Run You Down

by Julia Dahl

  “It’ll be like fifty bucks,” she says. “I’ll pay half.”

  “You’re not paying for my shrink,” I say.

  “I’ll pay for your margaritas if you come tonight.”

  “I don’t feel like it, okay?”

  Iris closes her laptop and gets up.

  “You know you’re not acting right,” she says.

  She says that a lot these days.

  The next week, Iris makes me an appointment and I agree by not canceling it. She takes a morning off work and we ride the A train to 168th Street together. The magazines in the waiting room are several weeks old, which, for some reason, pisses me off.

  “I can’t believe I let you drag me here,” I say.

  Iris rolls her eyes. “Don’t be a bitch about this, please? Living with you has gotten hard. It’s obvious you’re depressed. Just face it, please, and let’s move on.”

  “I don’t have depression, Iris, I have anxiety.”

  “Well, I’ve done the online tests and you are definitely depressed. I checked every box. Lack of energy, lack of interest in things that you once enjoyed, excessive sleeping, irritability. Come on. You weren’t like this last year. You gotta get your shit together.”

  A woman calls my name before I can retort. Not that I had a retort. Even sighing seems like a lot of effort. I stand up and approach the woman, who looks just a few years older than me.

  “I’m Anna,” she says. I shake her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Follow me?”

  We walk down a wide hallway and into a tiny room with two chairs and a small table with a lamp, a clock, and a box of Kleenex on it. There’s a framed poster of a field of flowers on the wall. She sits and I sit across from her.

  “What can I help you with?” she asks.

  I run my hand over my head. It’s become a tic. Touching the soft, sharp fuzz where my long hair used to be grounds me in what happened, reminds me it was real. “My roommate thinks I’m depressed.”

  “What do you think?”

  I shrug. “She sort of dragged me here.”

  “Why do you think she did that?”

  “Because she’s worried about me.”

  Anna remains unfazed. She is schooled, I suppose, in humoring people.

  “What do you think makes her worried?”

  “I’ve been sleeping a lot.”

  “What is a lot?”

  “Basically, if I’m not at work, I’m asleep.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter,” I say, and somewhere, below all the heavy blackness inside me, a tiny light flicks on when I do. I love saying I’m a reporter. It makes me feel strong. “I work for the Trib.”

  “Difficult work, I imagine,” she says.

  I almost laugh. “Sometimes, yeah. Mostly I’m in the office right now, though.”

  “Is the amount of sleep you’re getting now unusual for you?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why do you think you’re sleeping so much?”

  “I guess because I’m depressed.”

  She nods. “Is depression something you’ve dealt with before?”

  “Not really. It’s always been anxiety with me.”

  “Have you ever been treated for anxiety?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say. “I was in therapy most of college. And I still take medication.”

  She asks me for names and dosages. I give them.

  “And are you seeing anyone for therapy now?”

  I shake my head.

  “So how are you getting these medications prescribed to you?”

  “My regular doctor, at home,” I say.

  “Where is home?”

  “Orlando.”

  “And when was the last time you saw this doctor?”

  “Um, last year. Like, May, maybe.”

  “And this has worked for you until recently.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Has something happened, some life event, a stressor in the past few months that might have triggered something?”

  Again, I almost laugh.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Definitely some stressors.” I tell her about Rivka Mendelssohn’s naked body, and Saul, and my mother suddenly surfacing after twenty-two years. Moving my mouth is hard. I haven’t spoken this many words in a row in weeks.

  “It’s not unusual for a symptom like anxiety to morph into or remanifest as depression. Or vice versa. I’d like to prescribe you a medication that is specifically indicated for people experiencing both depression and anxiety.” She explains the dose and the side effects (sleep disturbance, loss of libido, headaches—basically what I’m already experiencing) and walks me out to the waiting room to make me an appointment to come back in a month.

  “Call me if you have any questions,” she says, handing me a card. “It was very nice to meet you, Rebekah.”

  I let Iris fill the prescription that night, because, why not? The shrinks and their prescriptions were the net that caught me in college when the lies and contradictions and despairs of my motherless childhood nearly felled me. Two weeks later, Saul calls and I pick up the phone. He asks to take me to lunch and I agree to meet him.

  The Kosher Kitchen is a narrow storefront on Atlantic Avenue between a halal meat market and an old botanica selling dusty Blessed Virgin candles. The proximity of this threesome makes me smile, genuinely, for the first time in weeks. The Jewish restaurant next to the Muslim butcher next to the Christian reliquary. I love New York.

  Saul is at the counter when I get there. A couple is sitting at one of the tables: he with a beard and the black coat-and-pants uniform, she in a glossy auburn wig. Another young man is working on a laptop. Every male in the restaurant, including the black barista, is wearing a yarmulke. I hop onto the stool next to Saul.

  “It’s still so cold,” I say, unzipping my winter coat.

  “The people on the television say it’s going to get warm soon,” Saul says.

  “Not soon enough,” I say. “It’s almost April, for Christ’s sake.” Twenty-two years in Florida and it never occurred to me until recently how much sunshine was a part of my life. The cold makes me feel smaller and less consequential. My reactions are slower. Even if I weren’t depressed I’d hate going outside.

