by Julia Dahl
“I wish you had come,” he said. “The music was really good.”
“Does Ryan know you are Jewish?” I asked him.
He looked puzzled for a moment, then he leaned against the door frame and looked down. “Yeah,” he muttered.
“And what did he say about that?”
“He doesn’t care.”
“Are you certain about that?”
“I don’t consider myself Jewish anymore,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter what you consider yourself, it is what you are.”
“It’s not what I am,” he said. “I don’t believe any of it. Neither do you.”
“That doesn’t mean I go with people like him!”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know he has a Nazi tattoo.”
Sammy rolled his eyes. “It’s an old tattoo. His dad made him get it, okay? What do you care? You hate them, too. You’re the one who said it was a cult. I mean, Shoah was, like, a hundred years ago but all they do is talk about how it excuses everything. It’s bullshit.”
“Sammy,” I said, slowly, “Shoah is not bullshit.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Where did you get an idea like that?”
“Like what? I’m saying they’re corrupt. They don’t care about me or you. They only care about everybody following the rules. Like robots! That is bullshit.”
“It is one thing for it to be bullshit and another thing for you to bring a Nazi into my house.”
“He’s not a Nazi!”
“When Isaac finds out he won’t want him to come here.”
“Why would you tell him? It doesn’t matter!”
“It matters to me. And it will matter to Isaac. What about his friends? All these people you are hanging around with. Are they all … like him?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Aviva. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe you should take your medicine and call me in the morning.” He laughed, suddenly confident, alive in his meanness. I had never seen him like that before and I was surprised at how much it hurt. I thought I knew him because I knew his secrets and he knew mine. I thought we were the same because we both left. But we are not the same.
After that, Sammy didn’t bring Ryan around anymore. And he started staying away for days at a time. He didn’t return my phone calls, and when he did come home he barely spoke, just locked himself in his room. I spent most of those next few weeks in bed. Every time I heard the front door open, I sat up and waited for him to knock on my door so I could tell him how much I loved him and that I just wanted him to be safe and happy. But he never knocked. And I started to feel sick again. Sammy was the last piece of family I had, Rebekah. He was the boy I was supposed to save. I slept and slept and it was never enough to make me feel awake. I stopped going to my cleaning jobs. I didn’t bathe. Isaac came upstairs with peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of water. Sometimes I ate them. When Sammy had been gone a whole month, I pleaded with Isaac to find him and bring him to me. Please, I said. I need him.
“Give him space,” said Isaac. “He’s in love.”
But he couldn’t stop me. The next Thursday I got out of bed and drove to the Mobil station and waited for Ryan and his father. His father was covered in tattoos. He had a skull and the SS lightning bolts on his enormous arms. He had a spiderweb on his neck with a swastika in the middle. Ryan was wearing shorts, and I saw he had a skull on his leg. The skull had an open mouth and wild eyes. It was laughing at me. They were both wearing sunglasses and to me they looked like soldiers. Soldiers without an army, with only their anger. I almost ran them over, right there in the parking lot behind the gas station. I wish I had. Instead I followed them. They drove out of New Paltz and up the Thruway past Kingston. After almost an hour, they turned west onto a state route I’d never been on. I was down to an eighth of a tank of gas when I followed the truck down a dirt driveway under a thick patch of trees. Three trailer homes and one old house shared the entrance. One trailer was new, but the other two were sagging, aluminum skirts cracked and split and missing in places, one just sitting on cinder blocks. On the porch of the old house sat an old, legless woman smoking cigarettes. She was sitting in a wheelchair wearing a long t-shirt, the stumps dangling over the edge of her seat.
Ryan and his father got out of their truck and both immediately walked toward me.
“What the fuck do you want?” The father was wearing blue jeans and a black sleeveless t-shirt with a faded yellow Batman insignia across it. Both their heads were shaved. I rolled up the window, locked the doors and pressed on the horn.
The father started screaming and banging on my window. I closed my eyes. I was here for Sammy. I had to get Sammy. The father banged and banged and then I heard Ryan say my name. I kept honking.
“Aviva! It’s okay,” he said, putting his palm on the passenger-side window. “I know her!”
“Tell her to shut up!”
“Aviva, please stop,” said Ryan, his face close to the glass. “Please.”
I stopped. The horn was very loud and it hurt my head. The father kicked my car door.
Ryan tried the door but it was still locked. “He’s not here,” he said to me through the glass. He looked almost as frantic as I felt.
“Who the fuck is this bitch?” shouted the old lady on the porch. Her voice sounded like a robot’s. Another man, closer to Ryan’s age, came out of one of the trailers. He was shirtless, with an enormous eagle tattooed across his chest, and holding a shotgun. He shielded his eyes from the sun.
“It’s okay, Hank,” said Ryan. “I know her.”
“She needs to get off our property,” said Hank.
“Aviva, please, let me in.”
I shook my head.
“Ryan, you fucking this chick?” asked the father.
Ryan didn’t answer.
“Tell him to put the gun away,” I said.
