The Angel of Losses (11 page)

“Arise, for Israel is in danger!”

The voice was coming from across the street, from the park. I ran toward it.

Steps from the avenue, the block plunged downhill into darkness, the fifteen-foot wall of the cathedral grounds a dam against stray light. I stopped. The wet pavement was studded with the tracks of bare feet, and for an instant I imagined the man who left them had floated up with the sudden pressure drop, toward the magnetic weave of stars.

A dark column slid slowly down the hill. A breeze came through and lifted its long hair. “Hey!” I called, and instantly regretted it—shouting at a stranger on a deserted, late-night city street. But the figure didn’t flinch, and I found myself running after her, or him, calling again, “Hey!”

It turned around, the wind at its back now, its hair and the tails of its cloak streaming toward me. It seemed to draw taller—lifting its head—when a seam of fire opened in the sky, accompanied by thunder so loud I felt it where my bones joined.

I put one hand over my eyes, the other to my throat, instinctively reaching for the charm I’d given Holly. I felt my ribs expand against my skin, my tattoo stretch like a wing.

I opened my eyes. Rain beat down, exploding in momentary spheres above the pavement. I took a few steps forward, then turned back, wading into the puddles already swirling at the curb. After a few minutes the rain slowed just enough for visibility to return, and I stood there, soaked through, shivering, alone.

THE PHONE RANG AT 7 A.M. I PULLED THE BLANKET OVER MY
head, my arm pressed into my eyes to block the sun. I had returned home alone and lain awake all night, unable to shake the sight of the strange wanderer, evaporated in a lightning strike. Just a nightmare, I told myself, planted by the strange old man. He had told me I would hear the Angel of Losses calling for his people to rise, and now my subconscious had conjured it, half fire and half water, flanked by storms. But if it was a nightmare, then I was a sleepwalker, waking suddenly in the middle of a wet sidewalk. I wondered if I should see a doctor after all. The phone stopped ringing, then after a moment began again. Caller ID showed a number I didn’t recognize, a Brooklyn area code. I lifted the receiver to my ear.

“It’s Yael. Chava asked me to call you.”

I fell back into bed, my eyes burning with exhaustion. “Sorry I didn’t answer before. I was asleep,” I lied.

She took a deep breath. “They’re at the hospital with Eli. Everything’s okay—he’s stable.”

My grandfather. Another heart attack.

No. The baby.

“He had a seizure. The doctor said it was mild.”

“Mild? How can a seizure be mild?” In my mind I saw Eli shake into a blur, and I felt the phone tremble against my cheek.

“When my oldest was a baby she had a seizure when a fever spiked. Sometimes that happens to little children, babies. If their temperature changes quickly, they can seize, but they’re okay.”

“When did he catch a fever?” Anger welled up inside me. I thought of him lying in the backyard at midnight, crying so, so quietly. But of course it had been too many weeks, more than a month, for that to have been the cause.

“I’m not sure. I know Chava was worried yesterday that he seemed lethargic. But the doctors are taking good care of him.”

“Which hospital?” I asked, picking my jeans up off the floor.

She named one near the house. “The doctor expects to release him in a few hours, and I’m sure they’ll head straight home and to bed. They were up all night with him.”

“Yael, please don’t tell me not to go see my sister when her baby is in the fucking hospital.”

“I know how you feel,” she said deliberately. Like she had prepared this answer. “But Chava doesn’t want a lot of people in the hospital, or crowding them when they get home.”

“I don’t think she meant me,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Marjorie,” Yael answered, and she did sound sorry. “She wanted me to tell you what happened and that she’ll call you later. She doesn’t want you to come.”

HOLLY DIDN’T ANSWER HER CELL PHONE. “THIS IS CHAVA,” THE
outgoing message on her voice mail began. I hung up without leaving a message. When I still couldn’t reach her an hour later, I called my mother. The doctors’ theory was the same as Yael’s. A fever spiking, and now already settled at a normal temperature. He had follow-up appointments scheduled. There was nothing to do but comfort him and watch him.

I had made it a policy never to call the landline at our old house—Nathan might answer—but when evening came and I still hadn’t spoken to my sister, I dialed the phone number I had memorized as a child.

“Hello.” Nathan’s voice was flat, his greeting a grim statement.

“It’s Marjorie.”

“Yes, it is.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to have a conversation. I just wanted him to put Holly on the line. “How’s Eli?” I asked.

“We don’t know.” He paused. “I take it you spoke to your mother? You know what there is to know.”

