“Masha…” Emily starts.
Before she can finish the sentence, I turn to Wang, who has been quietly sitting there with her hands in her lap. I feel kind of bad she got stuck in the middle of our long-overdue reunion, but it’s all I can do to keep my stomach contents down. I’d cracked the door open, and I now I have to shut it again.
“So what are you going to do?” I ask her, to get Emily off my back. “Did you go to the police?”
I admit, too, that I am a little intrigued by this scam. It certainly doesn’t lack in creativity.
“We did. I just come from police. They made sketch already because this not first time Chinese family complain. Want to see?” she asks, then whips out a folded-up piece of paper from her backpack. I lean over and look at the photocopied drawing. The girl is dark-haired, with big bright eyes and two face piercings and a dimple in her chin. She has a tiny row of earrings and a bandana around her hair. Despite all that, her eyes are kind, soft. They don’t quite match the outfit. There’s something familiar about them that makes my heart jump into high alarm.
I take the paper out of Wang’s hands and look at it more closely. The slender nose, the smattering of freckles. I know that face.
It looks remarkably like the photo I’ve been showing around all day.
MASHA
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Emily is saying when I finally start breathing normally again. She and Wang are both staring at me.
“Do you know her?” Wang asks, all the jest gone from her voice. “She stole precious things. Family heirlooms, not only money.”
I swallow, then make eye contact with Wang, clearing my face of whatever it’s doing. “No, no, I don’t know her. I felt faint for a second,” I explain. I stand up again and put my coat on. “I think it’s the jetlag. I couldn’t sleep on the plane. And I haven’t eaten. I’m sorry guys; I really don’t feel well, I better go.”
“Masha,” Emily says, starting to follow me out the door. I keep walking, but she pulls my arm back, and I nearly fall into one of the outdoor patio tables I’m so faint.
“Crap,” I say, rubbing my knee. I look out onto Bremen St., dimly lit, empty and dark now, snow still dropping like sheets. “Crap, crap, crap.”
Emily puts her hands on my shoulders, her forehead creased with concern, or anger, or both. Instantly, my reflexes want to elbow my way out of the situation, as I’d learned in Krav Maga. I have to fight against this urge. Emily isn’t attacking me; there’s no reason for my heart rate to be as sky high as it is. The inventors of Krav Maga were 1930s Russian Jews, sick and tired of seeing their people get killed in anti-Semitic attacks, not anxious girls who would rather avoid confrontations with former best friends. Slowly, I pick up and remove her hands, then step backward.
“Yes, Emily?” I ask. It’s not clear what she wants from me, why she came outside. Doesn’t she understand that I’m tired? That I’ve already done more in a day than I ever thought was possible? When I woke up this morning—yesterday technically—I had a pair of muscular, sweaty arms holding me tight, and a pretty comfortable life. Now, I feel as if I’m falling down the abyss, with nothing at all to hold onto on my way down.
Emily inhales sharply. “That’s Anna, isn’t it?” she asks.
“No!” This question takes me by surprise. I thought maybe she wanted to talk about why I lied about the drawing or why we aren’t friends anymore, but I should have known better. She was reading me, like she used to before. Like I am some misbehaving kid in her class.
Or maybe she’d seen the resemblance as clearly as I did.
“Masha. Come on. It is,” she says. “I won’t say anything to Wang, but…”
“Emily, it could be anyone. All those train-hoppers look the same.”
“Train-hoppers? I thought she was just hanging around all those anarchists. She’s doing that now?” Emily asks, eyebrows raised. Then she crosses her arms over her chest, rubbing them for heat. The snow has stopped, but it’s now freezing out, the wind turning from a slight discomfort into a bone-chilling cold—Wisconsin at its best.
“I don’t know for sure. I just heard things,” I shrug, also crossing my arms over my chest, shivering. A few years in the desert and you can completely disregard winter, apparently. How had I lived through so many decades of this cold and then forgotten to pack a real coat? To warm myself, I start hopping on one foot and then the other. I don’t even care how stupid it looks.
“This isn’t on you, Masha,” Emily is saying. “You weren’t here. How could you know?”
Of course it’s not my fault, I think, before a second thought follows: unless maybe it is? “It’s not her.” I reach into my bag and take out the cigarettes I’d hidden there. This one, I light myself. Maybe this was the real reason I’d purchased them at the airport, and I’ve been in denial all day. In case I needed one, not only to barter for information. “It was good to see you, Emily.”
I step around her and start walking as fast as I can throw the snow.
But Emily is nearly as stubborn as I am, and she isn’t letting me get away so quickly. She keeps up with me as I speed-walk all the way down Bremen Street.
“Masha,” she says. “Just stop for a second.”
“I can’t stop, Emily. It’s freezing. And I need to get some sleep. I’m a zombie right now. My brain isn’t working.” Truthfully, it is working overtime, but I don’t want her to know that. Wondering what’s worse—that Anna is possibly a liar and a thief, or that I am also lying. Lying is supposed to be a thing of the past, like all the drugs and sleeping around I’d done during that brief time of flailing around in the abyss of adulthood. Lying is the old Masha. One day in Milwaukee is already turning me into a bad Jew. A bad person.
I will have a lot to make up for next Yom Kippur.
“If that’s Anna—I mean, isn’t that why you’re here? To find her?” Emily asks, catching up again. “You can message the email from the Craigslist ad.”
“If that’s Anna—which it’s not—I would have already thought of that, Emily,” I explain. I walk even faster now, my breath hovering in the air like smoke. I can’t help but miss Israel again, my cozy little apartment, half-hidden behind a Washingtonian tree and a giant Israeli flag, surrounded by neighbors I know and feel like friends. And David. I haven’t been gone twenty-four hours, and his absence is almost like a severed arm. I know if he had been able to come with me, not only would I have already found Anna by now, I would be happier too. I have no way to contact him, either, being that he is off in some random country, doing God knows what, and as usual, I have to wait for him to call me, then drop whatever it is I am doing. He could be in America for all I know. He could even be here, and I would have no direct way of finding that out until I ran into him in the street.
This is pretty unlikely though. What business would Israel have in Milwaukee? Milwaukee certainly wants nothing to do with them. Everyone here thinks of the country as a political pawn, not a place full of interesting and diverse people of all sorts of religious and political leanings. It’s easy to dismiss something when it doesn’t have a face.
“God, when did you get into such good shape?” Emily asks, panting. “I could barely get you to go on a hike with me when we were in school.”