Like No Other (3 page)

D
evorah

A
UGUST
28, 7:30
PM

M
y niece’s name is Liya. Liya Sara Kleinman, after our late paternal grandmother and Jacob’s late maternal grandmother, because in our tradition it’s bad luck to name a baby after anyone living. (It’s also bad luck to announce the name of a baby girl before her
simchat bat
, or naming ceremony, but Rose was too excited and out of it to keep the secret from me, and I’m glad.) Liya weighs four pounds, one ounce, and is eighteen inches long, born at 7:19
PM
and out of our sight by 7:20, whisked off to the incubator to keep warm and have her breathing monitored for at least a few days, until she gains another pound or so, but otherwise healthy.

“Healthy as a horse!” I report to my mother illicitly from the stairwell, lowering my voice into the receiver of Jacob’s cell, trying to imitate her trademark optimism with an idiom I don’t really understand.

“No horse in New York City looks healthy,” my mother replies wryly, but I can hear the smile in her voice.

I’m afraid that Jacob will react badly to the gender news, but instead he actually
hugs
me and starts jumping up and down. I take him in to see Rose, but it’s really awkward since now that Rose is
yoledet
, all physical contact with her husband is forbidden. (Like
niddah
, when a woman has her period, the idea is to keep men from being intimate with a woman when she’s “unclean,” although when the sages wrote these laws I kind of doubt they took into consideration the decidedly unromantic atmosphere of a shared hospital recovery room, especially with some stranger getting a catheter put in, one curtain down.) So I stand there fidgeting as Jacob beams at Rose and clutches his fists over his chest, and Rose raises a weak hand to her lips.

“I love you,” Jacob says, his voice surprisingly deep with emotion.

“Mmmmmm.” Rose sighs dreamily. (She needed some stitches, so they gave her painkillers.) Then a lactation consultant shows up to teach Rose how to use a frightening breast pump the size of an air conditioner, and both Jacob and I make ourselves scarce.

• • •

An hour later, Rose is asleep, Liya’s in the NICU, and Jacob has wandered off, so I’m just loitering in the hallway waiting to be useful again. Adrenaline ricochets through my exhausted shell of a body, and I’m filled with a weird energy that I’ve never felt before. It feels kind of like the time I ate a pint and a half of ice cream all by myself at Chaya Miller’s fourteenth-birthday sleepover and then watched Chaya and her best friends Rachel and Tavi do the “Single Ladies” dance, which they’d downloaded on Rachel’s older sister’s iPad: My heart was racing and blood was rushing in my ears and tingling in my toes and I felt a little bit sick but mostly exhilarated. I wish I could call Shoshana right now and tell her about Liya, about the miracle I just saw with my own eyes. I wish I could call
anyone
. Almost all my friends have cell phones, but my father jokes that I don’t need one because he always knows that I’m right where I should be. “You can have a phone when you start worrying me,” he says drily every time I pester him. Even Amos has a refurbished Nokia from like 2003, the kind that you can use only to talk, no Internet. But that’s because he never comes home on time, and my parents have to be able to call and yell at him even if he’s far away.

I wander through the now-empty Labor and Delivery waiting room and over to the big window that overlooks the parking lot. The sky is dark and thick, and eerily quiet—no sign of the bone-rattling winds that were blowing through when we first arrived. I wonder if we’re in the eye of the storm—the evil eye that everyone fears but no one sees. I run my fingers along a strip of duct tape and peer up through the low gray clouds, but there’s no moon, not even a hint of one. I listen to the rain drum against the glass, while on TV I hear the news anchors regret to inform me that a young man has been killed by a falling tree in Borough Park.

• • •

The rest of the floor may be deserted, but the NICU is buzzing. Through the thick glass of the window made for new parents and gawkers like me, I can literally hear the thrum of electricity. It almost looks like a regular nursery, painted a bright buttercup yellow, with a rocking chair and a few stuffed animals perched on a beanbag, but the rest of the room is filled with giant machines, mostly eight incubators lined up in two neat rows. Dr. MacManus and two of the nurses who were in Rose’s room during delivery are going from baby to baby, making notes on a clipboard chart. I crane my neck and try to find Liya, but from where I stand I can see only slivers of skin poking out of diapers and blankets, and I haven’t known her long enough to pick her out of a crowd—especially one this tiny.

