Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(35)

“Okay,” I say, scribbling my name and e-mail and cell number on a piece of my notebook paper. “Were you able to run that plate?”

“Um, no. I think it’s a different database.”

Everything about our interaction has changed. Whatever came up on the plate search spooked him, and now he wants me out of his office.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says.





CHAPTER ELEVEN





AVIVA


I landed at JFK Airport late at night. It had been twelve hours in the air and several sleepless nights preparing to leave Jerusalem. Etan wanted children; that was expected after we married. I was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine. He taught history at a yeshiva to boys who were just before bar mitzvah; they were still children in many ways, but Etan said that their minds were ready to take on serious ideas about the world. Etan had a lot of serious ideas about the world. Two months after we married we put on our gas masks and went to the roof to watch the missiles Saddam Hussein sent over. I did not love him, but like so many of the Israelis I met, he was passionate, and I trusted that he would be kind to me. I imagined I would have boyfriends, and I did. I agreed to marry because I could not bear living with my father’s brother and his wife any longer, but I was afraid to live without my family’s support. If I married Etan, his parents would give us an apartment in the Old City. Etan would teach and I would have babies. Until then, I would do for money what I had done in Florida: clean house.

I did not tell him about you, and I did not tell him that I was terrified of becoming pregnant again. I had never felt fear as strong as the fear I felt when I lay in bed and imagined becoming a mother again. I knew I would fail, and that my failing would spread misery. I had already left you and your father in the wake of my weakness; Etan would be disappointed, but he would be better off. I got the prescription from a Christian doctor, an American from New Jersey who was living in Israel while his wife wrote her dissertation. He was a nice man. After two years, I told Etan the doctor said I couldn’t have babies, and he believed me. He could have asked me for a divorce then. His parents encouraged him to, but he thought that the righteous thing was to honor his commitment to his wife. He would help create a new generation for Israel as a teacher, not a father. But then he found the plastic disk of pills. They must have fallen out of my pocketbook. I had become careless, I suppose. Perhaps I wanted him to find them; perhaps I was finished with our life together. Or perhaps I just did not care either way. That evening he confronted me.

“Why are you taking these pills?” he asked as I walked into the front door of our little apartment. He came toward me, his eyes wide, waving the little pink case. “How long have you been taking these pills?”

I did not have an immediate answer. I hesitated.

“Aviva!”

“Not too long.”

“I don’t believe you.”

What could I say? I do not lie well. I omit, but I rarely lie. He left the apartment and did not return until morning. He said that he wanted a divorce. He said that he was still young enough to have children and that he wanted a wife who wanted to give them to him. I know he felt betrayed. He also felt foolish. He had turned his embrace of my infertility into a kind of martyrdom, and now he saw that I had duped him. I asked him what he would tell people, and he said he didn’t know.

“Tell them I was having an affair,” I said.

“I might.”

The terminal was empty when my plane landed. In the bathroom at the gate I changed into jeans and uncovered my hair, and at the luggage pickup I became a young American woman back from traveling abroad, not a sneaky frum failure. I took a taxi to the house in Coney Island, praying on the way that it was still a place for me. I imagined Saul in the kitchen. The front door was open and the people living there were asleep. I set my bags in the living room and walked to the beach. There had been changes in New York since I left. The Twin Towers had fallen only a month before. We watched them crumble from the television in the tiny triangle of a café on the corner of our street in Jerusalem. I remember that I’d thought about all the times I snuck into Manhattan as a child. I understood the grid, but the streets below Houston did not conform, and when I needed a marker to tell me where north and south and east and west were, I looked for the towers. What did people look for now?

I sat in the sand with my knees pulled to my chest. It was warm for October, and as I listened to the shuffle and fizz of the black waves sliding in, I thought about you. I had watched the American girls when I saw them in Jerusalem, on tours with their parents or a school group. I looked for you. I wondered if you’d been told about me. And if so, what you’d been told. I hoped that what I’d done hadn’t hardened your father. He was such a loving man. His loving felt strange to me, but to you, I hoped, it would feel natural. I hoped you would always know what love felt like. I hoped you would feel it enough for both of us.

Saul no longer lived by the house in Coney Island. The two semipermanent residents were Yael, a woman from Crown Heights fighting an ugly custody battle over her three children, and a young man named Isaac who grew up in Williamsburg. Isaac was twenty and gay, and unlike Yael, who was always running off to meet a lawyer or see her children, Isaac had nothing to do, so we quickly became close. He took me downtown to see where the towers had been, and on Thanksgiving we served food to the men and women working on the piles. Before I left, New York had seemed to me such a rigid, angry place. Everyone fighting to get where they were going, everyone with their heads down, their worlds small inside the enormous city. But the New York I came back to in late 2001 was a place where people smiled at one another. Thankful, perhaps, that they—and their beloved city—had survived. I remember taking great comfort in the smiles of strangers. I remember thinking I had made the right decision by coming home.