The Angel of Losses (18 page)

I see him dying in the corner of my bedroom. I see him dying under my kitchen table. I see him cowering in the stairwell, staring past me, his eyes wet, his teeth chattering. I see him on the corner of Mermaid Avenue, hiding behind a trash can crowned with seagulls, his blue fingers against the metal. I can no longer pretend that he hasn’t been with me all along.

The old man is coming for me again.

He’s coming for me tonight, but I’ll be at the sea, the churning stomach of the earth. I will sit at the water’s edge. Across the dunes, a young boy with frozen eyelashes and a bone-shattering cough will make his own place in the sand. We will wait in the waning day, in the darkness that dwells far from the Sabbath Light. We will listen to the storming anguish of the world soul, a soul exiled from its body, a people exiled from their God, a man exiled from his family, never to be known.

It is time for me to claim the death I left behind so many years ago. A train is speeding through a forest, flanked by starved wolves galloping between the trees, frenzied by the scent of fear. But here there is just a small boy with blue lips and black eyes, and when he puts his arms around my legs, the cold burns through my trousers, my skin, my bones, and swims in my veins toward my heart, now beating slower and slower and slower.

I have come home.

Ten

H
e’s coming for me, Grandpa told me before he died. I came to believe he meant the old man—dangerous, demanding—but now I knew he was talking about the ghost child, moon white and tubercular, emerging from the dark woods. The child he told me never to ask about. The one he killed.

The hospital smelled like rubbing alcohol and plastic. I went outside and stood on the corner drinking milky coffee, letting the crisp air sneak under my collar. The counselors told Holly there was little the doctors could do for Eli; that she should think about suffering and quality of life and the inevitable.

After Grandpa disappeared and returned an angrier version of himself, my father was sure he had had a stroke. Grandpa had submitted to an evaluation, but it was inconclusive, and his doctor could only speculate about a possible “neurological event.” A seismic occurrence. The plates of his brain moving. Something trying to get out. Something collapsing in. There’s no coming back, the doctor had explained. Once the brain falters, it can’t right itself. As long as baby Eli lived, we would be waiting for the damage left by the seizures to reveal itself, the motions he couldn’t make, words he would never say. Waiting, also, for the next seizure. For Eli to die.

Unless Nathan or I did something about it. There was an awful price to pay, though, which the Angel of Losses would someday exact, something that had driven the White Rebbe to run for centuries and Grandpa to abandon his own brother and his entire history.

Or maybe Grandpa was lying. Rationalizing. Hadn’t he said it himself—how desperately he had wanted to live? Desperately enough to kill the little boy who depended on him?

All along, I had imagined that once I knew Grandpa’s secrets, my relationship with him—with his memory—would be stronger. But let it be ruined. I was grateful for the truth. It reminded me that I would never, never abandon Holly. Even this Holly—Chava—whom I couldn’t speak to, not really, whom I couldn’t understand, who didn’t understand me, who didn’t even want to anymore. Even if we were never Marjorie and Holly again. It didn’t matter.

I couldn’t let Nathan take the Sabbath Light. It would destroy him—somehow—and that would destroy Holly and orphan Eli. We had to find the final notebook,
The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses,
the secret history Eli had learned in the ghetto cellar. It would show us another way. It had to.

In the waiting room, Yael sat amid a collection of discarded coats and duffel bags, chewing her nails and staring into the linoleum.

“Where’s Nathan?” I asked her.

She looked up at me and her face crumpled. Oh God, I thought. Eli seized again.

“Your sister collapsed,” she said. “They’re giving her fluids.”

I looked around the hall, at the uniform plastic-upholstered chairs, the ice-blue floor, the distant hint of the sun from the atrium. I couldn’t take any more of this, and I wouldn’t.

“Where’s Nathan?” I asked.

She looked over her shoulder, as if he were standing behind her—but no, she was checking to make sure no one could hear us. “I told Holly he went to the house to get clothes.”

“He didn’t?” She didn’t answer. “What about Brooklyn?”

She shook her head. “But he’ll come back soon, I’m sure.”

“Come
back
? How could he leave now?” She looked away. She was ashamed by his disappearance but perhaps not surprised; I knew his family thought him strange, but I hadn’t realized just how little they expected from him.

If moments before my head was filled with stories of magic and redemption, of immortals and God’s own language, now I was consumed by something greater than all the metaphysics the ancients could devise—my sister’s pain doubled by her husband’s abandonment, and the love I had for her.

In a rush it came out. “I never liked him.” I said. “In fact, I hated him. And I was right. Look what he’s done.”

