Like No Other (9 page)

Shoshana shakes her head. “It was too late,” she whispers.

I frown. “What does that even mean?”

“Devorah, you’re so innocent,” Shoshana says with a sigh. She glances around nervously and then gestures for me to look under the table, so I “accidentally” drop my napkin. At first I can’t make out what she’s doing down there, since the sun is reflecting off the mosaic glass set into the stone floor, and my eyes have trouble adjusting. But after a few seconds, I get it, and my breath catches in my throat. Shoshana is drawing an arc between her rib cage and her pelvis. She’s telling me that Ruchy got pregnant.

I sit back up and take a deep breath. “Where is she now?” I ask.

“No one knows,” Shoshana says gravely. “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

• • •

The conversation with Shosh is still weighing on me after school as I absentmindedly work the register at the store. Since Rose is on indefinite leave from her post as cashier, I get to break up the monotony of my stocking/shelving duties to help out up front when my dad holes himself up in the back office, poring over sales and inventory spreadsheets and making orders. I actually love working the register. Most of our customers have been coming for years, so I can greet them by name and ask after their families, which usually earns me a pat on the hand and a muttered blessing. I love the older ladies especially, because they usually pay cash, and there’s nothing better than ringing up purchases the old-fashioned way, hearing the dull chime of the register as it springs open and counting out change. I’ve never once given incorrect change. My father jokes that he shouldn’t even bother balancing the register at the end of the day when I’ve been working, since it always comes out even, to the penny. That’s the thing about math: It’s dependable. Math will never give you a blank stare and tell you you’re going to end up barefoot and pregnant, some grotesque poster child for the importance of
yichud
.

But maybe I’m being too hard on Shosh. She’s just looking out for me, in her way, which is to overreact. The funny thing is, her tough-love advice has made me think more about Jaxon, not less. I feel more than ever like I need to see him again, just to find out if he deserves to be on this surreal and dangerous pedestal I’ve placed him on. Was he really that charming? Or interesting? Did it really feel electric when we touched, or were my nerves just jumpy from the day I’d had? Given my mental state that night, I’d worry that I hallucinated Jaxon, except for the fact that Jacob clearly saw him, too.

“Hey, where do the Shana Tova boxes go?” Hanna interrupts my reverie, teetering into view from the greeting card aisle, balancing a dozen gift boxes bedecked with shiny red plastic apples in her trembling arms. Since the high holidays fall in three weeks, we’ve been spending hours arranging display shelves full of products featuring apples, honey, and the somewhat less appetizing shofar, a ram’s horn. (On Rosh Hashanah we eat apples dipped in honey to ensure a sweet year, and my dad blows the shofar to usher in the Ten Days of Repentance, which are as fun as they sound.) We don’t normally sell food, but the gift boxes are filled with candy and packets of honey, and occasionally Hanna and I will “spill” one on purpose so that we can hoard and eat its contents. Right now, though, Hanna is threatening to spill them by accident. I rush out from behind the counter and take some of them off her hands.

“Let’s put these in the window,” I say.

“But we just changed the window for back-to-school!” she groans.

“Right, but now school is back, and it’s time for Rosh Hashanah,” I say. “Besides, the new year is so much more fun to decorate. It’s full of . . . possibility. Think of all the people wishing for something special this year. Like to fall in love.” That gets her. Hanna is a sucker for all things romance. As a Hasid, of course, she approaches it from an anthropological distance. She would make an excellent
shadchan
.

“Fine,” she says with a sigh, adjusting her grip. “Lead the way.”

We spend almost an hour—interrupted only once by Mrs. Gottlieb looking for a disposable waterproof tablecloth—rearranging the crude tableaus that sit behind the streaky windows, underneath the sagging blue-and-white striped awning. Our store isn’t fancy, but it has character. A few years ago at a stoop sale Mom picked up some pedestals painted to look like Corinthian columns roped with grapevines, and so now whatever product we’re pushing gets special placement. Hanna and I set up three columns side by side, one tall and two short, like an Olympic podium, and have the Shana Tova boxes cascading down them, surrounded by holiday cards splayed out in heart patterns. I think it looks pretty good. And even better, it managed to completely take my mind off what happened at lunch.

