“I guess I’m just remembering,” says Saul. “I wonder if Sam is that child?”
My mother is motherless. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m just…”
“We need to talk,” I say. “It’s time.”
Saul takes a moment to answer. “Okay. I will be in the Village starting at about nine tonight. Why don’t you come join me?”
Right before I leave for my shift, I call Larry at the Shack and inform him I have a meeting tomorrow with a member of the Roseville burial society about the Pessie story. He says I can put in for my day rate and get paid for mileage.
“If I stay overnight, do you think I can get reimbursed?” I ask. “I’ve got a couple leads on addresses related to the ex-fiancé.”
“Okay,” says Larry. “Run ’em down. Just one night, though. And make sure the room’s cheap. Less than one-fifty. I can swing that.”
On the subway to Manhattan, instead of listening to a WNYC podcast to pass the forty-five-minute ride, I do something I haven’t done in months: I think about a story. When a woman dies, the first suspect is always the husband. But if Levi Goldin killed his wife he wouldn’t be begging a reporter to pay attention to her death, so I feel safe assuming he’s not the perp. It sounds as though Sam was the one that dumped Pessie, so jilted lover doesn’t fit, either. Unless she had another ex-fiancé, or lover, which Levi isn’t likely to know about. Her family probably wouldn’t know either-though even if they did I can’t imagine they’d tell me. So far, Sam seems like the best possible source for information on what was happening in Pessie’s life. Sam and maybe this Nechemaya. The fact that Nechemaya called me is, frankly, a huge coup. If he didn’t hate me, I’d call Tony and brag: Scoop’s got a scoop. I wonder if he’d even want to hear from me again. He probably thinks I dumped him because I got bored or hooked up with someone else. He doesn’t know that I’ve never had a relationship that lasted more than four months. He doesn’t know that the only time I didn’t run when I felt like I might be in danger of falling in love was when I was pregnant in college and imagining that my boyfriend and I would make up for where my dad and Aviva went wrong. He doesn’t know that that boyfriend was also sleeping with two other people, and that Iris was the one who took me to Planned Parenthood. He doesn’t know that I haven’t been able to make myself come since we broke up. He’s probably with somebody else by now, anyway.
Shit. Iris.
I call her but the call goes to voice mail. Maybe she has her phone on silent for yoga.
“Hey,” I say, “I’m really sorry but Saul says he has some stuff to tell me about my mom, and I think I should hear it before I head upstate tomorrow. Get this: apparently her mom died in childbirth, like, while she was still with my dad. And Saul thinks Sam might be that kid. I doubt I’ll be too late. Maybe you guys can wait up? I’m meeting him right after work. Okay. Did you get my text? I love you. I’m really happy for you. Okay. Bye.”
When I get into the office I call Nechemaya and tell him I can meet him tomorrow.
“Thank you,” he says. “There is a Starbucks in the Target just off the Thruway. Can we meet at eight thirty?” Saul always used to ask me to meet him at Starbucks. So did a former Haredi woman I met a few months ago. What’s with Starbucks?
“Sure,” I say.
I walk over to the editors’ desk at the center of the newsroom and fill Mike in on my plans tomorrow. There have been two arrests in Drug Dorm Den, and a small plane just went down on Long Island, so he’s not terribly interested in my little maybe-murder upstate. I start to walk back to my desk when he stops me.
“Wait,” he says. “Does this mean you have a car now? We need somebody in Nassau County tonight to door-knock when we get an ID on the plane vics. I’d rather have you on that than this… other thing.”
“It’s a friend’s,” I say. “He can’t loan it to me until tomorrow.”
“Oh.” And he’s done with me.
I leave work at ten and get on the F train to West Fourth Street. Saul is sitting inside his car, which is parked in front of what I assume is The Doom Room. It looks like your standard downtown club-blacked-out windows, no sign-except that there isn’t a velvet rope or bouncer outside. I knock on the passenger-side window and Saul unlocks the door.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Oh fine.”
“Anything happening?”
“I’ve been here two days and haven’t seen him or the woman who the wife thinks he’s seeing.”
“How does the wife know what she looks like?”
“She found a photograph in his e-mail,” he says.
“How long are you going to keep waiting?”
“As long as she wants, I suppose. Or until I get a better client. She is paying well. By the day. And a bonus if I find them together.”
“How would you find them together?”
“I would have to follow him inside.”
“Exciting.”
Saul shrugs.
“So,” I say, “Aviva’s mother died in childbirth?”
“Yes,” says Saul. “That is what I was told.”
“But you decided not to tell me.”
“It’s not that I decided not to.”
“You just didn’t.”
Saul looks out the window. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Anything. How did you meet? What was she like?” I didn’t ask Saul these simple questions when we first met in January. I’m not sure if it was because there didn’t seem to be time, or if because, even now, the possible answers terrify me. The devil I know-the runaway mother I’ve had nightmares about meeting in strange, perilous circumstances-is still less frightening than the unknown truth. I don’t know how the truth will hurt me, but I’m pretty sure it will. I’ve been practicing for the pain as long as I can remember. Closing my eyes at night and imagining the worst and how it will feel when I encounter it. I felt a lot of fear lying in that little bed in Orlando: My heart raced as I discovered her happy, beautiful, raising a different, better daughter. It raced as I imagined her fat and unthinking in Brooklyn, surrounded by a dozen screaming children and a husband she hates. And it raced when she was a crack whore, or a surfer, or a nurse, or long dead and buried without a headstone. I wonder how many hours I lost letting my mind spiral into those stories, that dread? Here I am, I think. About to learn the truth.
“I knew her casually in the neighborhood,” says Saul. “Two of my younger sisters went to school with her and sometimes she would come to our apartment to play, or for Shabbos dinner. She was just a child then. Maybe eight years old when I was eighteen. I remember my mother complimenting her table manners. She used to ask my little sisters why they didn’t have table manners like Aviva Kagan.”
“Table manners?”
“It was very important to my mother that my sisters marry well.”
“Make shidduch,” I say, parroting Dov.
“Yes.” Saul looks at me with a half smile. I think he might be as nervous as I am. “My mother felt that anything less than perfect manners might stand in their way. I don’t remember Aviva being especially polite or impolite-I wasn’t really paying attention. But my mother used to say her name to my sisters all the time. It struck me as strange because I always had the sense that she was a bit of a troublemaker. She behaved one way when adults were present and another way when she thought they weren’t. She talked about movies she said she’d seen, or books she said she’d read-none of which would have been allowed by the rebbe, or her parents, probably. And she told stories about people she said she knew, people she’d met in her father’s taxicabs.”
“You think she was lying?”
“I did then,” says Saul. “I told my mother I didn’t think she was a good influence. But my mother didn’t believe me. She was terrified my sisters would not make good matches, and she was always trying to fix them in some little way. My sisters were timid and not terribly creative, but my mother constantly imagined them into trouble. She could believe no good of them.”