One of the nurses reaches her hand into an incubator that’s glowing blue like the deep-sea life exhibit I saw last year at the Museum of Natural History. The baby inside has a bandage over its eyes; I wonder if it has any idea where it is, or if it thinks it’s still safe in the womb. The nurse smiles and begins to massage the baby’s tiny foot with her thumb, and I’m so transfixed that I hardly notice the other nurse and doctor push through the door just inches to my left.

“So you think we’re definitely going to lose it?” the nurse asks, her voice rising in panic.

“Not necessarily,” says the doctor, wiping sweat from under his scrubs cap. “But Lower Manhattan just went dark, and NYU Medical is on its backup generator.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers, and I turn my face so that they can’t see the flush in my cheeks. I’ve heard plenty of cursing, but no one in my family—
no one—
ever says His name in vain. At school, we’re not even allowed to write it out. We have to write
G-d
. (Shoshana says that if she ever becomes a famous Hasidic rapper like Matisyahu, she’s going to call herself G Dash.)

“Even in a worst-case scenario, we should be okay,” the doctor says. “But until we’re in the clear, we have to be prepared. MacManus is done with her deliveries, so she’s gonna hang out for a few hours in case we need extra hands.”

I let out the breath I didn’t even know I was holding. I don’t trust many strangers, but I trust our doctor. The thought that she will be with Liya fills me with relief.

“Can I help you?” The doctor has noticed me and sounds . . . not
annoyed
exactly, but tired. He tries to make eye contact as I search for words.

“Oh, no, thanks, I’m just looking.” This is the same line I use at the newsstand two blocks from my house, where I sometimes pretend to comparison shop for bottled water while discreetly gazing at the covers of the secular magazines, transfixed by the women with glossy hair and swollen lips and bare shoulders the color of dark honey. But now that the other nurse has gone back inside the NICU, I’m flirting with a violation of
yichud
by standing with a man in an otherwise empty hallway, so I take one last peek at the babies, saying a special prayer for Little Blue, and make a hasty exit.

• • •

Rose is asleep when I get back to her room, a bottle of thin yellow milk sitting on a table beside the bed alongside the red enamel mezuzah Jacob brought from home. She seems to be sleeping so deeply that her chest is barely moving, but when I lean in to kiss her forehead I can see her eyes darting back and forth under their lids, the rapid eye movement of deep dream sleep. It would be cruel to wake her, and boring to wait, so I double back through the waiting room to look for Jacob, even checking the hallway by the vending machines and poking around outside the men’s room for a few minutes just in case. (“When you don’t know what to do, walk fast and look worried,” my grandmother used to say, and it’s the perfect advice for a hospital.) While I’m loitering by the bathrooms it occurs to me that I haven’t peed since Rose and I were doing inventory at the store nine hours ago, so I duck into the empty ladies’ room, shut myself in a stall, and savor every vanishing inch of my tights as they peel away from my legs. Even though I don’t need to, I roll them all the way to my ankles. Like Dr. MacManus said, the heat makes people do crazy things.

After I reluctantly pull up my stockings and zip up my skirt, I take a good look at myself in the mirror. I’m almost surprised to see the same face I woke up with this morning; with all the rain, sweat, and tears it’s been drenched with today, I half expected it to look older and wiser, or at least pale and gaunt from anxiety. But no—there are my cheeks, as round and pink as they were when I was three and my zeidy would pretend to take bites of them during Shabbos dinner. There are my father’s thick eyebrows and my mother’s (and Rose’s) round gray eyes and the dainty nose that Shoshana says she would pay me her allowances for ten years to trade for hers, which is larger and sports a (practically invisible, but she won’t listen to me) bump on the bridge. There are my lips, which have been touched only by people in my immediate family and might as well come in a factory-sealed cellophane wrapper. I wet my hands again and clap the cool water on my face, smoothing the rest over my unruly black curls. I may not have grown any cheekbones today, but thanks to the humidity, my hair has at least doubled in size.

