Before I could do anything else, she rolled over and vomited on the floor.
“Mama! Mama! Papa!” I cried, jumping out of bed and running to where they slept in the apartment’s main room. They woke with a start, both of them blinking at me in surprise.
“It’s Esther,” I panted. “Come quickly!”
My father was out of bed instantly, rushing past me. My brothers had heard my cries and all but the twins had come to the door of their room to peer out at us. “What is it?” Jacob asked. “What happened?”
My mother followed my father into our alcove, the curtain swinging closed behind her. I just sat on their bed, unable to speak, unable to answer Jacob, thinking I should have done something sooner.
Four
After my parents left in a rush with Esther in their arms, I was too despondent to sleep. I curled up on their bed, hugging my mother’s pillow close, staring sullenly at the curtain that led to our alcove. The idea of going back in there made my stomach churn. All I could think about was Esther trapped in feverish sleep, moaning, crying, her pain evident in every bodily twitch and shudder. I thought of my mother kneeling beside her, cleaning her face with a damp cloth, smoothing her hair back and tenderly cradling her head in her lap while my father hurried about contacting our neighbor and booking tickets for the train to Krakow. I remembered the blue tinge to Esther’s lips and her shallow breathing, and how she cried as my mother sang her a lullaby.
I wanted to cry myself as I closed my eyes and inhaled the smell of rosewater that lingered on my mother’s pillow. I felt alone and afraid. At one point during the night, the twins came out of their small room and crawled into bed beside me. David’s tiny hand reached for my own. I put my arms around them as they snuggled against me. Majer began to snore softly with his thumb in his mouth, and David’s dark curls tickled my chin as he nestled closer to my side. When the first light of dawn began to work its way under the curtain, I heard my older brothers moving about in their room. I blinked in the dim light, dazed from lack of sleep. Before I could get out of bed, Jacob stepped into the main room. He was dressed in his school clothes. We looked at each other, and I noticed the dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you sleep?” he asked. I shook my head silently, not wanting to disturb the twins.
“Let’s get ready for school,” he said, assuming an air of authority, but as he stood in the kitchen holding his cap in his hands, he looked helpless as a child. He peered at the empty table where breakfast usually waited and the cold stove where my mother always greeted us in the morning.
“I don’t want to go to school,” I muttered, lying back against the pillow.
“I think you should, Sarah,” he said, coming to sit beside me. “Mama and Papa said we should.”
“I don’t care,” I sighed, closing my eyes.
Jacob gave my shoulder a gentle nudge. I looked up at him, ready to argue, but when I saw his face, I fell silent. He was biting his lip and blinking fiercely, his large, dark eyes, so like Esther’s, filling with tears. He gave a quick shake of his head, trying hard to maintain his composure. In that moment, my heart softened, and that stubborn part of me that was always ready to quarrel fell silent.
“I’m scared, Jacob,” I whispered.
“I know, Sarah,” he said. “I am too. But Esther is going to the big hospital. The city doctors will know what to do. And we have each other. I’ll take care of you.”
I looked into his eyes and said, “We’ll take care of each other.”
The memory of Esther’s smile haunted me in the days that passed. At school, I tried to focus on my work, but I kept slipping into a daze, remembering Esther’s face as she looked up at me from our bed, the painful smile on her dry lips as she tried to reassure me. The thoughts were fresh in my mind every night when I closed my eyes. Lack of sleep put me in a fog. Once, I even fell asleep at my desk. “Sarah,” my cousin Gutcha hissed in my ear, waking me before our teacher noticed.
Every afternoon, Jacob ran to the post office to see if my parents had sent any news. We didn’t have a phone in our home, and neither did our aunt and uncle. The closest phone was at the post office, and it was there that my parents had promised to call or send a telegram. Each evening when Jacob returned without any news, we sat silently in our living room, attempting to do homework and chores until my aunt came to collect us for dinner.
