Authors: Diana Spechler

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WHO BY FIRE

Bits and Ash were children when the kidnapping of their younger sister, Alena—an incident for which Ash blames himself—caused an irreparable family rift. Thirteen years later, Ash is living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel, cutting himself off from his mother, Ellie, and his wild-child sister, Bits. But soon he may have to face them again; Alena’s remains have finally been uncovered. Now Bits is traveling across the world in a bold and desperate attempt to bring her brother home and salvage what’s left of their family.

Sharp and captivating,
Who by Fire
deftly explores what happens when people try to rescue one another.

“Impressively executed. . . . [The characters’] voices are strong and convincing. . . . Spechler is a talented writer who transcends melodrama and cliché with striking sensitivity and delicate touch.”

—Boston Globe

An Excerpt from
Who by Fire

Prologue

April 24, 2002

A
T THE BACK OF THE PLANE,
twelve men bow and mumble and sway, masked by thick beards and crowned by black hats. They wear angelic white shawls over demon-black suits. Their eyes are shut. They hold their prayer books closed, using their thumbs as bookmarks. I face the front of the plane again, and return to the article my mother e-mailed me: “How to Cope When Your Loved One Joins a Cult.” For peace of mind, I’m supposed to get a support group, to eat whole wheat bread and peas, to breathe deeply and remind myself that I’m not to blame. I inhale sharply through my nose. The air smells stagnant—transatlantic airplane air. I try to exhale some blame.

After Alena disappeared, my mother was brimming with blame. She blamed the state police for not making enough effort. She blamed other families for not understanding. If my father sat down to watch TV, she would say, “You think your daughter has the luxury of watching television?” She started grinding her teeth so hard, she had to wear a mouth guard. For a year, she dragged Ash and me all over New Jersey, making us tape flyers to telephone poles, as if we had lost her favorite cat. She never directly blamed us, her two remaining children, but she often began a thought with, “If it had been you, instead of Alena . . .” Of course, she always followed that up with “Don’t give me that look. I never said I
wished
it had been you. God forbid. What do you take me for?” But we have always understood: Alena was the baby. Alena was the favorite. Six-year-old Alena, with the paintbrush-black hair and the chin dimple and the jeans rolled halfway up her calves, Alena imitating our eighty-four-year-old neighbor’s smoker voice, Alena whizzing through the kitchen on roller skates with pink wheels—Alena was the irreplaceable one.

After losing its baby, its best member, especially if a family can’t properly mourn, it begins to decay like a corpse. At ten years old, I didn’t know yet that my father would leave us, that my mother would grow old while she was still young, or that Ash would swing from obsession to obsession like a child crossing the monkey bars. All I knew for sure was this: We had lost everything we had been.

Ash might remember it differently. Perhaps he remembers the voice of God saying,
No one will ever forgive you
. I wait a while before unbuckling my seat belt and making my way to the bathroom at the back of the plane. The praying men have dispersed, but as I walk down the aisle, I can pick them out. I can see their hats towering over the seat backs. I can see their plain wives, their squirmy broods of children. I want to tell them that they are no match for me, that for ten days now they have been no match for me, ever since I heard the news that I know will get Ash to come home.

I plan to catch Ash off guard, to show up at his yeshiva, to tell everyone there that he used to eat baseball stadium hotdogs that couldn’t possibly have been kosher; that he fidgeted restlessly during
Schindler’s List
; that at Yom Kippur services, he used to fart on purpose during the silent meditation. I will tell them,
This is my brother you’ve taken! And now I’m taking him back
.

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Also by Diana Spechler

Who by Fire

Credit

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph by Marcy Maloy/Getty Images

SKINNY.
Copyright © 2011 by Diana Spechler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

11 12 13 14 15
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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