The Last Words We Said Read online

  “It’s okay,” I say, putting my arm around her. “You didn’t do it on purpose. It’s like accidentally turning on a light on Shabbat. You just say ‘oops’ and then try to do better next time.”

  She stares at me intently, her bloodshot eyes narrow with determination. “There isn’t going to be a next time,” she declares solemnly. “I’m pulling out of the play.”

  It’s my turn to be horrified. “You’re quitting? How can you do that? Deenie, you’re Éponine!”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t take the chance. What if it happens again? The audience is supposed to be all women, but I can’t control who walks in and out of the theater. And they’ll be recording opening night. So anyone can listen to my voice whenever they want. I’ll never be safe.”

  “But recordings are okay,” I protest. “It’s only live performances—”

  “Not according to some opinions,” she interrupts.

  “What about your dad’s opinion?” I demand. “Doesn’t that count for something?” I’m trying to keep calm, but my voice rises anyway. For the first time, I’m actually feeling Rae’s frustration boiling underneath my words, and I understand why she finds it so hard to deal with Deenie’s new convictions.

  “I love and respect my father,” she replies. “But I have to make my own choices.”

  “But you’ll be letting the whole cast down,” I say. “That’s way worse. You’re breaking your word.”

  “That’s what my father said.”

  “And you want me to talk to him? Convince him that you’re right?”

  She looks defeated. Her shoulders sag as she slowly rises from the couch. “Never mind. You can’t defend something you don’t believe in.”

  She starts to turn away from me, but I jump up from my seat and grab her by the arms. “I know you don’t believe in this either. Are you telling me that you’re never going to sing again? Deenie, you’ve been singing since you were a baby.”

  Her dark eyes seem strangely hollow when she finally looks at me. “Well, it’s time I grew up, then.”

  I can’t let this happen. Deenie’s voice is the soundtrack of our lives; she sings without even realizing it sometimes, while doing dishes or working on her homework. I can’t imagine a world without her light crystal soprano. “So you won’t even sing in front of me?” I plead. “Just once in a while?”

  She seems confused. “Well, if it’s just you,” she says cautiously, “then I guess it’s okay. But not if—” She pauses and glances around the room.

  “Not if what?”

  “Not if Danny is with you.”

  I’m suddenly glad that Rae isn’t here. Because I know exactly what she would say if she were. Damn it, girls, I don’t know which one of you is crazier.

  When Deenie leaves, I send Rae an urgent text telling her that I’m coming over. I need to tell her that she was right and that I finally understand why she was so worried. Today I caught a glimpse of the chopping block in Deenie’s mind, the religious guillotine that is slowly slicing away at everything she loved. And it terrified me.

  “You’re not going to believe what happened,” I say as soon as I walk into her kitchen. I don’t bother assuring her that I’m alone. “Just guess what Deenie’s decided.”

  She looks up from the cake she’s decorating. “Yeah?”

  “Deenie is dropping out of the play. She’s decided to give up singing.”

  Rae stops mid-rose, the frosting tip still poised over an ivy leaf. Her expression doesn’t change. “Okay.”

  “Okay?!” I’m nearly shouting. Where is Rae’s famous outrage when I need it? “That’s all you have to say? Just ‘okay’?”

  She leans over her rose and carefully finishes the final petal. “What would you like me to do, Ellie? I’m not allowed to talk to her about this stuff, remember?”

  “I never said that!” I protest. “Besides, this is totally over the top. How can Deenie give up her voice?”

  Rae doesn’t look up from her cake; her head is bent over her flowers so that I can’t see her expression. “I was expecting it,” she says quietly. “I’m just surprised it took her so long.”

  MY VERY OWN KING SOLOMON

  There are many different kinds of rabbis, just like there are many different types of Jews. There are community leaders, pulpit clergy, teen youth directors, the coordinators of the local college Hillel. They are teachers and guidance counselors, experts on the minutiae of practical law, marriage therapists, and dispute mediators. By the time I hit adolescence I’d met dozens of rabbis, both at school and through our synagogue. But no one inspired me to love religion like Deenie’s father. Rabbi Garner was a multi-hat kind of guy; he was involved in Jewish events at several local campuses; he lectured on various religious subjects at our high school. He tutored boys on their bar mitzvah portion; he gave talks for women on topics ranging from kashrut observance to marital harmony. But his passion was Kiruv work, the time he spent speaking to unaffiliated and unobservant Jewish teens, to draw them closer to our faith. It was said that there was no teenager so jaded he couldn’t move them to reflect, no adolescent so lost he couldn’t bring them back to the Shabbat table, if only for one afternoon. While we respected the appointed rabbi of our synagogue, we gravitated to Rabbi Garner because he represented the more “modern” track of Orthodoxy. He was clean-shaven and favored jeans over black suits. He’d been a troubled teen and found religion later in life, so we knew he wouldn’t judge our choices, even when they conflicted with our parents’ conservative ones. And he could relate to our parents, too, because he’d received a law degree before his ordination, so he had a foot in both the religious and the professional worlds.

