I don’t say any of this out loud to Saul. I haven’t even said it to Iris. And yet, perhaps they know.
“There is a lot of guilt to go around,” he continues when I don’t elaborate. “But I don’t think much of it rests on your shoulders.”
We ride without speaking for a while. The trees along the parkway that were still bare a month ago are popping green now. When we pass the sign announcing the exit to Roseville, Saul breaks the silence.
“We all played a role, I think. I could have found your mother years ago. It only took a few phone calls. I did not make those calls because I felt she would come to me-to us-when she was ready. But she was waiting for us.” He sighs. “Perhaps if I had been in her life sooner I might have helped her with Sammy.”
“Do you think you’ll be in her life now?”
“I would like to be,” Saul says slowly. “I think she would like me to be. But you are the most important thing to her right now. You and Sam. And if you are uncomfortable with our… being in each other’s lives, she has made it very clear that that is her priority.”
I guess I’d always sensed that Saul’s relationship with Aviva might have been romantic. I didn’t ask for details, though, and he didn’t offer. He’s still not offering, exactly, but I suppose there’s time for that.
“So,” I say, “I’m, like, your potential cock block?”
Saul shakes his head, smiling. “I wish you didn’t talk like that, Rebekah.”
“You sound like my dad,” I say.
“Your dad,” Saul says, “is a smart man.”
Aviva answers the door and the first thing I notice is that she has cut her hair. It’s not as short as mine, but instead of falling down her back like it did when we met, it now ends just above her shoulders. She sees me looking and brings her hand to it, self-consciously.
“What do you think?” she says.
“I like it.” My own hair has grown through the original buzz cut and the secondary pixie cut into an awkward kind of preteen boy’s ’do. It keeps wanting to part on the side, and because it’s so thick it puffs out instead of falling down over my ears and neck. Iris is helping me experiment with gel, and she says that in a couple months she can get me in at a fancy salon that’ll make it look better. We’ll see.
“You inspired me,” says Aviva, smiling.
“You could be sisters,” says Saul.
Aviva waves off his compliment and opens her arms for a hug.
“I am so glad you agreed to come visit,” she says. “Saul told me you are very independent. I do not want to intrude on your life. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to… get to know you.”
She looks up, but her face is angled down, like she’s girding herself for a slap, and I realize that she is afraid of me in a way I have never been of her. Her abandonment made her frightening to me, a ghost that punched me in the face every time I thought of her. If she did it once she could do it again. But it didn’t occur to me that as the one who was wronged, the one from whom forgiveness is sought, I have tremendous power over her. She knows what it is like to miss me, but not to be rejected by me. Some part of me still hates her, and a bigger part of me is still afraid of who she really is and how she might hurt me again, but she is no longer a monster or nightmare spirit poisoning me with the mystery of where she is and why she left. She is, just like me, only a woman trying to carve out a little space for her dreams.
“That sounds good,” I say, smiling hard, pushing my mouth up as I try to control my face, which is threatening to fold and let free a lifetime’s worth of sobbing. Sobbing I’d rather do alone.
Aviva ushers us into the living room where Isaac is sitting in an old leather armchair, picking at a plastic grocery store platter of cheese and crackers and fruit. White gauze is still wrapped around his arm-I imagine he’ll be changing bandages for a while-but he looks otherwise healthy, and happy to see us.
We hear footsteps upstairs and down come Sam and Ryan. I didn’t expect my uncle to look like the Haredi men in Borough Park or Roseville, but neither did I expect him to look so utterly different. His strawberry-blond hair is gelled into an inch-high Mohawk and he has the chest and arms of a devoted body-builder. Ryan’s look is All-American-he’s grown a neat goatee and his jeans look pressed-but Sam is almost punk. He has several earrings in each ear, and is wearing a leather wrist cuff and threadbare David Bowie t-shirt. His Adam’s apple is prominent, straining the pale skin on his neck.
“You’re my niece,” he says.
“I am,” I say.
Sam tries to smile, but he is clearly miserable; his shoulders hunched over and his face a blotchy, pimpled mess, red from stress and lack of sleep, I imagine.
“Thank you for not writing about us,” he says.
“Of course,” I say.
“Not of course. You didn’t have to do that. I mean, you don’t know us. It’s your job.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “You guys had enough to deal with.”
Aviva and Saul smile at me. They sit next to each other on the sofa.
“Sit down, Sammy,” says Aviva, patting the cushion next to her.
Sam remains standing. He looks at Ryan.
“Sam and I have something we want to tell you,” says Ryan.
“You start,” says Sam, his eyes on the floor.
“It’s my fault,” Ryan says.
“Shut up,” says Sam. “You know it’s not. Just tell them.”
Ryan inhales. “It was back in December. Sam had only been back from prison a month or two. We went out one night and when we got back we had a really bad fight.” He looks at Sam. Sam, if it’s possible, looks even more unhappy. I wonder what the fight was about. “We’d taken E, which didn’t help. Sam slept on the couch and the next morning we were both just wandering around the apartment like zombies, trying to feel better. He turned on the TV and that shooting, the one in Connecticut where all the kids died? It was all over the place.”
“Newtown,” I say. After the copy girl had thrown up in the office, I was sent to the Upper East Side to sit on the apartment building of a man whose daughter was a teacher at the school. They sent stringers to every address of every relative they could find in the city. My guy didn’t come home until after my shift was over. I heard his daughter survived.
“Right,” he says. “We both kinda got sucked in.”