By the time I’d finished my legs felt wobbly, but from relief instead of nerves, and I was excited for the party, which would be held in the social hall as soon as the service was over. Twenty round tables for ten were waiting, draped in pink and silver cloths, with pink and white hydrangeas in silver bowls at each of the adult tables and dozens of pink and silver balloons at the kids’ tables. There would be passed appetizers and then the grown-ups would get chicken or salmon and the kids would have a taco bar, and there’d be a disc jockey and six dancers, three boys and three girls, to lead us in the line dances and the games.
Rabbi Silver had given a speech, and then Mrs. Nussbaum from the Sisterhood had presented me with gold candlesticks and a copy of the Gates of Prayer. My parents and Jonah and I had stood together, huddled underneath my father’s prayer shawl, as the rabbi read a special blessing. “And now,” he’d said, “if Rachel’s parents, Bernard and Helen, would like to say a few words?”
I had expected my father to make the speech. When my parents had come up for their aliyah, my mom had been crying, and her voice was so faint when she sang the blessings over the Torah that finally the cantor had just shifted the microphone toward my dad. But then, as I’d watched, my dad had put his hand on the small of my mother’s back and given her a little push, propelling her forward so that she almost bumped into the fringed blue velvet that covered the bimah. She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolded it, adjusted the microphone, and cleared her throat.
“When Rachel was born . . .” she began.
“Can’t hear you!” hollered my great-uncle Si, who had plumes of white hair protruding from his ears and smelled like Luden’s cherry cough drops.
My mother gave a trembling smile. She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and started again, pressing her hands down on the page that she’d smoothed out on the podium. “When Rachel was born it was a difficult time for our family. As many of you know, Rachel was born with a congenital heart deformity that required immediate surgery. For a few days . . .” And here, she made a horrible gasping noise, like she wanted to sob and was trying to swallow it instead. Her next sentence came out in a rush. “For a few days we didn’t know if our sweet little girl would survive.”
I felt an iciness come over me, first numbing my toes, then my ankles, then freezing my belly, turning my arms to chunks of wood. This isn’t happening, I thought. She isn’t doing this. But she was.
“When Rachel was six . . .” She swallowed hard and sniffled, and then clamped her hand down on my upper arm, grabbing me like she thought I’d try to run. “We found her in her room, and she wasn’t breathing. I thank God every day for the paramedics who got there so quickly, who revived her and started her heart again, but you never forget . . .” She gave another awful gulp. “You never forget how it feels to see your child like that. For years, Rachel slept with a heart monitor, next to our bed. Every year, it seemed, there was another hospitalization, another surgery, or a trip to the emergency room, something that would make me think all over again, God is going to take her. And I asked myself why this had happened. Why it had happened to me, and my husband, and our son; why God was testing us this way, why he would have given us such a treasure, only to take her away.”
“Can’t hear you!” yelled Uncle Si again. I’d been staring down at my shoes, with my hands clenched, praying sincerely for the first time during the entire service, praying for this speech to end. I made myself look into the audience. Britt Weinstein was staring, her eyes wide and shocked, and both Joshes looked like they were laughing. I’d been to about ten bar and bat mitzvahs by then, and I knew that it wasn’t unusual for a parent to get emotional or even weepy giving the speech, talking about how their little boy or little girl was now a man or a woman; only this wasn’t just a regular mom having a normal reaction. This was my mother telling the secrets that I’d spent the last nine months trying so hard to hide.
That September, I’d started at a junior high that drew students from five different elementary schools in our town of Clearview, Florida. There would be lots of kids I didn’t know there, kids who didn’t know me as the girl with the broken heart; poor Rachel, who’d missed all those days of school, who had to sit on the bleachers during gym class while the other kids played flag football; Rachel, for whom they were always making get-well cards in art and who once had to carry an oxygen tank with her to class.
I had spent the summer figuring out how I would remake myself, turn myself into a different kind of girl, a laughing, breezy girl, a girl to whom the worst thing that had ever happened was waking up and finding that her favorite jeans were still in the wash.