Yael’s face flushed, and for an instant I was sorry. She had always been nice to me, and none of this was her fault. But then she said, “Yes, you were right all along. I hope you enjoy this moment, Marjorie.” She stalked away.

AFTER HOLLY’S VEINS HAD DRAINED THE WHOLE IV BAG, THE
doctors released her, and my mother and I decided to take her back to my apartment. She protested weakly about leaving Eli alone with the nurses but let us guide her outside. In the cab, while the city darkened around us, I slid my sunglasses onto her face and only took them off again after she was in my bed.

I gave her a sleeping pill. Only one left now. She swallowed it and lay back on the pillow. “Where is he?” she asked. I glanced at my mother—did Mom know that Nathan was gone, that no one could find him?

She did. “Nathan’s at the house,” she lied. “And Daddy’s flying in tomorrow.”

“Not Daddy,” Holly said. Her eyes were liquid, half-dreaming. “Grandpa. He’s watching Eli. When are they coming back?”

A chill went through me. The dead had no claim on that baby. Not even Grandpa, Eli’s namesake.

“Close your eyes,” I answered. She did, and she slept.

FIRST THERE IS THE LONG FLUORESCENT LIGHT, A FLICKERING
chemical path running toward infinity. Then I’m standing beside a pilled brown couch, a water cooler with its sleeve of paper cones, a rabbit-eared TV, a folding table with a chess set, and there, in the middle distance, an old man rising from an armchair. Eli.

I never wanted you to find me here, he says, and his voice is so close, no waver to it, just the soft grip of his faded accent. I flinch. But now that you’re here, Marjorie, I’m so happy to see your face. His left leg trembles—but no, there’s something moving behind him. A child emerges, a little boy in a ragged coat and too big shoes. Black eyes. He takes my grandfather’s hand.

I turn and run over miles of carpet, dodging rows of plastic plants and hills of magazines. Multiplying televisions flash a riot of tinsel. I barely feel anything, my body just an aura haloing my hammering heart, its pounding joining with the field of static. There’s one more element to their symphony: Grandpa’s voice, small, like a radio in a hurricane. My little girl. My love. I did a terrible thing. Forgive me.

But I can’t. If I keep running, I’ll never have to see him again.

SIMON WAS WORRIED. “YOU WERE SHAKING.”

“It was just a dream,” I said, but my legs were still tingling, my breath was still coming in uneven wisps, as if I had actually been in two places at once, asleep beside Simon and also racing through my grandfather’s eternal punishment, terrified that if I lingered, it might become my own.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not real.”

“What if it is?” I asked.

We both lay awake until morning.

IN THE MORNING I CALLED MY MOM, WHO HAD RETURNED TO
the hospital with Holly. It had been forty-eight hours since anyone had heard from Nathan; no one was answering the phone at the house, and he hadn’t appeared on any family doorsteps. Mom told Holly he was resting, that Simon and I were driving out to pick him up, and Holly had accepted her lies without comment. “She’s just so focused on the baby,” she whispered, but I wondered if Nathan had prepared her, somehow, for his disappearance.

I had only one lead: the yeshiva, which was mysterious even to his family. But first we stopped at the house, pulling into the driveway—right behind Nathan and Holly’s beat-up station wagon.

“Well, that was easy,” Simon said.

“You’re assuming he’s where his car is,” I answered.

“What are you going to say to him?”

“Everything.” I was furious with Nathan, for his apparent abandonment of Holly, but also for embarking on this—whatever, exactly, this would turn out to be—without me.

“Great,” he said. “This should go well.”

The front door was locked, but I still had my keys. We went inside and stood in the dark foyer, listening. I opened the door again and slammed it. Simon jumped, but the rest of the house was silent.

“I’ll look upstairs,” I said. “You look downstairs.”

“But who will guard the door?”

I shot him a look. “Is this funny?”

“No,” he said. “This is the opposite of funny. What am I supposed to say if I find him?”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Not as afraid as I am of you.”

“So why aren’t you downstairs yet?”

We parted. In Eli’s room, the crib looked like an altar. Pages of Hebrew text were scattered on the mattress and stuffed beneath it. The mobile was thick with blue yarn, strung through more slips of paper with black scrawls. If the necklace was there, it was deep inside the psychotic weave, invisible. I left and closed the door behind me.

The first floor was empty, and so I went to look for Simon in the basement. “Hey,” I said, coming down the steps. “Is there a way to disable the station wagon? Not permanently, but so if he shows up again, he doesn’t have a getaway? Hello?” Simon was standing in the middle of the room; all around him, sheets of paper moved in the slight draft as if they were alive.

