Believe

by Sarah Aronson

  Click, click, click, click, click.

  A tall man rushed toward me. Behind him was a woman with stick-straight brown hair and a blue-and-white pinstriped suit. She was wearing those plastic ugly/chic glasses that may be the rage, but as far as I could tell, they flattered no one. “Janine Collins!” She shoved a fat, brand-new Time magazine into my hands. The retrospective. “Do you ever think there’ll be peace in the Middle East? If there’s a treaty, would you ask to attend the signing?”

  I dropped the heavy magazine on the porch. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told them—no comment.” Sure, I wanted peace in the world, just like everyone else. But this wasn’t about the world. She was here to get me talking.

  I scrambled for the door, but when I tried to close it, she was too fast—she stopped me with her polished cherry-red peep-toe pump.

  We stood face to face.

  Click, click, click. “It’s been ten years since the bombing,” she said, holding her pen so tight her fingers blanched. “How have you changed? Do you still have nightmares? What do you want the world to learn from your tragedy? What do you remember?”

  I remembered glass breaking, people screaming. I remembered feeling pain from my head to my hands to my stomach. I remember crying for my mother. But what woke me up at night was the one image I will never talk about or forget—the face of the boy named Emir. It was a pretty face. An innocent face. When he walked into the synagogue, he stopped and looked at me.

  I saw him.

  I saw his face. I looked into his eyes. He looked back at me.

  You don’t forget eyes like that. You can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. Eyes like that—they give you nightmares. They wake you up. When you least expect it, they make your hands burn.

  If I wasn’t going to sell that detail to Time, there was no way I was going to tell her.

  The reporter spoke quickly. “Janine, I just want five minutes. I want to tell your story—paint the picture you want. I want to know what you believe.” When I didn’t take the bait, she said, “Do it for your mother.” She grabbed my hands. My hands. No one grabbed my ugly, crooked hands.

  I shoved her as hard as I could, and she stumbled backwards. I said, “I don’t believe in anything. You don’t have the right to bother me. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

  Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

  I slammed the door shut and ran upstairs. Next to my bed was a fuzzy eight-by-ten from the Dead Sea, the last picture taken of my family. My six-year-old belly stuck out like a big red balloon. My eyes were closed—my smile was that big. Mom sat up straight in a bright red bikini. Her tummy was flat. Dad wore a ripped University of Pennsylvania T-shirt and long cutoff shorts. Our skin sparkled, toasted by heat and the minerals of that magic water. He held rabbit ears behind her head.

  We looked happy.

  Lo, my mother’s sister, my guardian, took that picture. She said we were instant friends, but unlike the pain and the eyes and the screaming and the glass, I don’t remember that. My first memory of her was in the hospital, when the second wave of pain began.

  The operations. The therapy. The constant stream of reporters.

  They should know by now: My tragedy was history. God did not destine me to live. Every day, new suicide bombers blew themselves up. Dave Armstrong can call me his miracle, but he did not see stigmata in my hands. No matter what anybody says, I am not superhuman. I cannot change the world.

  Because if I could, the boy named Emir would have stayed home. My parents would be alive. This dress would be perfect, and reporters and photographers would not be ruining my life.

  And if not that, at least, I’d have beautiful hands like Miriam Haverstraw.

  THREE

  I took out my frustrations on a pint of store-brand French silk. It wasn’t gelato, but at least my freezer was free of photographers.

  Miriam sent me six texts and left two voicemails. They all said the same thing. We are so sorry. And We feel just awful. And You know Abe just made a mistake. Can you let us back in? We can get your flavors to go.

  I wrote back, “No thanks.” Texting more than that made my fingers ache. She might be sincere, but I was mad. I didn’t want to ask Abe how he could have missed a guy that size. I didn’t want to think he hadn’t bothered looking … on purpose. Instead, I opened the door a crack and grabbed the retrospective.

