Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(57)

“Wow.”

“Yeah. There are a lot of stories like that. Like Dev—if you want a good story, you should write about her. They took her daughter away when she left. She can’t even see her now. Seriously. Which is why this place is great. And Rivka knew that. She was all about making this a sacred space. That’s what she called it. She wasn’t here a lot. She had kids and a whole big family. But in the last few months I bet I saw her here a couple times a week. Eating lunch with Baruch, or on the computer. She spent a lot of time on the computer. I’m pretty sure they didn’t have one at her house. Even though they were rich. We don’t have one at my house either. There used to be some at the Borough Park library, but they broke and never got fixed.”

It’s a relief to talk to Suri. She knows I’m a reporter and she doesn’t care. She sees me as a person first, a peer. At Chaya’s apartment, I felt like an intruder, afraid her husband would come home and chase me out like Aron Mendelssohn had. But here, I am welcome. Suri might be hiding out here in Coney Island, but she is not afraid. She has made decisions about how she will live her life and she trusts herself enough to follow through on them. Even if they mean that her only sanctuary is a dingy row house with filthy carpet and strangers standing in for family. She and Dev seem to have a kind of friendship, but even I can tell that at the core, they are very different young women brought together by the accident of their birth and the curse of a restless spirit.

Aviva had to make the same decisions. So did Rivka Mendelssohn, but Rivka had so much more to lose. Suri is just a girl. Aviva was just a girl. But Rivka was a married woman, a mother. She knew that continuing to come to Coney Island, to see Baruch, to deceive her husband and expose her children to her rapidly unraveling faith was not behavior that came without consequences. Could she have imagined she’d pay with her life? Could anyone?

“Rivka told me once that she was jealous of me,” says Suri. “I offered her some pot and she said no. She said she wanted to try it—Baruch smokes—but she was too frightened. She said coming here, uncovering her hair, and being with Baruch, that these were things she could explain to her children once they got older. But not drugs. She was very afraid of things like that. Things that she thought would make her look like a bad mother. Sara Wyman asked her to speak at a chulent over the summer, but she wouldn’t do it. She said that if her husband found out she was speaking in public, in front of men, that he would not tolerate it.”

I pull out my notebook.

“Is it okay if I take notes?” I ask.

Suri nods.

“What do you mean, he would not tolerate it?”

Suri shrugs. “He would take her children away. And her home. Which is pretty much all she had.”

Suri pauses and looks out the window. “I can’t believe she’s dead. Maybe she was right to be afraid. Do you think her husband could have killed her?”

“I really don’t know,” I say.

“She didn’t love him, but I don’t think he ever beat her or raped her.…”

“Raped her?”

“Forced her to have sex, I mean. In a frum home, a wife is expected to be available for sex at any moment—unless she’s on her period. It’s really jarring because, when you’re a girl, they tell you that you have to cover yourself from head to toe so you don’t tempt or distract boys. You don’t speak to males you are not related to, and you certainly don’t touch them. Then you get married and it’s like, virgin to farm animal overnight. And if you don’t actually like your husband, let alone love him…” Suri shudders.

“Did Rivka ever love her husband?”

“I don’t know,” says Suri. “Maybe once. But she was definitely thinking about leaving him. She used to go online and look at apartments. She showed me pictures of one in Queens. Or maybe Long Island. She said it had three bedrooms.”

“She and Baruch were always looking at places to live,” says Dev, coming back into the room, carrying an envelope. “She showed me an apartment in Miami once.”

“Miami!” says Suri.

“She was just pretending,” says Dev.

“Pretending?” I ask.

“She was never going to leave,” says Dev. “She was stringing Baruch along.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” says Suri. “Just because she’s not the same as you doesn’t mean she’s not serious.”

“She was too serious, that’s what I’m saying. She could be a bitch.”

“Dev!” Suri looks at me. “She doesn’t mean that. Dev, why are you saying that?”

“She pretended to be nice to me,” says Dev. “But she said shit about me behind my back to Baruch.”

“She was worried about you!” Suri looks at me again. “Please don’t write this down. Dev disappeared for, like, two weeks.”

“I didn’t disappear. I just didn’t tell Rivka and Baruch where I was. Anyway, here.” She hands me the envelope full of photographs. “Those are pictures of Rivka.”

I stretch open the envelope and there she is. Alive. Laughing as she sits at a picnic table in the woods. Her eyes are squeezed closed and her head is thrown back. A baby is in her lap and it’s done something she thinks is hysterical. Her smile is enormous. She has a long neck and rosy cheeks. Her hair is pulled up beneath a wrap like the one Miriam was wearing Friday night. In another, she is unsmiling in a frilly wedding dress; a lace collar brushes her chin. In another, she is a student; a teenager. Buttoned up and posed; a shy, crooked smile. She is wearing a black headband with a tiny black satin bow holding back her dark brown hair. It isn’t until I see her here that I realize I had been picturing her with red hair. Like me and Aviva.