Sammy was more alive with Pessie beside him. They talked over each other, excited and overflowing with stories and details about this neighbor who smelled bad and that cousin whose wife had stopped shaving her head. One afternoon, as we sat around my kitchen table drinking Cokes and eating Doritos Cool Ranch chips-Sammy’s favorite-Pessie said that her older sister had just gotten engaged to a boy from Borough Park.
“She is scared,” Pessie said.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“Does she love him?”
Pessie shrugged. “No. But my mommy says that eighteen is too young for love. She says you get married first and then Hashem brings you love.”
“I fell in love when I was eighteen,” I said. “With a goy.”
For a moment, Pessie and Sammy, who were probably sixteen at the time, were speechless. They looked at me, and then each other, and then Isaac, trying to decide if I was teasing them.
“No, you didn’t,” said Sammy, his lips furry with yellow powder.
“I did,” I said. “His name was Brian.”
“Was he Chassidish?” asked Pessie.
I shook my head. “He was studying to be a Christian minister.”
They looked so shocked, I laughed.
“Does Eli know?” asked Sammy.
“He only knows I left with a man for a little while. He doesn’t know what happened while I was gone.”
“What happened?” said Pessie, leaning in, ready for gossip.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes!” screamed Pessie. Sammy and Isaac exchanged a look. Perhaps I should have read something into it, but I didn’t. I was ready to tell them. I was thinking that knowing something about my life that no one else in the family knew might make Sammy feel closer to me. I told them about the bookstore in Manhattan and the pool at the YMCA and the trips to Coney Island and the bus to Florida. I told them about living in the college dorm and about your grandfather’s job at Disney World. Pessie asked lots of questions, but Sammy was quiet. I keep looking at him, trying to figure out what he was thinking, but his face gave nothing away.
“What was your wedding like?” asked Pessie.
“We did not get married,” I said.
“Sammy said you were married, though.”
“That was later. In Israel. Brian and I were engaged, but things changed.” I looked at Sammy. I needed to see his face as I said this. “I had a baby.”
Pessie gasped. “A baby!” Sammy looked up, finally. Curious.
“A little girl,” I said. “I named her Rebekah, after our sister Rivka.”
“Did she die?” asked Sammy.
“No,” I said.
“Then why did you come home?”
“I came home because Mommy died and you were born,” I said. It was not a good excuse, but it was better than the truth-and it was partly true. I skipped the part where I snuck out in the middle of the night, and I skipped Gitty entirely.
“I was very young. I did not know how to be a mother.”
Sammy and Pessie were both silent for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell what the slightly scrunched expression on Sammy’s face meant. Pessie spoke first.
“Do you miss her?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every single day.”
“Where is she?” asked Sammy.
“She is in Florida, with her father.” As I said it, though, I realized I wasn’t certain. All those years talking to you, Rebekah, I did not allow myself to imagine that something might have happened to you. Or to Brian. I suddenly felt unsteady. What if I was talking to a ghost?
I must have looked as woozy as I felt because Pessie put her hand on mine.
“Don’t worry, Aviva,” she said. “We promise not to tell. Right, Sammy?”
Sammy nodded. After we dropped them off in Roseville that evening, Isaac and I went out to dinner at a tavern near campus.
“I wish you hadn’t asked them to keep a secret,” said Isaac.
“What do you mean?”
“This man,” he said, and the way he looked at me told me that he was talking about the person who had molested Sammy. “The way he talks about him… one minute he is almost… tender. And then he becomes angry and embarrassed. He said that when he thinks about the man he sometimes gets…” Isaac did not finish, but I understood.
“He said that?” I whispered.
Isaac nodded. “Not in exactly those words, but yes.”
“Did he say what happened?”
“He said it started with washing. Washing their hands together in the yeshiva kitchen. He said the man taught him to bake challah. I believe he may have been the school cook, not a teacher, although Sammy won’t tell me his name. He said soon after they would wash their whole bodies. The man washed Sammy, and then had Sammy wash him. And then… then he told Sammy to touch him. Kiss him…” Isaac took a deep breath. He wasn’t giving me all the details, but I didn’t push. It was enough.
“And he told Sammy to keep it a secret,” I said, feeling feverish with dread, abandoning my meal.
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes. I should have known better.
“I have read about men like this,” Isaac continued. “They find the boys with difficult family lives. They do things that are too shameful to say out loud. Sammy knows what the man did was wrong, but I think he is almost as afraid of people knowing as anything else. And now that he is becoming a man, he is mixed up. He asked me if I thought he was gay if it feels nice when he thinks about kissing a man instead of a woman.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I didn’t know. I said that if he is gay, there is nothing wrong with that. I told him that just because a man made him… do sexual things, it doesn’t mean he is gay. But if he is gay, it may be one of the reasons this man chose him. Men like that-they can tell who is different.”
The next time I saw Sammy he didn’t mention my secret or his, and when he turned eighteen, he told us that he and Pessie were engaged.
“Are you happy?” I asked him.
Like me, Sammy was not a good liar. “Pessie will make a good wife,” he said, but his voice did not sound like his own.
Two months later, Sammy broke off the engagement and Eli sent him to a camp that was supposed to fix gay boys. Three weeks in, he shaved off his sidecurls and came to live with me and Isaac in the yellow house.
A month after that, he met Ryan Hall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
According to my GPS, it’ll take about an hour to get from Roseville to 444 County Route 81, the address for Ryan Hall. The Google map says the location is between a small airfield and something called Winters’ Feed. I get on the Thruway and head north toward the Catskill mountains. Signs indicate ski areas and campgrounds, farm stands, firewood, and county fairs. I pass apple orchards and creeks running under the highway, and start seeing license plates from Quebec.
I take the exit for Catskill and follow Route 145 to Route 81, but my reception is spotty and I overshoot the address and end up back on 145, somehow. The roads are badly marked, and there are huge spaces between the houses. I’ve been spoiled reporting in the city the last year. It’s hard to get really lost in New York-there’s always somebody around to ask directions, and 178 Broadway is right next to 180, which is right next to 182. At first I was always forgetting to ask whether it was East or West Fourth Street, or if it’s Third Street not Third Avenue, but in most cases-except when you’re on Staten Island, where I haven’t been since my car died-you can hop on the subway and get back to someplace you know easily. In Florida, and up here, county routes become different county routes without signage. Landmarks-a gas station, a house with a purple barn-are how you tell where you are, but if you’ve never been to where you’re going, landmarks are meaningless.