by Julia Dahl
The steel sky has turned into a low fog, and my anxiety is so high, I feel like I might float away. Inside my chest my heart is bloated. It is clattering like thunder and I realize I’m sweating and shivering. I look around for a bench or a rock or something to sit on. My stomach is making noises, and of course I’ve left my pills at home.
I dial the Trib.
“City desk.”
“It’s Rebekah,” I say.
“Rebekah,” says the receptionist. “Lars has been looking for you. Hold on.”
Lars has Mike’s job on Saturdays.
“Rebekah—you were on the scrap yard body, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Lars,” I say, “you know I’m not on today, right?”
“I thought you had a car. The list says you have a car.”
“I did….”
“Can you work today? We’re short and I need somebody to go to Sunset Park. Police are questioning the gardener in the crane lady murder. When he gets home, we want to talk to him.”
“The gardener?”
“Apparently he’s illegal. If you’ve already worked your thirty-eight, you can put in for time-and-a-half.”
“Okay …”
Lars gives me the address. “Miguel Arambula. Do you speak Spanish?”
“No.”
“Shit. Hold on.” Pause. “I’ll call you back.”
He hangs up and I wait. That would have to be one seriously fucked-up gardener to do all that to a client. Maybe she was horrible to him. I haven’t thought much about who Rivka Mendelssohn actually was. Maybe she was a rich bitch. Maybe he kidnapped her and tortured her and tried to extort money from her family because he got tired of being called a wetback.
My phone rings.
“It’s Rebekah.”
“Hold for Lars.”
I hold.
“Rebekah. Can you go to Borough Park instead? They’re having crane lady’s funeral.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Get the scene. Find out whatever you can about her.”
“So is the gardener a suspect?”
“Don’t know. Her body is at the Adonai Funeral Home, so that’s where they’ll gather.” He gives me the address—but I’m already there.
Saul comes out of the funeral home.
“I’m supposed to cover the funeral,” I say, still holding the phone up to my ear. I feel like I can’t bring my arm down. “I guess they’re still interested in the story.”
“Good,” says Saul.
“Why did you bring me here?” I whisper. I can’t get ahold of what’s happening in my body. I feel like I’m going to explode into flames and melt into the cement at the same time.
“I brought you here because, in three hours, Rivka Mendelssohn will be in the ground and the only people who will have seen what happened to her body will be Malka and myself. And whoever did this. And now, a member of the press.”
My mind feels like it belongs to someone else. How did I get here? Who the fuck am I to be entrusted with this? Fucking murder. And we’re the only ones who’ve seen what he did to her.
My stomach heaves and I cover my mouth, but it’s useless. I lean over and vomit up coffee and egg and bile onto the pavement of the funeral home parking lot. The yellow liquid splatters on my shoes. Saul jumps back. I kneel down and gag again, but nothing comes out. My face is wet and hard with tears and snot and I can feel the bits of whatever came out on my lips.
Saul puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says. “Come, let’s get in my car.”
We walk in silence and I let him open the passenger door for me. He comes around and digs through his center console for Kleenex, which he hands to me. I wipe my face and blow my nose. My mouth tastes like acid. I roll down the window to get some air.
“Did you hear about the gardener?” I say, finally.
“The gardener?”
“Apparently you guys have the Mendelssohns’ gardener in for questioning. He’s illegal.”
Saul is silent.
“Did you know about that?”
“I did not,” he says. “But it is not surprising.”
“Aron Mendelssohn probably gave them his name.”
Saul almost smiles.
“So … what can I use of that? What we just saw?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the fact that she was pregnant is a big deal. My editor might care about that. And maybe that she was hit on the head. And that her head was shaved recently. And that she was tied up.” It is, I realize as I speak, a great story. A scoop.
“Use it all,” says Saul.
“But … can I use your name? And Malka’s?” Malka, who, I realize, doesn’t even know I’m a reporter.
