Run You Down (8 page)

“I didn’t know,” I say. “You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

True. “So did she go through gay conversion therapy?”

“No, but he said her girlfriend did. She’s from Utah and her family was Mormon. Anyway, in California, I think they actually outlawed it. Or maybe they tried to.”

“They should,” I say.

Iris nods. “That guy was amazing,” she says. Dov is surrounded by people; everyone seems to have a question or a story to share. “Are you gonna talk to him?”

“Yeah,” I say, “but it looks like it might be a wait.”

“So we wait. I’m getting another beer. I have cottonmouth. I’m calling in sick tomorrow.”

Iris goes to the buffet, and I lean against a covered piano in the corner of the room, watching. It’s almost midnight on a weekday, but the event shows no sign of slowing down. A group of young men in black hats brings in a case of beer. Three frum girls are bent over an iPhone, laughing. A teenage boy in Borough Park black is challenging a man maybe ten years his senior to explain why, if it’s okay to be gay, it isn’t okay to be a heroin addict or a prostitute or a murderer?

“If there are no rules, where do you stop?” he asks.

After about twenty minutes, I see an opening and approach Dov by the buffet table.

“Hi,” I say, “I’m Rebekah. From the
Trib
.”

“Rebekah!” he says, opening his arms for a hug. I oblige. “Thank you for coming.” He looks to his friends and says, “This is the reporter I was telling you about. She found out who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. She’s writing about Pessie.”

Dov’s friends nod and say hello.

“Do you have time to talk?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. “Let me finish here. There is a diner nearby. Can we meet there in half an hour?”

“Sure,” I say. Dov gives me directions and Iris and I step out of the noisy, overheated synagogue and into the nearly still late night. Ocean Parkway is a four-lane highway with wide pedestrian and bicycle promenades leading to the beach at Coney Island on either side. It’s a mix of residential and commercial here. Big prewar apartment buildings next to doctors’ offices and day care centers, many with Hebrew lettering on the signs. We pass a Haredi man sitting alone on a bench, talking on his cell phone. He turns away from us as we pass.

“You seem a lot better,” Iris says as we walk. “Do you think the medication is helping?”

“I guess it must be,” I say. And then: “Thanks. For, you know. Taking care of me. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass. I just…” Just what? Just everything.

“It’s okay,” she says. “So you called your mom.”

“Yeah. I can’t help but think she, like, sees my number and is purposely ignoring me.”

“That’s dumb. She’s the one that called you.”

“And now she’s disappeared again.”

“You’re the most ridiculous pessimist I know. She probably forgot to pay her bill or something.”

“Maybe.”

“Have you told your dad she called?”

“No,” I say. “I thought I’d wait until I actually talk to her.”

Dov and his friend Frannie get to the diner about twenty minutes after we do.

Frannie tells us she was also frum, but grew up in Baltimore. She and Dov met through Facebook, and now they’re roommates, along with four other people, in a house near Poughkeepsie. The rent is cheap, and none of them like the big city. Dov says that they’ve both applied to the community college there, but won’t hear whether they’ve been accepted until the summer.

“Pessie’s sister Rachel told me that Pessie had a bad reaction to her medication, passed out, and drowned,” says Dov. “But when I asked what medication she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Her husband said she’d been on antidepressants since after the baby was born,” I say. “But you can’t, like, OD on those.”

Dov shakes his head. “You know that, and I know that, but Pessie’s family probably thinks Prozac is the same thing as, like, OxyContin. They probably heard ‘antidepressants’ and assumed she wanted to kill herself. She still has sisters and brothers who need to get married and a suicide in the family would make shidduch much more difficult.”

“What’s that?” asks Iris.

“Shidduch is the matchmaking process,” says Frannie. “And every little thing matters.”

Dov nods. “And who wants to tell people their sister committed suicide? Blaming it on the goyish medication they don’t know anything about is easier. But none of it makes any sense.”

“What do you think happened?” I ask.

“I really don’t know,” he says.

“But you don’t think it was suicide.”

Dov wipes his hand across his face. “I don’t. She just … wasn’t the type. Some of us don’t fit in from the start, but Pessie did. She was a happy kid. Kind of a goof, you know? Her mother was a great cook and she sold food for holidays and stuff. There were always people in and out of her house. And I think she was one of eleven or twelve.…”

“Twelve kids?” gawks Iris. “Holy shit.” I kick her under the table.

