“What do you want?” she says at last.
I feel like I’ve been stuck with a live wire. My mind scorches to white static, and for a moment I almost want to laugh—because what did I expect? I should have known. After everything I did…after I left the community, left myfamily…of course she wants nothing to do with me.
My mouth opens and closes a couple times, abortive little efforts to speak. Finally, I manage to say, “I—I’m sorry. I just…I wanted to…”
“Do you want money?” Dvora says crisply.
I flinch. The worst part is, I can’t even be offended. I don’t deserve to be hurt. She’s right. I used to call all the time with one sob story or another, begging for cash. Making wild promises we both knew I’d never be able to keep about things I’d do if only she’d send money, if she’d talk to our parents, if they’d let me come home again.
The morning my parents finally kicked me out, I remember standing on this same curb with my one suitcase, the goyish taxi driver waiting impatiently in the street, my fist closed tight around the money my parents had given me for travel—money that taxi driver would never see, because I would spend it all on heroin and walk to the bus stop instead. Dvora was on the steps, her cheeks shiny with tears and one arm clutching our little brother Gedaliah’s skinny shoulders. She kept crying my name, begging me to stay—to apologize, to be a better Jew, a better person.
But I walked away.
Dvora isn’t crying anymore. The Dvora on the other end of thephone sounds more like our father: laden heavy with anger and disappointment.
The phone slips in my sweaty hand, and I blow out a hard breath.
I wish I were someone else. I wish I were literally…anyone else.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “Sorry to bother you.” And I hang up before I can make things any worse than they already are.
EIGHT YEARS AGO
The worst day of my life began in an ice storm.
The power had been out since the night before, which Chaya and I had spent bundled up together in my narrow twin bed, sharing warmth. In the morning my breath made little frozen clouds in front of my lips. Even my Cheerios felt like they came straight out of the freezer.
“Are you sure your parents are okay with you staying here?” my mother asked Chaya for the third time. “Do you need to run home and check?”
“They don’t care,” Chaya assured her. “Promise.”
I couldn’t tell if Chaya was lying, but I wasn’t about to press her on it. Selfishly, I wanted her there. With school canceled, the hours stretched out long and empty before me, ready to be filled with menial chores and demands to watch my younger brothers.
“We have to study anyway. Big test coming up,” I added for good measure, in case my mother was entertaining notions of having me and Chaya take the boys somewhere to get their energy out.
It worked like a charm because there was nothing my mother cared about as much as grades, and mine had been slipping lately. Chaya and I stole some blankets from the chest in the living roomand escaped back upstairs, bundling ourselves into the fortress of my bedroom.
“Maybe weshouldstudy Hebrew,” Chaya said, her head the only thing poking out from her chunky knit blanket. “Didn’t you get a C- on the last exam?”
“Ugh, don’t start.” I pulled open the top drawer of my dresser and shoved aside socks and underwear until I found what I was looking for. My stash was hidden away in a little carved box my grandmother had given me. She’d said her mother had brought it here all the way from Poland. Whatever it used to hold, it made a good home for my colorful collection of Percs and Oxys and the tiny bag of brownish powder that I’d bought the week before, because it was cheap, but was still too chickenshit to try out.
“M&M’s or Skittles?” I asked, spinning around with the box in hand to give Chaya my best cheeky grin.
“Skittles. And by Skittles I mean Oxy, please.”
“A woman of discretion and taste, I see.” I shook a couple of pills out into my palm and put the box back into its hiding place. We settled in together on the floor, close enough that our crossed knees bumped together. I crushed the Oxy under the weight of an amethyst crystal I’d bought after visiting the natural history museum and divvied up the powder into several slim lines. “Ladies first.”
Chaya dipped forward, accepting the rolled-up piece of paper I gave her, and the first line vanished up her nostril. Two more, then she offered the paper to me and sagged back against the side of my bed, her head tilted against the mattress and her eyes half-lidded.
“I wish I took the Benadryl,” she mumbled as I leaned over and did my own lines. “I always forget to take the Benadryl. I get so itchy.”
We settled in side by side, cuddled up under our respective blankets. I stared across the room at the ice that had crystallizedon the window glass over Dvora’s bed, tracking the shape of the fractals.
“Hey,” Chaya said after a while. “Do you have any more? I’m not really feeling it.”
I couldn’t relate. My brain already felt boggy, weighted down by the drug. “Sure,” I murmured, flapping my hand in the direction of my dresser. “Help yourself.”
I closed my eyes, tracking her movements only by the sound of her body shifting around, the open-shut of my sock drawer, the grind of the amethyst.