“You can’t use my name,” says Saul. “Definitely not. But your paper allows anonymous sources. Call me an official in the police department with knowledge of the investigation. Don’t mention Malka. Just say everything came from me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Saul leaves me at a deli a few blocks from the funeral home. I order a green tea and sit by the window. The streets are dark. My hands have stopped shaking, but my insides are on a low vibrate. My leg is bouncing beneath the wobbly wood table. I don’t have my pills with me, and I try to focus my mind forward, to problem-solve. But it’s a problem so much bigger than any other I’ve ever tried solving that I can’t even imagine where to begin. It makes no sense to me that the police would give a body away at the crime scene, then allow it to be buried without so much as a toxicology report. What if she was poisoned? What if the killer’s blood or hair is still on her? Or in her? Malka didn’t mention rape, but maybe she’d had sex before she died. Wouldn’t that be a lead? For the first time since I got this job, I know things no one else knows. But I have no idea what to do with what I know. Can I just write what I saw? Will it even make a difference? She’ll be in the ground by midnight.
I decide to call Cathy. I dial her extension and get voice mail.
“Cathy, it’s Rebekah Roberts. I don’t know if you’re still on crane lady, but I, um, got some information and I wanted to see what you thought. I’m covering the funeral, so I’ll have my phone on me. Just give me a call when you can.” I hang up and immediately feel like an ass for referring to Rivka Mendelssohn as “crane lady.” Like porn dad, and the hot dog hooker (who sold blow jobs and wieners from a cart on Long Island), and tan mom (who got arrested for supposedly allowing her toddler to use a tanning bed), tabloids, and to some extent cable news, often create crude monikers for the people unlucky enough to catch our attention. It’s a shorthand, obviously, since we deal with so many names every day. I’ve never thought of it as anything beyond mildly amusing, but saying those words now ignites a little army of pins and needles in my stomach. I’ve seen this poor woman’s naked, brutalized body. She is a woman with stories I will never know. Crane lady doesn’t have children, or ideas; she doesn’t love or weep or fight back. Crane lady is a cartoon; Rivka Mendelssohn is woman, like me. Like Iris. Like Aviva.
I sip my tea and wait. After about a half an hour, the streets start getting crowded. Hasidic men and women and children move as one from side streets onto the main road, where the funeral home is located. I toss the rest of my tea and head outside.
Everyone is dressed in black. There must be hundreds—maybe thousands—of people, but the street is almost silent. Even the children are quiet. I stand for a few moments in the doorway of a small apartment building, looking for a sympathetic face to stop. I covered the funeral of a construction worker once. He’d been atop a beam that wasn’t properly secured and fallen to his death. He was buried on Staten Island on a beautiful fall day. I spoke with a woman whose husband had been on the job with the man and she gave me a good quote about how frightening it was to know that the safety inspections hadn’t turned up any problems. Another woman, a cousin of the deceased man’s
wife, said his family was still in shock. That they’d just put a down payment on a house. After the graveside service, someone laid his hard hat, like a bouquet, atop the coffin. As everyone walked back to their cars, I watched the cemetery workers, who’d been standing off to the side smoking cigarettes during the ceremony, cover him in dirt.
I see a young woman, maybe my age, pushing a stroller, and I slide next to her, trying to keep apace.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m from the newspaper. Did you know Rivka Mendelssohn well?”
The woman does not break stride, and I can tell by the sharp shake of her head that she is not going to talk to me.
I step into the doorway and wait. Excuse me, I say, over and over to the people walking by. But no one stops. I decide to merge in and just follow the herd. I step in next to an elderly lady struggling with a heavy canvas shopping bag. Perfect, I think. The Good Samaritan gets the quote.
“Can I help you with that?” I ask.
The woman looks up at me. She squints, then smiles. The bag is heavy and her back is bent. She nods yes, and hands it to me. “Thank you,” she says.
“Did you know Mrs. Mendelssohn?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. “My daughter went to bais yaakov with her.”
I have no idea what that means.
