Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(6)

Her phone number is in a note application on my phone. No name, just the ten digits. It is time to call. The newsroom is mostly empty. I dial, and it goes automatically to a generic voice mail announcement. I don’t leave a message, and the shock of my immediate fail is so palpable that I laugh out loud. The absurdity—the agony!—of anticlimax. Fine, I think: if I can’t solve Aviva’s riddle, I’ll try to solve Pessie’s.

I call the number Saul gave me for Levi Goldin. He answers after the third ring.

“Hello?” He sounds out of breath.

“Hi,” I say. “My name is Rebekah Roberts. Saul Katz gave me your number.” Levi doesn’t say anything but I can hear a baby whining in the background. “Thanks for … taking my call. Saul told me a little about your wife’s death—I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you,” says Levi.

“Saul said you were interested in talking?”

“Now is not a good time,” he says. He shushes the child, whispering something in a language I don’t understand. Yiddish, I assume. “Can we meet tomorrow morning in Manhattan?”

“Sure,” I say.

“There is a diner on the West Side,” he says. “Frank’s. On Forty-ninth. Ten o’clock?”

“We’ll be there,” I say.





CHAPTER THREE





AVIVA


In Brooklyn, my future was always set: I would marry before I was twenty and have babies until I could not have more. That is what my mother did. That is what my aunts did, and that is what my cousins and friends from school wanted to do. We would support our husbands in their endeavors. Their endeavors would either be studying Torah, which was spiritually preferable but financially unstable, or working elsewhere within the community—teaching at yeshiva, property management, shopkeeping, imports. My father ran a taxi company. He and several of his cousins in Israel were the owners. The cousins put in all the money and my father put in all the labor. He worked very hard and made the business a success. There were nine of us, counting my sister Rivka (which I always do), and we were always fed and clothed. If my mother needed something—a stroller, or a washing machine—someone from the community would provide.

There were times that I thought I could live that life, but for the most part, from as far back as I can remember, I wanted to live another kind of life. I didn’t know what kind, exactly, and of course I didn’t talk about it. After Rivka died, I stopped loving Hashem. There was no good reason to kill her like that, to have nature attack her with such force. To sting her to death? Outrageous! I decided as I watched them lower my sister’s body into a hole in the ground that I would never do anything again for Hashem. I would never praise him, and I would certainly never live my life in his honor. I did not tell anyone how I felt for a long time. And when I finally did, I was ready to go.

It sounds ridiculous to say it now, but I did not consider the possibility that I might get pregnant once your father and I began having sex. I assumed you had to do something special—something only married people knew to do—to actually make a baby. I didn’t associate the domestic burden of a child with the physical pleasure of our sweaty afternoons in Coney Island. But when I told your father, he felt differently. He said we should have been more careful.

The first weeks I didn’t feel much. Your father immediately took the burden of preparing for your arrival onto himself, and I let myself be pulled along. First to the doctor to get a test, and then to his parents. He had told me his family was close. Brian and his older brother, Charles. The Roberts boys and Mom and Dad. Mom a school nurse and church choirmaster; Dad working in an office for Walt Disney. I was prepared to face them as if they were my parents. But their anger lasted what seemed like mere seconds, and then there was joy: a baby! And all was forgiven when your father said we were getting married.

But I did not want to get married. Men in Brooklyn change when they marry. My cousin Pesach’s husband was a nice boy when they got engaged. He took her out to restaurants and they talked about traveling together. But when they got married she said he became nervous and strict with her. She said he was consumed by the fear that she might shame him in some way, by dressing inappropriately or saying something that would offend someone. And when a year passed and she wasn’t pregnant, he grew even more frantic, and the fear turned him cold. Pesach told me they had problems having sex. She said it hurt when he tried to put his penis in her.

“Did you go to the doctor?” I asked her. I was seventeen then.

“I did, but he said there is nothing wrong.” She lowered her voice. “He said the problem is in my head.”

I could not see your father becoming like Pesach’s husband, but I also could not see running a thousand miles from home just to end up in exactly the same life—married with a baby by twenty—as if I’d stayed. It was just too crushing. I’m sorry, Rebekah, but that is the way it felt. I managed to postpone the wedding until after you were born, and then your father postponed it because he started to see what was happening.

Your grandparents moved us into the bedroom in their basement once I began showing. Brian went to classes during the day and I took walks and cleaned the house. It was easy, wiping and washing and vacuuming. I had done it for my mother most of my life, and it made your grandmother very happy. We did not get along well, she and I. I was not the good Christian girl she imagined her oldest boy would marry, and I did not know how to talk to her about where I came from. When we talked, it was about you. She told me she had been hormonal through both her pregnancies and that she understood it must be difficult for me to be so far away from my family. They invited me to church every Sunday but I did not go.