BY Anna Ralph
A sharp slice of light invites her in. It beckons her with what feels like the slow come-hither motion of a single index finger. The light escapes the door’s edges, indicating something beyond it. The door feels hidden but with purpose, like a hint just for her. It’s too similar to a door from her childhood, that one in the basement. There was no handle or doorknob, but if hit just right, it would pop just enough that you could pry it all the way open with an old butter knife that no one would miss. That one led to a cold, dry storage room smelling of must, heirlooms, things untouched. This one, its twin, opens onto a kitchen. No one else is there, but it’s clear someone had been, once occupied, lived in. Everything is cloaked in that black-blue pitch darkness. There are indications of windows, frames on the walls with vague reflections and expectations of glare, but no light comes through them, boundaries between an inside and outside are vague. She’s disoriented, but she belongs here still – she’s been here before, though not here here. She absorbs her surroundings with caution, taking soft furtive steps across the creaking floor though she’s not sure why, or who she’s scared of waking up. The space is extravagant even with the thick layer of dust coating the furniture and counters. She continues, taking inventory. A bread box. Open drawers. Pine cabinets. The kitchen looks out onto an impressive dining room with a long mahogany table at its center; a heavy chandelier hangs low above it, eerily still, lightbulbs surely burnt out. Three chairs sit haphazardly: a sign of a hasty escape.
Rebecca has been thinking of that door all morning. She sits in her driveway hours later, rolling last night’s dream back and forth in her mind to keep it malleable. While she never thought much of her dreams, a messy amalgamation of the day’s leftovers that remained in her psyche, she remained attuned to these fleeting moments of intuition, noting coincidences.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting in her driveway, but it feels like too long. She takes out her keys and phone before tossing her purse into the back seat. Her mother Leah is 77 years old, and Rebecca can count on one hand the number of times she’s uttered Ephram’s name.
Rebecca’s knowledge of her mother’s brother is limited, and she deduced long ago that he wasn’t living particularly close, given how rarely they saw each other, but the fact that she never met her great uncle never quite sat right with her. Ephram was carefully protected by her mother, but the longer her mother kept him from her, the wilder her version of him became.
Years ago and only once, Rebecca attempted to broach the subject obliquely over dinner, assuming her role as an unqualified though well-intentioned therapist and intergenerational trauma surgeon. As baby Clara, then two years old, slept upstairs, Rebecca and her mother split the dishwashing duties while her husband Marc cleared the table.
“You know, Marc and I have been thinking about having another baby… a little brother or sister for Clara.”
Leah responded deftly, barely looking up from drying the dishes.
“Mmm. Well, you should get a bigger apartment first. There’s barely enough room for you three!” she said jovially. She smiled and turned her head in her son-in-law’s direction. “Isn’t that right, Marc?”
Marc knew he wouldn’t get a word in edgewise even if he wanted to. He turned around to speak, but Rebecca quickly interfered.
“I mean, you had a brother, didn’t you? Ephram?”
Leah’s smile faded as she paused and calculated, bringing her gaze up to Rebecca. “I still do have a brother, yes.” Her face silently challenged her daughter, as if to say, “. . . And?”
Rebecca should have known better than to think she could outmanoeuvre her mother. She’d been dancing around this her whole life and had memorized the footwork.
“Well, it’s just that you never . . . You never talk about him.”
Leah then took a moment, like she was about to say something else. Out of view of his mother-in-law, Marc mouthed an exaggerated “Stop” in Rebecca’s direction.
“I don’t, no.”
And with that, everyone resumed their duties. Rebecca dejected, Leah relieved. Rebecca quickly lost what little momentum she had, accepted defeat, and vowed to never bring him up again until her mother decided she was ready.
Rebecca booked the day off work, but she stole a quick look at her phone and checked her inbox anyway. She ignored the fifteen unread emails and read a text from Clara.
Hug grandma for me, love you mom, xo
She dropped her phone into the cup holder in the center console. Still thinking of her dream’s door, she backed out of the driveway to visit Ephram’s for the first time.
