Like No Other (7 page)

It has already been decided that instead of the usual nine candles, we will light ten tonight, one for the baby in addition to the seven for each of us kids and the two requisite Shabbos candles. My mother lights the first two, then Rose lights two, and then me, Hanna, and Miri, in age order. Once the tiny wicks are flickering in the otherwise dark house, casting us all in an amber glow, my mother stands and holds her palms out over the candles, drawing her hands in toward her face three times, as if beckoning the light. She covers her eyes and recites the blessing:

“Baruch a-ta A-do-nay Elo-hei-nu me-lech ha-o-lam a-sher ki-dee-sha-nu bi-mitz-vo-tav vi-tzi-va-noo li-had-leek ner shel Sha-bbat ko-desh.”

We have to stay silent until my mother removes her hands from her eyes, which we’ve learned over the years is entirely dependent on her mood. If she’s happy, she’ll drop them almost immediately, but if she’s upset she can hold out for a good two minutes. The idea is that she’s using the quiet time to pray, so I guess the more she has to pray about, the longer she takes. Tonight is a two-minute night, and I wait it out trying in vain to pray for Liya instead of thinking about Jaxon.

When I was three I had to have surgery—nothing major, to have my tonsils removed—and as a reward for being brave, my mother took me to see
Annie
on Broadway. This was a big deal; hearing a woman sing in public is usually avoided as part of
tz’ni’ut
, but since Annie was played by a ten-year-old I guess my mom was able to rationalize it. According to her, I was very, very good during the whole show, but I
hated
it whenever Annie left the stage for any reason. “Where’s Annie?” I would demand, holding my mother’s face in my tiny hand. “Where. Is. Annie???” That’s what my brain is doing right now, only with Jaxon.
Where is he? What’s he thinking? Does he wonder about me, too?
I stare down at my plate as though the answers will appear, swimming up to the porcelain surface like letters in alphabet soup.

Finally, my mother drops her hands and we all shout, “Shabbat Shalom!” and turn to hug anyone within arm’s reach. I leave a wet splotch on Aunt Varda’s sweater.

After kiddush, the blessing over the wine, and the ritual hand-washing and the ceremonial breaking of my lopsided challah braid, it’s finally time to eat, and my nerves must be burning extra calories, because I’m starving. I demolish three pieces of challah, slurp down a bowl of chicken soup, and eat two servings of potato kugel before most of my family members have even filled their plates.

“Are we being timed?” Niv jokes.

“I like a girl with a healthy appetite,” Zeidy says, laughing and refilling his wine. “Go on,
zeeskyte
,
ess
.”

“More like
fress
,” Isaac chimes in, and my brothers snort.
Fress
means to eat like an animal.

“Enough,” my father says, and everyone quiets. There are rules for dinner conversation on Shabbos that include no fighting.

“Devorah,” my mother says gently, giving me a pointed look. “Leave some for Rose, please. She needs her strength.”

“No, Mama, I can’t.” Rose grimaces. “I’ve lost my appetite. I just want to be with her.” She looks around the table, her eyes wet. “I’m sorry, this was a mistake.”

“There is nothing we can do,” Jacob says stoically. “Visiting hours have almost ended. And I don’t think it will do you any good to spend the night on a waiting-room chair.” He tears off a chunk of challah and hands it to my father, who passes it to Rose. “Please,” he continues, making the word sound hard and impatient, the opposite of polite. “Have some bread, at least. You have to eat for your milk to come in.”

Rose cringes but takes the food silently and holds it in her lap.

“Good girl,” my father says gently. But I wonder if he can see what I see. I wonder if any of them do. Rose might be being “good,” but she’s not being
Rose
. My sister has always been the quiet one during big family gatherings, but this is different, and scary. It’s like she’s empty.

