“Hello?” I say, standing up, widening my eyes at Saul, who has been sitting quietly at one of the barstools along the diner’s counter.
“Rebekah! This is your mother. This is Aviva. My phone was… Rebekah, you have to help. Sammy has taken my car. Something is happening.”
Her voice is low. Not quiet-she is panicked and practically shouting-but a good octave below most women’s. She has an accent that, if I didn’t know was a product of speaking Yiddish, I might call Russian. Her words come from the front of her mouth.
“Hi,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Sammy has taken my car! He was tracking Conrad Hall.”
“Tracking him?”
“Rebekah, I am so sorry to talk to you like this!”
“Like…? It’s okay. Hold on, I’m here with Saul. Do you want us to come get you?”
“Yes. I will explain everything.”
She gives me the address and I tell her we will be there as soon as possible. When I hang up, I feel strangely calm. I am conscious of the fact that everything before I picked up the phone was “before Aviva,” and the rest of my life will be after. I am ready.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The morning sky is pink when Saul and I turn on to the street where Aviva is hiding out. Van is behind us in his cruiser. At the diner, I asked him if we could have a little time alone with her before he rolled in. He said he’d give us five minutes.
The driveway leading to the enormous house winds through maybe a quarter mile of woods. Saul and I haven’t said much to each other since getting in the car. I think we are both a little stunned by what Ryan and Mellie told us, and as Aviva looms just ahead, I imagine we’re both having conversations with her in our heads, conversations too intimate to share.
We park and get out. The weak sun is almost warm, and here among the trees and the quiet, it feels like it could be a beautiful day. Aviva opens the front door and she is exactly as I should have imagined her. My height, but thinner, a little too thin. Her hair less vibrantly red than mine, streaked now with bits of gray. She is wrapped in a puffy black winter coat, jeans, off-brand sneakers.
“Rebekah,” she says, stepping outside. I walk toward her, and she walks toward me. When we meet, she grabs my hands. “You are so beautiful.”
“So are you,” I say. Because she is. There are tiny crow’s-feet at her eyes and she is smiling. At me.
“I am so proud of you, Rebekah,” she says, squeezing my hands. “Look at you. A big reporter. And you still have your father’s little ears. Of course!” She is giggling. We both are. I’ve played the moment I meet her in my head all my life but I never imagined us laughing. I never imagined thinking she might be someone I would actually like.
“I will explain everything to you, Rebekah.”
“Okay,” I say. I almost say, it’s okay, because it kind of feels like it is. Or rather, like it will be.
“Can I hug you?” she asks.
I nod and open my arms and we fold together. I have a feeling like I am holding a baby, something delicate and precious. She holds tighter than I do. Less wary, I suppose.
When we part she looks at Saul and blushes. They don’t hug, but they both seem to want to.
“Thank you for coming,” she says, speaking now to him.
“Are you all right?” he asks. “What is happening?”
“Sammy left just before I called you.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing! I woke up and he was gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you have any idea?” I ask.
“He was tracking a man. A Nazi. Sammy put an app on his phone.”
We all turn to the sound of tires on gravel. Van in his Roseville Police car is coming up the driveway.
“Who is that?” says Aviva, stepping back.
“We know him,” I say. “He found Pessie. He’s a good guy.”
She looks at Saul.
“Isaac is in the hospital,” says Saul. “You were right, Aviva. Whoever vandalized your home came back.”
“In the hospital?”
“He will be all right,” says Saul. “But he was badly burned.”
Aviva puts her hand on her forehead and scrunches her face as though she is trying to lift something very heavy. Van pulls right up to the end of the driveway. As he steps out of the car, Saul says, “He left just before she called.”
Van sits back down and grabs the mouthpiece of his radio.
“Is he armed?” asks Van.
Aviva doesn’t answer.
“Aviva,” says Saul, “please tell him.”
“I don’t know!”
“Does he own a gun?” asks Van.
She shakes her head but too quickly. The answer is yes. “Please,” she says. “He is not going to hurt anyone. He wants to help!”
“What kind of car is he driving?”
“I know about the police in Roseville,” says Aviva. “I am not going to tell you anything!”
Van’s radio screams to life. Beep beep beep and a dispatcher’s voice.
“All units all units. We have an active shooter at 67 Hillcrest in Roseville. Repeat: Active shooter. All units respond.”
For a moment, we all just stare at the radio, and then Van presses a button on his mouthpiece and says he is en route.
“Stay here,” says Van but we are already opening the doors on Saul’s car. Aviva in the back, Saul and me in the front. Van switches on his lights and siren; he can’t keep us from following. I get on my GPS and find 67 Hillcrest. We are forty miles away. Google says the address belongs to something named Toras David.
“It’s called Toras David,” I say.
“That’s the yeshiva,” says Aviva. “Sammy’s yeshiva.” I turn around to look at her. She is clenching her jaw. I reach over the seat and put my hand on her knee. It’s going to be all right, I want to say, stupidly.
As we pass through the EZ Pass booth on the Thruway, my phone rings. It’s Mike at the city desk.
“We’re hearing there’s an active shooter situation in Roseville,” he says. “How close are you?”
“I’m on my way. Maybe half an hour. It’s a yeshiva.”
“We know. Photo will call you. Get everything you can from the scene. I’ve got a report of at least one person dead. It’s usually the shooter, but it could be anything. Did you work Newtown?”
“Not the scene,” I say. I was in the Trib office, actually, when the first reports of a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary came in. It was a Friday and I wanted to turn in my weekly timecard before my shift. I remember everyone standing around looking at the TVs above the city desk. First it was just a teacher shot in the foot, and then a whole classroom of six-year-olds missing. I’ll never forget the quiet that dropped over the newsroom when the words “at least twenty first-graders” flashed across the screens. It was just a few seconds, but everything stopped as we all began to catch glimpses in our minds of what “at least twenty first-graders” at the wrong end of a gun looked like. And then one of the women on the copy desk threw up. Her daughter was in first grade there. It wasn’t until several hours later that she got word her little girl survived, kept safe by her teacher in a bathroom stall as Adam Lanza picked off his prey.
“We need a victim count. Dead and injured. Number of shooters. Weapons. This is where your girl lived, right? You know it a little?”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking: what, exactly, do I know?
“School shootings are a clusterfuck. With the Jewish angle this’ll be national in an hour. It’s in our backyard and we need to own it, so feed everything back as soon as you get it. Cathy’s lead on rewrite. Get whatever the cops on the scene will tell you, which won’t be much. Take photos. Talk to anybody you see. When did the shooting start? What did they hear? You don’t speak Yiddish do you?”