Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(77)
“Your connection to the story and this community could make for a really compelling piece,” she says, and gives me her card.
It is at this same ice cream shop that Aviva and I finally have an hour to spend alone together—after all the victims are in the ground, after she’s been questioned and released, after she uses the last of her savings to hire a contractor to make the yellow house livable again, and after she offers her assistance to Eli and Penina, who are too broken and needy not to accept her help. I arrive first and focus my anxiety on sitting up straight so that I appear confident and nonchalant when she walks in. I want to show her what a successful, healthy woman I am. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun shines in through the shop window, making it hard to see who is outside. Aviva is right on time, and as soon as I see her I realize that what I want isn’t really for her to be impressed with me. What I want is for her to acknowledge me—impressive or disappointing. I want her to be forced to contend not just with the memory of me, and what she did to me, but the real live almost grown-up me. She avoided contending with me for more than twenty years, and now I’ve got her. Does she love me? Maybe. What does love look like on a person’s face?
We embrace tentatively and she orders a coffee at the counter. I watch her, noticing everything. The faded faux-leather sack that is her purse, the way she bends over slightly to dig exact change out of a zippered pouch in her wallet. The fact that she speaks to the woman at the counter in Yiddish, and puts sugar but not milk in her mug.
“You must have so many questions,” she says to me. She looks me in the eye for a moment, and then looks down. She does not wait for me to answer. “With me in your life you would never have become what you have become. You would not have had peace in your home. I am not frum but I was not like your father and his family and there would have been terrible strife.”
It’s such a reasonable explanation it almost makes me laugh. Isn’t there always strife? Does she really not understand that her ghost, always among us, created at least as much strife as a physical body?
“But I know,” she continues, her voice quieter now, “I know that what I did was a sin. I sinned against you, Rebekah. I sinned against your father. I have tried for many years to think of it as something else. Immaturity, or fear, or mental illness. And it was those. But mostly it was a sin. A grave sin. I carry it with me every day. But,” and here she pauses, and looks at me, “I also carry my memories of you. Like the way you loved to point at things. Lights on the ceiling or a dog on the street, or even just me. You would point at me and open your mouth like you’d found something wonderful. And after you sneezed, you always looked happy.” She giggles, thinking back. “Like you’d done something very silly and fun.” She takes a deep breath and the giggles turn to tears. Her chin crumbles. She puts her hand on her heart. “If not for those bits, Rebekah, the sin would have killed me.”
I reach over and put my hand on her elbow.
“I’m glad it didn’t kill you,” I say.
She wipes her eyes. “Are you happy with your life, Rebekah?”
Three weeks ago I was as low as I’ve ever been. I felt guilty and burdened and victimized and broken. And then I got back to work, and all the scary things didn’t seem so scary.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got it pretty good, I think.”
We stay in the ice cream shop for two hours. I tell her about Iris and Dad and my stepmom Maria, and my brother Deacon. I show her photos on my phone, and she looks at them with genuine interest. She tells me about her ex-husband, and her mother, and her cousin Gitty—the first person she told about me—who contracted HIV and died of pneumonia when she was just thirty. She tells me that she talked to me every day for twenty-three years, in her head. She says that she asked me for advice—What do you think your mommy should do, Rebekah?
“I know it is silly,” she says. “But I think you helped me. You did not steer me wrong.”
I don’t ask her if she ever asked the me in her head if she should come back to us; or even just send a letter saying she was alive. I will ask her, though. Someday.
As we get up to leave, Aviva waves at the woman behind the counter.
“Excuse me,” she says, handing the woman her phone. “Will you please take a picture of me and my daughter?”
*
By the beginning of May, I am back working shifts at the Trib, but I’m out on the street again, not in the office. It’s better for everybody. Mike doesn’t have to be reminded of my breaking-news betrayal by actually seeing my face, and I get to return to what I really like about this job: new people and new places. Iris gets promoted to assistant beauty editor and I invite Van Keller to the bar where Brice throws her a party. We’ve stayed in touch since Roseville. He keeps me updated on the appointment of a new police chief and stepped up efforts to engage with the Jewish community, and I “vouched” for him with Nechemaya and the rebbe. He arrives at the bar with a friend and we all have a nice time. There is an attraction, but for now, at least, neither of us acts on it.
The next afternoon, as Iris and I linger over bottomless Bloody Marys at a Park Slope brunch place, Aviva calls and invites me upstate for Shabbos dinner.
“Sammy wants to meet you,” she says.
When I hang up, Iris is grinning.
“What?”
“Your face changes when you talk to her.”