I study my mother’s face in the flickering candlelight. Her stone-colored eyes are big and bright behind her glasses, her smile easy and genuine as she gazes proudly at my dad and around the table at the big family she’d always wanted after growing up one of only two daughters (I once asked her why Grandma Deborah never had more children, but my mother just bristled and told me it was no one’s business but Grandma’s and G-d’s). Obviously I didn’t know my mother before she was married, so I don’t know if a switch flipped in her; if a light went out, like it seems Rose’s has. She has always been charismatic and commanding and intolerant of what she calls
blote
, which translates roughly from Yiddish as bullshit. But one of the cruelties of teenagehood is that you’ll never know what your parents were really like at your age, and they’ll never accurately remember—not enough to empathize, anyway . . . maybe just enough for pity.

“Where is the baby sleeping?” Miri pipes up, and we all look to Rose, bracing ourselves for her to lose it completely, but amazingly, she comes to life, laughing as she wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes with her wrist.

“She’s in an incubator,
tsigele
,” Rose says. The Yiddish word for “baby goat” has been our nickname for Miri since she came home from the hospital colicky and brayed like livestock for six months straight.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a little bed that keeps her warm and protected until she’s big enough to go outside.”

Miri smiles and takes a bite of chicken, seeming happy with this answer, and Rose pops the challah into her mouth, reaching for another piece. My mother and father exchange a glance of relief.

“If you ask me,” Jacob says—though clearly, no one has—“she could have come home today. She’s a good size for a preemie, she’s breathing on her own, she’s eating . . . Keeping her ‘for observation’ is just an excuse for them to take more of our money. Why should we trust that doctor? She’s not
our
doctor.” He doesn’t mean Dr. MacManus wasn’t Rose’s prenatal ob-gyn; I can tell he means that she’s not one of us. Not a Chabadnik. Translation: not to be trusted.

Rose’s face crumples again, and my mother rushes to comfort her.

“She was very respectful,” I say. “Wasn’t she, Rose?” Jacob glares at me.

“She was fine,” Rose says quietly, dabbing her eyes with a napkin.

“Exactly!” Jacob cries, banging his fist on the table and almost upending Isaac’s wine. “
Fine
. We shouldn’t pay eight thousand dollars for fine.”

“Jacob,” my father warns in a deep and weary voice. Money and business are not discussed on Shabbos.

“Rivka’s friend just had a baby,” Niv says. “She used a midwife from Park Slope. They had a home birth, right in the living room.”

On my right, Rivka takes a break from slowly and methodically picking the crispy top bits off her square of kugel and nods politely. She’s very nice but doesn’t talk much; Niv tends to speak for her, presumably because of her accent—Rivka’s family moved to Brooklyn from Ukraine when she was fourteen. Her grandfather is a rabbi there, which impressed my parents when Niv was looking for a bride. But I wonder what Rivka was looking for in a husband. My middle brother is fine as brothers go—a bit bossy and juvenile but not cold like Jacob or oblivious like Isaac—and yet, just like Jacob said, fine isn’t enough. Not for the rest of your life, anyway.

I look over at Rose, who is staring into her lap, pale as a ghost, lips cracked and eyes red. I can’t believe that this woman is the same brave big sister I looked up to and aspired to become for more than fifteen years, the one whose braces seemed so beautiful and sophisticated to me that I approximated them with strips of tinfoil on my own straight teeth. Maybe it’s not fair to blame Jacob entirely; after all, she just pushed a human being out of her body without pain medication. But there’s a spark that’s gone from Rose—not just gone, but seemingly taken from her against her will. I take a bite of my bread and say a silent vow that I will never let that happen to me.

With Jaxon it wouldn’t.
The thought takes me by surprise, so much so that I swallow too quickly and nearly choke.

“I told you not to eat so fast,” Niv says, and laughs. Jacob just looks annoyed that I’ve interrupted the conversation.

“Well,” my mother says once I catch my breath. “A home birth would be dangerous seven weeks early. Too much risk.”

“True,” Jacob says. “But for the next one, I would feel much better staying in Crown Heights, with our people to take care of us.”

“We’ll see,” my father says vaguely.

“What we need is more Hasidic doctors,” Isaac cracks. Since secular schooling is frowned upon—too much opportunity for insidious outside culture to seep in—there are few doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in our community, or in any of the Hasidic sects.