  Rae and I were Rabbi Garner’s faithful disciples from an early age. He ran a Torah for Tots group after preschool and gave ice cream to the kids who were on time. Through his stories the characters in the Bible came alive and became human, like us. His lessons were age appropriate and short (Respect your parents! Don’t say mean things about people!) and were always magically connected to the weekly Torah portion.

  His influence continued throughout my childhood; there was no crisis in belief, no discrepancy between science and religion that Rabbi Garner couldn’t resolve for me. If something didn’t make sense in my mind, it certainly did in Rabbi Garner’s. I only had to ask.

  A few weeks after Danny entered our lives, I decided to place a dilemma in Rabbi Garner’s capable hands. Deenie was sitting in her dad’s chair when I walked into his office. Her face glowed when I inquired if the rabbi was free for a consultation. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You’re here about Rae, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. “No, I think we just need to leave her alone. Let her figure things out on her own.”

  Rae had stopped coming to all nonmandatory religious activities. And as part of her rejection of all things Jewish, she’d cut Rabbi Garner out of her life as well. “What’s going on?” I’d demanded. “Are you mad at him or something?”

  “Why would I be mad at him?” Rae had replied. “He’s always been nice to me.”

  “Exactly! So why are you rejecting him?”

  “I’m not rejecting him. As a rabbi, he’s fine. But he’s part of the system. I’m rejecting the system.”

  I found it hard to understand Rae sometimes. Rabbi Garner may have been clergy, but there was nothing stodgy or old-fashioned about him. The man could quote lines from our favorite TV shows better than we could.

  The rabbi walked into the office before I had a chance to tell Deenie the reason for my visit.

  Rabbi Garner was unusually attractive for a suburban dad. To me, he was just Deenie’s father, but even I couldn’t help noticing the effect he had when he walked into a room. Most of Rabbi Garner’s congregants were used to the fact that their rabbi looked like Ben Barnes with a kippah, but it was funny how flustered some ladies got when they met him for the first time.

  He lit up the office with a smile and asked me to be seated. “We
ll, Ellie, it’s been a while,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  I glanced at Deenie, who nodded encouragingly and quietly placed a glass of water by my side. “It’s no big deal,” I told him. “I’m just worried about Danny.”

  The rabbi nodded at Deenie and folded his hands. “Your new friend. Deenie’s told me about him. Why are you concerned?”

  “It’s not him exactly,” I explained. “But I think something might be wrong at home. He won’t let us visit, and he changes the subject whenever we ask. I thought maybe you’d know what’s going on. Is Danny’s father sick? Is there something we should know?”

  Rabbi Garner considered the question quietly for a moment before fixing me with his dark eyes. “Before I answer that, I need to understand your motivation,” he replied gravely. “Are you worried for your friend’s safety or well-being? Are you thinking about paying a sick call to Mr. Edelstein? Or are you simply curious?”

  I opened my mouth to answer and then caught Deenie’s eye. “Curious,” I admitted in a low voice. “I think Danny’s being mysterious just to mess with us. And I wanted to know if I’m right.”

  “Ah.”

  “But—but, if he isn’t, and something is wrong or if there is some reason I shouldn’t go over there—”

  The rabbi raised one hand, and I spluttered to a halt. “First of all, I believe you should give your friend a little more credit. But I can speak to Danny’s father, if you’d like. If, however, he chooses to keep to himself, you will have to respect that.”

  * * *

  It took two days for the ripples of magic to work their way from Rabbi Garner’s office to the shuttered Edelstein home. I never found out how he did it. But Danny showed up at my house one afternoon, shaking with excitement.

  “I can’t cook,” he blurted out.

  Rae looked up from the bread dough she’d been pounding. “We know. So what?”

  “So my dad needs me to make dinner. He wants to have the three of you over for a home-cooked meal tonight. He wants to meet my friends.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence.

  “Well, it’s about time,” Rae declared, dusting the flour from her hands. “Get out your shopping bags, girls. I’ll have a menu ready in fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter 8

  After Danny’s disappearance I got asked about my grades a lot. It was the first question on everyone’s mind for some reason—psychiatrists, social workers, even my pediatrician at my yearly checkup wanted to know about my report card. I suppose people who are delusional tend to do poorly in school, as they’re too distracted by whatever is going on in their mind palace.

  I love to tell them the truth, mostly to see the surprise on their faces. “Straight A’s,” I reply. Their pen always stops over their clipboard for a moment. “They fell a little at first,” I admit. “But I’m back on track now.”

  I’m not lying, either. Ever since Danny returned to me, my grades have climbed back to where they belong. Well, except for a B in physics (but I hated physics before the accident too).

  So I’m a little shocked when Ms. Baker returns my latest assignment with a giant red C-minus on it. I’d been expecting some kind of reaction to the crap I’d submitted. Still, a C is pretty harsh.

  “See me after class,” she says shortly.

  “I was debating a failing grade,” she tells me as soon as the last student files out of the classroom.

