We embrace tentatively and she orders a coffee at the counter. I watch her, noticing everything. The faded faux-leather sack that is her purse, the way she bends over slightly to dig exact change out of a zippered pouch in her wallet. The fact that she speaks to the woman at the counter in Yiddish, and puts sugar but not milk in her mug.
“You must have so many questions,” she says to me. She looks me in the eye for a moment, and then looks down. She does not wait for me to answer. “With me in your life you would never have become what you have become. You would not have had peace in your home. I am not frum but I was not like your father and his family and there would have been terrible strife.”
It’s such a reasonable explanation it almost makes me laugh. Isn’t there always strife? Does she really not understand that her ghost, always among us, created at least as much strife as a physical body?
“But I know,” she continues, her voice quieter now, “I know that what I did was a sin. I sinned against you, Rebekah. I sinned against your father. I have tried for many years to think of it as something else. Immaturity, or fear, or mental illness. And it was those. But mostly it was a sin. A grave sin. I carry it with me every day. But,” and here she pauses, and looks at me, “I also carry my memories of you. Like the way you loved to point at things. Lights on the ceiling or a dog on the street, or even just me. You would point at me and open your mouth like you’d found something wonderful. And after you sneezed, you always looked happy.” She giggles, thinking back. “Like you’d done something very silly and fun.” She takes a deep breath and the giggles turn to tears. Her chin crumbles. She puts her hand on her heart. “If not for those bits, Rebekah, the sin would have killed me.”
I reach over and put my hand on her elbow.
“I’m glad it didn’t kill you,” I say.
She wipes her eyes. “Are you happy with your life, Rebekah?”
Three weeks ago I was as low as I’ve ever been. I felt guilty and burdened and victimized and broken. And then I got back to work, and all the scary things didn’t seem so scary.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got it pretty good, I think.”
We stay in the ice cream shop for two hours. I tell her about Iris and Dad and my stepmom Maria, and my brother Deacon. I show her photos on my phone, and she looks at them with genuine interest. She tells me about her ex-husband, and her mother, and her cousin Gitty-the first person she told about me-who contracted HIV and died of pneumonia when she was just thirty. She tells me that she talked to me every day for twenty-three years, in her head. She says that she asked me for advice-What do you think your mommy should do, Rebekah?
“I know it is silly,” she says. “But I think you helped me. You did not steer me wrong.”
I don’t ask her if she ever asked the me in her head if she should come back to us; or even just send a letter saying she was alive. I will ask her, though. Someday.
As we get up to leave, Aviva waves at the woman behind the counter.
“Excuse me,” she says, handing the woman her phone. “Will you please take a picture of me and my daughter?”
By the beginning of May, I am back working shifts at the Trib, but I’m out on the street again, not in the office. It’s better for everybody. Mike doesn’t have to be reminded of my breaking-news betrayal by actually seeing my face, and I get to return to what I really like about this job: new people and new places. Iris gets promoted to assistant beauty editor and I invite Van Keller to the bar where Brice throws her a party. We’ve stayed in touch since Roseville. He keeps me updated on the appointment of a new police chief and stepped up efforts to engage with the Jewish community, and I “vouched” for him with Nechemaya and the rebbe. He arrives at the bar with a friend and we all have a nice time. There is an attraction, but for now, at least, neither of us acts on it.
The next afternoon, as Iris and I linger over bottomless Bloody Marys at a Park Slope brunch place, Aviva calls and invites me upstate for Shabbos dinner.
“Sammy wants to meet you,” she says.
When I hang up, Iris is grinning.
“What?”
“Your face changes when you talk to her.”
“No it doesn’t,” I say, but I know she’s right. Aviva and I have been developing a kind of relationship via text message. She sent me pictures of the yellow house when the contractor finished with it, and she updates me on Sam and Ryan, who have moved in. Sam has some fairly complicated legal issues to settle. Carrying and shooting an illegal firearm-even at a man in the midst of the mass murder of children-was a violation of his parole, and although Aviva says the prosecutor appears willing to find a solution that does not involve prison time, Sam has to be extremely careful about what he says and where he goes until, as she puts it, “the ink is dry on the paper.” She orders a subscription to the Trib and when she sees my byline, she writes. Her texts are formal, like little letters: Dear Rebekah… And she always signs her name at the end: Aviva. I read the messages over and over again. I find myself daydreaming about her. Replaying our talk in the ice cream shop; replaying the way it felt when she put her arms around me that first time. I’ve started having dreams where I run to her, and I know she’ll be there. I run and she catches me, sweeping me up into her arms like I’m a child. The best part of the dreams is the sense of safety I feel, and the surprise of that safety. Like, Look, she was here all along. People say that parents fall in love with their children when they first set eyes on them. Could the reverse be true, too?
“I’m happy for you,” Iris says. “I feel like, maybe, this is the start of you really moving on.”
“Growing up,” I offer.
“Yeah?”
“I guess it took actually seeing her to understand why she did what she did.”
“Do you think you understand?”
“I think she got born into the wrong life. Who knows what that does to a person? I guess I can’t ever really understand, but I think it’s possible that if I was in her shoes-if I’d been raised how she was raised-I might have done the same thing.”
Iris looks hard at me. “I don’t think you would have, Rebekah. I don’t think so for a second.”
I call Saul the next day to tell him about Aviva’s invitation, but he knows already.
“I’m going, too,” he says. “Can you get off work a little early? I’ll drive us both.”
Four days later we battle Friday traffic along the West Side Highway and across the George Washington Bridge.
“Everybody going home for Shabbos,” says Saul, nodding to the minivan creeping beside us. The driver is wearing sidecurls and a black hat.
“I wonder if he’s going to Roseville,” I say.
“Perhaps,” says Saul.
“Do you ever think we could have stopped it-if we’d moved faster with Pessie?”
“Do you?”
“I think about it a lot,” I say, which is kind of an understatement. I think about it all the time. I replay every interview, every phone call, every Google search. In my dreams, I see Connie and Nan at the truck and the truck is bigger than it should be. And instead of taking the wheelchair out of the back, I see Connie take out the AR-15. He laughs and I think, But it looked like a wheelchair! How could I have missed it? What I haven’t told anyone is that I’ve developed a sort of-how should I say it?-response to pickup trucks. I have this feeling that they’re coming to get me, like that demon car Stephen King wrote about. Twice since the shooting I’ve been sent to cover pedestrian death scenes. The first one was an eight-year-old boy on the east side of Prospect Park. Kid ran into the crosswalk after his scooter and a woman in an SUV turned without looking. His parents watched the whole thing. A couple weeks after, it was a man who worked at a fix-a-flat on Flatbush. He was opening up at 6:00 A.M. when some drunk doing sixty-five in a sports car, after a night who knows where, lost control, jumped the curb, and pinned him against the storefront. The second driver fled the scene, but the woman who killed the kid stopped. I pitched Mike a story about pedestrian fatalities, and I now know that around 130 people get killed in the city each year while “crossing the street.” For whatever reason, this, plus the memory of Connie’s truck, combined inside me to create an almost instant anxiety attack almost every time I see a pickup. I think: here he comes. I go hot and cold; heart stopped for a moment. A year ago, the fright would have knocked me out. I’d have thrown up, or run home. Now I’m learning to right myself, by myself. I don’t know if I’m getting stronger, or just harder, but either way I have found that I can I keep working. Keep walking. Sometimes, yes, I take a pill. I went back to Anna-the student psychiatrist at Columbia-and she asked me if I thought the “he” coming to get me in the truck might be the guilt I feel about my role in Roseville. I thought that was a good question.