I leave the bathroom and find myself facing the elevator bank, so I decide to go down to the cafeteria below the lobby floor and see if Jacob is there. At the very least maybe I can get him to buy me that ginger ale he owes me. Suddenly starving, I step into the brushed-chrome car and reach for the door-close button. As soon as my skin touches it, I swear I feel the lights flicker.

• • •

Labor and Delivery is on the fourth floor, and on the third floor (Neurology), an elderly couple gets on, smiling oddly at me the way people do when they see me, out of the context, in the summertime. Black shoes, opaque black tights, black skirt to mid-calf, white long-sleeved T-shirt with a purple cardigan . . . I wonder, as I often do, what they assume I am. I’ve gotten Amish (thanks, Anne-Marie!), goth (that one was my favorite), or “in an orchestra?” (from a five-year-old, so I took it as a compliment). On the second floor, Electrophysiology, a young nurse with close-cropped hair and yellow running shoes gets on, wearing a backpack over her pastel blue scrubs.

“My shift just ended, and I’m gonna get myself home before I’m stuck here all night,” she says brightly to no one in particular.

Between the second and ground floors, the lights dim again, and the elderly woman gasps and grabs her husband’s arm.

“I jinxed us,” the nurse says, putting a hand to her temple.

But half a minute later, the doors spring apart on the main floor, and the old couple and nurse rush off. The elevator opens directly out into the ER waiting room, and the wind is whipping against the sliding glass door so forcefully that it’s actually banging. I vaguely remember futilely pulling on that same door for Rose when we arrived, not realizing it was automatic, and how heavy it felt—like a slab of granite. For the first time I wonder how I’m possibly going to get home tonight. Both Jacob and I took cabs to the hospital, and who knows if anyone is still willing to take a fare in this weather. At least I know that Isaac and Zeidy are with my younger siblings; that my second oldest brother Niv is with his wife, Rivka, in their apartment on President Street; that Mom and Dad are safe upstate; and that Rose and Liya have doctors watching over them. I’m the only one lost at the moment, and I can’t panic yet.

It’s not until the elevator doors close again that I realize someone else has boarded. A boy, my age or a little older, who stands with his broad back to me, sinewy muscles spreading his red T-shirt tight across his shoulders, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. Skin the shade of the smoky, dark chocolate hidden behind the gold foil of my Hannukah gelt. My pulse quickens. This is
definitely
a violation of
yichud
, although you can’t avoid ever being alone in an elevator with a stranger unless you’re a total freak, right?
Besides
, I tell myself,
it’ll be ten more seconds, at most. What could happen in ten seconds?

And then the elevator stops.

And the lights go out.

J
axon

A
UGUST
28, 7:45
PM

A
t home, our power goes out all the time. We live on the top floor of an old brownstone, which my dad would describe as “quirky” and my mom would deride as “broke-ass.” (Our landlady tries to fix everything herself, but she’s eighty-two, so mostly she relies on a glue gun and a bottle of Drano.) If we have the TV on and someone plugs in the toaster, a fuse blows. And forget about summer. If we want to run the AC we have to turn off almost all the lights in the house. So I’m used to the dark, but the way the elevator shudders and screeches to a stop is still freaky.

“Aw, shit,” I say, and there’s a sharp intake of breath behind me. The girl. I forgot about the girl. I only got a glimpse of her when I stepped in, since I was trying to make way for the old couple. But she has long dark hair, I remember, and a pretty face. Which means I’m probably going to make a fool of myself. My heart thumps so loud in my chest I’m sure she must be able to hear it.

“Sorry,” I say with a laugh. “I’ve just had a long day.”

No answer.

It’s funny; I forget sometimes how I might look to other people. I could be reading
The Great Gatsby
on the 3 train, or walking down the street listening to a podcast on my phone, or coming out of my orthodontist’s office with Invisalign braces feeling like the biggest nerd on the planet, but some people don’t notice anything but an almost-six-foot-tall black man. After Trayvon Martin got shot in Florida, Mom wouldn’t let me wear a hoodie for six months.