***
Ephram Richter, born out of love and desperation to Simon and Deborah Richter in Rochester, New York. After trying to conceive for years, they would finally beam with pride on April 19, 1928, upon finally holding their first-born son they gratefully named Ephram, “fruitful.” Three years later, Deborah gave birth to a daughter, Leah.
Leah found both their birth announcements clipped from old newspapers among her brother’s things in the garage of the townhouse he had been renting. She was caught off guard by all the boxes, full of photos and letters and whatever else he deemed worthy of keeping all these years, knowing that he must have carried all this from residence to residence for nearly six decades.
“I’m going to go pick up the shiva chairs, the little ones,” her husband David said as he set down another box with a huff, out of breath. “You’ll be okay here, honey?”
She barely heard him, these days everyone sounded like they were speaking underwater. “Didn’t even know he cared this much about the Jewish stuff,” she told him as she continued through the boxes’ contents. “Who’d guess he’d want a shiva?”
“People always surprise us most when they don’t have to answer to anyone anymore.”
“Hmm.”
David kissed his wife on the cheek. “Becca should be here any minute. I’ll be back soon.”
“And the candle! Don’t forget the candle. The big red one, not those tin ones, not the regular ones.”
Without turning around, he gestured so she knew he heard her. Leah watched her husband walk to the car, and she’s glad to be alone. If she looked at anyone too long she might just burst into tears. She focused again on the task at hand, flipping through photos of an idyllic childhood: Family trips, birthdays, blissful ice cream-filled moments on beaches. Ephram was always smiling as hard as he could in these, teeth clenched, eyes squinted as if it were the only way he knew how, like happiness was all or nothing. Under the photos were the letters, Ephram’s way of keeping everyone at arm’s length. Constantly on the move, he would only include a return address if he’d be there long enough to receive a response.
Leah suddenly remembered her trowel and gloves lying in the grass in her backyard, frozen in time. One day earlier, Leah received the phone call while she was gardening. She dropped her trowel and gloves. Death always has a totem, the otherwise inconsequential thing you did or heard or saw while your mind frantically rewires itself to make sense of your new life as quickly as possible. Picking up a tomato at the grocery store. The unique squeak of the mall bathroom’s stall door. An old Nokia ringtone. She wrongly assumed that the fact that he was never really there would soften the blow of his more permanent exit, but even though he was always gone, she was shocked by how unprepared she truly was for when he’d be gone.
“‘Cardiac event’, those were the words they used,” she told Rebecca, Marc, Clara, and David that night at dinner. “Sounds like a gala.” They all looked up from their plates, unsure if they should laugh. She knew none of them would know what to say to any of this, and she took the blame for it. It always made sense to keep him hidden, but now for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why.
The following 24 hours moved quickly as she hoped the blur would help her repress some of the moments she’d rather forget. After identifying her brother, she sat down with a lawyer to go through his will. It was simple enough, given that both their parents had passed years ago. Everything would go to her, and his only other request was a Jewish funeral and shiva.
“Great,” she said in the lawyer’s office to no one in particular, “We finally get to throw you a party, and you’re not even here.”
***
Rebecca pulls up, parks, and takes a deep breath before exiting her car. It is a warm brisk day; she always enjoyed the seasons’ in-betweens. She walks up the front steps and rings the doorbell, hearing her mother’s footsteps approach on the other side. Leah opens the door and they embrace in Ephram’s entryway.
“Becca, my beautiful girl.” Rebecca feels her mother’s quickened breaths, her first subdued, grieving tears.
“Oh, mom. I’m so sorry.” Rebecca holds her a little longer, a little tighter, her maternal instinct kicking in for her own mother. They release each other. “How’s it going? Where’s dad?”
Leah composes herself as she walks in towards the living room. “You’re not supposed to ask mourners how they’re doing,” she says loudly back to her daughter, suddenly an expert in Jewish grief. “And you can leave your shoes on!”
“Wait, really?” Rebecca leans on the wall as she slips a shoe back on.