  “It must be difficult adjusting to the weather,” says Saul.

  “It is,” I say. “I guess eventually I’ll get used to it.”

  “Do you think you’ll stay here, long term?”

  “That’s the plan,” I say. “There’s nothing in Florida. I mean, even where there’s something there’s nothing. Not compared to New York.”

  The menu is written on the wall in chalk. We both order tea and decide to split a smoked fish platter with bagel chips.

  “I’ve never been to a kosher restaurant before,” I say.

  “This one is new.”

  “How have you been?” I haven’t seen Saul since right after I got out of the hospital. Since he told me my mother wanted to get in touch.

  “Not bad,” he says. “What about you?”

  I shrug. “Just work, mostly. I’m feeling a little better, I guess. My ear still rings.”

  “It’ll go away eventually,” he says.

  “That’s what I hear,” I say. And then: “Oh, ha. I didn’t mean…”

  Saul smiles.

  “I haven’t called Aviva,” I say. “But maybe you already know that.”

  “She sent me a text message about a month ago, asking if I’d passed along her message,” he says.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What could I tell her? I tried to call her back, but she didn’t pick up, so I just sent a text saying that I’d given you the message and that you said you’d call.”

  The counter man sets out our tea.

  “I haven’t seen your name in the newspaper lately,” Saul says.

  “Yeah. I’m mostly doing rewrite. It pays a little more.”

  “So no more reporting?”

  “I�
�ll go back. I’m just … I don’t know, taking a break.”

  “Well,” he says, “if you’re interested, I have a possible lead for you.”

  “A lead?”

  “I’ve been doing a little freelance private investigative work.”

  “Really?”

  “It sounds more exciting than it is,” he says. “Mostly parents trying to track down kids who have gone off the derech.” He pronounces this last word I’ve never heard of as “der-eck.”

  “The what?”

  “Off the derech means off the path. Jews who’ve left the fold. Your mother, for example. And the people you met at the Coney Island house. They’re all OTD, as they say. Anyway, I got a call from a man in Roseville. It’s a little town about an hour north of the city. In Rockland County. A lot of Haredi live up there.”

  “Haredi?”

  “‘Haredi’ is another way of referring to the ultra-Orthodox.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Is ‘Haredi’ the same as ‘Hasidic’?”

  “No,” he says. “Hasidism is a specific branch within the larger Haredi community.” He smiles at me. “Perhaps you should do some reading on this.”

  I look down at my tea. He’s right.

  He continues. “The man called me because his wife died somewhat mysteriously a few weeks ago. He said that her family didn’t want any fuss—apparently they’re worried it may have been a suicide—but he thinks it was something else.”

  “Something else?”

  Saul raises his eyebrows. “He didn’t say specifically. He said she was upset in the days before she died, but he’s convinced she wouldn’t have killed herself. They have a young child. And he is very unhappy with the police in the town.”

  “He wants you to investigate?”

  “No,” says Saul. “He said he doesn’t think anything will get done unless someone from outside puts pressure on the police and the community. He called hoping I might pass the information along to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Your work on the Rivka Mendelssohn case did not go unnoticed, Rebekah.”

  I’m not sure what to say. I guess I didn’t think it went unnoticed, but it definitely didn’t occur to me that exposing a murderer and a cover-up inside the cloistered world of Borough Park might recommend me to members of the larger Haredi community.

  “What’s his wife’s name?”

  “Pessie,” he says. “Pessie Goldin.”

  * * *

  My shift at the Trib is always hectic for the first few hours when we’re scrambling to get copy in for the morning deadline. But things slow down after about six, and I Google Pessie Goldin. A newspaper obituary is the third and only relevant link. It says that Pessie Goldin, twenty-two, was buried in Roseville on March 5 and that she is survived by her husband, Levi, twenty-eight, and their infant son, Chaim. There is no mention of cause of death. Pessie’s son, like me, will grow up without his biological mother. But unlike me, there’s no chance his mother will suddenly appear when he’s twenty-three years old. When I think this I realize how insane it is that I haven’t called her back. It hits me hard: I want to meet Aviva.

  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.

  Once you came, my mind began to turn against me. You were beautiful, with milky blue eyes and tiny ears that curled at the top just like your father’s. But I knew I could not take care of you. I knew it the moment I first saw you, all swaddled tight by the nurses, your eyes barely open. I knew there was no way I could be trusted to keep you alive. I fell backward into that feeling of helplessness and your father basically kept us both alive for the first few weeks. He changed your diapers and woke me when you needed to feed. My breasts were enormous. I had half-waking nightmares that they would smother you to death. My mother gave birth to five more after me, but I never saw her breast-feed. I believe she did, but in private. Exposing her breasts to the family—even the girls—would have been considered unacceptably immodest in our home. I heard your father whisper to his brother that I hadn’t smiled since giving birth. I suppose he thought I should be joyful, but to smile felt as impossible as to fly. Sadness pulled at the corners of my mouth, and exhaustion coated my skin like a liquid iron cape.

  After a month, he introduced the idea of a baptism.

  “I will not have my child marked by your God!” I screamed at him.

  I was sitting up in bed and he was standing across the room we shared, holding you. He turned you away from my voice.