Nothing happens. The world doesn’t implode. G-d himself doesn’t descend from the mountain to smite me. I just screw the cap back onto the bottle and put it away in the booze cabinet and clean up the rest of the mess.
I spend the rest of the evening sitting on my bed tucked right beneath the window, the curtains drawn so the streetlights don’t wash out the colors on my screen as I edit the remaining photos from Friday night. The bodies of the people in the pictures shift,and there’s my mother, her head bent over the candlesticks. A man’s face blurs, and then he’s my father, smiling in the flickering light next to Michal and her wife. There’s Dvora, still fourteen, distracted by the dog pawing at her shin.
I clench my eyes shut and shake my head to clear my mind.Focus. I have to stay present. It would be too easy to let myself put my laptop away and bury myself under the cover of the duvet, hide in the dark until I forget how to feel again.
That’s the problem with making yourself vulnerable: It might be necessary, but it also makes you want to hide from your own art. To just…never finish.
It’s nearly dark by the time I’m done and all the photos are neatly labeled and organized in their own folder in my Dropbox. I close my laptop and let it slip off my thighs as I tilt back, letting my head rest against the window frame.
The world is draped in violet dusk, the buildings and people outside gone blurry as the light falls. It’s a new day by Jewish reckoning. Shabbos is over. All over the East Coast people are lighting braided havdalah candles and sipping wine, smelling sweet spices in reverence to the departing bride.
I wonder if there’s something interesting there, some contrast I could draw between beginnings and endings, openings and closings.
Eight years. It’s been eight years.
The world can change a lot in eight years.
I shove the sheets back and tumble out of bed, grabbing my bag and phone off the desk. I’m out the door and halfway to the subway stop before I can let myself think too deeply about any of this.
It just feels like the next step, somehow. Like I’m on a downhill slope picking up speed, careening toward this inevitable conclusion.
Wyatt’s right, after all. I have to face it. I can’t hide.
Even near dusk the air is still hot and humid, summer beating down on the nape of my neck and sweat prickling at the small of my back. I dodge the clusters of friends on Thirtieth headed out for a late dinner, their heads tilted together and their mouths laughing. I try not to let my gaze linger on the people with their dogs’ leashes looped around their chairs as they pick at their appetizers, oblivious to the way their pets’ eyes grow big and hopeful every time a stranger passes close by. I wonder what it’d be like to snip myself out of my own life and insert myself into one of their lives instead. Somehow it’s impossible to imagine any of these people having regrets. Guilt doesn’t live in their stomachs like it does in mine, festering like an open wound. They spin glittering nets of friendships that come easily; they aren’t constantly wondering how they’ll poison them.
I swipe into the station and stand on the platform to wait for the train, the evening breeze picking up and tangling itself in my hair.
Time to rip my heart open and spill out the gore.
¦
Crown Heights is both exactly and not at all as I remember.
This deli is the same deli that has been on this corner since I was a little girl. But the video store next to it is a smoke shop now. The kosher supermarket still uses the same font to announce its weekly sales, but the awning is green when it used to be blue. I find myself peering at the faces of the people I pass by, trying to tell if any of them are people I knew from my old life. Would Yaakov from next door look like that if he had a beard? Is that Bracha, her vibrant red hair obscured under an auburn wig?
If they recognize me, it doesn’t show. Turns out my past isn’t written indelibly on my skin after all. No one stops me on the street and accuses me of being Elisheva Cohen. No one seems to realize I’m anyone other than one of the goyish hipsters who’smoved into one of Crown Heights’ newly renovated, gentrified apartment buildings.
I know the walk from the Kingston Avenue stop to our old place so well. Even after eight years, the path is ingrained in my muscle memory. There’s the bakery where I used to buy doughnuts with my pocket money every Monday. There’s the boutique where Chaya and I used to say we’d shop once we were grown-up and fashionable and rich. There’s the kosher pizza place where I nodded off in the bathroom and woke up to find like five different pizza delivery boys staring at me, the door hanging off its hinges.
Our building looks the same from the outside. I assume my parents still live there. But maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ve moved on and some other family has taken over the apartment—some other kids’ heights marked on the kitchen wall, someone else’s shoes scattered by the front door.
I still have Dvora’s number saved in my phone. I have no idea if it’s the same—although I suspect it is. I suspect she still has that same shamelessly Luddite Motorola flip phone she had when we were teenagers, the one with the scratched paint on the side from the time I got angry at her and drunkenly threw her phone at a dumpster.
This is such a bad idea. This probably rises to the peak of bad ideas I’ve had since getting clean—the crown of “worst idea ever” having previously belonged to the time I tried to go off-roading in Shannon’s Toyota Camry. But I tap Dvora’s name and hit Call.
The phone rings and rings again, and I should hang up. This was such a stupid idea, embarrassingly masochistic—
“Hello?”
Dvora sounds just how I remember—soft, like she’s telling you a secret. I could close my eyes and let that voice soothe me to sleep.
The back of my throat has gone wrinkled and dry. My breath feels like it sticks to my tonsils.
“Hello?” Dvora says again, and I clench my eyes shut and my free hand into a fist.
Fuck it. “Hi,” I say back. “Um. It’s me. It’s…Elisheva.”
The silence that hangs in the following seconds feels like a blade waiting to fall. My nails dig into my palm and I count heartbeats; my pulse is pounding so hard I can feel it in my temples.
