Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(80)

“Newtown,” I say. After the copy girl had thrown up in the office, I was sent to the Upper East Side to sit on the apartment building of a man whose daughter was a teacher at the school. They sent stringers to every address of every relative they could find in the city. My guy didn’t come home until after my shift was over. I heard his daughter survived.

“Right,” he says. “We both kinda got sucked in.”

“Me more than you,” whispers Sam.

“Whatever,” says Ryan. “It was nonstop. You know? The pictures of the kids running and screaming, like, all in a line. And that girl on the cell phone the exact moment they tell her that her sister is dead. I tried to get him to turn it off, but he kept saying we had to watch.”

“I felt like, those kid are in pain and the least we could do was pay attention,” says Sam. “I started thinking about how nobody really paid attention to me back then. I was, like, if one of those little goyish kids on the TV came home and said their teacher was making him suck his dick his parents would go to the cops. But in Roseville they just pretend it didn’t happen so nobody who wasn’t Jewish would say anything bad about the community.”

“We talked about how growing up for both of us there was this ‘no snitching’ thing,” says Ryan. “How loyalty—like, no matter what—was the most important thing. My dad always said it was better to go to prison than be a rat.”

“What I was pissed about was how adults, like, need to keep kids safe,” Sam says. “I needed somebody to keep me away from him, ’Viva. Or at least to, like, fight back. Kill him, or at least lock him up. But nobody did. That’s what I was saying. They’re pussies.”

“Sammy thought my family was strong. He was, like, your dad doesn’t take shit from anybody.”

“I was a f*cking idiot,” says Sam, finally sitting down next to his sister.

For a few moments there is silence. Then Sam says to Ryan, “Keep going.”

“Okay, so he spent all day, like ten hours, on the couch watching the news and getting high. It was my dad’s birthday and there was a party that night. I wasn’t planning on going, but I felt like I had to get him out of the apartment. I’d never seen him so down. When we got there, we both started drinking. Sam went straight to the whiskey. The party broke up around two, I think. We’d gone inside my dad’s place and that’s when Nan started talking about the Jews. She said she’d seen some of them—the ones with the hats—at Home Depot. She was, like, I heard they’re trying to take over the school board down in Rockland County…”

“And I just, like, went off,” interrupts Sam, talking fast now, like he wants to get to the end. “I was so drunk. I was, like, they’re all on welfare and they make the women shave their heads and all the kids get molested because they’re so f*cked up about sex.”

“And they loved it,” says Ryan. “They ate it up. My family hates everybody who’s not like them, but they don’t really know anything about anybody else. So when he started talking they found, like, real reasons to hate them. To my dad, Jews were just money-grubbing rats who killed Jesus. Suddenly he’s getting all this detail. Sam kept calling them a cult. He was, like, somebody should wipe them all out. He was drunk. But my dad and his friends loved it. Everybody was, like, yeah. And they just kept talking about it, egging each other on to come up with the most f*cked up thing they could think of to strike the first blow, start their stupid race war. Nan was, like, you gotta do something people will remember. She was, like, you can’t just shoot up a school because that’s been done before. And my dad was, like, same thing with a church.”

They both stop talking for a minute. And then Sam speaks: “So I said, a playground. Nobody’s done a playground.”

I open my mouth but manage not to gasp. Sam is shivering. After a moment, he looks at Aviva. She is speechless. We all are.

Sam begins to cry, and beneath his tears, he whispers, “And Pessie. If I had just left her alone. If I had cut her off … She should have gone her whole long life without ever meeting people like Connie and Hank. But because of me—because she loved me…” He can’t finish.

Aviva wraps her arms around Sam and he wraps his arms around her. He cries and cries and she rocks him. He pulls away and bends over himself, sobbing. Aviva gets on the floor, kneeling before her baby brother, grasping his hands.

“Look at me, Sammy,” she says. “You did not kill Pessie. And you did not kill all those people at the yeshiva. None of us believe this was your fault. You have had more pain in your life than anyone I know, and you will never outrun what you have seen, and what was done to you. But that is not your fault. Our family was happy until I left, Sammy. I broke our family, not you. Not Eli. Not the cook. My selfishness created the world you grew up in. I killed Mommy, not you. Do you understand?” Sam is still crying, but he nods. “But we have been given a second chance. You have been given a second chance. You can stay with me, or Isaac, wherever we go. Or you can move far away. Whatever you do, I will love you. I will know who you are inside.”

“So will I,” says Ryan quietly. He puts his hand on Sam’s back.

Sam wipes his face and nods. “We were thinking we’d like to get out of New York, at least for a while. Go somewhere warm where nobody knows us.” For the first time since he started talking, he looks at me. “We were thinking, maybe, Florida.”