“Hank go inside, it’s fine!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Hank.
“Don’t be an asshole, Hank.”
“Fuck you, Ryan. Handle your fucking pussy.”
“You’re freaking her out, Hank. Gimme a break here.”
Hank lowered the firearm. I cracked the passenger window open. Ryan grabbed ahold and shoved his mouth as far into the car as possible.
“Sammy’s not here,” he said. “This is my family’s place. Please, they don’t know.”
At first I thought he meant that they don’t know Sammy is Jewish, that he was trying to protect my brother. But then I realized he was talking about himself: his family didn’t know that he had sex with men. I let him in the car.
“I want to see Sammy,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “Just go. Now.”
I backed out of the driveway and he directed me into town, past the A&P and the McDonald’s to the Dollar Store. We turned right and he told me to stop at a two-story apartment building.
“Thank you for not saying anything,” said Ryan.
“Where is Sammy?”
“He’s probably inside. I’ll take you.”
“What do you want with him? What does your father want?”
“My father?” Ryan was a little older than Sammy. Twenty-two or so. And he was very handsome. He had dimples in both cheeks. I remember noticing them in our kitchen once, before I saw his tattoo, when he and Sammy and Isaac and I were laughing about kugel. Ryan told us there was a similar word that meant an exercise for your vagina. It was a fun night. I remember being happy for Sammy that such a good-looking boy liked him. I thought it would be good for his self-esteem.
“Look,” said Ryan, his leg bouncing so wildly it kept knocking against the bottom of my glove compartment. “My family isn’t like you. It’s not okay to be … gay.” He stumbled over the word “gay,” like it hurt to say. It was almost funny: it is not okay to be gay in Sammy’s family, either. But to Ryan, I was Sammy’s only family. Me and Isaac. “Please don’t say anything
.”
“We’re Jewish,” I said. I said it proudly for the first time I could remember. Like it meant something strong and positive.
“I know,” he said. “I’m not racist. I know the … thing on my back is awful. I’m real sorry about that. I knew you saw it but I didn’t know what to say. I got it when I was sixteen. It was kind of a thing in my family. Everybody has one. But I’m not like that. That’s why I moved out.”
He was very convincing.
“Outside of work I never see my dad and my brother. Really. They’ve only met Sammy once. We said he was German.”
“German?”
“Because you guys have an accent.”
“We’re not German!”
“I know, but my family doesn’t know accents. And he’s blond.”
It was so outrageous I couldn’t even respond. Could Sammy have possibly allowed this? I turned off the ignition and we got out of the car. The building was faced with dingy white aluminum siding, and when Ryan opened the door to the first-floor apartment I could smell the marijuana from the landing. Sammy was on the sofa with a video-game controller in his hands. He was playing some sort of war game and the volume was turned up very loud. Gunshots and screams and the sounds of bodies struck by bullets filled the room. There was a thumping kind of music beneath it. Two girls were sitting at a kitchen table, putting pot into plastic baggies. At first, none of them noticed we’d entered, then the girls looked up. The one dressed like a boy acknowledged me with a slight backward nod. The other girl, who had bright pink hair and a tattoo covering her entire upper right arm (flowers, it appeared, not swastikas) looked at me and then looked at Ryan for an explanation.
“Sam,” he said. Sammy looked up and smiled when he saw me, which made everything better.
“’Viva,” he said. “You found me.”
“Can we talk?” I asked.
Sammy stood up. He was wearing a white tank top and new jeans that were too big for him. He hugged me and his arms and chest felt harder than I remembered.
“We’ll go outside,” he said. As we walked to my car, he lit a cigarette and offered me one. I rarely smoke, but I did not want to say no. I did not want him to think I was rejecting him.
“Please don’t cut us off, Sammy,” I said. “I love you.”
“I know,” he said. “But you can’t tell me what to do. I’ve had enough of that for a whole life. I get to pick what I do now, Aviva. Me. Not you.”
“I know,” I said. “But this Ryan … his people, they are bad people.”
“They’re okay,” said Sam, kicking the dirt. “They actually think like I do about a lot of stuff. Like, how the government is trying to take away our rights. I mean, that’s what the rebbes do—and the government is totally involved. The politicians look the other way so they can get elected. I’m supposed to have the right to an education, but all I know is Torah! And they want to tell us who to marry and what we can read and eat and do and wear. They take away our right to be free! This is a free country! And they get us to go along because they say it’s good for the community. But that’s communism! What about the individual?”
“That is not all they think, Sammy. That is not what that swastika means. That means they want Jews to die. That means they are full of hate. Are you so full of hate?”
“Fuck yeah, I’m full of hate,” said Sammy. His face was pink. He was getting worked up. “I’m never going to be normal, Aviva, because of what they did to me. You get that, right? And nobody cared. Nobody cares now. I don’t matter to them. You don’t matter to them. Eli knew what was happening to me. I told him about the bleeding. I told him! And he didn’t care! Do you know what Ryan’s dad would have done if he came home bleeding like that? He would have killed the guy. Shot him dead and fuck the consequences. But all Eli cared about was making sure no one could say anything bad about us. How fucked up is that! It’s totally okay to do bad, sick things but you just can’t talk about it? Rebbe Taub basically told Eli it was worse to report on a pedophile rapist Jew than be a pedophile rapist Jew! How is that okay? How are they all not in jail!”