I’ve just resumed my post behind the counter when my father comes out of the office.

“Daddy, we did the windows!” Hanna announces.

“That’s great, honey, I’ll look in a minute,” he says, frowning down at his watch. “Hanna, listen, I need you to run an errand for me. I forgot to pick up my cholesterol medicine at lunch, the pharmacy closes at five, and I have a call with a manufacturer that I’m already late for. Can you run over and get it?” He peels two twenties out of his wallet and hands them to her. “You can buy yourself something with the change—just no candy, it’s almost suppertime.”

“Sure, Papa,” Hanna says brightly, taking the bills. “Just let me know where to go.”

“It’s J&R Drugs, on Union and Nostrand,” he says. “It’s right next to that fast-food restaurant—”

I don’t claim to be any sort of mystic, but somehow, I know what my father’s going to say before he does. It’s like déjà vu. This whole day I’ve felt sort of fuzzy and out of focus, and now suddenly, everything is lining up, like the mirrors of a kaleidoscope shifting.

“—Wonder Wings,” he finishes. And just like that, there it is again, that electric feeling I thought I had made up, crawling across my scalp.

Jaxon works less than half a mile from my family’s store. Less than four blocks from my school. Of course I could have discovered this easily if I just snuck onto my father’s computer when he was up front helping customers, or stood on a kitchen stool to reach the cabinets above the pantry, where my mother stores the thick yellow phone books that show up on our doorstep once a year, even though we never use them. Those things would have felt wrong. This, though—my father, casually mentioning the piece of information I’ve been all but obsessing over for the past four days, the only piece of this forbidden puzzle that I’m missing—this feels like a sign. This tells me I
have
to go.

“Daddy?” I say. “It’s getting late, and the men will be out in the streets coming home from work . . . let me go with Hanna.”

He furrows his thick brow for a minute—it’s still bright and sunny outside, after all, and at a big-boned five foot seven, Hanna’s bigger than I am, so if anything, she’d be protecting me—but then shrugs.

“Business is slow today,” he says. “I’ll just put out the bell in case anyone comes in while you’re gone.”

Hanna is grinning at me, her pale, freckled face slick with sweat. She’s excited to have a break and to have the company. She has no idea she’s just become my accomplice.

• • •

I spend the walk to the pharmacy having two conversations. One is with Hanna, in real life, an inane back-and-forth about some girl in her class who Hanna doesn’t like. The other one is more urgent but also much harder to carry on, since it’s all in my head: the conversation I’m about to have with Jaxon.

“. . . so she told Rachel that Rachel couldn’t sit in front of her because she’s allergic to her perfume. But then Rachel goes, ‘I don’t even wear perfume!’”

Hi.

I hope it’s not weird that I came by. I was just running an errand with my sister, and I saw the sign.

I have the element of surprise working in my favor. I can plan out what to say, at least at the beginning. After that, who knows.

“—and then she told me that I was too tall to sit in front of her, and finally I just said, ‘You know, Haya, if you have so many special needs, maybe you should just sit somewhere else!’”

“Good for you,” I say out loud, while in my head I hear Jaxon say:

I’ve been waiting every day for you to walk through that door and back into my life.

No, that’s stupid. There’s no way he’s going to say that. Maybe just:

It’s good to see you.

And then what? I could say . . .

Yeah.

Brilliant. Brilliant, Devorah. Way to think this through.

“—she’s just a B-I-T-H-C, if you know what I mean.” Hanna is fuming.

“You mean B-I-T-C-H, and don’t spell out curse words,” I say, distracted by the giant red letters I can already read from a block away. I glance at my reflection in a shop window and realize that I’m still in my school vest, which combined with the long skirt makes me look like some sort of bohemian train conductor. I peel it off and stuff it under one arm. “What? I’m hot,” I say when Hanna makes a face.

We push through the doors into the pharmacy—not strictly Chabad but favored by my father for its Orthodox owners and reasonable prices—and are greeted by a cool blast of air-conditioning and the dueling scents of air freshener and cough syrup. It’s a mom-and-pop type place, just four modest aisles of ointments and vitamins, nothing like the Duane Reades and Walgreens that look like mini-department stores, lined with refrigerated cases of every conceivable beverage. The pharmacy counter is in the back, and since there’s only one employee and it’s a few minutes until closing, the line is four people deep. I take a sharp breath—this is my chance. I almost can’t believe I’m actually going through with it, but I know that if I don’t, I’ll always wonder what would have happened, for the rest of my life.