Dov nods. “In a house like that, there just aren’t enough adults to keep an eye on everybody. It can be easy to get into trouble. Her older brother went OTD back in, like, the nineties. I think he got into drugs.”

“A lot of people do,” says Frannie.

I’ve heard this before. Iris and I take the fact that we can dabble in drinking and drugs and casual sex, or take the occasional “sick day” from work, without really having to worry that one indulgence will lead to too many. We’ve had years to learn self-control and moderation in a world full of temptation and moral relativity. Not Dov and Pessie. Like the boy at the chulent asked: If there are no rules, how do you know where to stop?

“It caused her parents a lot of heartache and I know that upset Pessie. She used to say that she thought it was very selfish of her brother to leave like he did. But it was easy for her to say that. She was pious. She really believed that all the rules and rituals were important.”

Dov pauses. “I haven’t seen her in a few years, though. Since before she got married. If you can find him, you should talk to Sam Kagan. He probably knew her better than anyone.”

Iris and I look at each other. Kagan. That’s Aviva’s last name.

“Sam Kagan?” I ask.

“They were engaged at one point. We all grew up together in Borough Park and our families moved to Roseville around the same time. His family and Pessie’s lived a couple streets away from each other. There was a lot of turmoil in his family; his mom died in childbirth and his father never remarried. One of the sisters was OTD, too. Boys and girls aren’t supposed to hang out, especially if they’re not related, but no one noticed they’d become best friends. By the time they were sixteen, the families were discussing marriage. They got engaged, but there were big problems: he had been abused.” Dov shakes his head. “Monsters like that are very good at finding the boys who are different.”

“It’s really hard to be gay and frum,” says Frannie. She has been slumped low in her seat picking at a Greek salad while Dov has been talking. “The number one thing we are supposed to do is to make a big family. When you are gay you are shamed because you are gay. But also you are shamed because you betray Hashem by not marrying and making more Jews.”

Dov nods. “Sam loved her, I think. But not the way she loved him. She would have married him even knowing he was gay. She probably thought she could fix him. It was a while before she agreed to consider another match. And Sam’s been in a lot of trouble since he left. We haven’t spoken in years. His family sent him to New Hope, too. I found him on Facebook when the lawsuit was first getting started and asked if he wanted to talk about joining. He was, like, fuck lawsuits, I’ve got a gun.”

Dov purses his lips for effect, then sighs.

“I’m glad you’re looking into this, Rebekah,” he says. “I think what you did writing about Rivka Mendelssohn was very brave. And very important. A lot of people don’t agree. I’m sure you’ve read the blogs. People can be such assholes online when they know they’re anonymous. Believe me, I know. I’ve been getting death threats for, like, years. But maybe it takes someone outside the community to really investigate the bad things that are happening. I don’t know how Pessie died, but I don’t think she killed herself. And if all she was taking was Prozac, it doesn’t make sense she OD’d. But if that’s what her family is saying I doubt anyone in the community is going to do anything about it. They just want everyone to go back to normal and pretend no one has problems that can’t be solved by prayer.

“But prayer doesn’t make you straight,” he continues. “That’s why I’m in this lawsuit. And prayer doesn’t do police work. Her sister says she had a reaction to her pills, but how could anybody know? There was no autopsy.”

Dov wipes his mouth with his napkin and sets it on top of his plate.

“Do you know if Sam has a sister named Aviva?” I ask, feeling my face flush.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think that was the one who went OTD. She was a lot older than us, though. I never met her.”

“Do you know where she lives now?” asks Iris.

Dov shakes his head. “No idea.”

It’s after three when we leave the diner. Dov and I exchange phone numbers and he promises to call or text if he hears anything about Pessie or Sam.

In the livery cab home, Iris asks about the blogs Dov mentioned.

“Have you read any of them?”

“No,” I say. And I don’t want to, I think. Dov said he’d received death threats. And he said it with a kind of conciliatory tone—like I might have, too.

“Are you gonna look Sam up on Facebook?”

“I guess,” I say. My lips feel swollen, buzzing with the anxiety shooting up from my stomach. “If he’s OTD and she is, too, maybe they’re close.”

“Maybe he knows where she is.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe she bailed on him, too.”

We get out in front of our building on Third Avenue. The F train rumbles above us. Across the street, a sanitation truck idles. One of the men who collect steel in grocery carts and push it to the scrapyard on Smith Street rolls by, his cart empty.