“It’s so sad,” I say.
“Terrible,” she says. “She was very young.”
“What was she like?” I ask.
“Like?” The old lady looks at me.
“I’m … I’m from the newspaper,” I say quietly so no one else around us can hear and tear her away. “We’d like to write a story about her … sort of … humanize her for our readers. I spoke with her sister-in-law Miriam yesterday….” Saying you spoke with a family member or someone else in the inner circle of the person you’re trying to get information on makes it more likely others will talk. If the family is okay with me, I must be okay.
“You spoke with Miriam?”
“Yes,” I say. “She was very upset.”
The woman grabs my arm suddenly, her face now animated with unhappiness.
“It is so horrible!” she whispers, shaking her face at the sky. “I cannot understand it. So horrible. And you’re from the newspaper. They think, yes, that it was her gardener?”
Word travels fast around here.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “I think the police are questioning lots of people….”
She shakes her head fiercely. “Imagine. She trusted him, from outside the community…. Oh, her poor children. That poor family. As if they haven’t been through enough.”
“I know,” I say, though I don’t know anything.
“And you spoke with Miriam?”
“Yes. Will she be here?”
The woman raises her eyebrows. “I suppose so. If you spoke with her.”
“Have there been other … tragedies? For the family.”
“Nothing like this,” she says. “But like all families, they have illness. There are disappointments.” Illness and disappointments. Not too specific. Then she lowers her voice. “She lost a child last year. A baby.”
“That’s terrible,” I say, trying not to look too excited.
“It really was. But Rivka! She was a good woman.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Oh, not for several months. She had her family. But my youngest daughter, Chaya, Rivka has been a real friend to her. Such a blessing.”
I’ve managed to back us into the vestibule of an apartment building.
“Is your daughter here?”
“Chaya? No, no this is much too much for her. She is at home. I will go to the Mendelssohn home later today, to take this.” She points at the bag I’m carrying. “You are Jewish,” she says, certain the answer is yes. I nod. “Then you know.” But again, I don’t know.
“I would love to speak with your daughter, maybe have her share some memories of Rivka….” It’s a long shot, but why not? I’m not doing anything illegal. Just gathering information. And then it occurs to me that I don’t have my notebook out. Shit.
“Oh, that would be nice….,” she says. “Did you know her well? What is your name, dear?”
“Rivka,” I say. It just slips out. “My name is Rivka. From the newspaper.”
“Rivka! Yes, yes, you said, from the newspaper. Well, if it’s all right with the family, I suppose it’s all right with me. You said you spoke with Miriam?”
I nod.
“Chaya lives just around the corner there,” she says, twisting back and pointing at a series of row houses. I really need an address, but inserting numbers into the conversation, making it a more concrete thing—like, ring buzzer B at 560 Fifty-sixth—might freak this lady out. I know I’d be freaked out. Can I have your address so I can talk to your child about her dead friend? “I should be going,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say. I help her put her bag back over her bent shoulder. “And you never told me your name.”
“Mrs. Shoenstein,” she says.
And she’s off, slowing the ladies in her wake.
I wait a few moments and then step into the stream. As we approach the funeral home, the crowd gets thicker, and separates into males and females. I hear a male voice over a loudspeaker, broadcasting his prayers—I assume they are prayers—onto the street. I stand on my toes and all I see is black hats for what seems like blocks. It’s like a parade, but instead of cheering, people are weeping. Did all these people know Rivka? Do none of them want to know how she died? A year or two ago I read a novel that took place in an alternate universe where instead of going to Israel after the Holocaust, European Jews established a country in Alaska. In the novel, the author referred to the Jews as “black hats.” I liked the description, but when I told my dad, he said he thought that was a slur, and that my affinity for it evinced my adolescent anger at my mother—which I should have by now outgrown. But standing here among about a thousand black hats, it seems apt. Solemn and formal. A pretty good description of these people, or those I’ve met so far.