  I had to give them credit; the cover was provocative. Across most of it was a photo of the Israeli flag, pumped full of bullets. Dark block letters asked, Are We Any Closer to Peace? In the upper left-hand corner—the space reserved for special features—were red letters asking, Where are they now? and next to that was the picture that made me famous: me in Dave Armstrong’s arms, covered in soot. In that moment, I stared straight into the camera. Wide eyes. Broken hands.

  That photographer won a Pulitzer. I flipped past the ads to the table of contents.

  There were sections for real news (as opposed to reality/celebrity news), editorials, glossy color pictures of Israel over the last ten years, a few pages of history, and of course, the stuff that sold the whole thing: the tragedy. The heartbreaking story of the everyday people. My story. It was all there.

  My phone rang again. It was my boyfriend, Dan Snyder. This was no coincidence. “Hi,” I said to Dan.

  He said, “What’s up?”

  I obviously didn’t like Dan because he was the greatest conversationalist. But he did have great hands and great lips and a pretty good sense of humor. And it wasn’t every day you met a guy who cared about style, who understood the merits of pants with minimal break on a shorter physique, who knew that a jacket fit when your knuckles (arms extended, not flexed) lay even with the bottom of your jacket. He even liked talking about Glamour do’s and don’ts.

  I said, “I guess you saw the retrospective.”

  If he were smarter, he would have said, “What retrospective?” Instead he said, “I heard you were having a rough day. You want me to come over?”

  Dan Snyder might have been the first varsity shortstop with an eye for good tailoring, but he was just like every other guy when it came to getting a girl to possibly say yes.

  Eight minutes later, he was sprawled across my couch. Two minutes after that, he had his hand on my bare shoulder, two buttons undone, and the retrospective open to a list of all the journalists and photographers who had lost their lives covering the wars of the Middle East.

  There were a lot of them. From a lot of different countries.

  Dan kissed my neck. His hair tickled. He smelled like a combination of sweat and excitement and cinnamon donuts. “She’s here somewhere.” He scrolled down the smiling headshots until he found the picture of my mom. “You look a lot like her.”

  Yes. We had the same forehead. Same nose. Lo thought I was stubborn like my mother, too. She said my mother was really passionate; she turned into a Hulk when she saw any kind of injustice.

  But I wasn’t just a carbon copy of my mom. My chin and eyes came from my dad’s side of the family. According to Lo, so were my feet. Fallen arches. Second toe bigger than the first.

  Dan asked if I’d read the section about me. “No. And I’m not going to.” I sat back and tried to look sexy. “Is this really what you want to do?”

  He threw the magazine on the floor and kissed me again, this time harder. But the sad/funny thing was, the longer we kissed, the less interested I got, the more sure I was that I didn’t want to have sex. Not here. Not now. I may not have believed in waiting for “the one,” but I wanted dinner first. And something besides this itchy couch.

  Today was not the right day. It didn’t matter how cute he was. No doubt, if I got naked, Lo would walk in the door.

  My lips were numb when he finally got the hint and gave up. “Can I show you the new dress?” I disengaged. “If you want, you can come up.”

  He looked at the front door. I was pretty sure he thought that was code for something else. “Sure.
” He followed me up the stairs.

  In my room, we slipped the brown dress onto Dress-Form Annie and examined her from all sides. He said, “It’s cute and it’s got a lot of great movement, and I think you’ll get into every school in the universe.” He took a few pictures, then reached around me and felt under my shirt to the small of my back—just in case I’d changed my mind. “But I also think you can do more. I think if you put your mind to it, you could make something really spectacular.”

  Annie’s lips looked lopsided. “This isn’t spectacular?”

  He unsnapped my jeans and fumbled for the zipper. “If you want to be spectacular, you have to push the envelope. You have to trust your instincts.” When he had it open, he rested his hands on my hips. “You have to let yourself be vulnerable.” It was a pretty intense thing to say.

  It hit a nerve.

