To her surprise, she forgot about Duvie, about him sitting there eating his bloody, treife piece of meat in a roll so white it no doubt had been made with milk, which was forbidden to eat with meat, still another transgression. The music, which she had found so unsettling, suddenly seemed to flow through her, exciting her with its spontaneity.

What would it be like to live the way those men played, each day a new flow, in directions you couldn’t predict but just try to follow? To experiment every day? To be open to the lead of others, to the strangeness, to the newness?

It was the very opposite of everything she had ever been taught—that there was only one path, well traveled by every good Jew who had ever existed, and to step off it was to step into the uncharted wilderness leading to sin, ugliness, and death.

Then she suddenly thought of her poor mother, locked in the bathroom, bruised and broken, wandering in the darkness. She had never strayed, never taken a spontaneous step into foreign, untested terrain. How, then, had she wound up there?

A startling thought suddenly ripped through Shaindele Lehman’s seventeen-year-old heart—her mother, faithfully putting one foot in front of the other, doggedly keeping to the path of righteousness, the path of her forefathers, and still it had led her there! How could that have happened? Her poor, devout mother! She felt tears of sorrow fall quietly down her cheeks. She turned to Duvie, reaching out for him. But he was turned away from her, oblivious. His bangs were plastered to his sweating forehead like a little boy’s, his fingers moist and discolored by a sticky brown-and-red stain that also stained the white cuffs of his yeshiva boy shirt.

Stupid idiot, she thought, disgusted, wiping her eyes. She felt nothing for him, she realized. He was just another stranger who didn’t even know she was weeping in the darkness touched by blue light. He didn’t know that terrible things happened to Jews who went off the right path, the ancient path of their forefathers, or that the same things could also happen to those who never strayed, those who loved God and the Torah. He would make up his life as he went along, each day a random note in blue-tinged darkness.

It was well after midnight when she finally got home. She placed the key in the lock and almost held her breath as she turned it as silently as possible. But as she looked down, she realized that light was pouring through the space underneath the door.

They were all there, waiting for her: her father, her stepmother, Bubbee.

She turned to face them wearily, taking off her coat and hanging it in the closet.

“Shaindele,” her father began, his jaw clenched in fury.

“Please, Tateh. Can we talk tomorrow? I’m so tired.”