The water in the tub looks clear and inviting as I stand there, staring. Is this what the witches felt moments before they drowned? A kind of inner peace and desire to accept the invitation? To escape all that noise outside. The water is calling you.
I can feel Gali behind me, moving quickly and quietly, and suddenly I can see her movements during the murder with complete clarity, the small, efficient hand holding the knife. The little girl who isn’t a little girl. Who never was a little girl. Oh, Naama, I’m glad you’re not here to see this.
Facing each other, feet soaked in water, I look into her eyes and know what I need to do. This time you’re going to save this girl.
“Gali, you need help.”
“Help?” She laughs. “And who’s going to help me, you?”
“I want to.”
“You always want to help, you keep forgetting you’re not my mum!”
No, I’m not. But I’m as disappointed and scared of you as if I were your mother.
I slip the knife I brought with me out of my pocket, because munchkin or no munchkin, I’m not taking any chances. I’m not going to end up with a baby doll glued to my hands.
“Oh, come on, Sheila!” She laughs again. “You’re going to kill me? You?”
“I told you, I have no such intention, I just want to help you.”
“Again with the helping me?” She steps closer to me, eyes flaming, Thrump! Thrump! Thrump! “Why don’t I help you? Maybe I’d be doing you a huge favour? So you won’t end up an old spinster? So you won’t die alone? Huh? What do you say? Will you let me help you?”
Now she’s very close, and I’ll never know if she actually wanted to lunge at me or if she just slipped in the water, but the next thing I know I feel a sharp blow and a tug, and all of a sudden there’s a struggle over the knife, and I’m saying to myself, No, Sheila, this isn’t happening to you, not you, with the quiet, sheltered life you designed for yourself; you went and shut yourself off from the outside world and its dangers, so how, for heaven’s sake, are you standing here, in this bathroom, grappling over a knife with your little munchkin?
And the blood. Suddenly, there’s blood everywhere. I don’t feel any pain, but that might be the adrenaline. But then Gali collapses onto the floor, and I look at her and at the blood flowing, so much blood. It’s mixing with the water and painting the floor blood-red, and I bend over and reach out to her but my hands are wet, and that nasty gash on her neck looks black and pulsing, and I try to press it to hold back all that blood, but my hands keep sliding, and I try and try, but it’s all so sticky and slippery and red, so red.
No, she didn’t say “mum” before she closed her eyes.
26
I’M CLEANING MY APARTMENT.
Ever since that fight with Micha, my hair had stayed resolutely on my head. No more clumps, so no more use for the special silicone broom. I put it on the balcony, amidst the pile of old junk. I keep the Witch of Endor painting there too. I still can’t throw it away. But I’ll get there eventually.
Gali survived, of course.
In the story I’m telling, Gali couldn’t have died. I would never have let that happen. Besides, the EMS pre-arrival instructions were very clear. They also arrived surprisingly fast.
I recall the gushing blood, the dark pulses of life gradually leaving her body, recall the horrible fear that filled every part of me and can’t help but think about Dina and Ronit.
Yes, eventually, Gali told me how she led them to their deaths. And she was right, I did want to hear the details. “You won’t believe what you can find online nowadays,” she said with that same brisk, matter-of-fact tone. “There’s a manual for everything.”
When she called them asking to meet, they immediately agreed, and how could they not? To them, she’d always be Naama’s daughter. And their guilt must have numbed any inkling of suspicion.
In our meeting, so she told me, still with that same flat tone, she put crushed sleeping pills in their drinks. When the pills kicked in and they became drowsy, she tied them to the armchairs, and slashed their femoral arteries. She told me how she sat and watched the blood flow, and hinted that she collected it in a large vessel. She didn’t tell me what she did with all that blood, but I have my theories.
Ronit was suspicious. Liliths always are. At the last minute, when she was already too sleepy to resist, she looked straight into Gali’s eyes and knew what was going to happen to her. And more importantly, she understood the reason for it.
Gali told me that the look in her eyes was enough for her. “Maybe if Dina had looked at me the same way, with genuine regret and sadness, I wouldn’t have had to kill Ronit too,” she said. But Dina, as I’ve mentioned, never could apologize. Even when she wanted to.
I sometimes wonder about the child she would have had, Dina, if he would have looked like her, what kind of person he would have grown up to be, but I always shoo those thoughts away.
By the way, Gali wasn’t lying when she told me the picture of the drowned witch was sent to me from Neria Grossman’s phone, but the person who sent it was Taliunger, who took Frida Gotteskind’s witches course with us.
Obviously, she’d never admit it, Tali, and for now I have no intention of wringing a confession out of her, but I still get a kick out of knowing.
And Shirley’s pregnant, walking around the museum all peaceful