  He kissed me again. Pulled me so close I could feel every single part of him. He whispered, “What about that other dress you sketched?”

  I almost stopped breathing. He meant the one inspired by an old picture of my parents. He was the only person who’d seen it.

  He said, in a very soft voice, “That dress would blow Parsons away.” He put his hand on the small of my back again (crap), and I couldn’t be sure if he believed this or if he realized that now he actually had a chance. “It’s more exciting. It’s definitely more you.”

  I hesitated. “Definitely?”

  He smiled. Maybe he did. “Definitely.”

  If this had been a sitcom or even reality TV, I’d have ripped off my jeans right here. But it was my real life. Which meant that just when I thought I wanted to do it, the door downstairs beeped. Lo was home. I guessed that settled that.

  She must have recognized Dan’s car, because instead of coming straight up, she clanged around the kitchen for a good five minutes. In this way, Lo was very cool. She talked to me about safe sex and drugs and drinking, and when it was just us, she gave me a sip of wine. She took hot yoga three times a week. She and her girlfriend, Sharon, would probably get married if Pennsylvania would ever join this century and make it legal.

  But that didn’t mean Lo was what the tabs call a “modern woman.” She never wore a skirt above the knee—even on dress-down days—and she didn’t seem to understand that baggy clothes did not make you look smaller. She had worked at the courthouse for five years, but she never came home with juicy stories. She and Sharon had decided not to live together. I’d only seen them kiss twice.

  Maybe Lo thought she needed to act like all the other moms. She walked into the guest room and reminded us that Dan was not supposed to be above ground level and that if we knew what was good for us, we’d better both be decent. Then she came up. Slow, heavy steps. “I’m surprised to see you, Dan. I was under the impression that Miriam and Janine were going to spend the day doing homework.”

  He knew better than to argue with a former first lieutenant of the Israeli Defense Forces. He made an excuse and headed out the door.

  “We didn’t do anything,” I told her.

  “Not this time.” She didn’t trust Dan. Or Abe. Or any guy she thought might someday want to have sex with me.

  It really wasn’t fair. I said, “I’m sorry you were surprised, but I was having a rough day.” I gave her the retrospective and told her about the reporter. “They took pictures. I got mad. I didn’t even want to go out. The whole thing blew up in my face.”

  She took two big kapalabhati breaths—the breaths of fire—before barraging me with I-told-you-so’s. “I told you not to leave the house. I told you ten years is a big anniversary. These reporters—a lot of them knew your mom. They admired your father.” She paged through the magazine, stopping at the section about me. “How did they get this?” she asked. There was a school picture for every year from then until now.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  I told her what the reporter said about my mother. She shook her head. Working for the DA reinforced her distrust in the press—as well as casual acquaintances. “You didn’t make a statement, did you?”

  I sighed. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

  That was Lo’s number-one rule. No statements. No confessions. We never talked publicly about the past, especially the day I was buried alive, when the rubble dirtied my hair and stung my eyes, when my throat closed and I almost died. We never told anyone that my mother didn’t die right away, that she talked to me the whole time.

  She said, “You are strong.” And, “You can do this, baby. Keep talking to me, don’t be afraid, and I’ll stay here with you.” When I started to sleep, she told me over and over again, “You have a holy soul. You have so much to look forward to.”

  Lo said that was love.

  I knew her voice kept me alive.

  It was also the hideous punch line to my story. That day, the microphones could have helped me. The cameras should have found her. Dave Armstrong heard my voice, and at the same time, she stopped talking. I told them, but nobody listened. By the time they were done cheering, my mother was dead.

  FOUR

  There were some days that weren’t meant to be sunny.

  In the morning, my fingers felt cold and stiff. My joints ached. It was one of the not-so-great side effects of all those hand surgeries. If I sewed for too many hours, my hands went numb. I couldn’t text with accuracy. If there were a game show called Predict the Weather, I’d probably win a million dollars. When rain or cold approached, I felt it in my knuckles.

