A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (11 page)

“Of course,” I say, and she stands up and comes over to me and puts her hands on my head. They are warm and heavy on me. She closes her eyes. I close mine and feel all the people, all the past, all the slowly unfolding mysteries rushing through me. I take a deep breath. Rivka begins to whisper in this new language I’ve heard many times tonight, this language that is beginning to sound familiar to my ears.

FOURTEEN

I’m a fitful sleeper. I often wake up with my pillows on the floor and the sheets in a tangle around my ankles, and sometimes my head winds up where my feet were when I shut off the light. But this morning I wake up with my head on two pillows and crisp sheets still perfectly tucked beneath the mattress. I don’t think I even have a hair out of place. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the fresh sea air. Maybe it was Rivka’s blessing. Whatever it was, I am refreshed and clearheaded and happy to be here and happy to be alive.

When I find Rivka sitting in the kitchen, she has the look of someone who woke up in a tangle of sheets with the pillows on the floor, if she even went to sleep at all. She’s hunched over a mug of coffee. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her face looks drawn and pale.

“Good morning,” I say.

She smiles weakly. “Did you sleep well?”

“Extremely. You?”

“Not so much.”

“That’s too bad,” I say. “I wonder why.”

She runs her hands through her hair. “Simone, I have something to tell you.” She reaches her leg under the kitchen table and pushes out the chair across from her. She motions for me to have a seat.

I stand right where I am, in the doorway. My mind is racing. This feels like one of those moments when you know that there are only a few seconds separating you in your state of blissful ignorance from some new knowledge that is going to change you forever. And those seconds go by in slow motion.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock
. But what could Rivka possibly have to tell me? That I’m adopted? That she’s my mother? Maybe she’s going to tell me that she’s not who I think she is, that she’s
not
my mother. Wait a minute. Did something happen at home? Is everyone in my family okay? Is something wrong with Mom or Dad or Jake? No, that can’t be. I would have heard the phone ring.

I’ve been through this before. I’ve had my fair share of these moments, these conversations, in my life. And I’m still standing in the doorway staring at her when it hits me. Suddenly it all makes perfect sense. Why she found me
now
. Why my parents have been pushing me so hard to get to know her
now
.

“You’re sick, aren’t you?”

She looks down and studies her coffee mug. I don’t even need to hear the answer to my question, but she gives it to me anyway. “Yes,” she says. “I am.”

I don’t really know what it is that I’m feeling. Betrayed? Why would I feel betrayed? It’s not like she ever lied to me. I haven’t known her for very long, and all things considered, she’s telling me this pretty much right up front. Sad? Like I just said, I haven’t known her for very long, so how sad can the thought of losing her be? I’ve lived my entire life without her. Still, I feel something that’s keeping me from taking that seat across from her at the kitchen table.

I turn around and go back to the guest room and start to pack, bunching my clothes into balls and jamming them into my bag. I zip it up and toss it onto the desk next to my backpack. The bed hardly needs making because I slept so soundly, but instead of smoothing out the wrinkles, I find myself tearing off the sheets. I throw the pillows across the room. I toss aside the comforter, and it knocks the bedside lamp onto the floor. I’m
angry
. That’s what I’m feeling. I’m incensed, not insensate. Why does my life always seem to get more and more complicated? It finally felt like I was resolving something. I was healing something. I was letting some light into the darkest part of me.

And now this.

I storm back into the kitchen. Rivka is just where I left her. She looks so tired and sad and so much less beautiful right now, and I lose some of the steam that powered me in here. When I begin to speak I think I’m going to yell, but instead I sound like a prepubescent boy whose voice is just beginning to crack.

“Why did you bother? Why did you want to meet me?”

She opens her mouth as if she’s about to answer, but then she closes it again.

“Don’t you think you’re being selfish?” I ask her. “I understand you might want to tie up loose ends or get some kind of closure or whatever it is people do at times like this, but did you stop and think about what this would be like for me?”