“Can you put Holly on, please?”

“Chava’s resting.”

“I’ve been calling all day.” My voice hardened to meet his angry tone.

He exhaled into the phone, a rush of static. “You shouldn’t have interrupted. We were trying to protect him.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, but as soon as I spoke I knew what he meant. The night before the circumcision. The moonlit prayers. The men kneeling in our backyard. “He shouldn’t have been outside in the cold.”

“I know what’s best for him.”

Here we were, accusing each other of causing Eli’s fever. Interrupted spells versus cold night air. Superstition versus—what? The absurdity of a human body continuing to live at any given instant?

“He doesn’t need prayers,” I said, taken by this idea of Nathan as a science-rejecting faith healer, his fantasies putting Eli at risk. It meant that I hadn’t hurt the baby by bringing the ritual to a halt.

“He needs his father,” Nathan answered, and hung up the phone.

Seven

T
wo days after Holly brought the baby home, the seizure labeled as a fluke, we still hadn’t spoken. I barely slept, waiting for the only thing more frightening than the ghost I had seen: a middle-of-the-night phone call delivering more bad news about Eli. It was possible she was exhausted and distracted, or that she felt awkward reaching out to me, but I believed she was punishing me for arguing with Nathan, and finally I decided I wouldn’t allow her to banish me.

On the third morning, I went to the library loan office and told the girl manning the desk that I was looking for Simon.

He stepped out of the back and stopped when he saw me, ran a hand through his hair. The girl conspicuously turned a magazine page. Finally he came to the other side of the counter and I followed him into the hallway.

“Sorry to bother you at work. I need to ask you a favor,” I said.

He leaned against the wall, staring in front of him like I wasn’t even there. “A favor?” he asked. “What happened the other night? You disappeared. I called you three times yesterday.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I didn’t want to bother you. I’m sorry.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “Listen, my sister’s baby is sick, and I need to get out to Jersey. I’ll bring the car back by the afternoon.” I was broke, and no one was going to pick me up from the train station.

His eyes softened. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was angry.”

I waved my hand. I didn’t mean for Eli to be an excuse—I knew it was awful to ignore Simon, but I just couldn’t talk to him about this, any of this. I didn’t want him to see a girl who saw ghosts in Harlem, whose own sister refused her calls.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and his face changed again. He
was
worried about saying the right thing, and he wanted me to worry too. And here I had already accepted that I had screwed up and it was over, and I just wanted to pretend like everything would be fine. “It’s about an hour away, probably not even at this time of day,” I said quickly. “I just don’t want to bother them about the train, now that they just got home from the hospital.”

“The hospital?” he repeated. “Is the baby going to be okay?”

I had no idea. The assurances and platitudes all felt meaningless. “Sure. Yes. But it’s scary. He’s only a month old.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

“You don’t have to be here? In the office?” I stalled, preparing to refuse the offer, however much I wanted him to come with me. It was too much to ask, too tense a situation to draw him into.

“No one’s paying attention to me,” he said. “And I know what it’s like. To need backup when you go home.”

“Backup.” In Simon’s eyes, we were just your ordinary dysfunctional family. Maybe with him there that’s all we would be. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I CALLED HOLLY AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE. THE HOUSE
phone—I wouldn’t be cowed by Nathan. Still, I was relieved when Holly answered. “I’m on my way over,” I declared.

“Over here?” she asked. Her voice was weak. “Now?”

“I want to see Eli,” I said.

Holly had announced her pregnancy to me in a voice mail, and maybe she was right to have done so. Back then, I thought her pregnancy was a trick Nathan played on her; a game-winning move, the ultimate claim. Now that the baby was here, I felt like he was our baby too, my family’s. He had my grandfather’s name. I wanted to protect him.

“A friend is giving me a ride,” I continued. “We’ll be there before eleven.”

“Who is it?” she asked. “I really don’t feel up to people right now.”

“Whose voice is that in the background?” I asked. “I mean, voices?”

She was quiet for a moment. “They’re family,” she said.

“So am I.”

I hung up and stared at the planes hanging low over Newark. I felt Simon glance at me once, twice, before finally speaking.

“How’s your sister doing?” he asked.

“I have no fucking clue,” I answered, and instantly felt sick at the aftertaste of my voice, the one Holly summoned from some ugly place inside me. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, how much I missed her, how much I wanted us to be the way we were growing up, a pair of shared eyes, seeing the world in a way that no one else ever would. But when we spoke, all that hope and sadness burned away to anger. I had long told myself I had to bear Nathan for Holly’s sake; today I felt like I had to bear Holly for Eli’s.