“What we need is a fence,” Niv says, and the boys laugh.

“Maybe all of the goyim could move to Manhattan and let us have Brooklyn,” Jacob adds.

“Or we can kick the soccer moms off Staten Island,” Isaac says, and laughs.

“You’re all being imbeciles,” Zeidy grumbles, and I want to give him an air high five like Jaxon taught me. But of course I keep my hands on my knife and fork.

“No one is going anywhere,” my mother says loudly, a forced smile stretched wide across her face, the equivalent of a flashing yellow light warning her children to cut it out before she loses patience. “We live where we live.”

“And I have an easy way to avoid dealing with outsiders,” my father adds. “Ignore them.”

“But what if you can’t?” Hanna asks, refilling her grape juice. “What if you get
stuck
with one?” I catch my breath. I don’t know if this is coincidence or if Jacob has taken it upon himself to tell everyone where I was during the blackout.

My father chuckles, brushing crumbs off his beard with his napkin. His full, wide cheeks are rosy with wine. “How, my dear, would you get yourself stuck with one?” He doesn’t know. A good sign.

Hanna casts a sidelong glance my way. “I don’t know,” she says, picking at her salad. “What if you met in some way through forces outside of your control, almost like it was fate?” Hanna is the hopeless romantic of the family. She’s also the most outspoken opponent of our parents’ no-TV policy, since it means she can’t watch movies to feed her fairy-tale fetish.

“Like if an elevator stopped!” Miri nearly shouts, so excited that she has information to contribute to the grown-up talk. “Like with Devorah in the hospital!”

I glare across the table, first at Jacob and then at Amos, not sure who has betrayed me.

My father turns to me and sets down his fork. “Devorah, enlighten me. What’s this about an elevator?” Jacob smirks. He didn’t tell my father after all, but he clearly set me up by telling Amos. Okay, fine, I decide; if that’s how he wants to play, I’ll play. I smile sweetly at him and prepare to unleash my secret weapon, which is that regardless of the spark that was lit in that elevator, I am Devorah “
Frum
from Birth” Blum, and as far as my family knows I am nothing if not a virtuous daddy’s girl.

“Abba,” I say calmly, invoking my childhood pet name for him, “after I helped Rose through her delivery and checked on the baby in the NICU, I couldn’t find Jacob anywhere, so I decided to look downstairs. While I was on the elevator, the power went out, and I was trapped with a boy my age.”

“He was black,” Amos pipes up.

“Amos!” I yell.

“Did he try to save you?” Hanna asks breathlessly.

“That doesn’t matter,” my father says, clearing his throat. “Devorah had no control over her circumstances. What matters is how she behaved, which I know and trust is the right way.” I smile at Jacob again, and he rolls his eyes.

“However,” my father continues, “the laws of
yichud
exist for a reason, and we should all remember that when circumstances
are
within our control, we are bound to obey them.”

“Otherwise you’ll end up like Ruchy Silverman,” Niv says. Isaac stifles a laugh, and Rivka gasps. My parents seem to freeze in place, and exchange another glance that looks to me to be the opposite of relief.

“Did something happen to Ruchy?” I ask. I’m truly confused, as Ruchy was in the grade above me at school until the middle of last year, when she left suddenly to go on a trip to Israel. She has the shiniest golden hair and a face like a fashion model; Shoshana and I have spent many hours trying to make ourselves feel better by cataloguing her potential flaws.

“Niv,” my mother says sharply, “that is not dinner conversation, and certainly not Shabbos conversation.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I take it back.”

“Did she get hurt?” I ask. As much as I’m jealous of Ruchy, I would never wish harm on her. Well, nothing worse than acne, anyway.

“She got what she deserved,” Jacob mutters, and my father sets down his fork and shoots daggers in his direction.

“No,” my father says angrily. “She is fine, and we will discuss it
another time
.” The end of the sentence comes out like a growl.

My mother makes a show of changing the subject, and gradually, as my father relaxes, talk turns to the coming school year. But as my family chatters and laughs around me, I retreat into my head, worrying now about
two
people and where they are: Ruchy and Jaxon. Jaxon and Ruchy. Two figures that my memory renders both blurry and larger than life. Two specters I will probably never see again.

