I WAKE UP bright and early and can’t move, it feels like someone has nailed me to the bed by hammering needles into my spine. I’ve experienced back pain before, but never anything like this.
While trying to prop myself into a sitting position, a deep, ugly moan escapes my mouth, Watch out, Sheila, that’s an old lady’s moan. I mourn the twenty-year-old girl I used to be, gone forever.
Somewhere in the apartment my phone is ringing, but I don’t care, the thoughts swirling inside me are bitter and black, and I know that if I want to stay alive, I’d better expel them from my mind, but I can’t.
My phone is ringing again, and this time I manage to pull myself up, but when I finally get to it, the ringing has stopped. When I see who called, I don’t know whether to be happy or worried, but my hand is already reaching out to dial.
“Debby and Saul were less than impressed by you,” Micha says, brisk and matter-of-fact. So, Shorty’s name is Debby. Sounds about right, it’s a short woman’s name.
“And where have you been?” I ask.
“The investigation has expanded, so they had to put more people on it,” he says, before pausing for a moment. “But here I am.”
“They really think I did it?” My back starts throbbing again.
“What do you say I come over and we talk for a bit?”
“When?” I quake, but after a few seconds of blaring silence, I realize he has already hung up.
This time I have nothing to hide. All the boxes have been unpacked, and as I’ve mentioned, he’s already seen my Witch of Endor. Yes, this time he’ll walk into a (relatively) tidy apartment, with clean bowls, filled with cookies that weren’t bought at that awful grocery store down the street. The only problem is that my aching back is making me drag myself around the apartment with stooped, elderly caution. Really? You think that’s your problem? Not the fact that all the others have died? That you’re the only one left standing?
And here he is, at my door, standing in front of me, with that dimple and bright eyes, those flexible limbs, only this time my heart skips no beats. When you’re fighting for your life, passion is the casualty.
“Are you aware that you are very much a suspect?” He sits in front of me, waving away the (spotless!) bowl of cookies I placed in front of him. If you must carry yourself like a bent old lady, at least be a good hostess.
“Do you think I’m a suspect?”
I don’t care for his silence.
“We’ve already covered this!” I shrill with a voice so loud it bounces off the walls. “It was someone who didn’t like Dina’s anti-birth agenda, and whacked her, and now Ronit, the same exact thing! Another woman who didn’t want to be a mother ends up with a baby glued to her hands!”
Drifting into my mind is the image of a twenty-year-old Ronit, forever twenty. She’s holding a brand-new baby doll, fresh out of its box, and hands it to me. I take it and smile at her, and we both share a knowing giggle, while Dina stares at us from a distance. But now Ronit is also far away… very far away. You’re the only one left. And you don’t dare utter the other possibility aloud.
“Are you sure about that?” His voice is sharp and tight.
“About what?”
“That she and Dina felt the same way about motherhood?”
“Haven’t you read all the interviews they did with her?” And all the ones they didn’t.
“Yes, we read them,” he says. I don’t like this we. I picture him with Shorty and Froggy, analysing the evidence with solemn expressions. “Yes, Ronit Akiva was certainly outspoken against having children,” Froggy would state while the three pored over newspaper clippings. Newspaper clippings, really? Everything’s online today! You don’t only move like an eighty-year-old, you think like one.
I remember one of Ronit’s very first interviews. It was after she had a supporting role in some trite, uninspired TV drama, but the interview she gave was anything but dull, including statements such as: “I have no intention of becoming a reproductive assembly line, I have far more interesting things to do,” and “Childbirth is a national obsession, a cult that borders on terrorism. You’re expected to have children, and if you decide not to, then society will treat you like you’re somehow damaged. I am not damaged!” At the time, she got some serious PR out of that “not damaged.” But she sure is damaged now.
“Ronit might have been very vocal against childbirth in the past,” Micha says, “but in her last interview, she didn’t mention the subject at all.”
“Maybe because her last interview was after Dina’s murder, and she was afraid to talk about it?” I propose, but then remember her hesitant reaction towards the young woman who approached our table at the café to pay her respects, Ronit’s sudden and uncharacteristic modesty, how she passed on the credit to Dina, and even gave me some, She was the one who gave Dina the idea… Maybe if I’d paid more attention to this oddity at the time, I could have prevented everything that came after. And everything yet to come.
“There could be another reason,” he says, and I can see on his face that he already regrets it.
“What?”
His gaze silently hovers just above my head, lingering on the painting. Still he says nothing, and my spinal nerves respond to his silence by coiling in unimaginable pain again. In an attempt to loosen my crimped muscles, I stand up, accidentally knocking over the bowl of cookies, which hits the floor with a bang. By some miracle, it doesn’t break, and Micha and I stand over it, watching it spin around itself like a dreidel. This is also the moment I realize there’s absolutely no way I can bend to pick it up.
Micha doesn’t bend either. Instead, he looks straight at me. “What is this, some kind of test?”
“What?”
“Why aren’t you picking it up?”