“My brother’s older,” Simon said. “Twelve years. He was always a kind of a stranger.” He veered into the exit lane. “Sometimes it’s easier that way.”

“We were always close. Always,” I said. “Until her husband came along.”

He hesitated. “I mentioned him to the grad student, the Hasidic one. He comes from a really religious family—they nearly disowned him for entering the anthro program. Even he thinks the Berukhim Penitents are pretty out there.”

“What does that mean, out there?”

“Each group follows a rebbe, like a guru. They have dynasties. But there’s no current Berukhim Rebbe—hasn’t been for generations. The last one died centuries ago.”

“He didn’t die,” I said. “He ascended directly to heaven.” Just like the White Rebbe’s father. Although that wasn’t exactly how it happened in Grandpa’s story. Solomon’s father, alight with an eerie magic, had disappeared during a thunderstorm, his ultimate destination unknown.

I remembered when Nathan and I first met, lunch at the Indian restaurant, when I had described the Berukhim Rebbe’s end the same way—ascending directly to heaven—and Nathan had shrugged off that explanation. Only one thing was certain, he had said. The rebbe never died.

FINALLY WE ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE. I WAS RELIEVED TO FIND
only two cars in the driveway—Holly’s station wagon and a maroon minivan. I wouldn’t be too badly outnumbered. Nathan answered the door. “Marjorie,” he said. He couldn’t shake my hand; I couldn’t kiss his cheek to keep up appearances. Even in this time—a family crisis—our greeting was a staring contest.

Holly was sitting at the kitchen table with a man I recognized as one of the watchers. Crawling through the earth behind the house while Eli cried. He’ll get sick, my mother had warned. The man didn’t meet my eyes.

Holly was dressed in a shapeless black sweater, a denim skirt to her ankles, and brown slippers. Her hair was twisted against the back of her head. She turned her face to me, as pale as the moon, her eyes the smudge of craters, and instead of my sister, I saw Chava.

Finally she stood and hugged me. Our arms circled each other weakly and then fell away. “Thanks for coming,” she said. She forced a smile for Simon, who had come in behind me. “Hi, I’m Chava.”

He lifted his arm to offer her his hand, and I caught it before it left his side. “Simon,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Do you want some tea?” Holly asked.

I ignored her offer. “Eli’s upstairs?” I asked.

She filled the kettle with water. “He’s asleep.”

“I just want to look,” I said. “I won’t wake him.”

She set the kettle down on the counter with a clang. “If he wakes up, I’ll have to feed him. I need a minute to sit down by myself.”

I put the kettle on the stove and turned on the flame. “So go sit down,” I said, imitating my mother’s tone. She had spent those first days after Eli’s birth urging Holly to take care of herself, to sleep for a minute, to eat something. Even now, Holly, stubborn as ever, stood motionless by the stove. “Go,” I said again, and finally she sat down at the table.

We waited silently for the water to heat, and when Nathan laughed in the front hall, we both flinched. I wondered what Simon could have said to him, but more than that, I was relieved they had removed themselves. I was embarrassed by our standoff. It was easy to blame Holly for what had become of our relationship when she wasn’t there to defend herself implicitly, accusing me with her stiffly crossed arms and quick rebuttals.

The kettle whistled. I filled a mug and put it on the table in front of her. She stared at it for a moment, and then laced her fingers around the warm porcelain.

“Just be quiet up there,” she said.

“I promise,” I said.

Upstairs, I nudged open the door to the nursery. The room was cast in cool-blue light from the cheap drapes over the windows, and the green light of the baby monitor glowed from the changing table. I took careful steps, determined to be soundless, but as I leaned over the crib, I saw two alert and shining blue eyes looking back at me. Eli was awake, his hands balled into tiny ruddy fists against the white sheet, his dimpled chin shiny with spit, his hair a few dark strands of silk against his scalp.

“Hey there, little guy,” I whispered, reaching in to touch him gently above his belly button, still a wound in my mind. “Your mommy thinks you’re sleeping.” He kicked his legs and stretched his arms, his gaze on the mobile hanging above him. I picked him up carefully, my thumbs under his arms and my fingers sliding to the soft skin where his neck met his head. I wondered how long he’d stay so tiny, nearly weightless.

I sat in the rocking chair by the window, my elbow bent to make a pillow for his head.