J
axon

S
EPTEMBER
2, 7
AM

I
’m already awake when my alarm rings, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling above my bed, which look like two crooked parentheses with nothing in the middle. That’s a good analogy for the new school year, too: a big question mark hanging over you that could collapse at any minute. Kidding. Sort of.

I’ve been grounded since the night of the storm (a Thursday, and today is Tuesday), so I’m actually excited to get up and out, even though my summer-logged brain isn’t used to having to function this early. Staying in my room can get claustrophobic, since it’s no more than a glorified closet that barely fits a twin bed and a dresser, but that’s the price I pay for having my own space, I guess. Edna and Ameerah share a room, Tricia and Joy share, and of course Mom and Dad do, too. I’m the only one with any kind of privacy in this cramped house where we’re all practically on top of one another all the time, constantly up in one another’s business. It’s awesome to hole up in my room when I have my cell and laptop to listen to music and check Facebook and stream movies, but in my family
grounded
means no phone, no computer, no friends, no leaving the building unless it’s for work or school, and obviously no basement training sessions. So for the past four days I’ve been trudging through the last of my summer reading list,
Invisible Man
and
Ethan Frome
. Both are crazy depressing, so I’ve been taking lots of breaks to read the stash of comics my mom forgot to confiscate from under my mattress.

I’m pretty sure my parents aren’t that mad at me anymore. I got a huge lecture about the importance of honesty (and skateboard safety) when I got home on Thursday night, followed by the silent treatment on Friday, but after I did the dishes and two loads of laundry and picked up all the socks (thirteen) and hair elastics (seven) strewn around the living room without being asked, they started to forget to shun me by the weekend. Mom even gave me two extra strips of bacon at breakfast on Sunday, although I was still banned from going with the rest of the family to the West Indian Day parade on Eastern Parkway (which I told myself was just as well since it’s flooded with cops, and people get shot or stabbed almost every year). But when they got home, giddy and sunburned, dad slipped me $100 from his shoebox stash to buy some new school clothes. And then yesterday morning mom let me watch NY1 with her, and when I told her (in a fit of shameless ass-kissing) that I wanted to go to journalism school to be like Pat Kiernan, she hugged me and told me I was her favorite son, which is our running joke.

So I’m feeling pretty good walking to school to start my junior year, even if I am carrying ten pounds of books over my shoulder and wearing my same old jeans and navy hoodie, the one with the cuffs all frayed and thumb holes poked through. (My dad may have given me money, but that doesn’t mean I could leave the house to spend it.) But it’s seventy-five and sunny, and I’ve got a free first period and Charles Mingus playing on my phone as I walk down Kingston Avenue, past the neat little brick row houses with red plastic awnings jutting out over front stoops tagged with amateur graffiti, past the nail salons spilling their acetone-laced air-conditioning out onto the sticky pavement and the liquor stores, all neon signs and labyrinthian aisles of lotto-ticket-lined bulletproof glass, before I finally see the broad, leafy lanes of Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn’s own little ghetto Champs-Élysées.

And then I see them.

Black coats, white shirts, black fedoras, and beards on most of them, just like that mean-looking dude outside the elevator. They’re clustered around a reddish brick building with pointed turrets and stained-glass windows that looks kind of like a church crossed with a normal apartment complex. But the really weird thing is that I’ve made this walk at least five hundred times, and I’ve never noticed them before—not as anything other than scenery, anyway. Just then a group of girls rounds the corner, in matching black skirts, white blouses, and cardigans, and out of the corner of my eye I see a lock of dark, curly hair lifted up by the wind, and suddenly my breath is gone. I stare for longer than I should, just to make sure it’s not her (of course it isn’t, and to add potential injury to insult a burly middle-aged guy sees me looking and gives me the stink-eye). As I make a hasty retreat down the steps to the train, Devorah’s words ring in my head—
What, we all look the same to you?
—and I think about how just a week ago I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a crowd, and now she’s the only thing I’d see in one. Not that I’ll ever see her again. I turn my Mingus up, wedge myself into a too-packed 3 train between two Jamaican nurses trading salt-fish recipes, and try to zone out.

