Run You Down

by Julia Dahl

  “It’s a friend’s,” I say. “He can’t loan it to me until tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” And he’s done with me.

  I leave work at ten and get on the F train to West Fourth Street. Saul is sitting inside his car, which is parked in front of what I assume is The Doom Room. It looks like your standard downtown club—blacked-out windows, no sign—except that there isn’t a velvet rope or bouncer outside. I knock on the passenger-side window and Saul unlocks the door.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  “Oh fine.”

  “Anything happening?”

  “I’ve been here two days and haven’t seen him or the woman who the wife thinks he’s seeing.”

  “How does the wife know what she looks like?”

  “She found a photograph in his e-mail,” he says.

  “How long are you going to keep waiting?”

  “As long as she wants, I suppose. Or until I get a better client. She is paying well. By the day. And a bonus if I find them together.”

  “How would you find them together?”

  “I would have to follow him inside.”

  “Exciting.”

  Saul shrugs.

  “So,” I say, “Aviva’s mother died in childbirth?”

  “Yes,” says Saul. “That is what I was told.”

  “But you decided not to tell me.”

  “It’s not that I decided not to.”

  “You just didn’t.”

  Saul looks out the window. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. Anything. How did you meet? What was she like?” I didn’t ask Saul these simple questions when we first met in January. I’m not sure if it was because there didn’t seem to be time, or if because, even now, the possible answers terrify me. The devil I know—the runaway mother I’ve had nightmares about meeting in strange, perilous circumstances—is still less frightening than the unknown truth. I don’t know how the truth will hurt me, but I’m pretty sure it will. I’ve been practicing for the pain as long as I can remember. Closing my eyes at night and imagining the worst and how it will feel when I encounter it. I felt a lot of fear lying in that little bed in Orlando: My heart raced as I discovered her happy, beautiful, raising a different, better daughter. It raced as I imagined her fat and unthinking in Brooklyn, surrounded by a dozen screaming children and a husband she hates. And it raced when she was a crack whore, or a surfer, or a nurse, or long dead and buried without a headstone. I wonder how many hours I lost letting my mind spiral into those stories, that dread? Here I am, I think. About to learn the truth.

  “I knew her casually in the neighborhood,” says Saul. “Two of my younger sisters went to school with her and sometimes she would come to our apartment to play, or for Shabbos dinner. She was just a child then. Maybe eight years old when I was eighteen. I remember my mother complimenting her table manners. She used to ask my little sisters why they didn’t have table manners like Aviva Kagan.”

  “Table manners?”

  “It was very important to my mother that my sisters marry well.”

  “Make shidduch,” I say, parroting Dov.

  “Yes.” Saul looks at me with a half smile. I think he might be as nervous as I am. “My mother felt that anything less than perfect manners might stand in their way. I don’t remember Aviva being especially polite or impolite—I wasn’t really paying attention. But my mother used to say her name to my sisters all the time. It struck me as strange because I always had the sense that she was a bit of a troublemaker. She behaved one way when adults were present and another way when she thought they weren’t. She talked about movies she said she’d seen, or books she said she’d read—none of which would have been allowed by the rebbe, or her parents, probably. And she told stories about people she said she knew, people she’d met in her father’s taxicabs.”

  “You think she was lying?”

  “I did then,” says Saul. “I told my mother I didn’t think she was a good influence. But my mother didn’t believe me. She was terrified my sisters would not make good matches, and she was always trying to fix them in some little way. My sisters were timid and not terribly creative, but my mother constantly imagined them into trouble. She could believe no good of them.”

  That sounds like a terrible way to grow up. “Did she believe good of you?”

  “Oh yes,” he says. “She was very different toward her sons. We could do no wrong. I married when I was nineteen years old and we moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, for a time before coming back to Brooklyn. I did not see your mother again until about ten years later.”

  “Did she remember you from before?”

  Saul nods. “We met again at the house in Coney Island. I was separating from my wife and helping Menachem Goldberg renovate. Menachem was in his fifties and a widower. He and his late wife had emigrated from Ukraine through Israel in the 1950s. When his wife died of cancer, he renounced his faith, and his children shunned him. He bought a rundown house to live in and he invited people to stay because he did not like to be alone. There was a woman from the community named Tova Horowitz who had been holding meetings in apartments around the city for people to come and question. She asked if she could have the meetings at the house and Menachem said yes. Aviva came for a meeting.

  “I remember she didn’t seem fearful that night. Most of the people who came were paranoid. They were certain their brother or father had followed them there, or that someone else in the group was a spy sent by their family. But not Aviva. She stayed all night. She had a notepad with her and she had written pages and pages of questions. Menachem and Tova and I had different perspectives, but they all validated what had been dawning on her, which was that much of what was deemed sacred in her life meant nothing to her.”

  I have been to the Coney Island house, and as Saul speaks I picture my mother in the same small living room-kitchen-dining room I’d stood in in January. It was full of people then, but seemed a lonely place.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Soon after she came back from Florida,” he says. “Again, at the Coney Island house.”

  “And?”