It’s been half my life since I attended a Jewish event. I had a friend in junior high school named Anya who was Jewish. We met in the “gifted” social studies class. There are several thousand Jews in Orlando, but since my father worked for the church, all his friends were Christian. He often said he lamented the lack of Jews in our life and wanted me to learn more about “that side” of my family. He bought me The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, when I was eight or nine years old, and for years afterward I devoured a series of young adult novels about the Holocaust. I was, as most people are when they learn about the Holocaust, appalled. I remember I had a vague idea that I might find clues about my mother in the books. Maybe the horror of what the Jews had endured—the betrayal and savagery—was such a burden, culturally, psychologically, that it drove even those fifty years away from it to sacrifice everything in … deference? Remembrance? Honor? When Anya and I met, she had been preparing for her bat mitzvah for more than a year. She kept her “Torah portion” in a binder with her school papers. It was phonetic, so I could read it, too, sort of. She was always practicing, so when we would eat lunch together, or occasionally visit each others’ houses, I would test her. Once, I slept over on a Saturday night, and the next morning she took me with her to Hebrew School, which was much like Sunday School at my dad’s church, but more focused on preparing the student for either a bar or bat mitzvah or a confirmation, which was different, but I wasn’t sure how.
“This is my friend Rebekah,” she told the class when the teacher asked her to introduce her guest. “She’s Jewish, but she doesn’t belong to temple.”
I knew a couple of the kids by sight from school. One was a shitty kid named Gabe. He wasn’t terribly bright and his parents spoiled him, a lethal combination in his case.
“She’s not Jewish!” he said, his face a smear of scorn.
Gabe and I, it turned out, had already
had it out over my Judaism, or lack thereof. Early in the school year, the teacher had given him some tests to pass back, and when he saw how I spelled my name, he grilled me.
“Why do you spell your name like that?” he demanded, standing over me, waving a paper in my face.
“None of your business,” I told him. My rebuff only enraged him further, and he began telling everyone that I was trying to make myself look Jewish by spelling my name “the Jewish way.” And clearly I wasn’t Jewish, because have you ever seen a Jewish redhead? And besides, her dad works at a church. The gossip was much more interesting to Gabe than most everyone else, since most everyone else didn’t really give a shit about Jews one way or the other. He stuck to it, though. He made a real effort to get people to rally against me. Anya, whom I had told about my mom, told me I should stand up to him and say that I was Jewish because my mom was Jewish. But I didn’t want to open that can of worms with him. So when he protested my Jewishness in Hebrew School, I was surprised at how it suddenly affected me.
“My mom was more Jewish than you’ll ever be,” I said, leaning toward him. “My mom was so Jewish, she gave everything up for Judaism. She gave me up. Would your parents give you up for Judaism? Fuck you.”
If I hadn’t said “fuck,” they probably wouldn’t have escorted me out. But I did, and they did. When I saw them all again, at Anya’s bat mitzvah, they kept away. Even Gabe. After that, it was me who kept away.
I am pressed toward the funeral home by the crowd, barely having to move my feet. The moaning seems to be coming from every direction. Is Aron Mendelssohn here? Is Miriam? From where I’m standing, everyone looks the same. I am able to get to the sidewalk and just past the gate into the parking lot when the voice on the loudspeaker falls silent. All I can hear is weeping. I rise onto my toes again and see a light-colored wood box moving slowly on the outstretched hands of the women outside. The box that holds Rivka Mendelssohn. The women around me lift their arms. I do the same, my fingers moving in anticipation. As the box moves back, the women turn to watch it, until suddenly, she is in my hands, and everyone seems to be looking at me. My fingertips feel the scratch of the wood, but the box itself seems weightless. Around me, the women turn as one, passing her back toward the street. I watch as she floats away, carried on the outstretched hands of the women of her community, until finally she reaches a waiting black car and is slid into the back. Someone shuts the door and she is gone. The women nearest the car slap their hands on its tinted windows, their rising wails a final good-bye.
