She hadn’t stopped reaching for Yossele. Sometimes, without thinking, she’d picture him in the alcove, and try to draw comfort from the image. There were days when she would bitterly regret what she’d done, and feel a dull anger towards the Golem for not having the strength to do it herself. Other times, she’d wake in the night with the memory of Yossele bursting from the storage room, ready to kill at her command—and remember the Golem standing before her in the hallway, the locket raised in her fist.
Absently she put her hand to the chain at her neck. Instead of asking Kreindel to return the paper, the Golem had given her the locket to keep it in. They watched over each other now, Kreindel and her landlady.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Soon Kreindel heard Toby’s familiar footsteps on the stairs. A knock, and his head poked around the doorframe. “Hey there,” he said. “How’re the translations going?”
She tossed her pencil onto the desk. “It’s useless,” she said. “I have no idea why I’m doing it. No one will read them anyway.”
“I will,” he said. “And Miss—and Chava will, too.”
She snorted. “She won’t need to read them, she hears me thinking about them all the time.”
“I bet she’ll still read them.”
“Because she wants to? Or because I want her to?”
Toby cringed, and glanced at the half-open door.
“Oh, stop it,” Kreindel told him, annoyed. “She’s not my monitor or my mother. Besides, she told me she asks herself the same thing.”
Toby still thought it rude of her, but said nothing. The thorny nature of Kreindel and the Golem’s relationship made him uneasy, and he was helpless to change matters. He believed Kreindel when she said he was too taken with his childhood memories of Missus Chava to see her clearly. He also believed the Golem when she said it was only natural, even preferable, for Kreindel to be angry for a while. The important thing is that we talk to each other, she’d said. Arguments are uncomfortable, but silence is worse.
“What’s all that?” Kreindel asked, nodding at his rucksack. “Parts for the wireless?”
He nodded. “I’m going to finish it today. Want to help?”
“Sure,” she said.
He grinned. “Really? Or do you only want to because I want you to want to?”
That made her roll her eyes, but she abandoned her translations and followed him up the stairs to the attic.
For all the house’s comforts, the attic was the only room where Kreindel felt truly at home. Its dormer roof sloped nearly to the floor, creating two large, triangular walls, each set with a porthole window. She liked to sit against the low wall beneath the dormer, close her eyes, and inhale the attic’s scents of dust and wood-polish. In her first weeks at the house, she’d come up to the attic late at night with a velveteen blanket she’d found, wrap it around her shoulders, and pretend she was with Yossele. But the pretending had begun to pale lately; it felt too simple, too superficial, for the fraught and complicated thing that was her grief.
She watched as Toby stood with one foot out the porthole window, fiddling with a wire he’d strung up to an aerial on the roof. In the same way that she no longer knew what to do with her hours, she no longer knew what she wanted from Toby, either. At eighteen to his fifteen, she couldn’t help thinking of him as a child, an innocent; but she knew that was unfair. He, too, had been set apart from his peers by secrets and impossibilities. Perhaps they were destined to be a part of each other’s lives, and were only free to choose what form that would take. Perhaps that was what it was like to have friends, or a family.
It was true, though, that she liked watching him build the wireless. He’d been at it for weeks now: hauling the parts to Brooklyn trip by trip, clamping the aerial onto the roof, littering the attic floor with instruction booklets and scribbled diagrams. She hadn’t the faintest clue how any of it worked, but Toby could explain it clear as a bell. He’d learned how from library books, and trial and error; and when she complimented his skill, he’d say things like, Oh, anybody could figure that out. She doubted that greatly. She had to admit, he looked different out of his uniform, dressed in regular clothing. Like a real person. Someone she could get to know.
He glanced up from his work and caught her watching him. She glanced away, embarrassed. When she looked back, he’d returned to the wireless, but his cheeks shone a bright and fiery red.
Huh, she thought. So boys can blush, too.
* * *
In the kitchen downstairs, the Golem washed and shredded the carrots for a salad, while also taking note of the various emotions drifting down from the attic. She preferred to give the pair as much privacy as she could, knowing that her own presence was enough to, as Anna put it, “keep them out of trouble.” Still, she had to remind Kreindel occasionally