  “She was not there long. I was hoping we would talk but…” Saul clears his throat. He looks out the window and shifts in his seat. “Her mother had died while she was away and her family was very angry.”

  “Did she say anything about me?”

  “We really didn’t get much of a chance to talk,” says Saul. “She came and left very quickly. And then she went to Israel. I heard from someone that she was back in New York, but that was probably ten years ago. Apparently, she was at the Coney Island house, but not for long.”

  And there it is. A rough sketch of twenty-three years in the life of Aviva Kagan. Coming and going. Was she always running from something? Or to it?

  “When did you start communicating with my dad?”

  “He made a trip to Brooklyn looking for your mother a few months after I’d seen her.”

  “Did you tell him she’d gone to Israel?”

  “Your father always seemed like a nice man, and he clearly loved your mother, but I felt that if she left him, she must have had a good reason. I didn’t think it was my place to tell him where she had gone.”

  “Did he tell you about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that didn’t make a difference?”

  Saul hesitates. “At the time, it did not,” he says. “I’m sorry. I would make a different decision now.”

  “But you kept in touch.”

  “Your father sent me a card every year on Pesach, and I sent him one on Easter.”

  “That’s cute,” I say.

  Saul looks at me disapprovingly. My dad doesn’t like sarcasm either. “I don’t have any other religious friends who are not Jewish,” he says. “And I don’t think he had friends who were not Christian.”

  “And when you heard she’d come back to New York you didn’t reach out.”

  Saul confirms my stat
ement with silence. My eyes start to burn and I look up, sniffing back the tears that are gathering. If Saul had just told my dad what he knew … what? At least we would have known she wasn’t dead. My dad actually went to Israel once when I was in elementary school. He took his youth group to Bethlehem and the Galilee and brought back a bottle of water from the Jordan River that his church has been using to baptize people with ever since. A day trip to search for his baby mama wouldn’t have been on the official itinerary, but might he have made an attempt? It almost makes me laugh, thinking of my dad hunting Aviva in the Holy Land. How poetic.

  “Did he keep asking you?”

  “No,” says Saul. “He never asked me after the first time.”

  “Because he assumed you’d tell him if you knew.”

  Again, Saul’s silence is a yes. I blink and blink but there is no holding back the tears now. And why should I hold them back? I haven’t cried about my mother in years. I thought I’d outlived the sadness, but really I’ve just learned to live with it sitting quietly inside me, tainting everything. Gotta get it out, I think. Gotta get it out.

  “I’m sorry, Rebekah,” Saul says finally.

  “It’s okay,” I say, wiping my nose. “You didn’t owe us anything.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  AVIVA

  I got back to the house in Coney Island before the sun broke the horizon. The front door was open and I smelled brewing coffee inside. I walked toward the back of the house and there was Saul Katz in the kitchen, wearing a blue police uniform and reading a newspaper spread across the counter. His black belt and boots shined. He’d cut his hair short and lost weight since I’d seen him last, and he seemed to stand up straighter. He didn’t hear me come in, and I stood in the doorway watching him for a few seconds. He was probably thirty or thirty-one years old then. Ten years older than me. The girl I borrowed the skirt from had told me that Saul recently left his wife and child and been shunned by his family and hers. But he was a success. He was up early, preparing to go to work protecting the city. Why was I incapable of such a thing? Was it because I was a woman? Or was it because I was weak?

  “Saul,” I said finally.

  He looked up, and when our eyes met we both smiled. I couldn’t help it. I was so happy to see a man who knew me and did not hate me.

  “Aviva!” he exclaimed, leaning forward, looking me up and down.

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said. And I remember that I meant it. I’ll never forget how his eyes shone. They twinkled just like your father’s did when I told him I would come live with him in Florida. I had been so powerful then. The way Saul looked at me in that pre-daylight kitchen made me feel powerful again. But by then, I sensed it wouldn’t last.

  “And you!” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Florida,” I said.

  He shook his head, amused. “You went with Brian.”

  I nodded. “And after a while I stayed with my cousin Gitty,” I said. “In Maryland.”

  “You are well? Where is Brian?”

  “Brian is in Florida,” I said, leaving out the information he was really asking for. “You are a policeman now?”

  Saul smiled again and patted the NYPD patch on his shoulder. “I am. I work in Crown Heights.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” he said. “I meet so many people.”

  “You look very happy,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. But he could not say the same thing about me. “I am so sorry about your mother, Aviva. Is that why you returned?”

  I shook my head. “I only just learned that she died,” I said. “If I had known I would have come back sooner.” What I did not say, but what he probably knew, was that it was my fault. I left no way for them to contact me. No one knew I planned to leave because at the time it had seemed very important to keep our “Florida adventure” a secret. To speak of it, I foolishly imagined, might bring bad luck.

  “Do you need a place to stay?” he asked. “There is room.”

  “I am moving to Israel,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Soon?”

  I nodded. “Eli and my father do not want me here for Diny’s wedding.”

  “Why Israel?”

  “I am to live with family.”

  Saul looked puzzled. “What will you do there?”