• • •

When I get to school I take the stairs two at a time to the third floor and step over the other free-period kids, who are sitting cross-legged under their lockers, alternating between screaming greetings at one another and staring into their phones. I don’t see anyone I know yet, so I head to my locker, which is just through the doorway that leads to the back stairwell and up to “the cage,” a chain-link janitorial supply area by the roof entrance that’s supposedly a secret hookup spot. Not that I’d know.

I’m unloading the contents of my messenger bag when Polly passes by about six inches from me, so close I can smell her coconut shampoo. She’s got her hair pulled back in a little ponytail with pieces tucked behind each ear, and she’s wearing skinny jeans, a tight purple button-down, gray Converse, and thick, black-framed glasses that added up make her look like an impossibly cute hipster librarian. But something about the sight of her doesn’t paralyze me for once. And maybe that’s why, for the first time in months, she zeros in on me right away.

“Hey,” she says, a little hesitantly.

“Hey.” I close my locker and try to lean against it casually, which it turns out is impossible if you’re actually trying. I give up and shove my hands in my pockets.

“I was actually looking for you,” she says. Polly’s amber eyes dart nervously behind me, where a couple of goth-looking girls are clustered around their lockers comparing schedules. “I’ve gotta get to International Relations. But, hey, is Ryan okay? I felt bad not staying, but my dad—”

“Hates us?” I finish.

“No!” Polly smiles apologetically. “He was just in a bad mood.”

“Right,” I say, raising an eyebrow. I mean it to be flirtatious, but Polly frowns. “I mean,
right
, like of course,” I say, clearing my throat.

“Right,” she says. It could not get any more awkward.

Or so I thought.

“This freak bothering you, P?” Jason Rivera, the varsity basketball shooting guard, who’s easily two hundred pounds and built like a tractor trailer, all square shoulders and compact muscle, swoops in and lifts Polly up under one arm like she’s a physics textbook (not that J-Riv, which is his ridiculous, derivative nickname, would ever pick up a physics textbook, I’m just saying). Polly squeals delightedly and yells, “Put me
down
, monster! Jaxon and I were just talking.”

Jason drops her and looks me up and down, clearly unimpressed.

“Action Jaxon, huh?” he says. No one calls me that. “He don’t look so weird to me. Well, except for that pube mustache.” My face tingles with shame. I only have to shave like once every three weeks, but if I forget I get some sparse little tufts. I didn’t think anything was showing, but Ameerah fogged up the bathroom mirror so much with her long-ass shower this morning, I guess I didn’t really get a good look.

“Thanks,” I say, attempting to defuse whatever’s happening here with self-deprecation. “I’m working on a soul patch, too.”

Jason shakes his head, like I’m a lost cause. “Whatever, freak.”

“Hey,” I say to Polly, who’s averting her eyes. “Did I miss a memo or something? Why does he keep calling me a freak?”

“Because,” Jason booms, “this is the freak hallway,
freak
.” He bangs his giant fist against my locker for emphasis, and a group of seniors passing behind him crack up. I look behind me just in time to see one of the goth girls give him the finger.

“Let’s go, P,” Jason says, leading Polly away by the arm. She shrugs at me and mouths “
Sorry
.”

I’m sorry for you
, I want to call after her.
You’re better than this.
But the urge to get through my first day without a beat-down is slightly more powerful, so I just watch them go.

• • •

I wait around for Ryan, but he’s late—really late, since first period is almost over. And I know we have the same schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays: free first followed by a double AP Bio lab. We also have the same social studies elective: Intro Philosophy on Monday and Wednesday mornings with Mr. Miserandino, whose nickname is “Mr. Misery” because he routinely yells at students and kicks you out of class if you’re even a second late. My commute is half an hour door to door, so I’m gonna have to hustle to get here early. I’ll probably have to get up at six thirty just to win the race for the first shower. Or nah, I’ll just skip the shower those days and spray on some extra Axe. Like my mom says, I have to keep my eyes on the prize, and I’m willing to bet the admissions board at Columbia cares more about grades than a little natural musk.