“Hey,” I call to Hanna, who’s already padding down the center aisle to join the line, “I just saw Shoshana pass by outside. I’m going to talk to her for a sec, okay?”

“Sure,” Hanna says gamely, giving a little wave. I feel bad manipulating her natural naïveté, but I don’t know what else to do.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
, I think, quoting Robert Frost as I will my legs to move me back through the swinging glass door with its loud doorbell chime, out onto the humid street.
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by . . .

I look up at the cheery red Wonder Wings sign and the neon letters in the window that flash
OPEN
!
OPEN
!
OPEN
! again and again in a cascading rainbow of colored lights. I swallow my fear and push through the door.

. . .
And that has made all the difference.

For some reason, in my mind I was picturing a vast restaurant full of dark corner tables and balletic busboys, the kind of noisy, crowded place where I could hide in plain sight while I got my bearings. But instead, as soon as I step over the threshold, I’m greeted by a single fluorescent-lit room—maybe fifteen feet by ten at most—with mirrors and bright Caribbean flags lining the walls. There are only four tables, and three are empty; the only patrons are a middle-aged woman and her young son, picking over a plate of bones and celery ribs. A pretty older woman in a bright yellow head wrap and long green beaded earrings stands behind the counter, refilling a dispenser of lemonade. And there is one busboy, but he’s tying up a garbage bag with his back to me. His broad, muscular back.

Jaxon
.

He spins around, and for a second I’m afraid I’ve said his name out loud. But he looks completely shocked to see me; he actually freezes with the Hefty bag lifted in midair. I smile awkwardly and raise my hand in a wave, realizing too late that it’s completely idiotic to wave at someone who’s standing four feet from you. Jaxon blinks quickly a few times, like he’s testing his eyes, and then cocks his head and breaks into the slowest and most amazing smile I’ve ever seen, like a sunrise lighting up his entire face. He straightens up and puts the garbage down.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say.

“Wow. Uh . . . wow,” he stammers softly, and I just smile. I can’t help it. Already I know that this—whatever this is—was worth it; the feeling I’m having, like every cell in my body is doing a somersault at the same time, is positively euphoric.

“Can I help you?” asks the woman refilling the lemonade.

“Oh, um . . .” I shake my head.

“She’s with me,” Jaxon says. “I mean, I know her. Sort of.”

“All right, then,” she says, leaning forward over the counter, voluminous cleavage spilling out of her pink shell top. “You make sure he gets that stanky garbage outside before I faint!”

Jaxon rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Yes ma’am,” he says, and heaves the bag onto his shoulder. “You stay right here,” he says as he passes me. “Don’t move.”

“He’s a good one,” the woman tells me as the door swings shut behind him. She looks me up and down and then winks. “I always wondered what kind of girl he was hiding away.”

“Oh, I’m not—” I ball my vest in my fists and shake my head. “We’re not—” The boy eating with his mom—he can’t be more than ten or eleven—glances up at me and snickers.

“What is she telling you?” Jaxon says with a laugh, jogging back in from the street. “Don’t listen to her. Cora just likes to cause trouble.”

“Who, me?” Cora asks with a coy smile. Then she turns back to the lemonade. Jaxon gestures to one of the empty tables.

“Stay awhile,” he says.

“I can’t,” I say. He raises his eyebrows and smiles.

“That’s what you said last week, and here you are,” he says. “Come on, sit with me for one minute.”

I shake my head. “I really can’t. My sister is waiting for me next door. I just came to—”

To what? What have I come here to do? My mind is a blank, and my heart is a drum.

“—see you,” I finish.

“Okay.” He laughs. “Here I am. Looking is free, but a photo’s five bucks.”

“Stop it. That’s not what I meant.”

“Then sit,” he pleads. “I’ve been hoping you’d come here, and now you’re here, so let’s talk, or take a walk, or something.”