Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(36)

Etan sent papers to sign and I signed them. I knew my family had moved to Roseville, and I wrote to my brother, asking after Sammy and my father and the girls. Eli did not write back, but little Sammy did.





CHAPTER TWELVE





REBEKAH


Larry isn’t at his desk when I call to fill him in on what Van Keller said. I leave Nechemaya a message saying that I definitely want to talk to the neighbors about Pessie, and reiterating that I’d appreciate any leads on friends or family who could tell me about her. I look back through my e-mail and open the attachment the library sent on Pessie. Her address is just two miles from the police station, so I decide to do a drive-by before heading north to Ryan Hall’s in search of Sam.

I pull into a Shell station along the main road to fill up and use the bathroom. At the pumps on either side of me are men in Hasidic dress, phones pressed to their ears, putting gas into minivans. In the convenience store, the shelves by the bathroom hold plastic-wrapped magazines, but instead of Playboy and Hustler, the titles are Yiddish, and the covers feature old men with white beards. Yiddish movies and music are stacked in a rotating rack, and I notice that no women appear in the images on the CDs and DVDs for sale. I pour myself a cup of coffee and as I wait in line I watch a man in sidecurls and a hairnet slide a platter of what looks like bread pudding into a heated serving tray. He sets a paper notecard atop the glass display case: potato kugel. Beside the kugel is a steaming tray of something that smells fantastic but looks like brown slop. It is marked “chulent.” I’ve never had either dish and decide that, despite the possible inadvisability of eating gas station food, it’s time to try. I motion to the man and point to the stew.

“What size?” he asks. He is very tall and thin, with olive skin and a black unibrow.

“Small. And I’ll have a piece of that, too,” I say, pointing to the kugel. Next to me, a woman says something in Yiddish to the man, who nods at her. The woman is dressed all in black except for the white-and-green floral-patterned scarf wrapped over her head. I look down at my jeans and Doc Martens and am conscious, for the first time, that I might as well be wearing a sign that says “not one of you.” As the server ladles the chulent into a cardboard container and slides a lasagna-sized slice of kugel into a Styrofoam box, I wonder what this woman thinks of me. My first instinct is to imagine that she is jealous; that she would trade places with me and run off to the city for bacon and barhopping if it didn’t mean losing everyone she loved. But that’s me transposing my values onto her, and that’s exactly the opposite of what a real journalist is supposed to do. I’m in this work because I’m curious about people, because I want to bring the truth of their circumstances into the light. If I can’t even imagine outside myself, I can’t do that. And I certainly can’t do it if I feel sorry for everyone who doesn’t live like I do.

I pull Saul’s car to the parking lot beside the gas station and open the steaming cup of chulent. It is delicious: savory and sweet, hearty but not heavy. Jewish food, I think. Who knew? I put the container on the passenger seat and snap a photo with my phone, then send it to my dad.

Upstate on a story, eating Jewish food!

A minute later, he texts back:

Good for you, hon!

My dad still doesn’t know that Aviva contacted me through Saul in January. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t really want to deal with his reaction—whatever it was. He deserves to know, I know that. I’d been thinking that I’d wait and tell him when, if, I actually meet her. But now that I’m upstate, where she is—or was when she called—I want to share what’s happening with him.

He picks up on the second ring.

“Hi, hon!” he says. “You working?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m up in a town called Roseville. A lot of Jews from the city moved up here, so there’s a big Haredi community. This man named Levi reached out to me and Saul because his wife was found dead in their home. Everybody thinks it was suicide but he thinks it was murder.”

“Goodness,” he says. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So, I didn’t tell you this but Saul actually got a call from … Mom. Aviva. Apparently she’s upstate. She wanted to meet me, I guess. I didn’t call her back for a while, though. And now she’s not answering her phone.”

I spit the story out quickly and am glad I can’t see my father’s face when he learns, for the first time in two decades, that the woman who gave him a baby and then gave up is suddenly present in his life again. I know what I’ve just said has affected him because for the first time I can recall, my father is at a loss for words. Typically, his automatic response to sadness or distress is to immediately offer some verse or story or perspective; that’s his role as the youth minister: to comfort and guide. He’s good at it, especially when it’s not his biological kids he’s guiding and comforting. When my mom left, his church embraced him—and me—without reservation, and that, in some way, shaped his life after Aviva. God’s grace, he called it. I’d be lost without it.

“Dad?” I say.

He clears his throat. “I’m here,” he says. “I just wanted to shut the door. I’m in my office at the church.”

“Are you okay?”