Permanent

As soon as they were out on the street he took her hand and laced his fingers between hers. This was weird. They had never been much for hand holding, and it felt forced, like the kind of thing he thought he should do, even though it didn’t come naturally.

At the el station they waved their passes in front of the electronic sensor and thegreen light clicked on and let them through one at a time. Owen had to let her hand go for this, but took it back as they jogged up the steps to the platform. His grip was tight, and he looked at her and gave her a tense smile. Hannah smiled back, feeling absurd. They moved to the far end of the platform, away from the herd of commuters who were sweating in their suits and checking their watches as trains going in the opposite direction rumbled by.

“So what happened?” Owen hissed, looking anxiously at the guy smoking a cigarette a few feet away from them.

“She basically knew,” Hannah said. “I mean, I guess he did it with other girls too, so she knew the story.”

“Oh God, really?” Owen looked stricken, and for the first time Hannah realized how personally he was taking the whole thing.

“Yep.” She tried to say it with ironic cheeriness, but instead, without any warning she started to cry. Horrified, she wiped at tears frantically, but got nowhere. They were unstoppable.

Owen dropped her hand and pulled her into his chest in one smooth movement, squeezing hard. This was another thing they never did in public, but at least it hid her now snotty and wet face from view.

“I swear to God, I want to kill him,” Owen said, and even though she’d heard him say it about Rabbi Held before it was still strange to hear him say anything so vehemently. Usually, he was the king of affability.

“I just want him to disappear,” Hannah said into his chest. She imagined Rabbi Held sitting on the front edge of his desk with his legs crossed at the ankle, his frame strong, slightly thick around the torso, in a white shirt, dark pants, and a deep blue tie. She saw his poorly groomed red beard, and the big black yarmulke that he wore pushed upon his head to hide his bald spot. She saw his thin dry lips, and his wire frame glasses. In her head she tried to erase the image, to turn him into air, to leave the office empty, but she couldn’t.

A train came groaning into the station and made a breeze that blew hard against them. Hannah felt her hair flying around her face, and turned to see if it was their train, but it wasn’t. Commuters pushed against each other, swelling into the cars, and then the automated chime sounded, the doors closed, and the train slid off noisily. Owen loosened his grip on her a little, and she sniffed hard, trying to stop the obstinate leaking from her eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. He kissed her on the forehead, but didn’t say anything.

By the time they got back to their apartment in Edgewater, Rebecca had already left two messages on their answering machine about official interviews, meetings with other lawyers, and a phone number of a support group if Hannah wanted to be in touch with other victims.

Owen opened the refrigerator and rustled in the back while Hannah took down the information that Rebecca left. They ended up eating cold pasta with sauce in front of the television. Law and Order was on, and she found herself wondering if the trial would be anything like the trials on television, with lawyers yelling “Objection!” and criminals bursting into tears and confessing on the stand. But Owen changed the channel before they could even figure out what was going on. He settled on a sitcom neither of them liked much, and they sat limply through the laugh track.

Hannah could tell they were both thinking about their past lives, slouched into opposite corners of the couch, faces slack and tired. Owen’s father was a diplomat, and he had grown up in Austria and then Eritrea, going to fancy international schools with the children of ambassadors and minor royalty. When he was fifteen his father died suddenly of a heart attack, and they moved to Maryland so his mother could be close to her family. He went to public school for the first time in his life, quickly dropping out to join a punk band. He found the music scene in DC, and became apprenticed at a small piercing salon near where he should have been in high school. He moved to Chicago when he was 21 because his mother was driving him crazy in DC, and he heard there were a few openings for piercers in the Midwest. He met Hannah the weekend after she graduated from high school, both of them reveling in their great escapes.

She had told everyone she was going to college—Penn—but instead of getting on the plane she took her bags and the money she’d gotten for graduation and moved in with a girl she met at a Dropkick Murphys concert. The first thing she did was throw out all her long skirts and turtlenecks, the wardrobe of choice for Orthodox girls,and exchange them for anything that was tighter and shorter. The second thing she did was get a tattoo of a compass rose on the back of her left hand, to remind her that from then on she could go anywhere she wanted.

When the television show ended Owen clicked the TV off and moved over to Hannah’s side of the couch. “Normally,” he said, looking nervous, “this is the part where I would say something filthy and inappropriate to lighten the mood, but I guess that wouldn’t really help in this context.”

“No, not really.” She didn’t even bother smiling. Actually, there was a distinct possibility that she was going to start crying again.

“Well then, I’ll just sit here and try to look brooding and intense to blend in.” Hannah permitted herself a small laugh, and put her head down on one of the couch pillows. “I’m just ready for it to go away.”

“I know.” Owen kissed the side of her face very gently, and though it was a sweet gesture it was such an unconscious shadow of the way Rabbi Held had once touched her that she shuddered, and began to cry. She could tell Owen was making an effort, trying so hard to be a good boyfriend, but all she could think was that she wanted to be very far away from anyone, or anything.

The pre-trial preparations were dizzying and endless. One Saturday Owen drove Hannah to the Illinois state’s attorney’s office, and Rebecca asked her all of the questions she would ask at the trial. They brought in another guy to ask her the kinds of things the defense attorney would ask, and he was so good at being smarmy and cruel that Owen tried to punch him in the parking lot. That night they fought about whose turn it was to pay the electricity bill, and then Hannah had to call her parents.

Dialing the number felt strange. It seemed impossible that they shared an area code, that if she wanted, Hannah could get in her car and be at her parents’ front door in twenty minutes. She felt like she was a million miles away from them. Hearing her mother’s voice was even stranger.

“Hi, it’s Chana,” she said, feeling a wonted anger creep into her chest even before she heard her mother’s reaction.

“Oh. Hello.”

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to be testifying in the case against Rabbi Held on Wednesday.” She swallowed. “And they’re saying there will probably be some press there. So.” She paused again. “I wanted to say I’m sorry if it makes some trouble for you and Abba.”

It was a few seconds before there was any response, and Hannah pictured her mother in the kitchen, still dressed in her Shabbos robe, the dishes from shalosh seudos piled in the sink. She would be grinding her teeth and frowning the way she did when she was furious at any of them.

“How are you?” her mother finally said, and Hannah was surprised at how soft the words were, how calm.

“I’m okay,” she said, the lie coming as easily as it had all those times in high school.

She heard the wooden kitchen chair give its slight squeak as her mother sat down, and the old familiar sound set off a razor-thin pang of homesickness that overwhelmed her and then retreated.

“Someone from the state’s attorney’s office came over last week. She told us what to expect.”

Rebecca was the most organized person Hannah had ever met. She tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine how her father would have reacted to the crisp blonde professionalism that Rebecca exuded, but she couldn’t even picture the two of them in the same room.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you knew and everything.”

“Chana,” her mother said, sounding suddenly like she was on the verge of tears, “we really didn’t know. We just didn’t — I don’t think we understood what you were trying to tell us.”

“Well, that makes three of us,” Hannah said, trying not to think of that awful conversation, and the way her mother had actually patted her head, and told her to be flattered that she was getting so much attention from such a great teacher.

There was another pause, and then her mother said, “We’d like to see you again.”

 Continue reading…