“I’m Jaxon,” I say into the darkness, trying to make the most of my warm, deep voice, which makes my sisters laugh when I do impressions of radio deejays. (
“And now, a blast from the past going out to my girl Ameerah, who loves meatballs, Kanye West, and using up all the hot water in the shower, heeeeeere’s Sister Sledge, with ‘We Are Family’!”
)

But the girl stays silent, and after a minute I start to wonder if she might actually be deaf. “That’s Jaxon with an X,” I add, just to fill the dead air. “Not, like, the seventh president. Or Michael.”

Still nothing. Man, I’m striking out like A-Rod in the 2011 ALDS. But then, finally, a thin, nervous voice says, “Devorah.”

“All right, Devorah, I’m going to press the call button,” I say. “Hang tight.”
Hang tight?
I shake my head at my staggering lack of smoothness. The stakes for my redemption are rising with every stupid word out of my mouth. Now I’m going to have to try to get us out of the elevator MacGyver style to regain any shred of dignity.

I run my fingers over the wall where I know the buttons should be, trying to count floors and guess where the
HELP
button might fall on the bumpy grid. The worst that can happen is I press the alarm bell, which won’t win me any suave points but will still help our case. I tentatively press one button, then the next, and when nothing happens I start punching them harder, hitting everything I can.

“Nothing,” I say with a sigh, finally giving up. Devorah doesn’t react. In fact, I haven’t heard her move
once
, not even just to shift her weight or swallow. I realize she must be scared, or maybe even claustrophobic. I need to make her feel comfortable.

I reach into my back pocket for my phone—even the subways get reception now, and we’re barely underground in here—but there are no bars. I hold it up above my head, and its light gives me a few feet of visibility. The elevator is deep, maybe eight feet long to accommodate gurneys, and Devorah is backed into a corner, clutching a rail with each hand. Even though her face is a mask of fear, and despite the low light, I can tell I was wrong. She’s not just pretty, she’s
beautiful
. I can feel my mouth getting dry. “Is it okay if I, um, move around a little to see if I can get a signal?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, squinting into the light, trying to make me out. “Just . . . I’m over here, so . . .”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I won’t get too close.” I don’t know why I feel like such a predator all of a sudden when I’m trying to be the hero.

I inch around the perimeter of the car, keeping the phone up above my head. Who am I even going to call if I get a bar? I can’t call 911; we’re already at the hospital. And while I do owe my mother a phone call there’s no way I’m going to give her the opportunity to chew my ear off, the rhythm of her loud, lightly accented alto voice quickening the more worried and angry she gets, while I’m trapped five feet from Devorah. Luckily—or unluckily; I guess both—I can’t find service.

“Do you think the power’s out in the whole building?” she asks tentatively.

“Yeah, probably.” I stick my phone back into my pocket, but my eyes have adjusted to the dark now, and I can see Devorah clap a hand over her mouth. “Hey, you okay?” I ask.

She shakes her head no.

“We’re gonna be fine,” I say. “There’s nothing to be scared of in here.” I force a smile, my stomach curdling as I realize the thing she could be scared of is
me
.

“It’s . . . my niece,” she says, slow and high-pitched and kind of halting, like she’s trying not to cry. “She came early and she’s . . . in the NICU. What if she’s . . .”

Relief washes over me, followed by guilt for being glad Devorah’s upset about a sick baby and not my company. “No,” I say, trying to sound authoritative even though it’s just now dawning on me that the other people in the hospital could be in serious trouble. “She’s fine. Those babies are the first ones they’re going to check on. And they’re used to these hurricanes now. They have the backup generators ready to go.”

She swallows hard. “Then why is it still dark in here?”

“Because . . . the cafeteria elevator is low priority. They know the worst condition we’ve got in here is munchies.” Fourteen years of big brothering have made me pretty good at making stuff up on my feet. I wish I hadn’t said “munchies,” though. She’s not
eight
.

Devorah nods and slides down to the floor, pulling her knees in close to her chest. And suddenly, there is nothing more important to me than getting this girl back to her niece. I get a rush of dumb machismo.

“You know what?” I say. “I’m gonna get us out of here.” As usual, my mouth is a few steps ahead of my brain, but I feel unusually sure of myself, backed up by some Superman-caliber adrenaline. I know I’ve seen dudes escape from elevators in movies, but I’ve never exactly taken notes on the process. What I do know is that I have two options: Try to pry apart the doors or bust through the service hatch in the ceiling and climb up the cable. I look down at my beat-up Converse sneakers; I hope they have some tread left.

