Chapter Text
When David Jacobs was seven years old, his aunt Chavah died.
A month before she passed, his family received a letter with a real wax seal, the crisp parchment covered in loopy cramped cursive. Within the envelope sat four train tickets, tied with a thin red ribbon made of actual, genuine silk. An invitation. His Aba and Ima discussed the matter of whether or not they'd pack up their little family and travel across the country for a week long visit late into the night, while Sarah and David jittered with excitement in their beds as they pretended to sleep and strained their ears to listen to the hushed conversation. They wanted to visit their Doda Chavah desperately. She’d moved to America before they were even born, after all, with a perfectly suitable American-Jewish (and immensely wealthy) doctor husband paying her fare. She was sort of a legend in their family– smart and beautiful and brimming with life– and the children were practically bursting at the seams to meet this woman who was said to be very marvelous. Unfortunately, their Aba had qualms about leaving work for a full week. He and Ima had been urgently discussing the matter for at least an hour. Soon the candles had nearly dripped into nothing and Aba and Ima remained at a standstill, their faces swamped in shadow as waning light flickered through the silent kitchen.
David exhaled a shaky, soft little breath and silently asked God to allow them to visit their aunt. Wax rolled down the lone candle on the kitchen table. Ima’s stunning green eyes were glossy with tears. Aba finally relented. They’d visit Ima’s sister and spend a week at her side.
Little David and Sarah were beyond excited. The two bright-eyed children didn’t understand the true nature of their visit at first– all they knew was that they were taking a train all the way from their apartment in New York to New Orleans, and they were much more excited for this vacation then they’d been to move from Poland to America three years prior. David read every library book he could find about the city called the ‘Jewel of the South’ as the train chugged along. Little David was awfully excited to leave New York for the first time in years.
He could still remember the awe he’d felt as the streetcar chugged down St. Charles street, a wide road paved with maroon brick and lined with the biggest old oak trees he'd ever seen in his life, bigger than any tree in the city sprawl of New York, rivaling even the forests in Poland. The humid wind lazily rolled across his face as the ancient oaks stretched their limbs across the bustling street, tendrils of Spanish moss hanging towards the ground. Lovely, big houses lined the street, many with massive wraparound porches and eccentric accents. They had lawns of manicured green grass, neatly sectioned apart like nothing David had ever seen. Aba’s arm was firmly wrapped around his shoulders as he peered out the window and watched the scenery crawl past, tempting little David with images of a muggy and slow Southern life he’d never truly experience.
Doda Chavah lived in a big house right across from a streetcar stop. The house was black with accents of deep navy blue in the pillars supporting the overhang above the porch, three stories stretching up high. The pointed roof and chimney blocked the sun from their eyes as the Jacobs siblings happily ran inside, jogging up the front steps stride for stride and politely greeting the maid that met them. David had never seen a house so strange and lovely– not even back in Poland, or in the better parts of Manhattan he’d visited with his father. He desperately wished to explore every inch of the old manor, but his plans quickly died when he realized just how gloomy the atmosphere within the home had grown.
Sarah and David soon found out that their Doda was incredibly ill, and they were not just visiting for fun.
Their doctor uncle greeted them with a too-wide smile. Ima entirely ignored her brother-in-law as she ascended the stairs, her pretty smiling mouth set into an uncharacteristically grim line. Aba exchanged a strained handshake with the man but soon followed, bringing the children alongside him.
Doda Chavah was cooped up in a bedroom the size of the Jacobs' entire apartment, the curtains pulled wide to allow sunlight to spill into the large room. It smelled of sickness, the air thick and cloying with the stench of it. A crow perched on the wide, mossy branch of an oak just outside, cawing loudly as Ima went to take her sister's hand, practically collapsing at her bedside. Their aunt didn’t look like the young woman Aba and Ima and their grandparents had described. Doda Chavah was supposed to be a lively woman with beautiful blonde hair and a rosy complexion– she was supposed to wear a charming smile that could turn the head of any village boy. She was supposed to be their mother’s excitable younger sister, bursting with life and charm and personality, with an outgoing disposition that everyone oftentimes compared to Sarah’s own temperament.
This woman was anything but. She was sickly.
David felt a strange feeling of fear and sadness as he regarded the woman lying in the bed, his chest and throat tight with choking silence. Her skin was sallow and white, her light hair brittle and piled in a messy updo atop her head. Her cheekbones were gaunt and her lips unnaturally raw and chapped, providing the only color on her face save for her impossibly green eyes. Perhaps they were lively once, but as David saw them, lidded and framed with dark circles, they carried nothing but misery. She was thin and waifish and David noted, with rising horror, the mass of bloodied handkerchiefs gathered on the nightstand and scattered over the floor near the bed. It seemed Ima’s sister was very, very sick.
The week passed by in an uncomfortable blur. They spent a great deal of time talking and tending to Doda Chavah. Sarah and David read her stories and accounted tales from school with false cheer. Aba sorted through official-looking papers while Ima tended to her sister at all moments of the day, quiet and subdued. Doda Chavah’s cook made them meals and the household staff made their beds each night. Her husband, strangely always absent from her bedchamber, made awkward conversation with the family when he could. David did not remember much from the trip, but he did remember being ushered from the bedroom every time his aunt began to cough. Ima would lurch for a handkerchief and someone would herd the children away.
Most nights, Doda Chavah’s constant rattling coughing and retching kept them up. She’d gasp for breath as if something was physically stopping her, each cough sounding more painful than the last.
One night, David was unable to sleep. His aunt sounded miserable, all locked up in her room coughing endlessly. It was starting to drive him wild. He hopped down from his bed and crept past his sleeping elder sister, and from there, he made his way to his aunt’s room. He couldn’t remember what compelled him– but he remembered the feel of the intricately crafted brass door handle as he peered into the room.
