Chapter 20: Ely

20

ELY

The humiliation of almost being caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu is at war with the elation of realizing that I almost got caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu. Which would mean that I was almost kissing Wyatt again.

Which would meeeeaaaaaan he has decided not to be weird about the whole student thing after all.

His texts certainly seem to suggest as much.

I literally have the song “Walking on Sunshine” stuck in my head for the rest of the day as I keep editing the photos. Wyatt’s words echo there too. I think this could be a very powerful body of work.

Like this moment exists in a space between worlds.

I’m light-headed by the time I finish and log out of my account at the end of the day, the kind of dazed feeling you get after staring at a screen for too long. I float out of the computer lab and down the hall, intentionally drifting past Wyatt’s office—but his door is shut, the light dim in the crack against the floor. He already left, I guess. Without saying goodbye.

The dreamlike feeling ends by the time I’m on the subway headed back to Astoria, crammed into an orange plastic seat between a cluster of gossiping high school students and a thirty-something-year-old man who still feels the need to play music without headphones. But all that’s an excuse to tip my head back and close my eyes and try not to think of anything at all…at least until the train barrels out of the tunnel beneath the East River and rises to the elevated platform at Queensboro Plaza.

Back home, I’m alone. Diego and Ophelia are still out, although one of them has left a bottle of tequila open on the kitchen counter. I wipe sticky residue off the fake marble and am about to screw the cap on the tequila when instead, on impulse, I tip forward and inhale.

The aroma is just as I remembered—sweet but with a steel wire cutting through the sugar. Like poisoned honey.

That smell is laced through so many of my best memories. And my worst. Drunken nights with Chaya Mushka, the both of us a tangle of limbs on a bed somewhere, giggling over some stupid boy (or girl). Sitting on a stranger’s dirty floor next to a smashed bottle of the stuff, my hands trembling as I slide the needle into my wrist. The acrid way tequila smells when you’ve thrown it up, my sister Dvora scrubbing it off our bedroom floor as I moan and roll uselessly around in my own misery.

I lift the bottle and take a tiny sip. I hold it in my mouth for one second, two. I could spit it out. I should, probably. But two seconds turn into three, then four.

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’s moved 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—

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.

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.

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 my family…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…”

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 the phone 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.

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.

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.

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 room and escaped back upstairs, bundling ourselves into the fortress of my bedroom.

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.

We settled in side by side, cuddled up under our respective blankets. I stared across the room at the ice that had crystallized on the window glass over Dvora’s bed, tracking the shape of the fractals.

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.

Chaya’s finger slipped between my lips to rub some of the powder onto my gums. I hummed out my thanks and let the honey-sweet sea rise around me, drawing me under.

The next thing I heard was the sound of my sister screaming.

At first my eyes wouldn’t open. My lashes felt glued to my cheeks, all my reflexes slow, as if I were trying to move underwater. At last I squinted against the overhead light. Dvora was pressed against the wall by the bedroom door, both hands over her mouth.

Dvora didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. I followed her gaze to Chaya, who sat next to me against the side of the bed. Her skin was the waxy color of old seashells. A thin dribble of vomit crusted the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were open and still as glass.