“Of course I did, Simone. You’re all I thought about. Believe me, I wish it weren’t this way. I wish it weren’t now. But I didn’t want you to come to a point in your life when you wanted to know about me and to know about your past and then find that I wasn’t around to give you the answers. Maybe you would never have sought me out—I don’t know. But I didn’t want to take that chance. This is your opportunity, Simone. It’s the only opportunity you will have. And I’m sorry if it came before you’re ready.”

I walk over to the empty chair and sit down. I take a quick check of myself. Betrayed? No. Angry? A little, but I’m having a hard time hanging on to it because I’m not sure who or what to be angry with. Rivka? Fate? God? Modern medicine? Also, you’d be surprised how satisfying it is to knock over a lamp. When all else fails, take your anger out on inanimate objects. Sad? Yes. Look at Rivka. She’s so young, and under that worried expression and the dark circles brought on by a sleepless night, she is vibrant and beautiful. How can she be sick?

“How sick are you?”

“Really sick.”

“Oh.”

As I look at her sitting there, our first conversation on the telephone comes back to me, and I think about how hard I tried to picture her and where she was and what her kitchen looked like, and now here she is, sitting at her kitchen table, probably right where she was sitting when I was on the other end of the phone. The walls are painted a robin’s egg blue. Little potted cactuses line the counter above the sink. I look out the kitchen window and see that her view is to the south, down the long tree-lined country road.

“You were right to push this on me,” I say. “I don’t know when it would have happened exactly, but I’m sure one day I would have come looking for you. I wouldn’t have been able to avoid you forever.”

“I have to confess, Simone, it wasn’t only for your own good. You’re right. I am selfish. I really wanted to get to know you. For me. For my own good. And I’m so glad I did.” She makes a move as if she is about to reach for my hand, but then she seems to change her mind. “Now can we drop all this morbid crap and enjoy a good breakfast? I have a favorite diner I’d love to take you to.”

The diner is called the Briar Patch, and our waitress is this awesome older woman in a pink uniform and crazy blue eye shadow with a name tag that says
DOLORES
and a voice like Marge Simpson’s. When I order my fried eggs and toast she shouts at me—I mean she really shouts at me—“
Any meat,
” without an inflection to make it sound like a question, and this gives both Rivka and me the giggles.

The coffee is atrocious and the orange juice is watery and the booth is sticky, but I totally love this place. Everyone in here looks like they eat here every morning at exactly this time sitting in exactly the same spot having exactly the same breakfast.

“Why don’t you have any pictures of them?” I ask. I looked everywhere in her house. I looked on all the walls on every surface in every room. I even snuck a quick look up in Rivka’s bedroom when she was outside getting more firewood. I couldn’t find one picture.

She pauses for a minute and thinks about it.

“Oh. You mean my family. I do have pictures, but I keep them in a drawer. It’s too hard for me to have them out and look at them all the time.”

“Why? What happened?”

“There’s no simple answer to that.”

“I don’t need simple answers.”

“I guess you could say I lost faith. In God, in that way of life, in my father, in everything. And when I needed a change and to find my own way and my own answers, there wasn’t room for me in their lives anymore.”

“None of them? What about your brothers and sisters? What about Hannah?”

Rivka waves the coffeepot away when Dolores comes to refill us. “I became this pariah to everyone but my mother. They all treat me differently, like I’m some stranger. Like I’m the weird one. But at least they’ll still talk to me. Only my brother Ephraim has completely written me off. He actually sat shiva for me. Not even Mordechai did that.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sorry. Right. Sometimes I forget that not everyone was a Hasid in a former life. Sitting shiva is what you do when someone in your family dies. It is a mourning ritual. Ephraim is a fanatic. When I left the community and their way of life, he announced that I was dead to him.”

“That seems extreme.”

“You could say that.”

“So what did Mordechai do?”

“He stopped inches short of sitting shiva. He barely speaks to me or looks at me whenever I go and visit. It’s funny—he had a far more extreme reaction to my leaving than he did to my becoming pregnant.”

“Wait a minute. I thought Mordechai didn’t know you were pregnant. I thought Hannah helped you hide it from him.”

