What could I say? He was right. And I, too, had done nothing.
“You do not have to let that man ruin the rest of your life, Sammy. You are a smart boy. There are people who can help you. Professionals…”
“I’m not going to therapy. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to forget about it. I want to move on.”
It was a reasonable request. But by then I knew enough to know that trauma doesn’t let you move on. Whether you inflict it on yourself-like I did by leaving you-or have it forced upon you like Sammy did, shame and fear implants inside you like cancer. Sammy, I knew, would never go a day without being assaulted by that man, just as I had never gone a day without seeing your father’s face when he discovered that I was gone.
“Is this really how you want to live? With these people?”
“They’re my friends! Until I met Ryan, all I thought about was killing myself.”
“Sammy!”
“What? What did you think I was doing in that room all day? I had it all planned. I would go into the mountains where we used to hike and jump off a cliff. But now everything’s changed. Can’t you see I’m happier, Aviva?”
“But this can’t be what you want to spend your life doing?”
“Aviva, I have so much life ahead of me!” He laughed. “Since I left I’ve learned more about history, and the way things work in the real world, than twelve years in yeshiva. It’s such bullshit the way they make us afraid of everyone who isn’t like us. You can’t just come to America and pretend you’re better than everybody else. It’s supposed to be a melting pot.”
“I don’t think your friends with the swastikas believe in the melting pot, Sammy.”
“You know what I mean!”
“They’re going to find out you’re Jewish.”
“I’m not Jewish anymore.”
His naïveté shocked me. “Being Jewish isn’t like a hat, Sammy. You can’t just take it off.”
He made a little gesture with his hand like he was tossing something away. “It’s gone.”
“How can you pretend to be a Nazi?”
“I’m not pretending to be a Nazi!”
“What’s going to happen when they see you’ve fooled them?”
“Would you shut up about it, Aviva?” The meanness fell over his face like a metal gate closing over a store. I was back where I started. How could he not see that this was ridiculous? How could he not see that it would turn out badly no matter what? But I was not going to win this fight-at least not today-and I would not allow myself to lose him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t worry, okay? Ryan’s not close with his family. He just sees his dad for work because he has to.”
“I think he is the wrong man for you, Sammy,” I said, speaking slowly, thinking that perhaps if I enunciated perfectly, he would agree. “Please come home. It is not safe with all that pot around. The police will put you in jail.”
“It’s not that much,” he said. “You want some?”
I said, no, I did not want any pot. Sammy promised to come visit soon, and as I drove home, I began to see how I had opened this path to him. When I told him about you, I taught him that keeping secrets was normal. If I could live with a secret daughter, he could live as a secret Jew. And if big sister Aviva sometimes drank too much or smoked some pot, why shouldn’t he? When he first ran off the derech I imagined that getting a little tipsy or high together was a way to connect with him as a new adult-but I set a terrible precedent. Sammy was just weeks out of a life where every choice had only one right answer: whatever the Torah says, or the rebbe, or his elders. Suddenly, he could do anything. And why not try? But I should not have made it look like it was all without consequences. He needed to know about the hardships of this life. He needed to know that he would get hurt, and that he would hurt others. He needed to know that, sometimes, people die.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Half a mile away from the Halls I call Kaitlyn’s cell.
“I’m sorry to bug you again,” I say. “I was just out at Ryan’s family’s place in Greenville…”
“You went out there?” she says, interrupting me.
“Yeah. I was just trying to track down Ryan and Sam.”
“Well, they definitely aren’t gonna be out there.”
“Right,” I say. “I guess I didn’t know…”
“Ryan usually gets back to me quick but I still haven’t heard from him. I’m home now. Do you wanna come over?”
I plug her address into my phone and then call Larry to see if he’s gotten a name on the license plate number from Nechemaya.
“Nothing for you,” he tells me. “We’re not really supposed to run plates. I asked my guy for a favor but I don’t want to bug him too much. What did Roseville PD say?”
“The chief wasn’t there but I talked to the cop who was first on the scene when Pessie died.”
“Great! Can you write it up?”
“He wouldn’t go on the record. He told me the chief had turned the case over to the State Police, but the chief didn’t mention that to me when I talked to him. I gave him the plate number and when he looked it up… it was weird. He was all friendly and then he clammed up.”
“So nothing for tomorrow?”
“I got a little bit from a neighbor and one of Pessie’s coworkers. Apparently she had a fight with someone at work about a week before she died. It might have been this ex-fiancé.”
“What was the fight about?”
“She didn’t know. She said the guy was really upset.”
“But she doesn’t know his name?”
“No.”
“It’s a little thin. I’d rather advance the police angle. Have you called the State Police yourself?”
“No.”
“Do that. Call me back.”
I pull over at a Stewart’s gas station and Google “State Police Rockland County” on my phone. A woman answers.
“Troop F,” she says.
“Hi,” I say. “My name is Rebekah Roberts and I’m a reporter for the New York Tribune. I’m working on an article about a possible homicide in Roseville. A woman named Pessie Goldin. Do you know who I might speak to about that?”
“Hold please.”
I hold. About a minute later she comes back on the line. “I’m gonna have to take a message.”
I leave my information and call Larry back.
“I feel like I’m making progress,” I tell him. “I definitely want to stay up here tonight. That’s still okay, right?”
“Do you really think there’s a story there?”
“I do,” I say. Should I tell him about Mellie? I can’t use anything I saw there-or at least, I shouldn’t-since I didn’t ID myself as a reporter. There’s a story there, obviously, about white supremacists buying and selling guns in preparation for some race war, but it’s not Pessie’s story. I decide to wait. I can pitch it later. “Something is definitely fishy with the cops. I just need to, like, give it a little time.”
He considers. “Okay. But if you don’t get anything for tomorrow’s deadline I can’t justify expenses, or keeping you out of rotation.”
“I know,” I say, thinking, is this when people like Jayson Blair started making shit up? “I’ll get something.”
I follow my GPS through Cairo’s “main street,” which consists of a feed store, a combination lawyer/real estate office, a hair salon, a sandwich shop, and a post office. There are many more storefronts, but they are all vacant. Outside the post office is a folding table manned by a man and a woman who look sixty-ish. Draped over the table is a carefully hand-lettered sign that reads IMPEACH THE DISHONEST LIAR OBAMA. I wonder if they bought a gun from Connie or Hank Hall recently.