As soon as we get upstairs, I open my laptop and Google myself. The first page of results is all stories from the
Trib,
but halfway through the second page there is a post on a Web site called FarFrum.com with the headline “Who Is Rebekah Roberts?” The author—whose name is simply “Administrator”—links to my articles about Rivka Mendelssohn and writes:

You’ve by now read all about the murder of Rivka Mendelssohn. We at FarFrum applaud the reporter who apparently risked her own life to get justice for Rivka—but WHO IS REBEKAH ROBERTS? A quick Google search reveals she is from Orlando and is a graduate of the University of Florida’s school of journalism. Is she a Jew? And what do you think of her reporting on the charedi? We suspect there are some unhappy heebs out there.…

There are thirty-three comments. The first is from username “davenDan”:

this woman has blood on her hands. the goyim will use this to hurt us. she should be stopped before she brings death to us all.

Username “Ruthie718” posted beneath davenDan:

she is not jewish. no jew would do this.

Below that is “Heblow”:

Slut. I heard she fucked a cop to get her story.

Further down, username “Bodymore666” posted:

just like you chassidish puppet-bitches to hate on someone speaking the truth instead of actual MURDERERS! no wonder everyone wants to kill you all.

There are multiple blog posts on multiple sites with hundreds of comments, all devoted to me. The comment threads routinely devolve into personal spats and general complaints. Some people say that I should be thanked for exposing the ugliness in their secretive community. They post about how my stories, and the recent sex abuse trials and the New Hope lawsuit, are bringing attention to problems they want solved. Most, however, post that I probably have ulterior and sinister motives and should not be trusted.

“I can’t believe we didn’t know about this,” says Iris. “Does it freak you out?”

It does. It freaks me out so much I don’t really know what to say. I feel stuck to the sofa, like my body is made of hot, wet sand. They see right through me, I think. They see I’ve just stumbled into all of this. They see I’m just a little girl looking for her mommy.

“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten, like, hate mail or something,” says Iris. “Oh God, do you think they know where we live?”

“Anybody can find out where anybody lives,” I say.

“Okay, I can’t think about this anymore,” she says, standing up. “You should close your computer and go to bed.” She looks down at me and offers her hand. I should take it.

“I’ll go in in a minute.”

She doesn’t protest.

“Thanks for coming with me,” I say.

“You’re welcome,” she says.

She uses the toilet and I hear the sink running.

“Good night,” I call, when she comes out.

“Good night,” she calls back.

After she closes her bedroom door I turn on the TV. NY1 says it’ll be warmer tomorrow—if you can call forty-five warm. The computer is still open on my lap. I close my eyes and take ten deep breaths. My old therapist recommending breathing to “soothe” myself and return to reality. Usually, whatever ease the breathing brings is short-lived—a few seconds of relief from the pain in my intestines or the weight pressing down on my chest or the crackling heat in my face that makes it hard to see. But I can almost never do the one thing that would really help: refocus my attention away from the disaster my mind is racing toward. When I started at the
Trib,
one of he reporters warned me not to read the comments on any of my stories, which of course meant I had to do it. In college people rarely commented on our student newspaper articles. The residents of New York City, however, do comment. And most of the time, they are vicious, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist haters, and the “dialogue” usually devolves into ranting about Obama. The people posting on FarFrum and the other blogs seem split into a similar ratio of reasonable to crazy. There is, however, a legitimate question buried in the responses, and it’s that question that is making my anxiety come alive: what do
I
think of what I am doing? Have I seriously considered the fact that exposing Jews to scrutiny from the gentile world is a potentially dangerous thing? That for, oh, all of civilization, pretty much every generation has persecuted or slaughtered the wandering chosen people? Have I internalized the number six million? Can I defend the fact that I am reporting on the darkest corners of this community, writing about their deaths, not their festivals or small businesses or artistic endeavors? I didn’t ask this question when I was reporting about Rivka Mendelssohn, but now I have to. And, even though the terror has me practically bolted to the futon, I know the answer is yes. In college, one of my professors did a lecture on the theories of journalism’s “role” in society. One of those theories was called the “wandering spotlight”—the idea that the light of scrutiny spins, resting on people in power and instances of injustice. And you never know when it might land on you. In January, I landed on Borough Park. Now, it looks like I’ve landed on Roseville.