throw him on a desk. Facedown. It leaves black smudges on the grainy beige plastic. Clothes tear with an uneven whine. …but you were naked and bare… He turns his face to me and opens a slit of the eye, moves swelling lips. He says the last thing I will ever hear him say. “Chava… Don’t look.” He took us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festivity, and from deep darkness to great light, and from bondage to redemption. ***
T
hey told me I was found two days later, still locked in the anteroom of a bank vault in the middle of a condemned town. The men who had abducted me never managed to open that door. They didn’t kill me. They didn’t take me. But they took his body, and it was never found. A year later I was back home for a triple celebration: my sixteenth birthday, my return from the hospital, and Passover. Another Passover. When the Lord will return the exiles of Zion, we will have been like dreamers. Just a bad dream. He goes along weeping, carrying the bag of seed; he will surely come back with joyous song, carrying his sheaves. I listened to the commotion of Passover eve: Dad’s struggle with a vacuum cleaner, Ruth clanking the dishes, food hissing on the stove. The aromas I was meant to smell again. The words I was meant to hear. I stroked the fancy wine goblet set aside for Elijah. Come back, Elijah. I’ll be waiting for you. “Chava, honey… This is an extra plate.” Mom had learned to look at me the way sick children’s parents do—like they are trying to see into the center of you. She never used to be this gray. “We don’t need this plate, honey. I’ll put it away for you.” I took the plate from my mother’s hands and put it back on the table, next to the goblet. I looked her in the eye. I said, “It’s for Elijah.”