Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(29)

“I’m sorry, Rebekah,” Saul says finally.

“It’s okay,” I say, wiping my nose. “You didn’t owe us anything.”





CHAPTER NINE





AVIVA


I got back to the house in Coney Island before the sun broke the horizon. The front door was open and I smelled brewing coffee inside. I walked toward the back of the house and there was Saul Katz in the kitchen, wearing a blue police uniform and reading a newspaper spread across the counter. His black belt and boots shined. He’d cut his hair short and lost weight since I’d seen him last, and he seemed to stand up straighter. He didn’t hear me come in, and I stood in the doorway watching him for a few seconds. He was probably thirty or thirty-one years old then. Ten years older than me. The girl I borrowed the skirt from had told me that Saul recently left his wife and child and been shunned by his family and hers. But he was a success. He was up early, preparing to go to work protecting the city. Why was I incapable of such a thing? Was it because I was a woman? Or was it because I was weak?

“Saul,” I said finally.

He looked up, and when our eyes met we both smiled. I couldn’t help it. I was so happy to see a man who knew me and did not hate me.

“Aviva!” he exclaimed, leaning forward, looking me up and down.

“It’s nice to see you,” I said. And I remember that I meant it. I’ll never forget how his eyes shone. They twinkled just like your father’s did when I told him I would come live with him in Florida. I had been so powerful then. The way Saul looked at me in that pre-daylight kitchen made me feel powerful again. But by then, I sensed it wouldn’t last.

“And you!” he said. “Where have you been?”

“Florida,” I said.

He shook his head, amused. “You went with Brian.”

I nodded. “And after a while I stayed with my cousin Gitty,” I said. “In Maryland.”

“You are well? Where is Brian?”

“Brian is in Florida,” I said, leaving out the information he was really asking for. “You are a policeman now?”

Saul smiled again and patted the NYPD patch on his shoulder. “I am. I work in Crown Heights.”

“Do you like it?”

“I love it,” he said. “I meet so many people.”

“You look very happy,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. But he could not say the same thing about me. “I am so sorry about your mother, Aviva. Is that why you returned?”

I shook my head. “I only just learned that she died,” I said. “If I had known I would have come back sooner.” What I did not say, but what he probably knew, was that it was my fault. I left no way for them to contact me. No one knew I planned to leave because at the time it had seemed very important to keep our “Florida adventure” a secret. To speak of it, I foolishly imagined, might bring bad luck.

“Do you need a place to stay?” he asked. “There is room.”

“I am moving to Israel,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Soon?”

I nodded. “Eli and my father do not want me here for Diny’s wedding.”

“Why Israel?”

“I am to live with family.”

Saul looked puzzled. “What will you do there?”

“What else? Find a husband.” My voice was flat. All the anger and loss I felt screaming at Eli had fossilized inside me as I walked through the night.

“Is that what you want?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Aviva,” he said. “You have friends here. You have choices.”

I stared at him, blinking, hearing the words but not thinking that they applied to me. It was actually a good feeling, the hardness. If I could hold on to it, I thought, I could keep steady.

“Will you stay here today at least? There is a kugel in the refrigerator. And two empty beds. You can’t have slept. I will be home in the afternoon. We can talk.”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “We’ve missed you. Your spirit and your questions. There are more of us, Aviva. I think you could help the new ones. You could tell them about your experience. Good or bad. It makes no difference. Just that window into another life, that it can’t kill you.”

I did not say anything. I did not say, But Saul, it almost killed me.

“Go upstairs. Take a shower if you like. There are linens in the bathroom. Rest.”

After Saul left, I went upstairs. There were four bedrooms in the house, each not much bigger than a closet, all along a narrow hallway. The summer before we left for Florida, your father and I slept together in the room closest to the bathroom. The one with the window that looked over the little concrete backyard. We slept together on a single bed, never exactly comfortable, but so happy to be exactly where we were: together, naked, free. Intoxicated not just by each other but the circumstance, the fact that the long afternoons and sleepless nights seemed to be for nothing but our pleasure. Since I had last been there, the room had been transformed from a flop pad to a true bedroom. Three black-and-white framed photographs hung in a row on the wall across from the neatly made bed: one of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of a placid lake scene—upstate, probably—and one of three old men on the Coney Island boardwalk, standing with their backs to the camera, looking out onto the ocean. There was a small table with a lamp atop it and a fresh coat of pale blue paint on the walls. Everything was clean—even the thin carpet. I closed the door and took off my coat and shoes and then lay down. The morning sun was just beginning to come through the window as I closed my eyes.