“And don’t ring the doorbell. Your father’s helping with the logistics. He’s gone to pick up those little chairs, or I guess just the one…” Leah is reminded of how solitary this all is. She gestures broadly towards the bathroom. “He’s covering the mirrors with sheets too, all that.”
Rebecca, still in the doorway, notices a cardboard box next to what she assumes are Ephram’s shoes. As she enters, she takes stock of his home for the last few months of his life, and the dissonance between the man he was and the man she created. It’s clear the space hasn’t been renovated since the ‘80s with its wood-paneled walls and yellowing appliances, but Ephram kept it clean. His sparse belongings are well-organized. In the living room, there is a lone chair and a television in a staring contest, the touchstone of bachelorhood. An empty duffel bag sits on a couch that’s pointed at nothing in particular. It is a house of a person who’s no longer here and won’t be again, coated with that layer of dust that hasn’t been picked up by the routine of daily movements.
Her mother slumps down in her brother’s chair exasperated, suddenly remembering the box she brought up from the garage. She points towards the front door.
“Becca, can you bring that box in here?”
Rebecca obliges, shaking it gently like an unopened gift. “What’s in here?”
“Just things for the shiva… Memories, photos, letters… Give us something to talk about, you know. Tell some stories.” Rebecca joins her mother on the couch, placing the box on the floor between them.
“You always expect more answers at the end I suppose . . .” Leah half-smiles as she hands Rebecca photo after photo of young Ephram: at a beach, on Halloween, behind a birthday cake. Then, there is an abrupt jump, a chasm between smiling young Ephram and a mugshot, like his teen years didn’t exist.
“He ended up in jail in Boston somehow,” Leah began. She shakes her head and chuckles, as if incarceration is just another one of life’s milestones. She hands Rebecca the newspaper clipping. He had held up a corner store in downtown Boston in 1947. His soft features are slightly scrunched at the camera’s flash, and it’s hard to believe he could be any kind of criminal. Typically, this wouldn’t have made any newspaper, but they were cracking down on petty crime at the time.
“First and last time he was ever in jail, by the way,” Leah adds, ever his defender. “Just so you know. Called the police on himself too. Surrendered.”
Rebecca doesn’t know how to react to these stories so she doesn’t, simply letting her mother do what she needs to. She sets the clipping down on the coffee table in front of them and reaches back into the box, where she finds letters upon letters, spanning decades of daily platitudes; each one spilling into their margins, each one a vital sign, creating his life’s rhythm as he dictated his life to his sister one letter at a time. And then, a crack in her armour.
“Rebecca, he wasn’t a bad man. He was just . . . something else. Maybe a little harder for people to handle, that’s all.” Leah takes a beat and meets her daughter’s eyes again with purpose, begging for empathy. “I do wish you could have met your uncle.” Uncle. Rebecca had forgotten that she lost someone too.
The dam that held back Ephram has broken as Leah continues. She can’t stop now, frantic, wiping away tears after realizing she has already waited far too long.
“He meant well, in his ways. You know how things were, the right words didn’t exist for Ephram yet. I just . . .” She recalibrates, not quite ready to lay it all out just yet. “I remember getting those letters and I was just so happy, so relieved, that he wanted to talk to me, to us . . . I guess it was me that decided not to tell anyone at all. I was the scared one, not him. I assumed there was a reason he didn’t talk to anyone else, I was just too scared to throw off this balance we’d created and fostered, that anything could drive him further away . . . I just couldn’t risk it. He was so delicate underneath it all.”
Rebecca reassures her mother, hugging her and cradling her head onto her shoulder. She imagines her mother’s solitary grief, but they are both full of their own regret and doubts, not knowing when to push and when to pull. Rebecca recalls her dream and its door, her lack of fear and worry in a place that felt unearthly, potentially dangerous, and yet she couldn’t help but take her time, reveling in its comfort, in the warmth of this cold space.
The letters are unwittingly organized in the order they were received. They’ll find the very first at the very bottom. A long way to go, but they sit in the place that Ephram last called home as they assume the task of creating for him a history.