Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(40)

“You’ll think about what I said?” he asks.

Which part? I think. The part where there’s a dead woman no one cares about except for the two of us? The part where there are two police departments? Or the part where I’m 100 percent in over my f*cking head?

I get out of the car without answering.

“Rebekah,” he says, “I think your mother would be very proud of you.”

Fantastic, I think, as I slam the door shut. Just what I need.





CHAPTER SEVEN


Within ten minutes of walking in the door. I am asleep in my clothes. I wake up sweating at midnight. I turn my face toward the window and look at the street. We face west. It occurs to me that if there were no obstructions, no brick warehouses or apartment buildings or train tracks, I’d be able to see the scrap yard from my bed. The scrap yard that has become the center of my life.

At 2 A.M. I wake up again and see light beneath my bedroom door. I roll out of bed and squint down the hall and into the living room. Iris is on the couch watching Days of Our Lives, which she records every day and watches on the weekends. There is a pizza box on the coffee table. I open the box and pick up two slices, then carry them to the microwave on the counter.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“I slept mostly,” she says. “Then had dinner with one of the girls from work. How was your day?”

“Saul took me to see her body.” Iris doesn’t say much as I tell her, in disjointedly chronological order, about the funeral and Malka and the pregnant girl with the note, and Yakov and Miriam and Shomrim. She sits cross-legged, looking at me the whole time, her face twisting into an evolving series of what the f*ck expressions. I do fine recounting everything until I get to Rivka’s body, which I leave for last.

“It looked like she’d been attacked by animals,” I say, suddenly out of breath. My chest feels like someone is sitting on it. “I guess, where the pieces of scrap got her.”

“I can’t believe you saw a dead body today.”

I shake my head and inhale deeply. Twice. A third time. Iris hands me the glass of water she’s been drinking from. I drink. This feels different than the kind of panics I get that make my stomach hurt. This comes from my lungs and my throat, not my intestines. It’s hard to breathe.

“You want a pill?” asks Iris.

I nod. Iris goes into my room and brings back the bottle of lorazepam. She fills a glass of water at the sink, shakes out a little white pill, and hands it to me. I drink. When I first consented to be prescribed anxiety meds I noticed that the moment I took a pill I felt a little calmer. My doctor had said that even knowing I had them around if I needed them might help, and she was right.

“So what did he say about your mom?”

“He said her family moved upstate about twenty years ago.”

“Wow,” whispers Iris. “That’s close.”

“I know.” Iris was pretty crushed after her mom died, and we spent a lot of time crying and talking, mostly while intoxicated, about how helpless we felt, and how screwed up adults were and how we were gonna make our lives better. One of those nights we floated the idea of New York. Back then, I was battling urges to go find my mom. I’m an adult now, I thought. I could. Sophomore year, I considered doing a spring-break-long pilgrimage to Brooklyn as the final project for my creative nonfiction seminar. But I chickened out when I realized I’d have to explain what I was doing to my dad, and didn’t think I could bear the conversation. Eventually that lack of action hardened into a decision against action. New York, however, remained. I remember telling Iris, as the fantasy became a plan, that being in New York put me in a position where she could find me.

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said she went to Israel for a few years after she left us. He seemed to think she was sort of sent there,” I say, realizing I haven’t really thought about his story. “He said he’d heard rumors that she, like, had substance issues, but he thought maybe she was mentally unstable. Like, possibly depressed. And obviously getting no treatment.”

“Maybe she had anxiety, too,” says Iris.

Somehow, it had never occurred to me that her erratic behavior—leaving one life, then leaving another—might have been caused by chemicals misfiring in her brain. Getting help when anxiety started to turn me into a different person was just a matter of walking to student health services. Not so easy in her world.

“Maybe she was just a runner,” I say. “Things get bad, you leave. Saul said he thought she was weak. He also said he thinks I’m smarter than she was. And that she’d be proud of me.”

“That must be weird.”

I love Iris. She may be into makeup and lotions, but when you talk to her, she focuses on the details that matter, and she’s quick to put herself in your shoes. I make an ugly face indicating that, yes, it is indeed very weird to suddenly have a direct line to my mom.

“It sounds like he knew her pretty well,” she says.

“I know. But when we were talking about it, he was pretty vague.”

Iris nods.

“So, I need to figure out what to do here,” I say.

“Do you think you could really help?”

“I don’t know. I mean, Saul clearly thinks so.”

“But who is Saul, exactly?”