Run You Down (14 page)

I shrug. “I’m used to it. NYPD almost never even calls back, so even an official ‘no comment’ is better than I usually get.”

“You from the city?”

“No. I’m from Florida.”

“Oh wow, that’s a big change.”

“The cold is killing me. Seriously.”

I expect our banter to continue, but Officer Keller is suddenly still in front of his computer, mouth open. After a moment, he clears his throat and closes the page he was looking at.

“Do you, um, have a card?” he asks, standing up. “I should probably go ahead and let the chief … State Police should get back to me. I’ll … I can give them your contact info.”

“Okay,” I say, scribbling my name and e-mail and cell number on a piece of my notebook paper. “Were you able to run that plate?”

“Um, no. I think it’s a different database.”

Everything about our interaction has changed. Whatever came up on the plate search spooked him, and now he wants me out of his office.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AVIVA

I landed at JFK Airport late at night. It had been twelve hours in the air and several sleepless nights preparing to leave Jerusalem. Etan wanted children; that was expected after we married. I was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine. He taught history at a yeshiva to boys who were just before bar mitzvah; they were still children in many ways, but Etan said that their minds were ready to take on serious ideas about the world. Etan had a lot of serious ideas about the world. Two months after we married we put on our gas masks and went to the roof to watch the missiles Saddam Hussein sent over. I did not love him, but like so many of the Israelis I met, he was passionate, and I trusted that he would be kind to me. I imagined I would have boyfriends, and I did. I agreed to marry because I could not bear living with my father’s brother and his wife any longer, but I was afraid to live without my family’s support. If I married Etan, his parents would give us an apartment in the Old City. Etan would teach and I would have babies. Until then, I would do for money what I had done in Florida: clean house.

I did not tell him about you, and I did not tell him that I was terrified of becoming pregnant again. I had never felt fear as strong as the fear I felt when I lay in bed and imagined becoming a mother again. I knew I would fail, and that my failing would spread misery. I had already left you and your father in the wake of my weakness; Etan would be disappointed, but he would be better off. I got the prescription from a Christian doctor, an American from New Jersey who was living in Israel while his wife wrote her dissertation. He was a nice man. After two years, I told Etan the doctor said I couldn’t have babies, and he believed me. He could have asked me for a divorce then. His parents encouraged him to, but he thought that the righteous thing was to honor his commitment to his wife. He would help create a new generation for Israel as a teacher, not a father. But then he found the plastic disk of pills. They must have fallen out of my pocketbook. I had become careless, I suppose. Perhaps I wanted him to find them; perhaps I was finished with our life together. Or perhaps I just did not care either way. That evening he confronted me.

“Why are you taking these pills?” he asked as I walked into the front door of our little apartment. He came toward me, his eyes wide, waving the little pink case. “How long have you been taking these pills?”

I did not have an immediate answer. I hesitated.

“Aviva!”

“Not too long.”

“I don’t believe you.”

What could I say? I do not lie well. I omit, but I rarely lie. He left the apartment and did not return until morning. He said that he wanted a divorce. He said that he was still young enough to have children and that he wanted a wife who wanted to give them to him. I know he felt betrayed. He also felt foolish. He had turned his embrace of my infertility into a kind of martyrdom, and now he saw that I had duped him. I asked him what he would tell people, and he said he didn’t know.

“Tell them I was having an affair,” I said.

“I might.”

The terminal was empty when my plane landed. In the bathroom at the gate I changed into jeans and uncovered my hair, and at the luggage pickup I became a young American woman back from traveling abroad, not a sneaky frum failure. I took a taxi to the house in Coney Island, praying on the way that it was still a place for me. I imagined Saul in the kitchen. The front door was open and the people living there were asleep. I set my bags in the living room and walked to the beach. There had been changes in New York since I left. The Twin Towers had fallen only a month before. We watched them crumble from the television in the tiny triangle of a caf
é
on the corner of our street in Jerusalem. I remember that I’d thought about all the times I snuck into Manhattan as a child. I understood the grid, but the streets below Houston did not conform, and when I needed a marker to tell me where north and south and east and west were, I looked for the towers. What did people look for now?

