Like No Other by Una LaMarche Page B

Isaac—and yet, just like Jacob said, fine isn’t enough. Not for the rest of your life, anyway.
    I look over at Rose, who is staring into her lap, pale as a ghost, lips cracked and eyes red. I can’t believe that this woman is the same brave big sister I looked up to and aspired to become for more than fifteen years, the one whose braces seemed so beautiful and sophisticated to me that I approximated them with strips of tinfoil on my own straight teeth. Maybe it’s not fair to blame Jacob entirely; after all, she just pushed a human being out of her body without pain medication. But there’s a spark that’s gone from Rose—not just gone, but seemingly taken from her against her will. I take a bite of my bread and say a silent vow that I will never let that happen to me.
    With Jaxon it wouldn’t.
The thought takes me by surprise, so much so that I swallow too quickly and nearly choke.
    “I told you not to eat so fast,” Niv says, and laughs. Jacob just looks annoyed that I’ve interrupted the conversation.
    “Well,” my mother says once I catch my breath. “A home birth would be dangerous seven weeks early. Too much risk.”
    “True,” Jacob says. “But for the next one, I would feel much better staying in Crown Heights, with our people to take care of us.”
    “We’ll see,” my father says vaguely.
    “What we need is more Hasidic doctors,” Isaac cracks. Since secular schooling is frowned upon—too much opportunity for insidious outside culture to seep in—there are few doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in our community, or in any of the Hasidic sects.
    “What we need is a fence,” Niv says, and the boys laugh.
    “Maybe all of the goyim could move to Manhattan and let us have Brooklyn,” Jacob adds.
    “Or we can kick the soccer moms off Staten Island,” Isaac says, and laughs.
    “You’re all being imbeciles,” Zeidy grumbles, and I want to give him an air high five like Jaxon taught me. But of course I keep my hands on my knife and fork.
    “No one is going anywhere,” my mother says loudly, a forced smile stretched wide across her face, the equivalent of a flashing yellow light warning her children to cut it out before she loses patience. “We live where we live.”
    “And I have an easy way to avoid dealing with outsiders,” my father adds. “Ignore them.”
    “But what if you can’t?” Hanna asks, refilling her grape juice. “What if you get
stuck
with one?” I catch my breath. I don’t know if this is coincidence or if Jacob has taken it upon himself to tell everyone where I was during the blackout.
    My father chuckles, brushing crumbs off his beard with his napkin. His full, wide cheeks are rosy with wine. “How, my dear, would you get yourself stuck with one?” He doesn’t know. A good sign.
    Hanna casts a sidelong glance my way. “I don’t know,” she says, picking at her salad. “What if you met in some way through forces outside of your control, almost like it was fate?” Hanna is the hopeless romantic of the family. She’s also the most outspoken opponent of our parents’ no-TV policy, since it means she can’t watch movies to feed her fairy-tale fetish.
    “Like if an elevator stopped!” Miri nearly shouts, so excited that she has information to contribute to the grown-up talk. “Like with Devorah in the hospital!”
    I glare across the table, first at Jacob and then at Amos, not sure who has betrayed me.
    My father turns to me and sets down his fork. “Devorah, enlighten me. What’s this about an elevator?” Jacob smirks. He didn’t tell my father after all, but he clearly set me up by telling Amos. Okay, fine, I decide; if that’s how he wants to play, I’ll play. I smile sweetly at him and prepare to unleash my secret weapon, which is that regardless of the spark that was lit in that elevator, I am Devorah “
Frum
from Birth” Blum, and as far as my family knows I am nothing if not a virtuous daddy’s girl.
    “Abba,” I say calmly,