  “Come on, it wasn’t that bad.” I can’t help smiling, though. I have a stack of stories piling up at home, but I wasn’t going to share them with anyone, least of all my overly enthusiastic English teacher. So instead, I’d handed in a steaming pile of purple prose, complete with a girl “whose tears were diamonds that glistened with the songs of a thousand prayers” and her lover “whose azure eyes shrieked like ocean waves wailing against jagged, splintered rocks.” At the end of the excerpt I’d run out of overwrought adjectives, so I’d hit the thesaurus—hard. It was educational, in a way. I’d learned some new words, and then sprinkled them “like confetti over a tortured, putrefied wound.”

  “You know, when most people self-sabotage, they generally don’t advertise it like that,” she remarks. There’s no humor in her eyes. “It’s usually a quiet process ending in failure. Not a ‘fanfare whose pomp and grandeur ooze with the poison of a generation’s ennui.’ What does that even mean, Ellie?”

  I smother a grin. “You’re the English teacher. Which word didn’t you understand?”

  She folds her arms and leans back in her chair. “I didn’t force you to enter the contest. It was just a suggestion. There was no need to churn out nonsense just to make your point.”

  I’m trying hard not to feel foolish, but it’s not working out too well. I hadn’t meant to piss her off so completely. She seems to be taking the garbage assignment personally, as if I’ve insulted the English language with my paper. “Look, I can rewrite it,” I suggest. “I was just having a little fun.”

  “No, I think you were trying to tell me something. So, I’m going to read between the lines.”

  I want to tell her that I have no idea what I’d written between the lines. I’d been too busy finding clever ways to say “skin that glowed like a moonlit pond.”

  “I think you’re trying to tell the world that you’re tired of being coddled. So, I’m going to treat this assignment like I would treat any subpar work by a student who can do better. I’m not allowing a rewrite. You’ll have to work hard if you want to pull up your average by the end of the semester.”

  She gets out of her chair as she speaks and motions toward the door. The conversation is over. I want to ask her what she meant, want to insist that I never expected to be coddled and that I’m prepared to accept the C if that will prove that I’m happy to take responsibility for the joke. But there’s no way to say all that without sounding like a manipulative kiss-up angling for a better grade. I have no idea how to even start a decent apology. Apparently, I used up all my words in that ridiculous essay.

  So, I stuff my paper into my bag and walk out the door.

  DANNY AND HIS ABBA

  If not for the mountains of books, the Edelstein house would’ve been a study in minimalism. There was a futon sofa in the living room facing a TV stand without a TV. A foldout table in the dining room with five folding chairs. No carpets on the floors or curtains over the shuttered windows. But every surface in the place was covered in books. They were stacked everywhere, crammed into corners and piled in leaning towers and ambitious pyramids throughout the home. There was no theme to the books, as far as I could see. It looked like Mr. Edelstein had simply walked into a used bookshop one day and bought them out. They had everything from science fiction novels to essays on comparative religion, volumes on economics to collections of poetry. Only the math books were grouped together in impressive columns by the TV stand. All the others were scattered randomly wherever they fit.

  I’d always believed you could learn a lot about a person by just walking over to their bookcase. But I had no idea what to think of this monstrous collection. Or the fact that the Edelsteins didn’t appear to actually own a bookcase.

  Danny came up behind me as I was inspecting a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.

  “Your dad’s a mathematician?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He used to work as an investment analyst for a local firm, but he left them a couple of months ago. Now he does financial consulting. Mostly at home.”

  I was about to comment on the comfort of working in pajamas when a door at the far end of the hall opened, and the man himself appeared.

  He tottered toward us slowly, then stopped in the middle of the corridor and raised his hand to his eyes to block the light from the window. Danny hurried past me and quickly closed the shutters, and the living room immediately went dark. “I’m sorry, I was going to close them,” he apologized. “I’ll go get the candles.”

  “Ooh, I love a candlelit dinner,” Rae declared as he set the flickering light
s by our plates. “What’s the occasion?”

  “The occasion is my son is overly concerned about my health, so he likes to baby me,” Mr. Edelstein replied fondly. “I keep telling him it isn’t necessary, but sometimes it’s just easier to let him have his way.”

  “Do you need some water, Abba?” Danny inquired, ignoring his father’s remark. “Here, why don’t you sit down and I’ll get the pitcher for you.”

  “Don’t you want to introduce me to your friends first?” his father suggested.

  Danny glanced around, startled, as if he’d forgotten that we were there. His dad slowly eased himself onto a chair with a soft grunting sound and winced as he stretched out his legs. Mr. Edelstein hadn’t been to synagogue since Danny’s arrival to Atlanta, and I was surprised to note how much he’d aged since I’d last seen him. He was in his mid-fifties, but he looked ten years older. He was very thin like Danny, but Mr. Edelstein’s thinness seemed starved and unnatural to me. A wrinkled knitted kippah was perched awkwardly atop a few strands of sparse black hair that fell over thick black brows. His dark eyes seemed even darker in the sunken shadows over his hollow cheeks. Even as he turned his head to study us, the movement seemed to cause him pain.

  I couldn’t blame Danny for being worried about his father’s health. He didn’t look like a well man.

  As we settled around the table, Danny introduced us, using our full names, which made Rae chuckle. He came to me last, and his dad turned to me with a twinkle in his tired eyes. “Ah, yes. The redhead from the plane.”