  Heat helped, but the problem was, too much of it made me feel claustrophobic. Lo said it was the PTSD. She said that, even after years of therapy, I would always hate feeling covered; loud, sudden noises would freak me out. I’d probably always have nightmares.

  She called up from downstairs. “Are you awake?”

  “Come on up.”

  On the anniversary, there was no work, no sewing, and no yoga. Instead we talked. We went to the cemetery. At some point we looked at old photos’the ones nobody had ever put in print.

  I had two favorites: the first was of my dad and me. We were sitting under a tree, and I was pointing up at the sky. The other was taken two years before they died, right after my mom won some local journalism prize. In that shot, she leaned back in her chair, her feet up on her desk, her sandals dangling from her toes, a big smile on her face. Her T-shirt said in big black letters, “Face your fears.” According to Lo, that was one of her mantras.

  I kept them both next to my bed.

  The phone rang. Private name, private number. Lo ignored it. “I have something for you,” she said. “It’s from your grandparents. They asked me to give it to you today.”

  I loved getting presents, but my grandparents didn’t really know me that well. They lived in Tel Aviv, and in ten years, we had never gotten together once. We talked for two minutes every other Monday, and in between my grandfather e-mailed me articles about Judaism and/or Israel. They sent me things I did not want or need: a piece of Roman glass, halvah, or a T-shirt, usually too small.

  Lo reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, square box. “Open it,” she said without excitement. “They were very insistent.”

  In a small box was a black satin bag with a black drawstring. A tag taped to the bag said, “This belonged to your mother.”

  As fast as I could, I untied the string and dropped the necklace into my open palm. When I saw the charm, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. If it hadn’t been my mother’s, I would have thrown it across the room.

  It was a hand. Three round fingers and two tiny ones flaring out on either side. There was a blue stone in the middle of some beveled silver that made it look a lot like an eye. A yellow piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the box:

  The hamsa is an ancient symbol used as a protective amulet by both Jews and Muslims. It is usually worn around the neck or hung on walls or over doors as protection from the evil eye.

  Lo took it from me and clasped it around my neck. “I remember this. Sh
e used to wear it all the time.”

  I was confused. “My mother hated religion.” My mother wrote about politicians who claimed to be faithful but didn’t vote or act that way. She wrote about religious strife all over the world. Her most noted series focused on the many soldiers who had sacrificed their lives for causes that were rooted in religion. You didn’t have to read between the lines to infer that she blamed religion for America’s interest in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Or 9/11. Later in her career, when newspapers began printing her columns, she didn’t mince words: religion was a hoax/a business/a conspiracy’at worst, a lie. She was 100 percent sure that religion was going to lead to the destruction of the world. “Are you sure?”

  Lo nodded; she handed me the phone. My grandfather picked up on the second ring. He asked, “Will you wear it?” (as opposed to “Do you like it?”). His accent was heavy, hard to understand.

  I said yes, but the connection was spotty. I didn’t think he heard me. He said, “The hamsa is for protection, so you shouldn’t take it off. Not even to shower. It encompasses the four areas of healing: heart, soul, mind, and world.”

  I didn’t care what it was supposed to encompass. It was hers. She wore it. For that reason alone, I promised to wear it every day.

  My grandmother said, “When your mother was a little girl, she used to have this dream’that the whole world was linked, hand to hand to hand to hand. We gave it to her when she was your age’when we came to Israel. Even though we know that the hand as a symbol might be … complicated for you, we thought you should have it now. Because we know’ you must have dreams too.”

  I did have dreams. In every one, my mom skipped the assignment. We were just like those people who didn’t go to work on September eleventh or missed their connection on a plane that later crashed. In my dreams, she finished her work and we went to the beach and then we left Israel and lived normal lives. Many nights I’ve dreamed that, on this one day, the story was about someone else. In my dreams, my whole family let go of her stupid chain of hands.