“Miriam,” I say, when I am two paces behind. “Excuse me, Miriam?”
She turns sharply, her eyes wide.
“We cannot talk here,” says Miriam. “Come.” She resumes her pace. I follow, two blocks and then a left, and another block and a right. She stays ahead of me, sucking on her cigarette. Across the street from the house, she stops.
“They do not know I have gone,” she says. “We are sitting shiva and we cannot leave the house. Aron and the children are in the living room on their chairs and I went to lie down in my room. But it is too much in that house. There are too many children. Do you understand? I had to get out. My brother. He expects me to be their mother. But I am not their mother. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I say. “Do you have a minute for me to ask you some questions? We could do it inside.”
Miriam shakes her head. “No.” A woman and her children come up the block. Miriam turns her back to them. They pass us by without a glance.
“Come,” says Miriam. She drops her cigarette on the sidewalk and crosses the street. When we get to the edge of the Mendelssohn lot, she stops and peers around a leafless shrub. “Go to the side. See if the window shades are open.”
“What?”
“Go!” she says. “They cannot see me outside. Go! Through the gate. See if they are looking.”
I go. I walk up to the gate and slowly lift the latch, running through the words I’ll say if I encounter Aron Mendelssohn. Hello, sir. Trespassing? Oh no, your sister asked me to stop by. If I could even get the words out before I just turn and run. The backyard is empty and quiet. Snow is frozen in dunes beside the shoveled brick walk between the house and the garage. The window in the back door, the door I went through last time, is covered with a curtain. I take two more steps and see a row of windows; the kitchen, perhaps. They are not covered with curtains, but inside the room seems dark.
“See?” Miriam is suddenly behind me. “There are many windows. Come. I need one more cigarette.” She crouches down and scurries behind the house, underneath the row of windows. She turns and motions for me to follow, then darts across the yard and disappears inside the garage. I look around. It’s an overcast morning. Cold, but less windy than the past few days. A man in a black hat walks by the house. Does Miriam really have to hide in the garage to smoke? My heart is starting to flutter unpleasantly. There are so many fucking secrets in this world. I can feel my armpits slick and the skin on my neck burn. Should I not be following Miriam? My body is screaming at me. But it screams so often that it’s easy to ignore. And I have a story to get, so fuck you, body. I’m going to get it.
The door at the side of the garage is open and I let myself in. Miriam is pacing, smoking. There is a minivan in one space, but the rest of the garage seems to be used for storage. There are half a dozen card table chairs folded up and leaning against one wall. Along the wall by the door are a couple of deep plastic bins full of discarded objects-old cookware, broken desktop filing systems, dirt-caked garden tools, a table lamp without a shade. And more bins full of empty water and juice bottles, presumably ready to recycle. Beside the bins is a wobbly plastic shelving unit holding canned food.
“In here it is safe,” says Miriam, closing the door behind me. “You see? My brother, he does not want anyone to know about Rivka. But I will tell you. What would you like to know?”
“I actually wanted to ask you about… Shoshanna,” I say.
This surprises her. Her face doesn’t change-it’s still pinched and pale, her eyes half hidden beneath the thick bangs of her wig-but her body does. She jumps slightly.
“I thought you wanted to talk about Rivka?”
“I do,” I say. “I was hoping you could tell me how she handled the death. I spoke with some people who said she was very… affected. That it was very difficult for her.”
Miriam scratches at her wig.
“Could you tell me when she died?” Miriam shakes her head. She seems to have forgotten her cigarette, which is burning down slowly, ash dropping onto the concrete floor. “Were you here? Do you remember what happened? It must have been horrible.”
Miriam says nothing. I take my notebook out of my bag and ask again, “Do you remember anything about that…?”
“I do not want to talk about Shoshanna.”
“Okay…”
“Shoshanna was just a baby. Babies die. Sometimes we don’t know how. Sometimes they die inside their mothers. It is the will of Hashem. We must accept it.”
“But she was a bit older, right?”
Miriam glares at me. “She was a little momzer. Her mother was a zona.”
“Her mother… you mean, Rivka?”
“You want to know about Rivka. Rivka was weak. She turned her back on Hashem and on her family. My family. My family that took her in. Rivka had everything, but she always wanted more. She thought she deserved more.” Miriam’s face is flushed. “What do you think of this?” she asks. “What do you think of what I am telling you?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you…”
“You said you wanted to write a story about Rivka,” she says. “I am telling you about Rivka.”
“I know,” I say, “but maybe we could go into the house?”
Miriam shakes her head slowly. Before I saw her on the street this morning, I hadn’t spent more than five minutes interacting with Miriam. I’d never encountered her alone and I hadn’t spent much time thinking about her personality, just her situation. Dead sister-in-law; frightened, seemingly, of her domineering brother, yet willing to talk to me in her grief. Which, come to think of it, was unlike most of the grief I’ve encountered getting quotes from the relatives of homicide victims over the past few months. Usually, they beg me to leave them alone. They hold their hands out and squint, like they’re trying to find shade from a hot, horrible sun. Please, we can’t, they say. Not now. Some sizable minority get angry; they call me a sicko, a vulture, a parasite; they slam doors. In October, I was chased off a tiny Staten Island front lawn by the aunt of a girl who was found buried in a shallow grave in New Jersey.
But Miriam, it occurs to me, was not at all emotional. Not until now. And now it’s the wrong emotion. Miriam is not sad-she is seething.
“What do you think of this?” she asks, breathing heavily. She comes closer to me. “What do you think of a mother who betrays her family? For sex.”
“Sex?…”
“When she told me, she was happy. Happy to be shaming her family and her husband. Her children.”
Her face changes again, now to an expression of extreme distaste, like she’s just eaten a mouthful of shit.
“‘Miriam,’ she said”-her voice is thick with sarcasm-“‘Miriam, I wish you could find this love. You would understand that it must be Hashem speaking to me. It must.’”
“You were close, then…,” I stammer. “She trusted you?”
“Why are you not writing this down?” She flicks her cigarette at my face. It’s just a butt now, but it hits below my right eye and stings. “Rivka betrayed her family. She was greedy and she was a zona and she deserved to die.”
I am afraid that if I turn away, I will provoke her. This is a woman with a mental illness, I remind myself. A woman who has been mistreated. Like the men and women who mutter and pace and shout in the subway late at night, she is unpredictable. One wrong look, and suddenly I become a demon to be slain. I need to say the right thing, I need to remain calm, and I need to leave the garage.
“Miriam,” I say, stepping backward toward the door, “I think maybe…”
Miriam grabs a card table chair and swings it at me. I turn toward the door, but before I can take two steps the sharp end of one of the chair’s aluminum legs connects with the side of my skull. I stumble sideways and land on my hands and knees.