“Why aren’t you being a gentleman and picking it up for me?”
“You answer first.”
My mind strains to find a plausible answer other than the truth, but there doesn’t seem to be any. “My back hurts,” I finally reply, and witness a slight alteration in his expression.
“Oh, poor woman,” he says, “I know what that feels like, really, I do.” He bends over to pick up the bowl and the cookie shards, and I see how his back arches with elegant elasticity, opening out like a folding fan of healthy vertebrae. Healthy and young.
“Believe it or not, when I was young I had to wear a back brace to straighten my spine,” he says, still hunched over the floor. I try to imagine him trapped in a brace, but my mind can’t conjure up the image, certainly not when he’s bending in front of me, all flexible and springy.
“What was wrong with your back?”
“Bad genes.” He rises back up. “My grandmother had a hump.”
I flinch, imagining that hump ticking inside him like a time bomb waiting to explode, if not in the near future then maybe in one of his descendants. Blood never forgets.
“I see that every time I come over I end up working as your cleaner,” he says, straining a smile, and once again he seems like a vulnerable youth while I’m ensnared in my stiff, aching body. He takes a step closer and pauses. I can smell his aftershave, covering the subtle scent of young sweat.
“Where exactly does it hurt?” he asks, and I don’t dare move or even breathe, Is he going to touch you? Remember, it has to come from them, always from them! We’re standing at arm’s length from one another in complete silence. My lips are located directly opposite his neck, but I’m as still as a wax figurine. He isn’t moving either, and for a moment I wonder whether he’s holding back because of his job or because he’s just not interested, and this entire drama is taking place in my own head and nowhere else. I always seem to put myself in these elusive, ambiguous situations, but at the same time I always make sure there’s some secret escape route by which I can explain to myself that it isn’t rejection, It’s not you, of course not, it’s because he’s here in an official capacity, otherwise you’d both be rolling all over your couch, which isn’t white and for that reason can never get dirty.
He takes a step back and sits himself down in the armchair. When he pierces himself into the seat, his back as straight as a board, for a moment there he reminds me of Froggy.
“Let’s review the facts,” he says with a gravelly voice. “You had a big fight with Dina, immediately after which she was murdered. With Ronit you also had a…” He pauses for a moment, “disagreement.”
“I see you’re well informed.” I can barely get the words out, still trying to process this quick shift in his mood. Well, that’s how it always is with these infantile boys, don’t you know that by now?
“In your case it’s not so easy to keep up.” He smiles again, his eyes soften again, my heart leaps in my chest again, until I remember Ronit dragging Eli into her bedroom, Ronit with the red eyes, who, by Eli’s account, lay on her bed and cried her heart out. Ronit who was tied to her armchair, naked and branded with the mark of motherhood, Ronit whose flesh had already started to decay, the baby glued to her hands, Ronit who was drained of all her blood, drained!
“Say, how did they drain her?”
I can’t quite read his expression when he hears my question; it isn’t disgust, but it’s something in the vicinity. “You don’t know?” he asks.
“You know I don’t.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “They slashed her thigh, severed the femoral artery.”
The beautiful Ronit, prancing on the grass, limbs intact… Ronit teaching me how to apply lipstick so it won’t get on your teeth… Ronit that night, her lipstick all smeared… the rage and panic erupting from her body like crushing waves… and Dina looking at us from afar, like Miriam watching over baby Moses, stealing peeks through the reeds.
“So that was the cause of death?”
“When the blood flows out uninterruptedly, yes, you can absolutely call it a cause of death,” he replies drily.
“But why the thigh?” I ask.
“Where would you have liked them to cut her?”
Where? A very old memory flickers and quickly fades, I try to hunt it down but my mind is already charging ahead and I fail to notice that Micha is still talking and I’m not following, until I suddenly hear the words “the group.”
“What group?” I blurt.
What group.
“The only group I could be talking about, your college gang, your posse.”
“I’ve already told you we were a group of friends.”
“But you didn’t tell me what kind of group.” We lock eyes, all three of us – me, Micha and the Witch of Endor with her inquisitive gaze. You beware.
Here comes the moment of truth. Should I or should I not tell him? And like always, when a young man is involved, I manage to make the wrong decision.
“Just a group of friends from college, you know, nothing special,” I say, and I am not in the least prepared for what happens next.
“Stop lying!” he shouts and almost knocks over the table, his jugular bulging. “Can’t you see I’m trying to help you? I don’t even understand why I’m trying so hard!” A tiny drop of spit lands on my chin, and I don’t dare wipe it. “Sheila, you’re rapidly approaching the point where I won’t be able to help you, do you understand that?”
No, I don’t.
“What kind of group was it, Sheila?”
Why am I getting the feeling he already knows? I hear the chant wafting through my head, Forever four, never less, never more!
“Tali Grossman says it was a serious business. That you had nicknames and code words, that you used to perform ceremonies like some medieval cult or illuminati-type shit. What exactly were you doing there?”