My Aunt Leah and Uncle Abraham were watchful of us and did everything to make us feel safe and loved. They lived in the apartment above ours with my cousins Gutcha and Daniel. Aunt Leah cared for the twins during the day while we attended school, but I insisted on bathing them and washing their clothes, singing to them at night and tucking them into bed with kisses on their foreheads. I wanted the normalcy of routine as much as they did, perhaps more. Keeping busy kept my mind from worrying obsessively about my sister.
On Friday evening, we gathered around my aunt’s dining table as she lit the Shabbat candles. After repeating the prayers over the wine and challah and welcoming the Sabbath, my aunt stood with her hands over her eyes and added another prayer. “Watch over our Esther and return her to health.”
“Amen,” we chanted, and I stood with my eyes closed tightly, willing the prayer to rise up and up and up, higher than any other prayer, to where I imagined it would be heard.
A week after our parents’ departure, Jacob burst through the door, an envelope grasped in his hand. “It’s a telegram from Papa!” he exclaimed as we all turned to look at him in surprise. We gathered around him as he tore open the envelope.
“Dearest children,” he began to read. “We are here in Krakow. Your sister is in the hospital. We have a room and are comfortable while we wait to see what can be done. We miss you all very much and think of you daily. Please be strong and we will see you soon.”
Jacob looked up.
“What else does it say?” I asked eagerly, trying to see over his shoulder.
“That’s it,” he said, turning the page over in his hands. The blank side of the thin, yellow sheet of paper mocked us. What was Esther’s diagnosis? How long would they be gone? Where were they staying? We were left with more questions than answers, and no way of reaching our parents. But I took some comfort in the fact that Esther was being treated by the city doctors. Surely they’d find a cure for her.
I missed my parents dreadfully and hadn’t slept in my bed since they’d left. “What a silly girl,” Sam said one evening, ruffling my hair teasingly. “Still need to sleep in Mama and Papa’s bed? I thought you’d outgrown that.”
I pushed his hand away defensively and stormed out of the room. I didn’t want to tell him the truth—how every night I couldn’t get the image of Esther tossing and turning out of my head, how being in our alcove only made the memories more intense, and how, more than anything, I didn’t want to wake up in our bed to find Esther gone. The only time I slipped past the curtain was to change clothes or grab my schoolbooks. The twins slept with me at night in our parents’ bed, abandoning their own room for my company, and I took some solace in having them near.
It was a hot evening, a sign that summer was fast approaching, when Jacob finally returned from the post office with a stricken expression on his face. I had become accustomed to seeing him shake his head as he came through the door, hang his cap on the hook, and say with a touch of resignation, “Maybe we’ll hear something tomorrow. I wouldn’t worry. They would have sent word if something was wrong.”
I was only vaguely aware of Jacob when he first stepped into the room because Majer had just grabbed David’s small wooden toy horse. “That’s my horsey!” David wailed. “Mine! Gimme back!”
“Boys,” I said, kneeling beside them. “You have to share. Majer, that wasn’t very nice.” It was then that I realized something was wrong. Majer dropped the toy without any argument and looked past me to the door. From the kitchen table where they were studying, I noticed Sam
and Isaac both staring silently over my head. The whole apartment was suddenly too quiet.
Puzzled, I turned and caught my first sight of Jacob’s face. His eyes were unfocused, his face white, his lips set in a grim line. Tears fell silently down his cheeks as he twisted a piece of paper in his hands. I felt a ghostly punch to my gut as my blood turned to ice. My pulse throbbed in my ringing ears, and I suddenly felt light-headed.
“Well?” I demanded almost hysterically. “What is it? What’s happened?”
When Jacob didn’t answer, I glanced over at Sam and Isaac. They remained frozen in their chairs. No one spoke. I couldn’t bear it. “Say something!” I screamed, getting to my feet, but some part of me knew instinctively that I wouldn’t want to hear Jacob’s response.
Sam finally stood and, moving to Jacob, grasped his shoulder, rousing Jacob from his stupor. He swallowed painfully and turned to Sam. Taking a deep breath, he choked, “It’s over. Esther’s—” Shaking his head and covering his face with his hands, he sobbed, “Esther’s gone.”
