On the bus ride home from the hospital, Jake worried about the ten-year-old in sickle cell crisis in intensive care. He found Esther in the rocking chair, holding Molly and weeping. He dropped his coat on the floor and kneeled next to her.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“Molly’s hair. How can I stop thinking about Rosa when I’m reminded of her every time I look at my baby?”
“We could dye her hair? Shave her head?”
Esther sobbed harder and buried her face in Molly’s neck.
Jake stood up and turned toward the dark window facing the street. “This city isn’t healthy for you. Our friends don’t talk to us. You barely leave the house.”
“People look at me like I have a fatal disease and it’s contagious. The bookstore cut my position. Even my sisters in my women’s group won’t talk to me. Everyone’s on her side.”
Jake wished he knew what to say. He was furious with Rosa but still found himself looking carefully at redheads on the bus, scanning women’s faces as he walked through the crowded ER waiting room.
“Even Maggie won’t return my phone calls. I heard she has a new girlfriend, but that never affected our friendship before.”
“Let’s move,” Jake said. “Go someplace new.”
“Go where? This is home.”
“We’ll make a new home. The three of us.”
Esther shook her head. “How could I do that, Jake, how could I leave my parents? Then they’d have no one; no daughters, no grandkids, nobody.”
“They’ve got each other,” Jake said. “And Miriam and Max. You’ll visit often, with Molly. I’m worried about you, about us.”
He picked up his jacket from the floor and hung it on the wroughtiron coat tree from Goodwill. He was fond of Esther’s parents; they had become his family, too. His own parents barely survived the death of his brother, then died in a fiery car crash a month after he started med school. He suspected they waited until he was set on a life course before ending their pain.
Leaving town was definitely the right thing to do, but Jake wasn’t anxious to see Esther’s reaction to his news. He wasn’t sure how to tell her.
She looked at him funny, tilted her head to the side. “What is it?”
“I’ve been looking into transferring to another residency program,” Jake admitted. He hadn’t said anything about his plans, in case he wasn’t accepted. Esther couldn’t deal with another disappointment.
“Without discussing it with me?” she asked.
“I wasn’t sure it would work out.” Not a good reason, he knew that. “I got a call today from the University of Massachusetts. They offered me a place and I took it.”
“Boston?”
“The western part of the state. You’ll love it.”
“No I won’t. I’ll hate it. How could you make a big decision like that on your own? We’re equal partners. Haven’t you learned anything from the women’s movement?” Esther squeezed her eyes closed and leaned down to Molly again.
“It could be just for a few years,” Jake offered, then stopped. He understood that the conversation was over. She was right; he should have talked to her. But she hadn’t been easy to talk to in the past couple of months. “I’m sorry.”
She probably wouldn’t love western Massachusetts, not at first. But something had to change. If they left Detroit, maybe it would break Rosa’s spell. Esther would learn to be happy with just Molly and him. They could move there for a year or two, while he finished his residency. Maybe Mama and Pop would sell the store, come live near them. He kneeled again next to the rocking chair, put his arms around Esther and rested his head on her breast. Molly looked at him.
“Don’t worry, Monkey,” he whispered and stroked her cheek. “I won’t get in the way of your dinner.” He inhaled Molly’s milky fragrance. For a split second he remembered the patchouli oil Rosa wore, how she had dabbed some just under his nostrils during his first clinical rotation, when he admitted that the smell of sickness made him nauseous. He pushed the thought away. This was home, the safe place he and Esther had created with Molly. He had to protect that place, despite Esther’s inevitable reaction.
“One other thing,” he said.
“What other thing?” Esther asked.
“We’ve got to leave the past behind. Start over with a clean slate.”
“What are you saying?”
“Promise me that we won’t tell Molly about this stuff. About Rosa or the demonstration or the trial.”
“Not talk about my sister?”
“Rosa will never forgive you. Our only way forward is to leave her behind.”
“How can I do that?”
“How can you not? This is very important to our family. Promise?”
Esther didn’t say no, and Jake pretended not to notice the flooding of her eyes. He knew how hard this was for Esther, but it was the best way. At least he hoped that twenty years from now they’d talk about how they made it through these awful times. His knees hurt on the hard floor, but he knelt a moment longer in the nest of her unspoken promise, savoring the milky aroma of shelter.
Two weeks later, their living room was a muddle of cartons and trash bags stuffed with books and clothes. Packing up the apartment was challenging. Molly had mastered crawling and couldn’t be trusted for a single, unobserved second. While Esther emptied the front closet, Molly played in a makeshift playpen of cardboard boxes. Jake packed books into cartons and tried to gauge Esther’s frame of mind.
