena Observer, to ask them for a statement. They waited the whole afternoon, during their pre-fast meals, and into the evening, but there was nothing, and it made them wonder whether things really were all over.
Mrs. Pool held Martha tightly with one hand and checked her jewelry with the other. She’d never worn both her diamond brooch and her pearl necklace at the same time before, but Mr. Pool said he was worried about leaving the jewelry in an empty house tonight—an empty house with a piece of cardboard where the living room window belonged. As for Jack, he’d tucked his cello under his bedcovers, and now he wondered if he’d picked too obvious a hiding spot.
“Don’t pull away from me, Martha,” Mrs. Pool scolded.
“You’re pinching my hand,” Martha complained.
“I wouldn’t have to pinch if you didn’t pull.”
Crossing Main Street, Jack looked over at the diner. Yellow light spilled out of the windows, and he could see the blue outlines of the customers inside. It was just another night to them, he supposed. They were eating their smoky meats and buttery potatoes and treating each other as if they were human beings. Maybe the trooper was in there too, yucking it up with the crowd. Maybe they were all having a good old time chatting about the look on Jack’s face last night, about hurling eggs and rocks, about headless chickens. Or maybe they were having a serious talk in there, planning the next thing they would do to uncover the ‘truth.’ Jack kept walking.
At the synagogue, Rabbi Abrams was standing on the front steps, greeting each family as they arrived. “Jack,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m looking forward to hearing you blow the shofar tomorrow for us.”
Jack took the rabbi’s hand and tried to plumb his thoughts. Does he know I was here last night? Jack couldn’t tell. The rabbi was either totally poker-faced or genuinely clueless.
Everyone came—the entire congregation—except for Simon Slavin, who was still in Albany trying to get his store door repaired long-distance, and the Popkins, who were with family in Watertown, and Sarah Gelman’s mother, who was too sick.
“You showed,” Jack’s friend Abe Goldberg mouthed, taking a seat directly behind him. Jack nodded.
Old Max Clopman, holding his cane more tightly than usual, arrived with Benny Kaplan and took his regular place in the front row. Sarah Gelman entered soon after, wearing a beaded navy dress, her face half-hidden behind her dark curls. He nodded to her, but she didn’t see.
The chanting began. Jack listened for a while to Rabbi Abram’s rich voice intoning the ancient lyrics. Then he let his attention stray around the sanctuary. Everything was the same as ever: the women in grey or brown dresses, praying or quieting their daughters or whispering to each other. The men in their best suits doing the same alongside their sons. The same prayers in the same order with the same melodies.
He wanted it to be different.
How can anything stay the same when everything—the world, me, maybe even God – has changed? Jack wanted to make the Hebrew words and the music echo his bitterness. He wanted everyone to wear angry red or grieving black. He wanted lightning to sizzle through the windows and thunder to rattle the benches. He wanted some sign that the others felt the way he did, that they weren’t just trying to forget what happened, that he wasn’t alone.
He didn’t get what he was looking for. When services ended, he walked home silently along the unlit streets and closed himself in his room. His cello was still there. He put it back on its stand and stretched out on the bottom bunk. A few threads hung from Harry’s bunk above, and he swatted them absently.
“Why won’t You do something?” he demanded out loud.
He listened for a long time for a reply. Then he fell asleep, still in his suit and tie, on top of the bedcovers.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1928
Jack was the first one up the next morning. In the bathroom, he splashed cool water on his face and combed his hair. Thirst had set in, and hunger would soon follow. He watched the water rush teasingly down the sink before turning off the faucet. Then he plodded down the stairs and lay on the living room sofa, where the brisk air seeped easily around the makeshift cardboard window. Even with his legs curled and his arms hugging his chest, he felt cold—not from the wind that grazed his face, but from somewhere deep inside.
With the sun still low in the east, everyone gathered again at temple. During the Yizkor memorial prayers, Jack stood on the outside steps and leaned against the wrought-iron railing. Martha skipped around the sidewalk with a pack of other kids, while Harry gathered with a few boys to talk. The handful of adults lucky enough to be outside kept track of the small ones, although they also seemed to be watching Jack.
Sarah Gelman sat on the small stoop and leaned against the building with her eyes closed. This would surely be the last Yizkor she’d spend outside; her mother, devastated by a stroke, hadn’t been expected to last even this long. God was sealing the Book of Life today, and Mrs. Gelman was not going to be in it. This time next year, Sarah would be inside the synagogue, reciting the Yizkor prayer in memory of her mother.
Jack walked over to her. “Hi, Sarah.”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Jack,” she said, her lips parting into a smile. “How are you doing?”
He shrugged. “You?”
“Gus fired me today.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose.
“Well, he didn’t actually tell me I was fired. He called this morning to say there was a change in the schedule, that he needed me to work today.”
“On Yom Kippur?”
“And if I refused, I shouldn’t bother coming in for my regular shift tomorrow.”
Jack thought of Sarah, of how she looked the last time he saw her at the diner, running around in her hairnet and apron, her thin arms laboring under the heavy platters of food. He thought of how Gus had eyed her that day through the smog of his cigar—not looking at her face, but looking her up and down.
“You’re better off away from that place,” Jack said.
“I need the money, though.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m really…”
“No, Jack, I didn’t mean to blame—”
“All right,” called Mendy Segal, throwing open the temple doors. “You can come back in now.” Suddenly, Martha was at Jack’s side, and Sarah was walking ahead with little Ruthie Black.
Jack kept his eye on Sarah. He’d never noticed how pretty she was, with her heart-shaped mouth, her vibrant green eyes, and milky swan’s neck. Jack wondered why he hadn’t ever noticed her this way before.
Because of Emaline, that’s why.
The remaining hours of prayer and fasting passed slowly. People wandered in and out of the sanctuary. Mothers took home the children who were too young to fast, returning with them after lunch. People whispered with bent heads. Jack thought about water and food and whether his cello was safe. He wondered whether Emaline or Mrs. Durham would phone—or if they’d already tried while the Pools were at shul. Finally, in the late afternoon, Rabbi Abrams announced his sermon, which meant that services were nearly over.
“I want to share a story with you,” the rabbi began.
Jack settled back on the bench. He considered the rabbi’s talks—filled with colorful tales, both true and imagined—to be the entertainment portion of the services.
The Blood Lie Page 9