My legs are free, but I’m still tethered to the chair so I can’t actually stand. I scoot backward along the floor. Miriam is gripping the scissors with both hands, pointing them at me like she’s protecting herself.
My phone rings again; again, Miriam is startled.
“Who is that!” she screams, and begins backing into the opposite corner, toward the sink.
“Don’t come any closer,” she says.
And then I hear it: footsteps. Boots.
“Miriam!” calls a male voice.
“Get away!” screams Miriam.
“We’re coming in!” shouts the man. A kick, and the door swings open.
It’s Aron Mendelssohn. Behind him is Detective Darin Spinelli, holding a gun.
“Drop the weapon!” Darin shouts at Miriam.
But if Miriam hears him, she doesn’t act like it. She wipes her eyes with her bloody hand and charges forward with the scissors in front of her. She takes less than three steps before Darin blasts her. One, two shots to the chest and she falls like a bag of bricks.
Aron Mendelssohn runs to me and kneels down, frantically untying my hands. “Are you all right?” he asks, grabbing my arms, turning me, examining me, and then suddenly, pulling me to him. Holding me, and murmuring, “Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Miriam does not get taken away by the Chesed Shel Emes. Aron Mendelssohn objects, but he is handcuffed on his own sofa and he doesn’t seem to have much energy. The police, not the Shomrim, take custody of the body of the second woman to die at the Mendelssohn house in a week.
Darin gets his gun taken away, and I am wrapped in a blanket and put in an ambulance. I have lacerations, a concussion, and possibly a broken bone and some torn ligaments in my right foot. My hair is mostly gone.
Tony and Iris are at the hospital within hours. My dad and Maria get on an airplane.
It is dark outside when Captain Weber and another detective come to question me. They say that the police found Rivka Mendelssohn’s blood and hair in the garage. They say they want to exhume her body, but Aron Mendelssohn, who is in custody, is refusing to give his permission.
“We’ll get around him,” says Weber. “It’ll just take a few days.”
“Why is he in custody?” I ask.
“For now, we’ve booked him on illegal disposal of a body,” says the detective. “We have surveillance video of his car going into the scrap yard the night Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was dumped.”
“What is he saying?”
“He’s not saying anything. He lawyered up. But he’s got a lot of explaining to do before he sees sky.”
“I don’t think he killed her,” I say.
“We’ll be the judge of that,” says Weber. At least he’s dropped the diminutives.
“How did you know I was in there?” I ask.
“The little boy noticed the aunt was missing.”
“Yakov?” I cringe thinking of what that little boy knows. What he’s seen in just the past year.
Captain Weber nods. “He told his father and the father called Shomrim. It was just luck that Detective Spinelli was at their mission control interviewing the leader when the call came in.”
I sleep through most of the first twenty-four hours. My head feels huge and delicate, and my dreams are throbbing cascades of faces and hard surfaces and fear: Aviva holding a knife; Miriam trying to dial out from my phone; Rivka Mendelssohn rubbing her pregnant belly.
Iris brings a purple scarf and ties it over my head. She holds up a mirror for me to see, and the reflection is unfamiliar. The white of my left eye is blood red. Black stitches hold my bottom lip together. I am lopsided and swollen everywhere else. I feel weak in my unattractiveness.
Tony does a lot of pacing. Maria spends hours on her phone just outside my room, arguing with their insurance company, which may or may not cover me in New York State. Larry shows up with the paper. There is a short item about a police-involved shooting in Borough Park. My name isn’t mentioned. He tells me they’re going forward with the story about the murdered baby and the cover-up. I’ll have a byline, he says, but Albert Morgan doesn’t want to wait.
“He’s thinks Pete Calloway could scoop us,” he says. “We’re calling it the “‘Hasidic House of Horrors.’”
I close my eyes. All I want to know about the Trib is whether they’re going to help with my hospital bills. Larry says he’ll ask.
When Iris leaves for her office, my dad takes her place by my side, sitting forward, hands ready to hold. The second evening, as the sky goes purple in the window behind him, I catch him murmuring to himself.
“Dad?” I say. “Are you okay?”
He smiles weakly, and puts his hand on mine. My dad is a young man compared to the fathers of most of my friends; he was still in his thirties when I started college. He wears his sand-colored hair a little bit long; it curls around his ears and falls over his forehead. He was just a boy when he became a dad.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” he asks.
“I think I’m okay, Dad,” I say. I’m glad you’re here, I think. I’m glad you’re mine.
“What were you doing?” he whispers. “Why were you all alone?”
I close my eyes. “I made a mistake, Dad. I didn’t see what was happening. I just…” I just wanted the story. I wanted to know. But I don’t say that; he won’t understand.
“I feel like this is my fault,” he says. “All the questions you have, about your mother. And I could never really answer them, could I?”
“I don’t even know if there are answers, Dad,” I say. But even as I say it, I know that I don’t believe it. If I believe in anything, I believe that there are always answers. You just have to ask the right question of the right person at the right time. And my dad, loving and incurious and satisfied in his life with Maria and his children and his church, was never the right person. But the Orthodox women who knew Rivka Mendelssohn, they are. All week, I’ve looked at each of them and asked myself: Is this Aviva? Is she frumpy and kindhearted like Sara Wyman? Guiding others on the path out of the community that suffocates them. Is she timid and unhappy, like Chaya? Married now, bearing babies-grandbabies, even. Accomplished and content like Malka? I want her to be like Rivka: responsible, admired, agonizing over how to balance her long-held beliefs with newfound ideas and emotions. But I don’t think she was. Or is. I think that if she’s like any of them, she might be like Miriam. Beset by an inconvenient, undesirable illness. And in way over her head. I want to tell my father about all these women. About all the things I’ve learned about them. About the new perspective I have. But the stories seem too long to tell now, and so I say this: “I think maybe I forgive her, Dad.”
He looks at me with soggy, hopeful eyes. “Oh, Rebekah,” he says, reaching for me, clumsily wrapping his arms around my bed-bound body. “I’m so glad.” And then we both start to cry. I’m not sure what he’s crying about, or whom he’s crying for-his injured only daughter, or the woman who left us both behind-but me, I’m crying because I’ve finally seen a little bit of the world as Aviva saw it, and it nearly killed me.
I stay in the hospital a few more days while they monitor me for a possible blood clot. When I leave, Dad and Maria and Iris and I all pile into a livery car and go back to Gowanus. After they get me in bed and my dad and Maria go back to their hotel, I tell Iris to bring in the newspaper. I avoided the article I knew they’d published while I was in the hospital because I knew it would stress me out, but I told Iris to get a copy so I could read it when I got home.