I don’t know who made the first sound. I don’t know who gasped, who cried, who started shouting loud denials. The room swam. I heard Isaac whisper, “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.” I trembled. I gathered the twins to me, squeezing them so tightly they started protesting. David looked up at me, his chubby little hands pushing against my chest. I watched as a teardrop fell onto his face. That’s when I realized I was the one who had gasped, who had cried, who was saying “no, no, no” over and over and over.
That night we all wept together. We sat huddled, each of us only a child, on our parents’ bed. I held Majer and David close, seeking comfort in the smell of soap in their curls, the feel of their round cheeks as they nestled against my shoulder, the tender way they reached up with their arms to be held and hugged. I don’t think they understood why we were crying, but they imitated our sorrow by wiping at their own tears and asking for their mama. I was a poor substitute, and in my few moments of coherent thought, I’d whisper to them that Mama would return soon to care for them and love them as only a mother could.
We didn’t light the candles when the sun set. We sat in a darkness appropriate for our grief until our aunt finally arrived. She knocked gently at the door and called, “Jacob? Sam? Sarah, dear, are you all here?”
The door opened, letting in a small amount of light from the streetlamp outside. “Tante Leah!” Majer cried, eager to have an adult in our home. He jumped off the bed and into her embrace. David followed him. My arms were suddenly empty.
“Oh, boys,” she said, lifting them in her arms as she stepped inside. “What are you doing in the dark?” That’s when she saw the rest of us sitting on the bed. Her face mirrored our own heartache.
“Tante Leah, Esther’s dead,” I said, feeling the urge to speak the words in the hope that she’d reply, “Silly girl, Esther’s not dead. Pu, pu, pu, don’t say such things! She’s fine! I’ve just heard from your parents and guess what? They’ll all be home soon!”
But Leah did not say that. She only nodded. “Abraham just received a telegram as well,” she said in a whisper of a voice. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
She held her hand out to me. I jumped off the bed and ran to her, burying my face against her chest and giving in to sobs that threatened to rip me apart. Her hands gently soothed my back, and I realized just how much I needed to be comforted as well.
“Come upstairs,” my aunt said gently to all of us. “I don’t want you children down here by yourselves tonight. In the morning, we’ll prepare the house for the shiva. Boys, you can notify the rabbi then. Your parents will surely be exhausted after their trip, and we don’t want them to worry about a thing. They should be home soon.”
My heart lifted ever so slightly at these words. I was eager to see my father, to curl up in his lap and rest my head against his broad chest and inhale the sweet confectionary scent permanently ingrained in his clothes. I closed my eyes and thought of the treats he always brought home from his bakery, sticky icing and drizzles of honey melting on my fingers as I pulled freshly baked rugelach and small honey cakes out of their paper wrappings. I longed to have my mother place her soft hands on my head as she recited the Sabbath prayers, to feel the whisper of her breath against my cheek, to smell the sweet perfume of her skin. I ached so much from missing them, from missing Esther, that I felt suffocated. I wondered, as we held on to each other in grief and disbelief, if I’d ever be able to breathe again.
Five
The morning came too soon, pulling me out of dreamless sleep. I blinked in the early light, feeling confused. I was lying on a hard surface that was not my bed. Small bodies pressed against me, and I glanced down to see the twins curled up on either side of me on our mat on the floor. My cousin Gutcha slept beside me in her bed. I was in her room. That’s when I remembered.
Esther. Esther.
I had never experienced death before, and the aching, almost manic feeling that assaulted me was both foreign and scary. I felt feverish and queasy. I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to fight against the emotion, to deny it, to close my eyes and insist I was in a bad dream and would wake again in my own bed with my sister beside me. But I heard my aunt moving in the other room, talking in soft whispers to my uncle. I heard Jacob’s voice then, a low murmur, saying words I couldn’t make out, and I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
“Sarah?” a small voice asked. I looked down at David, who was sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. “Sarah, I’m hungry.”
“Where’s Mama?” Majer grumbled in a tiny voice, hugging the blankets close to his little body. “I want Mama and Papa. You said they’d be home soon.”
“They will, Majer,” I said. “Very soon, I promise.”
