But Nechama’s hand finds my wrist, curling lightly around my arm and squeezing once. “I’m sure they miss you very much. Ely…you must know the doors of our community are never closed forever. Even if you caused a great deal of pain…there is still a place for you here, with us. If you want it.”
I’m not so sure Dvora agrees. But when I meet Nechama’s kind brown gaze, I can tell she really means it, down to the word.
I want to say she’s being naïve. I broke my family’s trust in me. I brokeeveryone’strust. My family areKohens,descended from a long tradition of rabbis and scholars going all the way back to the actual town of Lubavitch that Chabad Lubavitch is named for. That yichus, that lineage, is half the reason why I’m not welcome back. Maybe other sects would shun you for life if you went off the derech, but Nechama’s right—not Chabad. I knew so many kids when I was growing up who had an aunt or a cousin who lived in Boston and didn’t believe in G-d anymore. They’d still come back for Seder every year. They knew they still had homes to return to, if they ever changed their minds.
But they probably didn’t steal thousands of dollars from their parents’ credit cards before leaving.
“You don’t have to let your past define you,” Nechama goes on,her hand still rubbing a gentle pattern against my wrist. “There is nothing you could ever do that would erase Hashem’s love for you.Orthe community’s. If you don’t think there is a place for you with us anymore, that’s your decision. I won’t tell you how to live your life. But it isn’t because Judaism doesn’t want you anymore. Your seat at our table is always open.”
I duck my head but not quickly enough to hide the way tears suddenly prickle at my eyes. Nechama doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what I’ve done. But even so, hearing her say this…it means everything.
The door isn’t open, but it isn’t shut anymore either.
Maybe Wyatt was right.
There’s always a way back.
26
There’s something heady and disorienting about the smell of those chemicals as I wash my prints and clip them to drip-dry on the line. I always get light-headed in the darkroom. Maybe it’s an effect of the strange red light, but most likely it’s just the developer killing off my brain cells one by one.
The photos are turning out better than I expected. In black and white, they seem almost timeless. Nechama could have emerged from any era between now and the 1940s, a composite of all our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers. And I understand now why these traditions are so important to people, why the community I grew up in clings to them with both hands—they’re like a thread strung through time. If you tug, you’ll feel your ancestors tugging back.
I dip another print and watch the image emerge beneath the developer fluid, the smiling faces of Nechama’s daughters smudged with flour, Nechama herself wrist deep in a mound of dough and watching them with fondness crinkling the edges of her eyes. Film either softens its subjects or makes them stark; with Nechama, it’s the former.
There are a couple of digital photos of me in there too. I’m impressed by Menuchah’s eye; for such a young girl, she really has an instinct for how to frame a subject. I almost don’t recognize myself. I fit into the scene more easily than I would have thought. All that time away from Crown Heights, but I still look right at home kneading challah dough, a tiny smile settled on my lips as if I couldn’t be happier doing anything else.
The door to the darkroom swings open and shut again. There’s not that many people using analog at Parker, so I look on reflex.
“Nice to see someone’s focused today,” Wyatt says. His smile always makes me stand a little straighter.
“Unlike yourself, I’m guessing?”
Wyatt ducks under one of the lines of drying prints and moves closer to me, peering over my shoulder at my own photographs. “For the record, I am very busy and important.”
“Oh, right. And that’s why you’ve stalked me into the darkroom. Just doing your mentoring duty.”
“Absolutely.”
He reaches past me to pluck one of the images off the line. The sudden proximity makes me stand too still, like if I move, the moment will splinter.
The photo is one I took of Nechama standing behind her youngest daughter, Batsheva, Nechama’s hands gently cupped around Shevy’s as she shows her daughter how to knead the dough. A puff of flour has been caught in the air, frozen forever by the snap of my camera lens.
“This one,” Wyatt says. “This is perfection.”
At least it’s red in here; my blush blends right in. “Not perfect. But it’s…okay.”
Wyatt shakes his head. “Nothing’s ever perfect. But nothing has to be. And you shouldn’t doubt yourself like that. You should take pride in your work.”
I can’t keep looking at him when he’s saying things like that.The eye contact makes me feel too unsettled, hyperaware of my position in space relative to his. The air between us feels as if there’s an electric current running through it. So I turn away to look at the other photos myself, scanning from one shot to the next without really seeing them. Maybe Wyatt’s right. Maybe there’s a part of me that can’t stand to be observed, even by him.
“You’re talented,” Wyatt says from behind me. His voice is soft but close enough that I can almost imagine his head tilting in toward my neck, his breath ruffling through my hair. “Acknowledging that won’t hold you back. It won’t keep you from learning. I wish you could see yourself the way everyone else does. The way I do.”
I turn around and he’s so close all of a sudden, close enough that I would have stepped back on reflex if not for the table behind me, pressing up against my thighs. Wyatt seems frozen too, his eyes widened slightly and his lips parted but unbreathing. It would be easy for him to step away. But he stays where he is. And if before I found it impossible to look at him, now I can’t look away. The red light casts strange shadows about his face and shimmers in his dark eyes like lights moving beneath the surface of a lake.
Any minute now,I think.Any minute now he’s going to move back.
But he doesn’t, and I stay where I am, and my heart is pounding so fast I wonder if he can hear it.