I sat in the sand with my knees pulled to my chest. It was warm for October, and as I listened to the shuffle and fizz of the black waves sliding in, I thought about you. I had watched the American girls when I saw them in Jerusalem, on tours with their parents or a school group. I looked for you. I wondered if you’d been told about me. And if so, what you’d been told. I hoped that what I’d done hadn’t hardened your father. He was such a loving man. His loving felt strange to me, but to you, I hoped, it would feel natural. I hoped you would always know what love felt like. I hoped you would feel it enough for both of us.

Saul no longer lived by the house in Coney Island. The two semipermanent residents were Yael, a woman from Crown Heights fighting an ugly custody battle over her three children, and a young man named Isaac who grew up in Williamsburg. Isaac was twenty and gay, and unlike Yael, who was always running off to meet a lawyer or see her children, Isaac had nothing to do, so we quickly became close. He took me downtown to see where the towers had been, and on Thanksgiving we served food to the men and women working on the piles. Before I left, New York had seemed to me such a rigid, angry place. Everyone fighting to get where they were going, everyone with their heads down, their worlds small inside the enormous city. But the New York I came back to in late 2001 was a place where people smiled at one another. Thankful, perhaps, that they—and their beloved city—had survived. I remember taking great comfort in the smiles of strangers. I remember thinking I had made the right decision by coming home.

Etan sent papers to sign and I signed them. I knew my family had moved to Roseville, and I wrote to my brother, asking after Sammy and my father and the girls. Eli did not write back, but little Sammy did.

CHAPTER TWELVE

REBEKAH

Larry isn’t at his desk when I call to fill him in on what Van Keller said. I leave Nechemaya a message saying that I definitely want to talk to the neighbors about Pessie, and reiterating that I’d appreciate any leads on friends or family who could tell me about her. I look back through my e-mail and open the attachment the library sent on Pessie. Her address is just two miles from the police station, so I decide to do a drive-by before heading north to Ryan Hall’s in search of Sam.

I pull into a Shell station along the main road to fill up and use the bathroom. At the pumps on either side of me are men in Hasidic dress, phones pressed to their ears, putting gas into minivans. In the convenience store, the shelves by the bathroom hold plastic-wrapped magazines, but instead of
Playboy
and
Hustler,
the titles are Yiddish, and the covers feature old men with white beards. Yiddish movies and music are stacked in a rotating rack, and I notice that no women appear in the images on the CDs and DVDs for sale. I pour myself a cup of coffee and as I wait in line I watch a man in sidecurls and a hairnet slide a platter of what looks like bread pudding into a heated serving tray. He sets a paper notecard atop the glass display case:
potato kugel
. Beside the kugel is a steaming tray of something that smells fantastic but looks like brown slop. It is marked “chulent
.
” I’ve never had either dish and decide that, despite the possible inadvisability of eating gas station food, it’s time to try. I motion to the man and point to the stew.

“What size?” he asks. He is very tall and thin, with olive skin and a black unibrow.

“Small. And I’ll have a piece of that, too,” I say, pointing to the kugel. Next to me, a woman says something in Yiddish to the man, who nods at her. The woman is dressed all in black except for the white-and-green floral-patterned scarf wrapped over her head. I look down at my jeans and Doc Martens and am conscious, for the first time, that I might as well be wearing a sign that says “not one of you.” As the server ladles the chulent into a cardboard container and slides a lasagna-sized slice of kugel into a Styrofoam box, I wonder what this woman thinks of me. My first instinct is to imagine that she is jealous; that she would trade places with me and run off to the city for bacon and barhopping if it didn’t mean losing everyone she loved. But that’s me transposing my values onto her, and that’s exactly the opposite of what a real journalist is supposed to do. I’m in this work because I’m curious about people, because I want to bring the truth of their circumstances into the light. If I can’t even imagine outside myself, I can’t do that. And I certainly can’t do it if I feel sorry for everyone who doesn’t live like I do.

I pull Saul’s car to the parking lot beside the gas station and open the steaming cup of chulent. It is delicious: savory and sweet, hearty but not heavy. Jewish food, I think. Who knew? I put the container on the passenger seat and snap a photo with my phone, then send it to my dad.

Upstate on a story, eating Jewish food!

A minute later, he texts back:

Good for you, hon!