Gutcha began to stir in her bed. She sat up and stretched, her chestnut brown hair disheveled, her drowsy green eyes meeting mine. She hadn’t spoken much since my aunt brought us upstairs the night before. She had been awkward and uncomfortable in my presence, but she had stayed by my side the entire night, even offering me her bed to sleep in, but I’d wanted to stay with the twins.
The door to the room opened and my aunt peered in. “I thought I heard voices,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Did you sleep at all?”
I nodded solemnly. I had slept. After tossing and turning and holding in sobs so as not to wake Gutcha or the twins, I had finally succumbed to my exhaustion. I wanted nothing more now than to escape into the void of sleep once more. But the twins were rising from the floor, pulling at me to get up too.
“I’ve made breakfast,” my aunt said. “A hearty breakfast for all of us.”
“I’m not too hungry,” I muttered.
“I am!” David shouted, running into the kitchen ahead of us, Majer on his heels. My aunt waited for me in the doorway. She put her arm around my shoulder and guided me toward the table where my uncle Abraham, cousin Daniel, and brothers sat. “I know you might not be hungry now,” she said, “but it’s important that you eat. I’ll need your help today. Another telegram came this morning from the post office.”
I looked up. “What did it say?”
“Mama and Papa will be home tonight,” Isaac answered for her, a hint of relief in his voice. “They are catching the train back from Krakow and should be home before supper.”
I relaxed a little at this prospect. Part of me felt that, with the return of my parents, I could lay my sorrow aside, let them hold it for me, and tell me everything was going to be OK.
“We are going to see Rabbi Blumenfeld when we’re finished,” Jacob added, wiping his fingers on a napkin.
“We’ll need a minyan,” my uncle said, stroking his dark beard. My brothers nodded. Ten men were required to recite the prayers for Esther’s death.
I picked at the eggs my aunt set before me while my little brothers ate heartily and talked eagerly about seeing my parents. Their sor
row from the previous evening was forgotten in their youthful excitement. They didn’t understand the extent of what had happened and only focused on the good news that my parents were coming home. I wished I could be so blissfully unaware myself.
Work kept me busy that day. My emotions were in check as I helped my aunt dust, polish the surfaces of her dining table and breakfront, prepare food for the shiva, put out her best china, and drape the mirrors with black sheets. We were forbidden from looking at our reflections during this time of grieving; this was not a moment to be vain. I knew this, but I still caught a glimpse of myself as I helped cover the mirror by the front door. My eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, my face pale, the freckles I so detested standing out like paint splattered on a canvas. I knew it was wrong to be concerned about my appearance, but still I ran my fingers through my hair and pinched at my cheeks as I turned away from the mirror.
Sadness ebbed and flowed, punctuated by moments of denial, as the day wore on. We heard my parents before we saw them. The sound of an engine grew louder outside, followed by a horn honking and muffled voices I immediately recognized. “They’re here!” I exclaimed, running to the front window and looking out at the street below. My father and Mr. Geller were lifting luggage from the trunk of Mr. Geller’s car as my mother emerged from the back seat. Her head was downcast so I couldn’t see her eyes beneath her kerchief, and my father’s tall hat kept his face from view. I let the curtains fall back into place as I ran to the door. The twins were instantly at my side, and soon Jacob, Sam, and Isaac were there as well.
We heard footsteps on the staircase outside and stared eagerly at the door as it opened. I was prepared to run into their arms the minute they walked in, but when I saw their faces, I froze in place. Papa stood in the doorway, only it wasn’t Papa—he had changed since the morning he’d carried Esther out of our lives. His eyes were surrounded by heavy wrinkles so that they appeared sunken and small. They were glazed with tears that did not fall, dark pools surrounded by withered skin. The humor that usually danced beneath their surface was gone. His shoulders sagged forward as though he could not support his own weight. But the most drastic change was to his hair—what had once been a thick, dark, full head of hair had turned white. Silver strands ran through his beard as well. He looked like he’d aged fifteen years in just over a month’s time. An old man had replaced my father, sapping him of energy and humor and, as I’d later discover, his abiding conviction and belief in a benevolent God.
What She Lost Page 3