“How are you feeling?” I held an open palm over him, and he beat a little fist against it. “Better? We were so worried about you. Did you know your mommy and I grew up in this house too? And this room was your great-grandpa’s study. This is where he kept his books and read the newspaper and wrote in his journals.” I looked around the room—spare, smooth, and peaceful. “He would be happy that this is your bedroom now.” And for the first time, all of my grandfather’s belongings stacked in the basement didn’t seem like a sad thing.

“He loved his family very much,” I said, my throat catching. “He took care of us when we were little. He took care of us when we were sick.”
Holly’s boy will need help,
he had warned me. It was just a coincidence, I told myself—an anxiety dream—just as predicting the gender had been a coincidence, my subconscious triggered by the blue nursery, and with a 50 percent chance of being correct.

The baby had a perfect, doll-shaped mouth and a tiny freckle next to his nose. “Would you like to hear a story?” I asked him.

I closed my eyes, rocking the chair slightly, as if the motion would transport us back in time.

“Once upon a time, many years ago, there was an evil king. All the people in the land feared him. Every year, he would send his soldiers into the towns and villages to collect taxes from the people—their gold and their food and their horses. Sometimes people would try to hide what they owned from the king, because they were very poor, but the king’s soldiers always knew where to look, as if by magic, and if they found what the people were hiding . . .”

They would kill them.
Had Grandpa really said that? We were so little.

Eli wrapped his hand around one of my fingers. I tugged his collar up to wipe his chin.

“They would be in a lot of trouble. Anyway. The king wasn’t the only person in the land who knew magic. There was also the White Magician.” I paused. “The White Rebbe.” The baby, of course, was oblivious. It was safe here to try this: imagining another version of the story, how Grandpa might have written it in one of his notebooks.

“The White Rebbe,” I said again. “He came from a very special family. In every generation, a son was born who would grow up to be very wise and holy. So holy that he could do things no one else could—like find things that were lost, and heal people who were sick, and bring children to families who thought they could never have them. The White Rebbe traveled throughout the land, appearing just when he was needed most, and not staying a moment longer. Everyone loved him, and everyone knew his name, even the evil king.

“When the king grew very old, he sent his soldiers in search of the White Rebbe. They stopped at the center of every town in the kingdom and cried, ‘If the White Rebbe doesn’t appear before the king in ten days, then the king will destroy your whole village!’

“On the morning of the last day, the soldiers rallied outside the castle, prepared to go back out into the countryside and carry through with the king’s threat. A sweet wind blew, and all of the soldiers’ horses lay down. The White Rebbe, with his long beard and his magic staff, was standing in the center of the crowd.

“Now the soldiers parted again, for the king, who was being carried in the arms of servants to meet the rebbe. Even though he was the same age as the rebbe, the king was stooped and hard of hearing and close to blind—though still meaner than ever—while the rebbe stood taller than all the men of the court.

“ ‘I command you to make me young again,’ the king said.

“ ‘No magic can do that,’ the rebbe answered. ‘Every man will come to the end of his life someday, and there is no door in nature that offers escape from this journey.’

“But the king had heard the story of the rebbe’s own childhood,” I improvised. “He had been very sick as a little boy, close to death, and his father had summoned the power of life itself to heal him.

“ ‘If you don’t do as I command,’ the king said, ‘I’ll destroy all the people of the land.’ ” I paused. “Sorry, Eli, I know that sounds terrible. But you’ll have to get used to it. It’s a common trope.” Eli just stared at me. His face was calm, his eyes clear. I felt like he was enjoying the story. I enjoyed telling it to him.

“Anyway, the White Rebbe answered, ‘I’ll do what you ask. But if I succeed, you must not send your soldiers to collect taxes for one hundred years, and you must never take food from your hungry subjects again. If you ever break the contract, you’ll break the spell with it, and instantly transform back into a man so old that he can see death’s shadow in his doorway.’

“The king agreed to the deal.

“ ‘You must build a bath,’ the rebbe said, and the king set a hundred workers to complete the task. Following the rebbe’s instructions, they built a swimming pool, tiled it with precious stones and filled it with water from the deepest well. The king’s servants carried him, still in his purple robes, into the bath. The White Rebbe came and drew—” I paused. Grandpa had called it a magic formula in the version he told us so many years ago. But I thought of the image Solomon saw reflected in the water when he agreed to the Angel of Losses’s demands. Grandpa had struggled to capture it in words, just as he had struggled to complete the symbol in the notebook. Surely that’s what the picture was, I realized. The picture on the page and in my skin: the Sabbath Light.