My dad still doesn’t know that Aviva contacted me through Saul in January. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t really want to deal with his reaction—whatever it was. He deserves to know, I know that. I’d been thinking that I’d wait and tell him when, if, I actually meet her. But now that I’m upstate, where she is—or was when she called—I want to share what’s happening with him.

He picks up on the second ring.

“Hi, hon!” he says. “You working?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m up in a town called Roseville. A lot of Jews from the city moved up here, so there’s a big Haredi community. This man named Levi reached out to me and Saul because his wife was found dead in their home. Everybody thinks it was suicide but he thinks it was murder.”

“Goodness,” he says. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So, I didn’t tell you this but Saul actually got a call from … Mom. Aviva. Apparently she’s upstate. She wanted to meet me, I guess. I didn’t call her back for a while, though. And now she’s not answering her phone.”

I spit the story out quickly and am glad I can’t see my father’s face when he learns, for the first time in two decades, that the woman who gave him a baby and then gave up is suddenly present in his life again. I know what I’ve just said has affected him because for the first time I can recall, my father is at a loss for words. Typically, his automatic response to sadness or distress is to immediately offer some verse or story or perspective; that’s his role as the youth minister: to comfort and guide. He’s good at it, especially when it’s not his biological kids he’s guiding and comforting. When my mom left, his church embraced him—and me—without reservation, and that, in some way, shaped his life after Aviva.
God’s grace,
he called it.
I’d be lost without it.

“Dad?” I say.

He clears his throat. “I’m here,” he says. “I just wanted to shut the door. I’m in my office at the church.”

“Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he says. “Thank you for asking.”

“Are you mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want you to think I’m, like, betraying you by getting in touch with her.”

“Don’t be silly, Rebekah. I hoped one day she would reach out to you.”

“Do you think you’d want to see her?”

Another long pause. “I don’t know,” he says finally, slowly. “She gave me you, and I am thankful to her for that. But I love you so much more than I ever loved her. I never wanted to say anything negative about her to you. That was very important to me. I can’t say what I might have done in her shoes, but she brought great pain into my life, Rebekah. I’m happy with what I have now, but I’m a different man than I was before she left us. It was so sudden. And what she did took something from me. My innocence, I guess you could say. I hadn’t understood that people really did things like that to each other.” He pauses. “In some ways, I know, the experience made me a better counselor to those in pain, and brought me closer to the Lord.”

Whenever my dad says things like “brought me closer to the Lord,” I cringe. It’s such a corny, awkward thing to say. I always imagined he was trying to convince me of something, trying to push me to believe what he believes by exaggerating a relationship with the God he is so devoted to. But just because such a thing would never come out of my mouth doesn’t mean he isn’t telling me the truth. And if I actually want to understand him—which is something he deserves after all these years—I have to assume that when he says things like that he is being sincere.

“I don’t look forward to having that pain in my life again,” he continues. “But I’m a big boy, honey. I can handle it.”

And I know he can.

“Thanks, Dad,” I say. “I’ll keep you updated.”

“Be safe, Rebekah. Promise me.”

“I promise. I love you, Dad.”

“I love you, too, honey.”

When I hang up the call I am trembling. Did Aviva just help bridge a gap between me and my dad?

I pull out of the gas station and follow Roseville’s two-lane main street east past several more strip malls, each with about half the signs in Hebrew and half in English. The road has no sidewalk, and little shoulder, but scores of men and women in black walk alongside it nonetheless, hands holding hats and head coverings against the wind, arms weighed down with shopping bags and briefcases. After about a quarter mile the buildings become residential. I turn off the main road and wind through a neighborhood of two- and three-story apartment buildings, most shabby and utilitarian with beige vinyl siding and long orange rust stains bleeding from metal handrails down bare concrete front steps. Plastic children’s toys and strollers are scattered on tiny lawns and recently poured sidewalks; minivans abound, the better to carry all the kids in, I guess. The neighborhood reminds me of the low-rent sprawl that popped up outside Orlando before the real estate crash. Every week some new development broke ground. Their names were all stupidly sunny, referencing either the warm weather or their proximity to Disney World. Most of them filled up fast and are now half empty, with absent or incarcerated landlords, falling into disrepair from neglect. Here in Roseville, on the other hand, the buildings appear worn down by use.