I think we’re between floors, so I’m not going to risk messing with the doors (also, I’m not sure I’m strong enough, and I don’t want to look stupid). The hatch, though—I’m pretty positive I could kick that open if I can get in the right position. It can’t be heavier than a 150-pound punching bag.

“Is it okay with you if I try something?” I ask, pointing up to the square two feet above us. Devorah looks stricken but nods.

“Be careful,” she says as I brace my hands on the railing.

“Relax, I do this all the time,” I joke. She doesn’t laugh.

I bounce a little bit to get a feel for the strength of the railing and the give of the floor, which moves a little bit under my weight but not enough to do any damage if I can support myself on my arms. I almost can’t believe that my basement hobby is going to come in handy. I know my dad wishes I played baseball, or at least something he could come watch me play in the park while eating a hot dog. He’s been squirreling away money for years for a college fund, but I know he’d rather I get a scholarship. “Why don’t you drop the ‘kick’ and just do boxing like Muhammad Ali?” he’ll comment with a laugh when he sees me padding downstairs in my shin guards.
This is why, Dad
, I think as I launch myself off the floor.

I swing my legs up like I’m doing a handstand on the bar and kick as hard as I can at the ceiling. The muscles in my forearms shake as the soles of my shoes hit the underside of the hatch with a dull, heavy thud. It dents but doesn’t open, and the whole car sways.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Devorah says sharply.

“I can do this,” I mutter, flexing my hands before trying again. This time I twist while I jump, coming at the hatch from an angle and using the torque of my body to increase the force of my legs against the metal, and even I’m surprised when it clangs open, echoing through the tunnel above and sending soft light streaming in.

“The emergency lights are on in the shaft,” I pant. “That’s a good sign.” I catch my breath and stare up at the steep seven-foot climb. I didn’t really think this through. “Hello?!?” I yell, cupping my hands around my lips. “Anybody up there? We’re stuck!” I shout two more times before deciding it’s a lost cause. On the floor, Devorah is covering her ears.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m gonna climb up.” Something passes over her face that looks like relief, and a pang of shame blooms in my chest. None of this is impressing her. She’d probably rather be alone in here. I bend my knees and jump up, grabbing the edge of the hatch like a chin-up bar, and hoist myself through.

There are two sets of twin cables attaching the elevator to whatever secures it at the top of the building. In my mind I had seen myself climbing one of the cables like a gym-class rope until I reached the first-floor doors, which I would then pry open with my bare hands, but (A) these cables are no thicker than two inches across, way too skinny to climb; (B) there’s a safety ladder bolted into the wall; and (C) even if I
did
climb the ladder, to open the door I’d have to hug the sheer face of the wall, Spider-Man style, which wouldn’t give me any room to maneuver. I’d probably fall just reaching for it.

I don’t know this girl, Devorah. I don’t know her and she’s barely said two words, and she seems weird and cold and totally uninterested in me, but for some reason I still have this powerful urge to do it anyway, to step off the ledge and basically sacrifice myself to make her like me. It’s
crazy
—especially since we’re not exactly in imminent danger. But then I think of my four little sisters, my mom, and my dad, and the shoebox full of bills on the top shelf of my parents’ closet that’ll pay for my education, something they’ve worked their whole lives just to give me, and I talk myself down. There’s no reason to take such a stupid risk. I saw what happened to Ryan, and he just tried to jump a skateboard over a tree. What would my tombstone say?
Here lies Jaxon Hunte: “A” Student, Hopeless Romantic, Virgin, Dumbass.

I yell for help again, and when no answer comes I lower myself back into the elevator. “Sorry,” I say, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I guess I need a stunt double.”

“No,” Devorah says, her voice sounding strong and sure for the first time. “That was really brave.” She stands up and takes a step toward me, and as the light filters down through the hole above us, like artificial moonlight on a movie set, I can really see her eyes for the first time, big and gray flecked with shimmering hints of sky blue, like someone bottled that moment when Dorothy steps out of her black-and-white farmhouse and into Oz.

That’s the moment I know I’m in trouble.