Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(49)

He was very convincing.

“Outside of work I never see my dad and my brother. Really. They’ve only met Sammy once. We said he was German.”

“German?”

“Because you guys have an accent.”

“We’re not German!”

“I know, but my family doesn’t know accents. And he’s blond.”

It was so outrageous I couldn’t even respond. Could Sammy have possibly allowed this? I turned off the ignition and we got out of the car. The building was faced with dingy white aluminum siding, and when Ryan opened the door to the first-floor apartment I could smell the marijuana from the landing. Sammy was on the sofa with a video-game controller in his hands. He was playing some sort of war game and the volume was turned up very loud. Gunshots and screams and the sounds of bodies struck by bullets filled the room. There was a thumping kind of music beneath it. Two girls were sitting at a kitchen table, putting pot into plastic baggies. At first, none of them noticed we’d entered, then the girls looked up. The one dressed like a boy acknowledged me with a slight backward nod. The other girl, who had bright pink hair and a tattoo covering her entire upper right arm (flowers, it appeared, not swastikas) looked at me and then looked at Ryan for an explanation.

“Sam,” he said. Sammy looked up and smiled when he saw me, which made everything better.

“’Viva,” he said. “You found me.”

“Can we talk?” I asked.

Sammy stood up. He was wearing a white tank top and new jeans that were too big for him. He hugged me and his arms and chest felt harder than I remembered.

“We’ll go outside,” he said. As we walked to my car, he lit a cigarette and offered me one. I rarely smoke, but I did not want to say no. I did not want him to think I was rejecting him.

“Please don’t cut us off, Sammy,” I said. “I love you.”

“I know,” he said. “But you can’t tell me what to do. I’ve had enough of that for a whole life. I get to pick what I do now, Aviva. Me. Not you.”

“I know,” I said. “But this Ryan … his people, they are bad people.”

“They’re okay,” said Sam, kicking the dirt. “They actually think like I do about a lot of stuff. Like, how the government is trying to take away our rights. I mean, that’s what the rebbes do—and the government is totally involved. The politicians look the other way so they can get elected. I’m supposed to have the right to an education, but all I know is Torah! And they want to tell us who to marry and what we can read and eat and do and wear. They take away our right to be free! This is a free country! And they get us to go along because they say it’s good for the community. But that’s communism! What about the individual?”

“That is not all they think, Sammy. That is not what that swastika means. That means they want Jews to die. That means they are full of hate. Are you so full of hate?”

“Fuck yeah, I’m full of hate,” said Sammy. His face was pink. He was getting worked up. “I’m never going to be normal, Aviva, because of what they did to me. You get that, right? And nobody cared. Nobody cares now. I don’t matter to them. You don’t matter to them. Eli knew what was happening to me. I told him about the bleeding. I told him! And he didn’t care! Do you know what Ryan’s dad would have done if he came home bleeding like that? He would have killed the guy. Shot him dead and f*ck the consequences. But all Eli cared about was making sure no one could say anything bad about us. How f*cked up is that! It’s totally okay to do bad, sick things but you just can’t talk about it? Rebbe Taub basically told Eli it was worse to report on a pedophile rapist Jew than be a pedophile rapist Jew! How is that okay? How are they all not in jail!”

What could I say? He was right. And I, too, had done nothing.

“You do not have to let that man ruin the rest of your life, Sammy. You are a smart boy. There are people who can help you. Professionals…”

“I’m not going to therapy. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to forget about it. I want to move on.”

It was a reasonable request. But by then I knew enough to know that trauma doesn’t let you move on. Whether you inflict it on yourself—like I did by leaving you—or have it forced upon you like Sammy did, shame and fear implants inside you like cancer. Sammy, I knew, would never go a day without being assaulted by that man, just as I had never gone a day without seeing your father’s face when he discovered that I was gone.

“Is this really how you want to live? With these people?”

“They’re my friends! Until I met Ryan, all I thought about was killing myself.”

“Sammy!”

“What? What did you think I was doing in that room all day? I had it all planned. I would go into the mountains where we used to hike and jump off a cliff. But now everything’s changed. Can’t you see I’m happier, Aviva?”

“But this can’t be what you want to spend your life doing?”

“Aviva, I have so much life ahead of me!” He laughed. “Since I left I’ve learned more about history, and the way things work in the real world, than twelve years in yeshiva. It’s such bullshit the way they make us afraid of everyone who isn’t like us. You can’t just come to America and pretend you’re better than everybody else. It’s supposed to be a melting pot.”