down around Christmas when the office slowed down anyway. None of it had kept her from sinking into a mire of depression by mid-January. By February she knew she couldn’t go on. She closed the office temporarily and Iris had sent her packing to Palm Springs, where her parents doted on her with a gentle love that kept her afloat. She couldn’t worry them now.
“I’m all right, Mom. But It’ll be nice to have you back next week.”
“You sound tired, dear. I don’t want you to do any work for the Seder. We’ll be back Monday — Daddy and I’ll come over and do everything. Wait till you see the pretty Seder plate I picked up here.”
“Your mother thinks if she spends enough on a Seder plate the Messiah will come to our door instead of Mrs. Cohen’ s.”
“Who’s Mrs. Cohen?” Flo asked.
“Do we have to have a Seder?” her father interrupted. “Couldn’t we just have the guilt-free dinners we used to have before Susan married a rabbi?”
Rebecca smiled. Her sister’s husband was an academic who taught Jewish history at McGill University in Montreal.
“You know you like Ben,” Flo said. “And it won’t kill you to be a Jew once a year. Besides, you need to concentrate less on food. Rebecca, tell your father to stop snacking on chips and pretzels. All that salt and fat is pushing up his blood pressure.”
“What’s it at?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s not so bad,” Mitch said. “160 over 90.”
“Sometimes 95,” Flo added.
“Not time to panic yet,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you try some air-popped popcorn?”
“Isn’t that girl a genius?” said her mother.
“If she was so smart, she’d know we left our air-popper in Toronto,” Mitch said. “I got to tell you a doctor story about our neighbour. Mrs. Goldblum.”
“Mitch, we don’t have a neighbour Mrs. Gold....”
“Sha. I met her on the elevator when you were sleeping. So Mrs. Goldblum is maybe ninety-four and she insists on telling me this story even though I don’t know her from Adam. She says she went to the doctor with this embarrassing problem. She told him, ‘I pass gas all the time’ — actually she said ‘fart’ — ‘but they’re soundless and don’t smell. You won’t believe this but since I’ve been here I’ve farted twenty times. What can I do, Doctor?’ So the doctor gave her a prescription for pills. She should take them three times a day for seven days and then come back to see him in a week. The next week Mrs. Goldblum marched into his office, furious. She said, ‘Doctor, I don’t know what was in those pills but the problem is worse. I’m farting as much and they’re still soundless but now they smell terrible. What do you say for yourself?’ The doctor said, ‘Calm down, Mrs. Goldblum. Now that we’ve fixed your sinuses, we’ll work on your hearing.’ “
Rebecca closed her eyes and smiled. Some things didn’t change.
“Your father makes up a neighbour every time he wants to tell a joke.”
“Your mother just won’t admit she takes an afternoon nap. Mrs. Goldblum lives on the other side of the garbage chute. Honest. Besides, good medical jokes are scarce as hen’s teeth. And what else can I tell our daughter the Doctor?”
“I think she’s heard enough jokes for one night,” Flo said. “We have to let the poor girl get some sleep. You do sound tired, dear. We’ll call again on Saturday. Or if you feel like talking, call anytime.”
“Can’t wait to see you, doll,” her father said.
Rebecca lay back in bed, exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. It was comforting to hear their voices. Yet she couldn’t help feeling that everything in her life had turned upside-down again. The sense of vulnerability when David died, the aloneness, stole back into her life like a phantom. She tossed and flailed in her bed. The air in the room was so close she could barely breathe. She was suffocating in her own bed. Then she realized that the door was shut — she never closed her bedroom door, something was lurking behind it, something she almost recognized.
Suddenly someone was pounding her front door with ferocity. They pummelled and banged with unreasonable force until Rebecca checked outside the window, wondering if she could climb down the two floors to the ground. The dark outside was impenetrable. How would she get down? It would be like falling into an abyss. They were yelling something unintelligible downstairs so she opened her bedroom door to hear better. Though she knew the bedroom was upstairs, the front door had somehow moved directly across the hall and now she knew terror because it was brutally clear that she couldn’t escape.
“¡Abra la puerta!” screamed a man’s voice. “¡Abra la puerta!” The pounding continued.
She tried her utmost not to approach the door but something pulled her there, an old curiosity, an ancient fate.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her own voice echoing in the hall.
Hard fists answered her. “¡Abra la puerta!”
“I know what you want and I’m not coming.” Even as the words spilled out, she watched her own hands betray her and open the deadbolt on the door. Her own hands.
Five men with guns fell on her and pinned her arms behind her back. Everything was in shadow. “Okay, bitch, where is she?”
Terrified, she cried, “I don’t know!” But on the couch, barely visible in the dark, lay a woman facing the other way, unknowable.
“Lying bitch!” they said.
Then one man stepped forward, his face still obscured by the shadows. “My colleagues are crude, doctor. They like to hurt people. Why not cooperate, just help us get the old woman the way you helped us get Goldie.”
Rebecca gasped, shrieked toward the shadow-man. “It wasn’t me. I loved her.”
One of them was about to hit her across the face when the phone rang. They all stared at it, until one of the men said not to answer it; another said she must answer it because someone probably knew she was home. A third man picked up the receiver but said nothing. As he moved in the dark room, a slat of light from somewhere found his face. It was Feldberg.
Her eyelids burst open. The back of her neck felt damp and cool from sweat evaporating into the morning. The noise of the phone beside her was relentless.
She picked it up automatically, but she couldn’t quite recall what day it was or why she felt so awful. All she remembered was the dark outline of the woman floating on the couch in her dream.
“Rebecca? Are you all right? Have you seen the paper?”
Rebecca blinked at the clock on the mantle. Seven-thirty. The woman on the couch — Rebecca knew now. It had been Chana.
“Are you awake?” said the voice.
“Oh, Iris, I’m sorry. I should’ve called you ... I didn’t think....”
“What on earth happened?” asked Iris. “It says Mrs. Kochinsky is dead.”
Rebecca