“Taliunger is a jealous liar,” I blurt out, “she always was. I thought you were too smart to believe her wild fantasies. What do you think, that we pranced around naked during a full moon? There were no ceremonies.” Just that one time.
And suddenly I miss Dina, who always knew how to put her in her place with a scathing look that said, Taliunger, shut your fat piehole. Who would have thought I would ever miss Dina? Who would have thought I’d have to bother myself with Taliunger again, as if I was still twenty? But that’s what you are, aren’t you? Twenty. Or at least you think you are.
“Did your group have a name or not?”
“It did.”
The Witch of Endor is giving me a cautioning look, Don’t tell him, don’t tell this man a thing!
“The Others,” I say. “We called ourselves the Others.”
Once again, I see Dina’s, Ronit’s and Naama’s faces, before… before that night, before all the deaths, paragons of youth and otherness. There’s Dina lying on the grass, her hands resting on the small tambourine by her side as she smiles at Naama who’s sprawled next to her, limbs loose and slack, hair splayed on the grass, Naama’s auburn hair, and Ronit who’s approaching us, arms akimbo, hands on flawless hips. Ronit smiles at me and wants to say something, but her mouth is full of blood. I open my eyes straight into Micha’s face.
“And what was the purpose of this group, if I may ask?” he enquires after a lengthy pause.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
“We thought… I mean, this freshman year at college,” don’t tell him! I’m searching for the words, not sure I’ll be able to explain, don’t tell him! “We took a course together and just clicked.”
I recall the grey blob from the Women of the Bible course, the one who started it all with his sages of blessed memory, and all the mothers and children, and how Dina said without blinking an eye, “We’ll have other ambitions,” and we laughed and laughed. Because that’s how it is when you’re twenty, everything makes you laugh, until it doesn’t.
“And then what happened?”
“We just thought maybe not all women have to get married, or have kids, or…” My voice trails off. “And that maybe we didn’t have to either.”
“And then?”
Don’t tell him!
“And then, as you can see, that’s exactly what happened. We didn’t get married and didn’t have kids, that simple.” I wish it was that simple.
“But… but why?” His mouth hangs agape in enquiry, but he doesn’t look so boyish and innocent any more.
“Because,” I answer, “because we were young and we wanted something different out of this life.”
“And did you girls get what you wanted?”
I fall silent. Very, very silent.
“Did you, Sheila, get what you wanted?”
Tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.
“And maybe,” his tone changes, “let’s just try a little thought experiment: maybe you actually blame them, Dina and Ronit, the whole group, maybe you think it’s their fault that you never got married or had kids, that you essentially wasted your life. Does that sound right? Only as an experiment, of course.”
Tick-tock, tick-tock. We lock eyes. Only as an experiment, sure. Where’s the “I’m trying to help you”? Where’s the “I’m on your side, Sheila”? For a moment he seems almost enthusiastic, like any man about to get a promotion because he caught the serial killer terrorizing the nation.
“I did not waste my life,” I say.
“Let’s carry on with the experiment, okay? Look at yourself,” he says and sweeps his gaze across the room, lingering on the hairballs lurking in the corners. “Look at your life. Are you happy?”
Happy?
“Is anyone?”
“Don’t change the subject, Sheila. Are you happy with your life?”
“Would kids make my life better?”
“Let’s assume they would,” he says, and it stings. I reach for a cookie, ignore the dust sprinkles and take a bite. It’s dry and bland, like those rice crackers you give babies when they’re teething, and for some inexplicable reason, the image of the mysterious redhead from the party drifts into my mind, raising her wine glass in my direction. Cheers!
“With all due respect for your thought experiment, I didn’t murder anyone, and you know that,” I say. “What bothers me is that you’re not considering that it could be the other way around, that maybe the fact that all my college friends have died and I’m the only one left means I’m next. Is that so far-fetched? Why aren’t you looking into that?”
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
“We’re looking into all leads,” he says, but his tone says something entirely different.
“And if you’re searching for suspects who knew both murder victims, then there were a few of those at the party. Neria Grossman, who hated Dina, and Taliunger, who hated both Dina and Ronit, and who knows who else was there.”
Once again the young redhead’s face floats into my mind, and I remember the glance she cast at Ronit who passed by her in the hallway, a glance full of loathing that lasted no more than a second. I didn’t pay it much attention at the time, but now it’s back with clarity and meaning. So why am I not telling this to Micha? Why am I not giving him her description? What’s stopping me?
“I told you, we’re pursuing all leads,” he says, his tone oddly formal.
“You don’t say, Mister Officer,” I reply with a high-pitched simper.
“I do,” he says, “and don’t try to sound like a little girl, it doesn’t suit you.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t.”
He gets up and stands inches away from me. “Sounding like one doesn’t suit you, but having one would have,” he says. “Would have suited you perfectly. I think you could have made a great mum.”
And the moment he utters those words, I suddenly realize who the red-headed girl is, and can hardly swallow my shock.