Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(78)

“No it doesn’t,” I say, but I know she’s right. Aviva and I have been developing a kind of relationship via text message. She sent me pictures of the yellow house when the contractor finished with it, and she updates me on Sam and Ryan, who have moved in. Sam has some fairly complicated legal issues to settle. Carrying and shooting an illegal firearm—even at a man in the midst of the mass murder of children—was a violation of his parole, and although Aviva says the prosecutor appears willing to find a solution that does not involve prison time, Sam has to be extremely careful about what he says and where he goes until, as she puts it, “the ink is dry on the paper.” She orders a subscription to the Trib and when she sees my byline, she writes. Her texts are formal, like little letters: Dear Rebekah … And she always signs her name at the end: Aviva. I read the messages over and over again. I find myself daydreaming about her. Replaying our talk in the ice cream shop; replaying the way it felt when she put her arms around me that first time. I’ve started having dreams where I run to her, and I know she’ll be there. I run and she catches me, sweeping me up into her arms like I’m a child. The best part of the dreams is the sense of safety I feel, and the surprise of that safety. Like, Look, she was here all along. People say that parents fall in love with their children when they first set eyes on them. Could the reverse be true, too?

“I’m happy for you,” Iris says. “I feel like, maybe, this is the start of you really moving on.”

“Growing up,” I offer.

“Yeah?”

“I guess it took actually seeing her to understand why she did what she did.”

“Do you think you understand?”

“I think she got born into the wrong life. Who knows what that does to a person? I guess I can’t ever really understand, but I think it’s possible that if I was in her shoes—if I’d been raised how she was raised—I might have done the same thing.”

Iris looks hard at me. “I don’t think you would have, Rebekah. I don’t think so for a second.”

I call Saul the next day to tell him about Aviva’s invitation, but he knows already.

“I’m going, too,” he says. “Can you get off work a little early? I’ll drive us both.”

Four days later we battle Friday traffic along the West Side Highway and across the George Washington Bridge.

“Everybody going home for Shabbos,” says Saul, nodding to the minivan creeping beside us. The driver is wearing sidecurls and a black hat.

“I wonder if he’s going to Roseville,” I say.

“Perhaps,” says Saul.

“Do you ever think we could have stopped it—if we’d moved faster with Pessie?”

“Do you?”

“I think about it a lot,” I say, which is kind of an understatement. I think about it all the time. I replay every interview, every phone call, every Google search. In my dreams, I see Connie and Nan at the truck and the truck is bigger than it should be. And instead of taking the wheelchair out of the back, I see Connie take out the AR-15. He laughs and I think, But it looked like a wheelchair! How could I have missed it? What I haven’t told anyone is that I’ve developed a sort of—how should I say it?—response to pickup trucks. I have this feeling that they’re coming to get me, like that demon car Stephen King wrote about. Twice since the shooting I’ve been sent to cover pedestrian death scenes. The first one was an eight-year-old boy on the east side of Prospect Park. Kid ran into the crosswalk after his scooter and a woman in an SUV turned without looking. His parents watched the whole thing. A couple weeks after, it was a man who worked at a fix-a-flat on Flatbush. He was opening up at 6:00 A.M. when some drunk doing sixty-five in a sports car, after a night who knows where, lost control, jumped the curb, and pinned him against the storefront. The second driver fled the scene, but the woman who killed the kid stopped. I pitched Mike a story about pedestrian fatalities, and I now know that around 130 people get killed in the city each year while “crossing the street.” For whatever reason, this, plus the memory of Connie’s truck, combined inside me to create an almost instant anxiety attack almost every time I see a pickup. I think: here he comes. I go hot and cold; heart stopped for a moment. A year ago, the fright would have knocked me out. I’d have thrown up, or run home. Now I’m learning to right myself, by myself. I don’t know if I’m getting stronger, or just harder, but either way I have found that I can I keep working. Keep walking. Sometimes, yes, I take a pill. I went back to Anna—the student psychiatrist at Columbia—and she asked me if I thought the “he” coming to get me in the truck might be the guilt I feel about my role in Roseville. I thought that was a good question.

I don’t say any of this out loud to Saul. I haven’t even said it to Iris. And yet, perhaps they know.

“There is a lot of guilt to go around,” he continues when I don’t elaborate. “But I don’t think much of it rests on your shoulders.”

We ride without speaking for a while. The trees along the parkway that were still bare a month ago are popping green now. When we pass the sign announcing the exit to Roseville, Saul breaks the silence.

“We all played a role, I think. I could have found your mother years ago. It only took a few phone calls. I did not make those calls because I felt she would come to me—to us—when she was ready. But she was waiting for us.” He sighs. “Perhaps if I had been in her life sooner I might have helped her with Sammy.”