Finally the bell rings, and Ryan runs through the door so fast he nearly smacks into me. He’s still wearing his sling, which he’s tagged himself with a Sharpie message that reads, “Keep Calm and Carry My Books.”

“There you are!” he pants. “Oh, man, you owe me. I told Miserandino your grandma died yesterday.”

“What are you talking about? And that’s not cool. Both of my grandmas are still alive, man.”

“Philosophy,” he says. “The class we just had. Or
I
just had.”

I place my hands on his shoulders, making the most of our six-inch height difference. “Ryan,” I say. “What are you smoking? We have a free first period Tuesdays.”

He swats my hands away, his blue eyes twinkling with some mixture of amusement and schadenfreude. “Jaxon,” he says, imitating my condescending tone. “Today’s a
Monday
schedule, dude.”

“Oh, no.” I feel the blood drain from my face. I’ve accidentally cut my first class of the year. With Mr. Misery, who takes no prisoners. “Oh,
shit
.”

“Yup. You so owe me.”

“I don’t owe you,” I say, grabbing my bag. (If today is a Monday schedule, that means I have Spanish in five minutes, which means I need to get halfway around the building.) “I stayed with you in the ER all day Thursday. If anything,
you
owed
me
. And now we’re even.” I make a break for the stairwell, and Ryan follows. “By the way,” I say once we’re out of the goth girls’ earshot, “did you know our lockers are in the freak hallway?”

“I found out this morning when some chick with a septum barbell tried to scalp me tickets to see a band called Blood Spatter,” Ryan says. “I already put in a request with the main office to switch.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“I would have, if you would have been
on time
,” he says, trying to rub it in some more.

“You could have texted me,” I say as we exit the stairwell on the second floor and merge into boisterous teenage traffic. “Or did your phone get dislocated trying to jump the toaster?”

Ryan gets quiet, and I wonder if I’ve hurt his feelings, but when I turn back to check he smiles at me nervously.

“Look,” he says, struggling to keep pace, “I was going to talk about it at lunch, but, um . . . I’m kind of not supposed to hang out with you for a little while.”

“What?!” I stop in my tracks, and a tiny freshman plows into me, sending his iPod flying. Ryan retrieves it for the kid and then drags me over to a nearby water fountain.

“I know,” he says. “But my parents are pretty pissed about what happened.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I say, glancing at my phone. I have sixty seconds before I’m late to my second class of the day.

“They kind of think it is,” Ryan says, looking at the floor and scratching the back of his neck.

“Why would they think that?”

“Because I kind of . . . told them it was?”

“Ryan!”

“I know, I know,” he says, holding up his good hand defensively. “But they were so mad at me for not telling them about it, they were going to take my Xbox 360, so I needed a scapegoat.”

The warning bell rings—thirty seconds—and I take my cue. I back away from Ryan and toward the small beige-paneled room where I’ll be forced to perform dialogue scenes in which I describe in detail every piece of furniture in my imaginary Mexican hotel room.

“I don’t have time for this,” I yell. And as I turn my back I wonder if it’s remotely possible that this could all be a dream, one of those worst-case-scenario anxiety nightmares in which everything that could go wrong, does. I’m an accidental truant and a self-selected freak. My best friend can’t talk to me, and my former crush is getting manhandled in front of me by a giant basketball star. I have a patchy mustache and old clothes, and nobody sees past that to the person underneath.

No one but her, anyway. Devorah’s different from every girl—hell, every person—I’ve ever known. She has no game, no agenda. She made me feel like the best version of myself: brave and funny but not trying too hard; romantic but not cheesy. She made me feel like a good man, maybe even good enough to deserve someone as open and guileless and beautiful as her.

But I’ve got to stop thinking that. I don’t know where Devorah is, and I probably never will. Like the saying goes, lightning doesn’t tend to strike twice.