Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(15)

“Eli!” I cried.

“Aviva, please come home,” he said. “Mommy is dead, Aviva. And we have a new brother.”





CHAPTER SIX





REBEKAH


When I wake up, Iris has already left for work. I open my laptop and find Pessie’s story six headlines down inside the News section.



ROSEVILLE MAN ACCUSES COPS, COMMUNITY OF IGNORING WIFE’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH

By Rebekah Roberts

The family of an upstate mother whose body was found in her bathtub is accusing local police of ignoring her mysterious death.

“I have no doubt that Pessie was killed,” says Levi Goldin, 28, of Roseville.

“I do not know why the Roseville police are uninterested in Pessie’s death. And I do not know why her community seems to have already forgotten her.”

Goldin told the Tribune that on the day of her death, his wife was supposed to take their son to the doctor but did not show up and stopped answering her phone. When he got home he found his wife in the bathtub and the child screaming, strapped into his car seat in the living room.

Pessie was born in Brooklyn but her family moved to Rockland County when she was a child.

Roseville police chief John Gregory declined to comment on the case.

I click into Facebook and see that I have a message from someone named Dov Lowenstein.

Hi! I’m SO glad you are trying to find out what happened to Pessie! We grew up together and she was the nicest girl in the world. No WAY she killed herself. Thank you thank you thank you!

I click into Dov’s Facebook page and see that he has more than a thousand “friends.” His profile picture depicts him in short shorts, waving an Israeli flag at some kind of parade. I write back immediately.

Thanks for reaching out! I’d love to interview you about Pessie. Do you have time to chat today?

Moments later, a message pops up.

I’ll be in Brooklyn tonight speaking at a chulent on Ocean Pkway. Wanna come? We can talk after.

He includes a link to a Facebook event page. Fifty people have already RSVPed saying they will attend. According to the invitation, the event begins at 10:00 P.M. and is BYOB.

I Google “chulent” and discover that it’s a traditional Jewish stew made with beans and potatoes and onions and meat that takes twelve hours to cook. It is also the word used to describe, as the Web site NeoHasid puts it, “a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world, whether in spirit, mind or body, along with their allies and friends.”

I message Dov back saying I’ll be there, then I send Iris a text asking if she’ll come with me. While I wait to hear from her, I click back to the event invite. It appears to be sponsored by a group called OTDinNYC. I click onto their Facebook page, which is open, and see that there are 978 people in the group. A long post in the “About” section lays out the rules of the group, which include refraining from personal attacks and “outing” people who have joined with fake names (“Mikveh Mouse” and “Shtetl Gretel”). The administrator is a woman named Chasi Herzog. She describes the group as a place for off-the-derech and OTD-curious to share, connect, question, and find support and advice. The most recent post is from someone named Ben Silver who asks: “Do you still plan on marrying Jewish?” He posted less than twenty minutes ago and there are already nineteen comments. Further down, a woman named Shimra Reich posted, “If you had a dollar for every person you’ve had sex with, what could you buy?” There are more than a hundred comments. One person named Yisrael Greenberg wrote: “A Ferrari!” sparking a series of comments about STDs and whether oral sex counted. Another, named Hindy Levin, wrote: “A cup of coffee—and not at Starbucks!” Her post was met with approving remarks about honesty, sexual repression in the Haredi world, and invitations to fill her wallet, so to speak. There is a post saying “Like this status if you were thrown out of yeshiva!” There are 235 likes and fifty-eight comments recounting skirmishes over skirt-length, smuggled magazines, OTD siblings, and insufficiently pious parents.

Iris texts back saying that she’s up for the chulent. I tell her I’ll try to leave work early and meet her at home, then we’ll go together. I turn on the shower and undress. For the first few days and weeks after I lost all my hair, I was surprised every time I dipped my head back into the stream of water. I felt the hair that wasn’t there. I’m getting used to it now. Iris encourages me to “play up the look” with big earrings and more makeup, but there’s something interesting about being, well, less pretty than I have been most of my life. I feel like it’s making me stronger; like that little happiness I’d get when I looked in the mirror before all this was a false, or at least a shallow, psychological bump. And now that I don’t have it, I have to find something else, something more substantial, to look for in my reflection.

Ten minutes before I have to leave for my shift I try Aviva again. Again, her number goes straight to voice mail: This mailbox is full. The user is not accepting new messages. This time, the automated message pisses me off.

“Really, Aviva?” I actually say out loud to the empty apartment. “You’re gonna play me like that? Clean out your f*cking in-box.”

It’s a slow news day, so once I plunk out my assigned stories (Staten Island state representative’s son arrested for domestic assault; another crane incident at the luxury condo going up on Fifty-seventh Street; gang-related shooting on the B31 bus in Brooklyn) I Google Dov Lowenstein. Dov, I discover, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a group called New Hope, an organization of unlicensed “therapists” who purport to turn gay Jews into straight Jews. The Trib actually did a story about the lawsuit last year when it was filed. Dov is quoted as saying that the people running the group are frauds who prey on Jewish parents desperate to “fix” their gay children.