Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(53)

“Oh yeah? What do you think I’m involved in, Isaac?”

“Drugs, obviously.”

Sammy rolled his eyes.

“Now you owe Connie Hall a favor.”

“No I don’t,” he said, automatically. But you could see it dawn on him that Isaac was right.

I looked at Sammy, trying to get him to look at me.

“Come live here,” I said. “For a little while. Just until…” I did not know how to end the sentence. It didn’t matter. “Come stay. There are plenty of rooms.”

“I hate it here,” said Sammy, finally lifting his eyes, which had softened. “Do you know how stupid I feel with all these college kids around? I can barely read a book in English!”

Isaac and I looked at each other. Isaac knew exactly how poor a yeshiva education in Roseville was. He knew that just like in Williamsburg, the rebbes censored whole portions of textbooks; he knew that words like “university” and “dinosaurs” were blacked out with markers, just as Pessie’s “anatomy” lessons had been conducted without mention of entire regions of the human body.

“You’re smart, Sammy,” I said. “You will fit in when they get to know you.”

Sammy made an ugly face. “I don’t want to live with a bunch of hippies.”

Isaac and I exchanged a look. Hippies?

“What do you mean?” asked Isaac.

Sammy sighed dramatically. “It’s just not me, okay?”

“What’s not you?”

“All my friends are in Greene County.”

“Ryan’s friends,” I said.

Sammy glared at me. His moods changed so quickly.

“They’re my friends! I have my own life!”

“What do you think Conrad Hall is going to do when he finds out his son is having sex with a Jewish boy?”

“I’m not a boy!” screamed Sammy. He brought a fist down hard on the table. The wine glasses jumped; his glass fell into his food.

“You think there won’t be consequences?” asked Isaac, his voice steady. “If you think they are going to keep believing you are a German exchange student you are being very stupid.”

“Who the f*ck do you think you are, Isaac? You’re not my father. You’re a f*cking old faggot.”

“Sammy…,” I said, standing up. “I love you.”

“Whatever, Aviva. I came over for Shabbos, like you’re always begging me to do. This is why I don’t want to live here. I’m eighteen years old! I can do what I want. And I don’t want to live with you.”

Four months later, Sammy got arrested again. The charges were more serious, and this time Conrad Hall didn’t come to the rescue.

At the jail, the woman behind the bulletproof glass told me his bail was set at $50,000.

“That seems very high,” I said.

“It’s because of the gun,” said the woman.

“What gun?”

“There’s a weapons charge,” she said, and directed me down the street to a bail bond office where a man took my money order. After we moved to New Paltz, Isaac and I both put a little bit of money aside each month. The man who owned the yellow house took only a few hundred dollars in rent from us—just enough to pay his taxes. He had no mortgage and was grateful to have caretakers continue his work, housing people who were leaving the community. We joked that we ran a secret bed-and-breakfast. Once Isaac brought little chocolates home and we put them on the pillows in all the bedrooms, just to be silly. Some months there were half a dozen people in and out of the house; some months there was no one but us. We opened savings accounts at the same bank on the same day, and ten years later, I had almost ten thousand dollars in mine. Before I went to the bank for the bail money, Isaac told me he hoped Sammy knew how lucky he was that he had a sister who loved him so much. I don’t know, Rebekah. That day—and most days—I felt certain I had failed my brother.

I waited two hours for Sammy to come out. He was silent almost all the way home, staring out the window.

“You have a gun?” I asked finally, almost whispering.

“It’s not really mine,” he said. “I was just borrowing it.”

“What do you need with a gun?”

Sammy sighed. “For protection, Aviva, don’t be stupid.”

It hurt to be called stupid. But this was not about me.

“Protection from what?”

Sammy didn’t answer immediately. We drove through town. When I moved here, I looked at the main street and all the happy college students and felt fortunate. I knew I could blend in. Sometimes it was sad knowing that all this learning was going on around me and I would never really be a part of it. Sammy could. But he did not want to.

“You know I’m a really good shot,” he said, finally. “Ryan learned to shoot when he was a kid and he’s been teaching me. We go to the range and sometimes out in the woods to practice. I could maybe have been a sniper in the army or something.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I have never held a gun in my life. I have never wanted to.

“I wish I’d had a gun when I was ten,” he said. “I would have killed him, Aviva. Boom. And everything would be different.”

“You think you would have been happier if you had murdered the cook?”