Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(22)

I send an e-mail to the Trib’s library asking for a background search on Sam Kagan and Ryan Hall. I add that they likely live—or lived—upstate. And then I go back to Facebook and do what I have done several times over the past five years: I search for Aviva Kagan. But none of the Aviva Kagans that come up match. They are too young or too old. Probably, I know, she married, and has a new last name. Or maybe she never joined Facebook. I pick up my phone and scroll to the number I’ve been told is hers. I know it by heart now. I will die with this phone number planted, roots deep, in my brain. Maybe it is all I will ever know of her. I press CREATE NEW CONTACT and enter just a first name: Mom.





CHAPTER SEVEN





AVIVA


When I returned to Borough Park my mother had been dead for almost half a year. She was forty-seven and Sammy was breach. Something went wrong during the delivery—no one ever told me what, exactly. She never got to hold her ninth child. Eli and his new wife were already living in the apartment above my mother and father, so they took the baby. My father was not equipped to care for an infant. My sister Diny was engaged, and my two teenage brothers were studying in Israel. Only Sara, who was eight, and Chasi, who was twelve, still needed looking after, and Chasi could mostly look after Sara.

I took the bus from Ocean City to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan. Eli came to meet me at the house in Coney Island where I’d spent nights with your father. I tried to hug him when I answered the door but he stepped back. He was furious that I was wearing pants. He lectured me for a long time. He said making shidduch for Diny had been nearly impossible because of me. He said her fiancé had no sense and that we would have to support them because his family was poor and that Diny’s job at the grocery would barely pay their rent. He said the only way for my sisters, and now little baby Sam, to avoid the same fate was for me to move away and marry as quickly as possible.

I think of it now, and I see that Eli was still practically a boy then, just twenty-two years old. But he was also a man with a pregnant wife, a dead mother, and an infant brother to raise. He told me that after I called he’d hoped I would come home and help him take care of the family.

“But I see now I was mistaken,” he said. “You disrespect me the moment you see me. You disrespect Hashem.”

I looked down at my hands in my lap, at my pants, and tears began to form in my eyes. He had no idea what the past year and a half had been like for me, and he had no desire to know. He just wanted me to help him make his life easier. I asked if he had told my sisters that I telephoned. He had not.

“How do I know what kind of ideas you are going to give them, Aviva? How can I let them see you?”

I remember thinking, I should be very angry at the way he is treating me. I wish now I had shouted back, Let me?! Let me see my family? The outrage rose inside me, but it was not a rocket like it had been before. I was so tired, Rebekah. So much had gone so wrong. I had failed at creating a life away from Borough Park. This, it seemed in that moment, was what mattered. What I really thought about his stupid hat and beard or my sisters’ shidduch or dressing tznius didn’t matter if I could not survive without them. And when I think back now, I know it did not matter to Eli, either. Now I know he did not expect me to believe everything we did was meaningful. He did not believe it all himself, but he couldn’t tell me that. He couldn’t tell anybody. That was part of how it worked.

I asked him what I had to do. He said I should stay by Coney Island until he made some calls.

“Can I see the baby?” I asked.

Eli said he would be in touch. The next day, he called and asked me to come watch Sammy while his wife, Penina, prepared my family’s apartment for Shabbos dinner with Diny’s fiancé’s parents. I borrowed a skirt and stockings from one of the girls staying by the house and took the subway to Borough Park. It was noon, and the streets were full of people shopping and running errands before sundown. I felt like I was watching them from far away. It was so familiar—the sound of men and women speaking in Yiddish, the train rattling above New Utrecht Avenue, the Hebrew lettering in the store windows—but it was as if I wasn’t really there. I was almost surprised when a woman ran into me with her stroller. I felt as though she should have been able to pop me like a soap bubble and keep walking home. You do not matter, Aviva, I told myself. This all goes on without you.

Eli met me at the end of our block and secreted me up the back staircase to the third-floor apartment. For as long as I can remember, the apartment was used as temporary housing for family visiting from Israel. My father’s cousin Ezra stayed there by his wife and their twin sons for several years when he and my father were starting their business. After that, my mother’s cousin Yankel stayed for a year while he worked for a company that exported Torah scrolls. Now, the apartment was my brother Eli’s. Penina greeted me with a shy smile. She was nineteen years old, and eight months pregnant, padding around in wool socks. Penina and I had been in the same school, but she was a year behind me and I did not know her well. She was cooking chicken soup and the apartment smelled wonderful. She took me into the bedroom where Sammy lay in the same white crib all the children in our family had slept in. He was just a little bigger than you were when I left and I felt that same squeeze in my heart when I looked at him. Could I start again, I wondered. Could I take care of little Sammy? Could I give him what I could not give you? Eli left and Penina went downstairs and I spent the day with Sammy. He had more hair than you did, and his was lighter. He had a pink birthmark on his left shoulder blade in the shape of a smile. I fed him and held him and sang to him all afternoon. In Florida, I read you the books your father and your grandparents said were “classics,” books about bunnies and moons, but there were no baby books in Eli and Penina’s apartment. I told Sammy about you, and I asked him if he thought it would be better for him if I stayed in Brooklyn or went away. What is better, I asked him, a sister who is absent, or a sister who is a problem? Because even then, I knew that if I stayed I would never be able to do what Eli wanted. Not for long, anyway. What kind of man will you become? I asked Sammy. Will you be pious? Will you be afraid? Will you be wise? I remember thinking that I did not want him to become like Eli and my father if he didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to spoil him for this world, either, if that was how he wished to live.