“She did help me, and we did hide it. We never spoke of it. Not once. But I know that he knew. I just know it. He made the choice to look the other way. And I think I’ve never forgiven him for that. In the end, I think that’s probably why I had to leave. Because I needed a father, especially at a time like that, and he couldn’t be my father. He was always just the Rebbe.”

I don’t want to argue with her, and I certainly don’t want to be thrust into the position of defending Mordechai because I don’t know him and from what I’ve heard about him I don’t think he’s someone I’d like to spend my time defending, but it seems to me that Rivka’s logic on this is a little faulty. If Mordechai were really just being the Rebbe, he wouldn’t have looked the other way. He would have kicked Rivka out of the house. He would have disowned her. He would have done everything Rivka feared he would do when she went to my mother for help.

Dolores delivers our plates like it’s a big inconvenience for her. I still don’t have a fork, but Rivka doesn’t wait for me. She digs right in. I appreciate this about her. She’s comfortable enough around me to drop her manners. Would I wait for Cleo’s fork to come if we were having breakfast together at a diner? No way. I watch Rivka devouring her pancakes like a ravenous and perfectly healthy person. How can she be sick? Sick people don’t eat pancakes like that. I want to ask what’s wrong with her. What is she sick with? How long is she going to live? But I’m not sure how you ask a question like that of someone who seems to be enjoying her pancakes so much.

So we talk about nothing. We talk about everything but what is right there on the table between us. I tell her about school and my friends, and I even tell her about my crush on Zack. And then I use Zack as a segue into asking if she has a boyfriend. She just says no without elaborating. So I ask if she has ever been married, and she says, “God, no.”

Then she seems to realize that her answers are too clipped, so she adds, “I always imagined that I’d get married in my forties. I guess it was a reaction to my mother and looking at the life of someone who got married before she knew anything about herself.” She slowly stirs her cold coffee. She looks up at me. “But I want you to know that I’ve had many good relationships since my first one with Joe, and some have even ended well, with lasting friendships.”

“I guess all high school romances are doomed to disaster.”

“It’ll be different with you,” she says. “You seem so much more together than I ever was. So much more sure of yourself. So much stronger. You should have far better luck with guys than I ever did.”

“You don’t think it takes strength to leave everything you know and everyone you love to discover a life on your own? I don’t think I could ever do that. And as for my luck with guys, sometime when we aren’t eating breakfast, remind me to tell you the making-out-and-puking story that made me famous at my school.”

Even though I protest, Rivka will not allow me to pay for breakfast. She says that it’s been a good year for beach photography and this one is most definitely on her. So I release the bill from my grip and let her plop down the whopping $9.49.

On the drive back to her house I stare out the window. It is extraordinarily beautiful here. I can understand not only why Rivka would choose to live here but also why she would choose this landscape as the foundation of her work.

“I hope I gave you enough information,” she says as we pull into her driveway. “I know we got into some other stuff, and that kind of took time away from the Levin family saga.”

This is the only reference either of us has made to her illness since our conversation this morning. Again I feel like I should say something about it, but I simply can’t.

“I’ll be counting on you for more next time.”

“I’ll be counting on you counting on me,” she says.

I load the car while Rivka makes me a brisket sandwich for the road. She also packs some grapes and almonds and ginger cookies. Doesn’t anyone realize that I’m not going to starve during a two-hour drive? That I’d be fine with a stick of gum? Rivka is looking through the windows of the Subaru as if to make sure that no one is stowing away with me, hitching a free ride north. I survey her house and her land and take one last deep breath of the pine trees and the salty air and the wood smoke pouring out of chimneys I can’t see but know can’t be too far away. There’s an awkward pause, and then Rivka leans over and gives me a hug, and I pat her on the back a little too hard. She pulls away. She reaches out her hand and quickly touches my cheek. “Drive safely.”

I slide in behind the wheel and just sit there. I watch Rivka walk up the front steps and onto the porch. She doesn’t look back. I watch her close the big wooden door behind her. I watch her shape pass by the front window. I buckle my seat belt and adjust my rearview mirror. But before I start the car and begin the drive back to my home and my family and my life, I make good on my promise: I pick up my phone and call my mother.