I swipe into the station and stand on the platform to wait for the train, the evening breeze picking up and tangling itself in my hair.
Time to rip my heart open and spill out the gore.
* * *
■
Crown Heights is both exactly and not at all as I remember.
This deli is the same deli that has been on this corner since I was a little girl. But the video store next to it is a smoke shop now. The kosher supermarket still uses the same font to announce its weekly sales, but the awning is green when it used to be blue. I find myself peering at the faces of the people I pass by, trying to tell if any of them are people I knew from my old life. Would Yaakov from next door look like that if he had a beard? Is that Bracha, her vibrant red hair obscured under an auburn wig?
If they recognize me, it doesn’t show. Turns out my past isn’t written indelibly on my skin after all. No one stops me on the street and accuses me of being Elisheva Cohen. No one seems to realize I’m anyone other than one of the goyish hipsters who’s moved into one of Crown Heights’ newly renovated, gentrified apartment buildings.
I know the walk from the Kingston Avenue stop to our old place so well. Even after eight years, the path is ingrained in my muscle memory. There’s the bakery where I used to buy doughnuts with my pocket money every Monday. There’s the boutique where Chaya and I used to say we’d shop once we were grown-up and fashionable and rich. There’s the kosher pizza place where I nodded off in the bathroom and woke up to find like five different pizza delivery boys staring at me, the door hanging off its hinges.
Our building looks the same from the outside. I assume my parents still live there. But maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ve moved on and some other family has taken over the apartment—some other kids’ heights marked on the kitchen wall, someone else’s shoes scattered by the front door.
I still have Dvora’s number saved in my phone. I have no idea if it’s the same—although I suspect it is. I suspect she still has that same shamelessly Luddite Motorola flip phone she had when we were teenagers, the one with the scratched paint on the side from the time I got angry at her and drunkenly threw her phone at a dumpster.
This is such a bad idea. This probably rises to the peak of bad ideas I’ve had since getting clean—the crown of “worst idea ever” having previously belonged to the time I tried to go off-roading in Shannon’s Toyota Camry. But I tap Dvora’s name and hit Call.
The phone rings and rings again, and I should hang up. This was such a stupid idea, embarrassingly masochistic—
“Hello?”
Dvora sounds just how I remember—soft, like she’s telling you a secret. I could close my eyes and let that voice soothe me to sleep.
The back of my throat has gone wrinkled and dry. My breath feels like it sticks to my tonsils.
“Hello?” Dvora says again, and I clench my eyes shut and my free hand into a fist.
Fuck it. “Hi,” I say back. “Um. It’s me. It’s…Elisheva.”
The silence that hangs in the following seconds feels like a blade waiting to fall. My nails dig into my palm and I count heartbeats; my pulse is pounding so hard I can feel it in my temples.
“What do you want?” she says at last.
I feel like I’ve been stuck with a live wire. My mind scorches to white static, and for a moment I almost want to laugh—because what did I expect? I should have known. After everything I did…after I left the community, left my family…of course she wants nothing to do with me.
My mouth opens and closes a couple times, abortive little efforts to speak. Finally, I manage to say, “I—I’m sorry. I just…I wanted to…”
“Do you want money?” Dvora says crisply.
I flinch. The worst part is, I can’t even be offended. I don’t deserve to be hurt. She’s right. I used to call all the time with one sob story or another, begging for cash. Making wild promises we both knew I’d never be able to keep about things I’d do if only she’d send money, if she’d talk to our parents, if they’d let me come home again.
The morning my parents finally kicked me out, I remember standing on this same curb with my one suitcase, the goyish taxi driver waiting impatiently in the street, my fist closed tight around the money my parents had given me for travel—money that taxi driver would never see, because I would spend it all on heroin and walk to the bus stop instead. Dvora was on the steps, her cheeks shiny with tears and one arm clutching our little brother Gedaliah’s skinny shoulders. She kept crying my name, begging me to stay—to apologize, to be a better Jew, a better person.
But I walked away.
Dvora isn’t crying anymore. The Dvora on the other end of the phone sounds more like our father: laden heavy with anger and disappointment.
The phone slips in my sweaty hand, and I blow out a hard breath.
I wish I were someone else. I wish I were literally…anyone else.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “Sorry to bother you.” And I hang up before I can make things any worse than they already are.
EIGHT YEARS AGO
The worst day of my life began in an ice storm.
The power had been out since the night before, which Chaya and I had spent bundled up together in my narrow twin bed, sharing warmth. In the morning my breath made little frozen clouds in front of my lips. Even my Cheerios felt like they came straight out of the freezer.
“Are you sure your parents are okay with you staying here?” my mother asked Chaya for the third time. “Do you need to run home and check?”
“They don’t care,” Chaya assured her. “Promise.”
I couldn’t tell if Chaya was lying, but I wasn’t about to press her on it. Selfishly, I wanted her there. With school canceled, the hours stretched out long and empty before me, ready to be filled with menial chores and demands to watch my younger brothers.
“We have to study anyway. Big test coming up,” I added for good measure, in case my mother was entertaining notions of having me and Chaya take the boys somewhere to get their energy out.
It worked like a charm because there was nothing my mother cared about as much as grades, and mine had been slipping lately. Chaya and I stole some blankets from the chest in the living room and escaped back upstairs, bundling ourselves into the fortress of my bedroom.
“Maybe we should study Hebrew,” Chaya said, her head the only thing poking out from her chunky knit blanket. “Didn’t you get a C- on the last exam?”
“Ugh, don’t start.” I pulled open the top drawer of my dresser and shoved aside socks and underwear until I found what I was looking for. My stash was hidden away in a little carved box my grandmother had given me. She’d said her mother had brought it here all the way from Poland. Whatever it used to hold, it made a good home for my colorful collection of Percs and Oxys and the tiny bag of brownish powder that I’d bought the week before, because it was cheap, but was still too chickenshit to try out.