“Here, Mol.” Esther picked dust bunnies off a soft fabric ball and rolled it to Molly, who startled at the jingle of the bells stitched onto the surface. Then she laughed and grabbed for the ball. Esther scooped the sleeping cat from the open carton labeled “Art Supplies” and turned back to the closet jumble. She gathered a handful of old paintbrushes, the bristles stained with shadows of color, and flung them into the trash.
At the noise, Jake looked up from a stack of paperback novels. “What are you doing?”
“I’m finished with art.”
“That’s nuts. That’s why we’re moving. So you can get your life back.”
“I can’t paint anymore.”
“You’ve got to.” Jake reached into the trash bag to retrieve the paintbrushes. He handed them to Esther with a flourish. “Please.”
Stroking the velvety bristles back and forth against her upper lip, she looked absent, like her mind was elsewhere. Jake picked up a brush and stroked his own face with the soft bristles. He wanted to touch Esther like that now, with the whispery graze of brush on skin. He half-closed his eyes to blur the present image, to remember Esther at camp.
The summer of 1960, Jake hadn’t planned to work at camp again, but his hospital orderly position fell through at the last minute. Loon Lake was desperate for counselors and he needed work. During the second week of the session, he sat alone at the edge of the ball field eating an apple and watching his campers play nobody-wins softball. Camp was boring and he wished he had looked harder for a job in the city. He shoved the apple core into his mouth and licked the juice from his fingers. It had gotten Jake teased before, the way he ate every last bit of the fruit, seeds and core and all.
Esther plopped herself on the grass next to him. “Aren’t you afraid an apple tree will grow in your stomach?”
“No.” He started to explain why that wouldn’t happen, how his stomach enzymes would prevent germination and the small amounts of arsenic in the seeds wouldn’t hurt him either. Then he realized Esther was flirting.
Within a week, Jake had entirely forgotten about Rosa and couldn’t stop thinking about Esther. One day, she missed free swim and Jake went looking for her. He found her painting in the art room, so entranced that she had lost track of time, so involved that she rested the wet bristles against her face. He laughed and told her she looked dazzling with a turquoise mustache. He tried to rub the paint from her upper lip with his thumb, faltered, then kissed her mouth instead. She smelled of turpentine.
He explained it all to Allen that night in the counselors’ bunk: Esther was too young, but he could wait for her to grow up. He had big plans—college and med school and free healthcare for the poor of the world.
Molly’s chortles turned into complaints. Jake rescued the ball, wedged in the crack between boxes labeled “Pots and Pans” and “Posters and Letters”, and tossed it to her. Molly ignored it, her complaints escalating into demands. Esther was still staring at the apartment wall and Jake dabbed at her cheeks with an old cloth diaper, soft beyond absorbency.
She pressed her face against his hand for a moment, then picked up Molly. “Nap time.”
“I’ll keep working.”
After Esther left the room, he wrapped the paintbrushes in the cloth diaper and slipped them into a corner of the “Art Supplies” box, tucked among drawing papers and misshapen tubes of paint. When Esther got over this, when she was herself again, she’d want her brushes. He taped the box shut and stacked it against the wall with the others.
When he moved “Desk Supplies” to the pile of boxes, a legal pad lay exposed on the blotter. It had Rosa’s writing on it with bulleted reasons why Esther should reject the plea bargain and stand trial with Rosa, fight for the good guys. Rosa must have left it the last time she visited: before storming out of the apartment, before inviting them to dinner with Mama’s tablecloth, before Esther accepted the DA’s deal, before the trial, before Rosa disappeared. Jake tore off the page, but the impressions of Rosa’s arguments still gouged the yellow paper. He ripped off the next two sheets, crumpled them, and threw them across the room into the trash.
He stood up and stretched, then wandered down the hall to the bedroom doorway. Esther and Molly were curled up together on the queen-sized mattress on the floor. The Venetian blinds sliced the weak winter sun into thin lines across the quilt. In sleep, Esther looked a decade younger, almost like the girl he fell for at camp. But the specter of Rosa lingered. How did she sneak into his apartment, her electricity palpable, to demand his attention even when she was disgraced, in hiding? Jake felt foolish talking to a phantom, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“I don’t know where you are right now, Ms. Queen of the Underground,” he whispered. “And I don’t care. We’re leaving. And if you have any thoughts of reclaiming your sister, forget it. You’re toxic, Rosa. Poison. Stay away from my family.”