Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(72)

But Miriam, it occurs to me, was not at all emotional. Not until now. And now it’s the wrong emotion. Miriam is not sad—she is seething.

“What do you think of this?” she asks, breathing heavily. She comes closer to me. “What do you think of a mother who betrays her family? For sex.”

“Sex?…”

“When she told me, she was happy. Happy to be shaming her family and her husband. Her children.”

Her face changes again, now to an expression of extreme distaste, like she’s just eaten a mouthful of shit.

“‘Miriam,’ she said”—her voice is thick with sarcasm—“‘Miriam, I wish you could find this love. You would understand that it must be Hashem speaking to me. It must.’”

“You were close, then…,” I stammer. “She trusted you?”

“Why are you not writing this down?” She flicks her cigarette at my face. It’s just a butt now, but it hits below my right eye and stings. “Rivka betrayed her family. She was greedy and she was a zona and she deserved to die.”

I am afraid that if I turn away, I will provoke her. This is a woman with a mental illness, I remind myself. A woman who has been mistreated. Like the men and women who mutter and pace and shout in the subway late at night, she is unpredictable. One wrong look, and suddenly I become a demon to be slain. I need to say the right thing, I need to remain calm, and I need to leave the garage.

“Miriam,” I say, stepping backward toward the door, “I think maybe…”

Miriam grabs a card table chair and swings it at me. I turn toward the door, but before I can take two steps the sharp end of one of the chair’s aluminum legs connects with the side of my skull. I stumble sideways and land on my hands and knees.

“What do you think, Rivka?” hisses Miriam, standing over me as I try to get up, her voice an echo in my ears. My head is sparkling with pain. “Don’t you think that is a good story?”

I look up and see she is holding something else. The table lamp from the plastic bin. I lift my hand to her, and just as the base end comes down on my head, I think, this is gonna hurt.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


When I come to, I am sitting, and the first sensation I recognize is great thirst. Something is stuffed in my mouth, holding it wide open. I try to swallow and I start to choke. It feels like my tongue might fall back down my throat. My jaw is sore, the corners of my mouth pulled taut. There is something cold and wet itching in my left ear. I try to lift my hand to wipe it away, but my hand—both my hands—are tied behind my back with something coarse that is digging into my skin. Twine, maybe. My feet are tied, too, each to one leg of the chair I’m sitting in. Miriam is sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor. She has the contents of my purse laid out in front of her and she is browsing through my wallet, sliding my debit card, my Visa, my Florida driver’s license, out of their little pockets. I have no idea how long I’ve been in this garage. There are no windows.

I watch Miriam for what seems like at least a few minutes before she looks up.

“Rebekah,” she says, turning my license toward me. “Rebekah is Rivka. Rivka is a pretty name. Prettier than Miriam.”

She picks up my plastic bottle of anti-anxiety pills and shakes it, smiling.

“I know this,” she says. “This is for when you get too upset. Too…” She waves her hands around. “I have lots of this. I have other pills, too. All kinds. Blue and pink and white and yellow. Big ones and little ones and sometimes I take them when I’m not supposed to. Do you ever do that?” She is talking very fast. “Sometimes I take too many. Rivka always counts my pills. ‘Miriam, Miriam.’ She likes to say my name because it makes her prettier. We are not sisters, you know. I was the one who asked Tatti to take her in, when her mommy died and her crazy father was crazy. Then we were like sisters. We did things girls do. Silly things. What did we know? She did not really know me, Rivka.” She giggles. “You are Rivka.”

Miriam bows her head forward and pulls off her wig. What is underneath looks much like what was above, but messier, frizzier, streaked with gray. She puts the wig on the ground and fluffs up her hair.

“Itchy,” she says.

She is still holding the pill bottle. She is also holding a pair of scissors.

I try to say “Miriam,” but the sound that comes out is just a grunt. A quiet grunt. The sidewalk isn’t fifteen feet from the wall of the garage, but grunts at that pitch aren’t going to bring anybody running.

Miriam twists open the cap of the pill bottle and shakes the ten or twelve pills that are left into her palm.

“I can take some?” she asks. But she’s not really asking. She smiles and then nods, and says, “Yes. I feel very anxious. Do you know that word? That is the word they call it. My mind is spinning. I should take some.”

Miriam takes an empty plastic bottle from the recycle bin and goes to the far corner to fill it at the slop sink. I need to get the scissors away from her. Without those scissors I can survive. The weak spot is my feet. They’re tied, but not as well as my hands. She used electrical cord. If I can slip one leg out, I can probably use my foot to push the cord off the other leg, and then I have motion.

“Rivka was very devout when we were girls,” says Miriam once she’s filled the bottle. “We used to talk about our wedding day. And our husbands. We hoped we would marry a man who studied Torah all day. A man who devoted his life to Hashem.”