  “What else? Find a husband.” My voice was flat. All the anger and loss I felt screaming at Eli had fossilized inside me as I walked through the night.

  “Is that what you want?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Aviva,” he said. “You have friends here. You have choices.”

  I stared at him, blinking, hearing the words but not thinking that they applied to me. It was actually a good feeling, the hardness. If I could hold on to it, I thought, I could keep steady.

  “Will you stay here today at least? There is a kugel in the refrigerator. And two empty beds. You can’t have slept. I will be home in the afternoon. We can talk.”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ve missed you. Your spirit and your questions. There are more of us, Aviva. I think you could help the new ones. You could tell them about your experience. Good or bad. It makes no difference. Just that window into another life, that it can’t kill you.”

  I did not say anything. I did not say, But Saul, it almost killed me.

  “Go upstairs. Take a shower if you like. There are linens in the bathroom. Rest.”

  After Saul left, I went upstairs. There were four bedrooms in the house, each not much bigger than a closet, all along a narrow hallway. The summer before we left for Florida, your father and I slept together in the room closest to the bathroom. The one with the window that looked over the little concrete backyard. We slept together on a single bed, never exactly comfortable, but so happy to be exactly where we were: together, naked, free. Intoxicated not just by each other but the circumstance, the fact that the long afternoons and sleepless nights seemed to be for nothing but our pleasure. Since I had last been there, the room had been transformed from a flop pad to a true bedroom. Three black-and-white framed photographs hung in a row on the wall across from the neatly made bed: one of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of a placid lake scene—upstate, probably—and one of three old men on the Coney Island boardwalk, standing with their backs to the camera, looking out onto the ocean. There was a small table with a lamp atop it and a fresh coat of pale blue paint on the walls. Everything was clean—even the thin carpet. I closed the door and took off my coat and shoes and then lay down. The morning sun was just beginning to come through the window as I closed my eyes.

  I awoke in the early afternoon and used the toilet, avoiding my face in the bathroom mirror. I stood in the hallway and listened, but the house seemed empty. I lay down again and closed my eyes again, looking deep into the darkness for more sleep, more escape. Perhaps I could sleep through the next week, the next year. Perhaps I could sleep until I was dead. It was dark again when Saul knocked on the door.

  “Aviva,” he whispered, gently pushing the door open.

  “Mmm,” I murmured. I’d had an orgasm in my sleep—my dream a frenzy of seeking relief for the deep ache that crawled and scratched inside me, begging to be satisfied. It was a blur of men and women, lined up somewhere, and me grabbing ahold of whoever didn’t push me away, groping, grinding against them like an animal in heat. The relief, when it finally came, was waves of warm. And then Saul’s voice.

  “Aviva,” he said. “Would you like some dinner?”

  “Saul,” I said, my face still against the pillow. I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anything. I needed to keep that warm feeling for just a little longer. It didn’t matter that it would be gone in minutes. Minutes was all I needed; all I deserved. I reached out my arm and he took my hand and sat down on the bed. “Lie here,” I said. “Touch me.” I felt his body tense, and I turned over beneath the covers to look up at him. By the time our eyes met, he had consented. He leaned forward a
nd kissed me. It was the kiss I remember most. He was as hungry as I was. He lay down beside me, his uniform belt pressing against my stomach. I pulled off my sweater and I heard him gasp quietly. I had complete control over him. He would do anything I wanted at this moment. He didn’t waste time asking me this and that like your father did at first (“can I touch you here?”), he just tossed back the blanket and climbed on top of me. We kissed and kissed and he held my face in his hands. “I don’t have a condom,” he breathed into my ear. “I want to, but we can’t.” I looked at him. We huffed in unison, both red-faced, exhilarated. “What?” I said, lost, barely listening. “I know, but we can’t,” he said again. I closed my eyes to his protest, smiling, falling back into the swell of the moment, arching my back to unhook my bra. “Just kiss me,” I said. “Kiss me more.” We kissed and I wiggled out of my skirt. I was naked and I felt as safe as I had ever felt. I knew nothing could go wrong. “Please,” he said. But I couldn’t hear him. I pulled down his zipper. He loved me, I thought. How could he not? “Please,” I said. And that was all it took. We both kept our eyes open, each experiencing the other for those few minutes as everything we had ever wanted. Ecstatic, and alone. Afterward, he lay beside me, his hand resting on my ribcage. I turned my head toward him and, mercifully, he did not smile. A smile, I thought, would ruin it. This was serious.

  It was dark in the room, and neither of us had anywhere to go, so we fell asleep together. It was long after dinnertime when I woke up. I slipped out of the bed to go to the bathroom. I hadn’t planned to leave, but it quickly became the best choice, for both of us. If my family did not want me in Brooklyn, I would leave. Brooklyn meant less than nothing to me. I had been to Israel three times to visit family and my impression was that it was both much the same and completely different. I needed some completely different. Saul did not need me. Saul was just fine. I dressed as he slept, watching him for signs he was hearing me. He didn’t move—what if he had moved?—and then I was outside, with a subway token back to Borough Park in my pocket.