I had to grasp the railing. I took each step carefully and knelt on the concrete floor. The pages were ragged along one edge, torn from some binding, and scrawled with hasty black strokes. There were multipointed stars, multidimensional cubes, multiarmed trees, multipointed compasses. Some lines dissipated at the edges, the swift stroke of a marker; others were studded with holes where a ballpoint bit through the paper. Nathan had been desperately trying to re-create the Sabbath Light, the same symbol I had been unable to draw myself, but whereas my tattoo was a whim, his work was purposeful; he had invoked the Angel of Losses to protect his son.

Simon was on the floor now too, collecting pages. “There are hundreds of them,” he said. He sat back, squinting at one drawing, and I snatched it out of his hand. It wasn’t his to examine.

“You know what this is,” he guessed. I didn’t know if he recognized the similarity to my tattoo or if he was responding to the territorial way I had taken the paper from him. I didn’t answer.

Inside the car, Simon stared straight ahead. “What are you thinking?”

I had to tell him something—so I explained what had happened the night before the circumcision. Eli exposed to the cold night air. Holly insisting I never speak to Nathan again. Nathan, with dirt on his face. Me, screaming like a madwoman.

“I know how it sounds,” I said. “But I feel responsible for Eli being sick.”

“You know you’re not,” he assured me. “This is one of those things that’s out of our control.”

I said nothing; I let him think I agreed.

We parked across the street from the Berukhim Yeshiva, an orange brick cube and small parking lot settled between a dentist’s office and an accountant’s. Two bearded men with rainbow fringe at their belts stood talking on the lip of pavement along the front of the building. Since they took over the lease, the Penitents had been a mild curiosity in the town, like the Jehovah’s Witness hall or the Masonic Lodge, different but not distressing—but their presence tortured Grandpa. Did he interpret it as a signal from Solomon? I didn’t know what kind of quotidian magic would send the Fellowship here—clipping real estate listings, or whispering “New Jersey” in the Penitents’ dreams.

But there was a hand in it. Maybe Solomon had even diverted Nathan’s path, sending him to the Berukhim Fellowship, and then to Holly too.

Or there was a force greater than the old man—not a heavenly king or divine watchmaker, but the dumb and unstoppable motion that carried the glitch in Grandpa’s DNA through Holly and into her baby, a history that needed no man to write or speak or remember.

A maroon minivan pulled into the lot. I sat up straight, watched it park and expel another black-hatted man. He paused halfway across the parking lot and answered his cell phone, then turned around, drifting back toward the car with the phone at his ear. He stood with his hand on the door, talking for a moment, and then climbed back inside the van. The taillights went on and the car reversed.

“That’s Nathan’s friend,” I said. He had been part of the ceremony I interrupted, one of the three Penitents who stood with dirt on his hands and face, watching silently as I shouted at Nathan. “Follow him.” He passed the high school and turned down a tangle of lanes set with identical twin homes with tan siding, a yard where a group of boys in dress shirts chased one another, shouting cheerfully in Yiddish.

Grandpa, with his perfect American accent, would have understood them.

The minivan pulled up to the curb in the middle of the block, and the driver ran to the door.

“Now what?”

I unsnapped my seat belt. “I’m going in.”

“Okay, Rambo, maybe you should calm down first.”

“I’m calm.” I glared at him. “You know, I really hate that.”

“What?”

“When men tell me to calm down when I’m perfectly calm. I can be calm and angry at the same time.” But I wasn’t angry—I was guilty, for stopping Nathan’s ritual, for failing to uncover Grandpa’s secret sooner, for letting Nathan disappear. I was frightened too, that something terrible would happen to him. That would be my fault as well.

Nathan’s friend was returning to the car, a paper bag in his hand. I jumped out of the passenger seat and ran across the empty street. “Hey!” I shouted. The man stopped halfway down the walk, his eyes wide. “Where is he?” I demanded. The man looked at me, and then beyond me—Simon was crossing the street to join us. “Hey!” I clapped my hands twice in the space between us. “I’m asking you a question.”

The children in the neighbor’s yard stopped their game, instinctively moving closer to one another, watching me. One ran into the house.

“Who?” the man mumbled, not meeting my eyes.

“You know who—”

“I’m sorry,” Simon interrupted, laying a hand on my shoulder. “We were just, uh, driving by, and Marjorie thought she recognized you—you’re a friend of Nathan’s?”

The front door opened, and a young woman with a toddler on her hip came to the threshold. “Aaron?” she called, and took a tentative step outside. Another toddler—a girl—followed, her hands on her mother’s skirt. Suddenly my voice was gone. I wanted to shout at the woman,
Come with me! Get all of your children and I’ll help you leave. I’ll help you start again.
But why should I think that? They looked happy—a happy family.