What could I say? He was right. And I, too, had done nothing.
“You do not have to let that man ruin the rest of your life, Sammy. You are a smart boy. There are people who can help you. Professionals…”
“I’m not going to therapy. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to forget about it. I want to move on.”
It was a reasonable request. But by then I knew enough to know that trauma doesn’t let you move on. Whether you inflict it on yourself—like I did by leaving you—or have it forced upon you like Sammy did, shame and fear implants inside you like cancer. Sammy, I knew, would never go a day without being assaulted by that man, just as I had never gone a day without seeing your father’s face when he discovered that I was gone.
“Is this really how you want to live? With these people?”
“They’re my friends! Until I met Ryan, all I thought about was killing myself.”
“Sammy!”
“What? What did you think I was doing in that room all day? I had it all planned. I would go into the mountains where we used to hike and jump off a cliff. But now everything’s changed. Can’t you see I’m happier, Aviva?”
“But this can’t be what you want to spend your life doing?”
“Aviva, I have so much life ahead of me!” He laughed. “Since I left I’ve learned more about history, and the way things work in the real world, than twelve years in yeshiva. It’s such bullshit the way they make us afraid of everyone who isn’t like us. You can’t just come to America and pretend you’re better than everybody else. It’s supposed to be a melting pot.”
“I don’t think your friends with the swastikas believe in the melting pot, Sammy.”
“You know what I mean!”
“They’re going to find out you’re Jewish.”
“I’m not Jewish anymore.”
His naïveté shocked me. “Being Jewish isn’t like a hat, Sammy. You can’t just take it off.”
He made a little gesture with his hand like he was tossing something away. “It’s gone.”
“How can you pretend to be a Nazi?”
“I’m not pretending to be a Nazi!”
“What’s going to happen when they see you’ve fooled them?”
“Would you shut up about it, Aviva?” The meanness fell over his face like a metal gate closing over a store. I was back where I started. How could he not see that this was ridiculous? How could he not see that it would turn out badly no matter what? But I was not going to win this fight—at least not today—and I would not allow myself to lose him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t worry, okay? Ryan’s not close with his family. He just sees his dad for work because he has to.”
“I think he is the wrong man for you, Sammy,” I said, speaking slowly, thinking that perhaps if I enunciated perfectly, he would agree. “Please come home. It is not safe with all that pot around. The police will put you in jail.”
“It’s not that much,” he said. “You want some?”
I said, no, I did not want any pot. Sammy promised to come visit soon, and as I drove home, I began to see how I had opened this path to him. When I told him about you, I taught him that keeping secrets was normal. If I could live with a secret daughter, he could live as a secret Jew. And if big sister Aviva sometimes drank too much or smoked some pot, why shouldn’t he? When he first ran off the derech I imagined that getting a little tipsy or high together was a way to connect with him as a new adult—but I set a terrible precedent. Sammy was just weeks out of a life where every choice had only one right answer: whatever the Torah says, or the rebbe, or his elders. Suddenly, he could do anything. And why not try? But I should not have made it look like it was all without consequences. He needed to know about the hardships of this life. He needed to know that he would get hurt, and that he would hurt others. He needed to know that, sometimes, people die.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER SIXTEEN
REBEKAH
Half a mile away from the Halls I call Kaitlyn’s cell.
“I’m sorry to bug you again,” I say. “I was just out at Ryan’s family’s place in Greenville…”
“You went out there?” she says, interrupting me.
“Yeah. I was just trying to track down Ryan and Sam.”
“Well, they definitely aren’t gonna be out there.”
“Right,” I say. “I guess I didn’t know…”
“Ryan usually gets back to me quick but I still haven’t heard from him. I’m home now. Do you wanna come over?”
I plug her address into my phone and then call Larry to see if he’s gotten a name on the license plate number from Nechemaya.
“Nothing for you,” he tells me. “We’re not really supposed to run plates. I asked my guy for a favor but I don’t want to bug him too much. What did Roseville PD say?”
“The chief wasn’t there but I talked to the cop who was first on the scene when Pessie died.”
“Great! Can you write it up?”
“He wouldn’t go on the record. He told me the chief had turned the case over to the State Police, but the chief didn’t mention that to me when I talked to him. I gave him the plate number and when he looked it up … it was weird. He was all friendly and then he clammed up.”
“So nothing for tomorrow?”
“I got a little bit from a neighbor and one of Pessie’s coworkers. Apparently she had a fight with someone at work about a week before she died. It might have been this ex-fiancé.”
“What was the fight about?”
“She didn’t know. She said the guy was really upset.”
“But she doesn’t know his name?”
“No.”
