Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(35)

“I wonder if you know if Rivka was … unhappy,” I ask. She looks puzzled. “Because I spoke with a woman who said…”

“A woman?”

“Just, a woman at the funeral.” Another thing I have to be careful of, revealing sources. “I didn’t actually get her name.”

Miriam’s face, if it’s possible, becomes sadder. Her chin sinks closer to her neck and she closes her eyes, almost wincing. “There is so much talking,” she whispers. “That is how the women are. Their children, they are not enough. Their husbands, they are not enough. They are always talking.”

“What kind of talking?”

Miriam shakes her head. “Horrible things. Lies. That is what killed her. The lies.”

I bring my voice down very low. “What were they saying?”

Miriam puts her finger to her lips. I wait, but she doesn’t continue.

“Have you spoken to the police?” I ask her.

“No. I have nothing to say. I do not gossip.”

“You never know what might help,” I say. “Sometimes little stuff, like the last time you saw her. Or, where she liked to go, that sort of thing.” I’m kind of talking out of my ass here. I’ve never been privy to a murder investigation that wasn’t on Law & Order. I want to ask again if she’s safe, but I stop myself because I wouldn’t know what I’d say if she said no.

“The service was very crowded,” I say.

“I’m glad,” she says.

“Were you there?”

“No,” she says. “It was … too much.”

That’s the same thing Mrs. Shoenstein said about why Chaya didn’t go. Too much.

“Is there anything else about her you could tell me?” I ask, figuring I should at least try to get a quote I can give the desk. “Was she … had she been acting differently at all?”

Miriam’s eyes wander toward the back gate.

I repeat my question and Miriam pulls her eyes slowly back to me. But she says nothing.

“Because, you said you hadn’t seen her since Tuesday? I just wonder if…”

“I am not certain about the dates.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay. Well, is there anything you could tell me? What did she like to do? Did she…” I’m flailing around for examples of activities, but everything that comes to mind—movies, sports, adventure travel—seems culturally inappropriate. “Did she like to read? Or … cook?”

Nothing. It’s almost as if she doesn’t hear me.

I lower my voice. “I heard … I was told she’d lost a baby recently.”

Miriam shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s indicating that, no, she did not lose a baby, or yes, and it was very sad.

“Thank you,” she says finally. She begins walking toward the back gate. “Rivka would have liked you.” She opens the gate. Apparently it is time for me to go. “She liked to talk.” And with that, Miriam turns and walks back into the house. I stay in the yard for a moment. Once again, I forgot to ask her last name. Maybe Saul can help with that.

*

I get to the Starbucks before Saul and pull out The Oprah Magazine while I wait. When I open it, a piece of paper slips out. It is a handwritten note.

Chaya,

I know you are frightened. I was frightened after becoming engaged. I think most of us are frightened. But I cannot answer your questions about whether your marriage will be a happy one. I married because it hadn’t seemed possible to do otherwise. I know now that I always had a choice. Had I chosen not to accept Aron’s proposal, my life would have become more difficult in many ways. I do not know where I would have lived, but now I know that I would have lived.

What does this life mean to you, Chaya? Why do you pull on your stockings in July? What do you feel when you pray? I wish I had asked myself these questions when I was 18. Hashem can see the truth inside your heart. And I now believe that to defy that truth is to defy Hashem. Your choices may cause pain before they bring joy, but no joy can come from lies. Especially lies you tell yourself.

Yours always,

Rivka


I read the note again. The handwriting is a mix of print and cursive. Flourishes on the y’s and f’s, but otherwise utilitarian. The paper is thin and pink, the kind of paper I wrote notes to my friends on when I was eleven years old. Not notes like this, though. This note is more honest than any note I’ve ever written. And judging by its soft, easy crease, Chaya read it often. My dad used to tell me stories about my mom as if she were a character in a fairy tale. Like most suburban girls growing up in the 1990s, I learned about sex young. I was nine when our Girl Scout troop went to Planned Parenthood to learn about ovaries and sperm. I learned the rest sporadically from Madonna songs and Maury Povich and maybe someone’s mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had several years for the act itself to morph from mildly horrifying to potentially cool, and several years after that to actually get involved in doing it. Not my mother. My mother, my father said, learned about sex only in whispers. And then one day her best friend, a girl named Naomi, became engaged to a man in his twenties. Naomi was seventeen, and my mother was sixteen; neither had ever traveled farther than the Catskills. Her interaction with men was limited to family. And suddenly, Naomi was to be married. Which meant sex. My mother, my father said, stayed with her the night before her wedding. Naomi was sick with dread. She knew not to expect love, but when she’d met her fiance, she told my mother, he made her stomach turn. Your mother, said my father, vowed she would not find herself in Naomi’s position. She was not ready to run away then, my father said, but she was planning. She knew that the best way to postpone an engagement was to make herself undesirable to a potential groom’s family. That was the word he used, “undesirable.” When he came to this part of the story, I always pictured my mother burping in public, or parading around in dirty clothes. That’s what undesirable meant to me: ugly, unladylike. But that’s not what my mother did. What my mother did was start reading—and asking questions. Word got around, and it bought her some time.