It must have been hours later when I woke up. The girl on the sofa across from me was still there, but she’d changed positions. I heard voices and dishes, and a shirtless man sat down next to me and turned on the television. He bent forward, revealing a white back spotted with moles. More moles than I had ever seen. Moles with hair poking out of them. I stood up.
“Is Gitty Rosenbaum here?”
“Who?” he said, barely looking up. He was probably my age now. Forty-ish. I remember there was gray in his week-old beard.
“Gitty,” I said again.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Ask one of the girls.”
I walked past him into a tiny kitchen. He called after me: “And while you’re at it, ask which one of ’em is letting that dog piss all over the place. That dog is gonna be gone next time I come here.”
I kept walking down a hallway and found two girls in a bedroom. I asked them if Gitty lived here and they looked at me blankly.
“Ask Sandra,” said one. “She’s been here a while.”
I knocked on the bedroom door across the hall and someone said to come in. The room was black, thick curtains drawn against the sun. I squinted into the darkness and made out a figure in the bed. I asked if Gitty Rosenbaum was here and a female voice said Gitty hadn’t lived there in months. I asked if she had any idea where she was and she said, “I think she’s in her car.”
“Her car?” I said.
“She was parked behind the 7-Eleven on Third,” said the girl, flopping over to face me. She wasn’t much older than me and she had a black eye. I asked her what kind of car and she said a Honda. And then she flopped back over.
I slept that night and the next in a motel room that cost twenty-nine dollars plus tax. I ate what I could buy at the 7-Eleven while I waited for Gitty. On the third day, she appeared in her Honda. She was skinny, and her dark hair was streaked with blond, but I knew her. I called her name and she stopped and turned. And then she screamed. We both did. She ran to me and we hugged and laughed until we were out of breath. But that excitement didn’t last very long. We bought hot tea and sat on the curb outside. I told her my story and she told me hers. She had been living in the Honda since May. It wasn’t so bad, she said, but I knew she didn’t mean it. She had deep puffy circles under her eyes, and a cold sore on her mouth. She smelled bad. I asked why she wasn’t living at the house I’d been to anymore, and she said she left because you can’t stay there if you don’t work.
“Don’t you want to work?” I asked.
Gitty shook her head and looked away from me. “It is not good work,” she said. And she wouldn’t say any more.
We both looked for jobs while we stayed together in the motel. After four days, we were down to fifty dollars. On the fifth day I got a job at a Goodwill store making four dollars an hour sorting through donated clothes, but they only needed me from noon to five. And, I learned at the end of my first shift, it would take ten days for my paperwork to go through, which meant I wouldn’t get paid until then. So Gitty and I slept in the car. The hardest part was finding a place to take a shower and go to the bathroom. Gitty had a bottle she peed in at night, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I usually held it in until dawn when we could drive to a McDonald’s. I asked Gitty if she’d ever gone to shul to ask for help and she shook her head.
“This is not Brooklyn,” she said.
Gitty had changed almost entirely since I’d known her. When we were children, our families went to the same bungalow colony in the Catskills and Gitty and I shared a bed. She had a pretty singing voice and she practiced songs in our room. Girls are not supposed to sing in front of boys, but Gitty liked to show off. She was always getting into trouble for singing. Sometimes she made up new words for the songs-inserting impressions of people we knew, making everyone laugh. Tante Leah and my mother told Gitty she talked too much. But now, Gitty didn’t say much of anything. And she never sang. Or smiled. When she did talk, she didn’t talk about anything that mattered. She never once mentioned her family.
I tried not to think about you, Rebekah, but it was impossible. Almost every day I said to Gitty, “I wonder what Rebekah is doing right now?” I imagined you in your stroller on the way to the park with the baseball field at dusk. I imagined your father smiling and cooing at you as he lifted you out of your seat and set you on his chest, your head, still a little unsteady on your neck, wobbling as you tried to look all around you at once. Gitty did not want to imagine with me, but I have played the game of imagining where you are every day since I left. I have told you all my stories. I have asked for your advice. I have carried you everywhere, Rebekah. Always.
After I started at Goodwill, Gitty told me she was spending the afternoons looking for work, but she was bringing men into the car for money. They left their smell. We showered at night by the beach, where there were nozzles for people to rinse off after a day in the sand. And then one night a police car drove into the parking lot behind the Rent-A-Center and saw me peeing beside the car. I spent that night and all the next day and night in a cell with seven other women. One was naked except for a bed sheet. Gitty didn’t come to get me, and when I got out, I called home to Brooklyn. My brother Eli answered the telephone, and at first I didn’t recognize his voice. I had been gone for fifteen months and he had become a man.
“Aviva?” he said. “It’s Eli.”
“Eli!” I cried.
“Aviva, please come home,” he said. “Mommy is dead, Aviva. And we have a new brother.”
CHAPTER SIX
When I wake up, Iris has already left for work. I open my laptop and find Pessie’s story six headlines down inside the News section.
ROSEVILLE MAN ACCUSES COPS, COMMUNITY OF IGNORING WIFE’S MYSTERIOUS DEATH
By Rebekah Roberts
The family of an upstate mother whose body was found in her bathtub is accusing local police of ignoring her mysterious death.
“I have no doubt that Pessie was killed,” says Levi Goldin, 28, of Roseville.
“I do not know why the Roseville police are uninterested in Pessie’s death. And I do not know why her community seems to have already forgotten her.”
Goldin told the Tribune that on the day of her death, his wife was supposed to take their son to the doctor but did not show up and stopped answering her phone. When he got home he found his wife in the bathtub and the child screaming, strapped into his car seat in the living room.
Pessie was born in Brooklyn but her family moved to Rockland County when she was a child.