Aunt Chavah was bent over, her pale and shaking hands clutching at the metal pail that always sat at her bedside. David watched her cough and cough, shiny red blood dripping from her lips. It plunked against the metal of the bucket, soon joined by bile. She retched and heaved drily until, to David’s utter astonishment, a bright purple flower began to force itself through her stretched lips. He watched, subdued and stunned, as his aunt threw the flower up. Its vibrant petals were stained with crimson as it finally dropped into the bucket, stem and leaves and all. Her coughing subsided, and she shakily wiped her mouth clean, straightening her posture as if scraping together her remaining dignity.
Then, weakly, she fell back against the pillows as if nothing had happened– and she finally noticed him.
“David-Kah?” With a hoarse voice, she extended a pale hand towards him.
Slowly, he made his way towards her and respectfully forced his eyes away from the contents of the bucket. Once he took her hand, he clambered his way up onto the bed next to her just like his mother always did. “You’re very sick, aren’t you, Doda Chavah?”
“Yes, darling boychik. I am.” If pressed to remember any details about his aunt, he’d tell you that her voice sounded just like his mother’s, raspy as it was. Her words curled with a soft, honeying tinge of Polish. Her tone was sweet. “I am very sick. I believe I might die soon.”
David thought about that for a great while. The crickets continued to chirp. It was never truly quiet in that big old house. “Aren’t you scared?”
“Yes.” She hummed thoughtfully, and turned his hand over within her own frail grasp. He could imagine her in her youth, happy and bright next to his Ima, who’d always been shy. “But there’s no cure for this sickness, I’m afraid. I’ve had to make peace with it. That’s the best one can do, after all, in a situation like this.”
“I’ve never seen anyone cough up a flower before.” He answered, rather thoughtlessly, but he was only seven after all.
“I hope I didn’t scare you, malach.”
David shook his head and gave her hand a little squeeze, just for good measure. That always seemed to make his sister feel better, and it seemed Doda Chavah needed all the good feelings she could get. “I’m not scared. But how did the flower end up inside of you in the first place?”
“My sickness. It’s a very old disease from across the world, little one, and you can only contract it if you believe the person you love with your whole entire heart doesn’t love you back. Your heart wants them so desperately that it plants a garden within your lungs, and flowers grow there. But I’m sure you know that lungs aren’t meant for growing flowers, hm? That’s what makes you sick, in the end. The flowers eventually steal your breath away.” With a cheeky little smile that looked an awful lot like Sarah’s teasing grin, his aunt cupped his cheek with her cool hand. David leaned into the touch, feeling shaky and unsettled.
“But you’re married, Doda Chavah.”
Her little smile faded quickly. “I am.”
“Why’re you growing flowers, then?”
David, then, was too young to understand the furrow between her brows and the faraway look in her eyes. He couldn’t read into the frown that tilted her lips, nor could he understand the deep ache she surely felt. “I discovered that my husband… he found someone he loves more than me. I fell ill soon after.”
Still, he was an intelligent boy. He understood that this was a sad, dire thing, and it certainly wasn’t fair that someone who was as beautiful and lively as his aunt wasn’t receiving love as deep as the love she was giving. He pressed a kiss to the palm of her hand and decided then and there that he’d never fall in love with anyone that wasn’t going to love him right back. Little David placed his aunt’s hand in his lap and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry, Doda.”
“Don’t be. Everyone has a time when they must go and be with God, my darling. Mine is near, and I’ve learned to live with that.”
She placed a spindly hand over the shimmery gold necklace she wore. A star of David. David watched as her pale fingers brushed over the glinting charm, her green eyes closing reverently. Pale lashes brushed her high cheekbones, and he thought, for a breathless moment, that she might've been ready to die then and there.
Two days later, Doda Chavah fell silent during one of her coughing fits and that was the end of it. The funeral took place on a very muggy day in a very crowded synagogue, and David could scarcely focus on the rabbi as he was too busy wiping sweat from his brow. He understood a bit better why his parents were ignoring Doda Chavah’s husband (and by extension the slim young lady that always seemed to linger behind him). David ignored him as well, because there was a budding flame of rage in his chest that he couldn’t quite understand, but he knew deep down that all of their sadness was this man’s fault.
When they were packing up to return home, his aunt’s maid brought him an envelope with the same wax seal as the letter his parents received a month ago. His Doda's loopy writing (incredibly shaky) spelled out ‘David’, and within the envelope was a very sweet letter and the prettiest bookmark David had ever seen.
Vibrant irises framed a beautifully drawn letter D, with the simple caption ‘Guard your heart.’ scrawled across the bottom of the bookmark. It was the most lovely thing David had ever received, made of stained leather with careful branding and a blue silk ribbon at the top. Once he returned home, he never once used it to mark books- it sat carefully preserved beneath the milk crate he used as a bedside table, wrapped in a stained lace doily he'd knicked from the laundry.
The Jacobs’ silently returned to New York shortly after and didn’t ever speak of their time in New Orleans again. The memory began to fade, visions of old oaks and crows and wet-hot mornings fading and blurring together, Doda Chavah’s sickly figure sitting in the midst of it all. David had almost forgotten the tired lines of his aunt’s face by the time he turned eighteen, years of life pushing the memories deep into the recesses of his mind, only to be dredged up during particularly horrifying nightmares filled with sticky crimson-splattered flower petals and an old, creaking manor.
He’d remember very soon.
He’d remember because he’d broken the promise he’d made to himself all of those years ago, curled up in bed with his sickly aunt. David Jacobs had, in fact, fallen in love– and this love was a single step away from being totally and completely hopeless.
Somewhere along the way, David had fallen in love with someone, and the chances of that love being returned were slim to none.