Next Stop - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benjamin Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his family. Next Stop is his first novel.

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Chapter I

I

ETHAN AND ELLA MET IN a coworking space, one of the airy open-plan offices that were common in their city at that time. Ethan had worked there longer and he liked the office, which was on the twenty-sixth floor of a tall building. It was full of plants and full of light and there was a balcony on the eastern side with a rock garden and benches and he would often sit outside, even in the fall and early spring, and this reminded him of his childhood during the pandemic. He remembered windows, high places, the cold.

During those years they lived in a very tall building in a different city. They were meant to live in that apartment for only six months, while his parents looked for a house, but that was not what happened. Life was predictable and orderly until it was not, and in the end they lived there almost three years, from when he was six until he was eight. He learned to read. His parents argued and reconciled endlessly. His great-grandmother, whom he did not remember, died.

The schools did not reopen for more than a year in that city, and he cycled through many different fixations during that time—dinosaurs, self-portraits, Rube Goldberg machines, unboxing videos, Zoom karate, Cosmic Kids Yoga, Minecraft, making slime. One of the most durable was folding paper airplanes with his father and then throwing them from their balcony and watching them fly out over the lake. They went through reams of paper and the airplanes were scattered everywhere, which bothered his mother and, for a while, every day, she would insist that they gather them into a pile in one corner of the room. And then, without warning, she gave up and the planes—the ones that did not make the one-way trip over the water—came to rest where they would.

Later, when he would visit his parents as an adult, he would often walk by the old building. And once, several years before he met Ella, he knocked on the door of their old apartment, 22E, and asked the couple living there if he could look around. They seemed much older to Ethan, though they really were not, and the wife was pregnant. At first, they regarded him with some suspicion. But Ethan was charming and soft-spoken, and he seemed harmless and a little lost, like a child. “I spent the pandemic here,” he said, and the husband looked at his wife and then said, “Would you like to come in?”

They spent half an hour together. They made coffee and Ethan asked for a few sheets of paper and he showed them how to fold a few airplane models. But none of them flew as far as he remembered.

ETHAN HAD NEVER THROWN AN airplane from the balcony of the office building, even after working there for four years. He thought about it, though.

He wrote for a website that covered tech trends. He did not like his job very much because his performance was tied directly to clicks and he suspected that the other writers—six of them in all—were faster and funnier than he was. And often when he could not think of anything to write about he would go out onto the balcony to look out over the city or up into the sky and sometimes he would think of the apartment on the twenty-second floor.

It was on the balcony that he first saw Ella. He was sitting on a bench in late November, looking up at the knifelike form of a peregrine falcon as it rose into the sky, when he noticed her standing near the rail on the far side. She was wearing a yellow blazer and leggings and to Ethan she looked cold and very small.

She was facing the opposite direction, so she must have assumed she was alone. He had been watching her for only a few seconds when she took a paper airplane from the pocket of her coat. After quickly adjusting the wings, she threw it out over the city. From where he was sitting, he was unable to see its flight.

When she turned, he saw her face, pale and sharp, like the airplane.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“I guess I’m worried it might land on a car and cause an accident.”

“You should worry less,” she said, and she blew air into her cupped hands and went back inside.

ETHAN DID NOT SPEAK WITH Ella again until several weeks later, when they met by chance at one of the office’s four kitchenettes. He had hoped they would talk sooner but she was there only sporadically, twice the week of the airplane, once the following week, and then not at all for two weeks after that. By then the episode on the balcony had taken on a dreamlike quality for Ethan, significant but almost forgotten. And when she came up next to him, he did not immediately recognize her.

She was studying a little packet of jerky, turning it over several times in her hands. Her fingernails were alternating shades of pink and blue—newly painted and glossy—and around her wrist were several silver bracelets, which glittered beneath the overhead lights. Everything about her was small. She had small hands and small shoulders and a small, delicate mouth. But her expression was the same as the expression he remembered from the balcony—severe and searching, and her face had a shadowy quality, despite the paleness of her skin. All of this seemed at odds with the fragile, childlike features, the small hands and the fancifully painted nails, and still she was reading the package.

“They don’t have any weird additives,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly to her left. “It’s not that.”

“What are you looking for?”

“It’s nothing. I was just reading the ingredients.”

“They’re good. I eat too many of those.”

She returned the packet to the jar. “I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said. She turned to leave.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Listen, I might have this wrong, but did we meet a few weeks ago on the balcony? You threw a paper airplane. That was you, right?”

“No,” she said, after a brief pause. “You must be thinking of someone else.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, and instead of the jerky she took a small bag of granola clusters and walked away.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, ELLA SAW him again on the balcony. He was sitting under a heat lamp, his legs beneath a blanket and his laptop balanced on his knees. It was cold outside, but he did not look cold, which she found intriguing. She was not sure why she lied about the airplane. There was no reason to lie. And now she felt guilty, though when she thought about it there really was no reason for that either because likely enough she would never speak to him again. Ella was a freelance photographer and she was stringing for a magazine that rented a few desks in the office. She would be done with the project at the end of the day and tomorrow she was planning to take her son on a train south to meet up with a friend from college. He did not seem to be enjoying his school of late and he had become increasingly anxious at home and Ella hoped that some time in a more pastoral setting would help him reset. She was not planning to return to the city for a month or so, and even then, unless she happened to take another gig at the same magazine, she would not return to that coworking space.

She watched him from behind...