by Neil Clarke
“Wicked dog,” Gerry said in a teasing tone as he caught Abel’s leash. He scratched the dog between the ears and then bent to grab a package from under the counter. “Sit,” he said. “Beg.” The old dog rushed to do both. Gerry unwrapped a sausage and tossed it. Abel snapped and swallowed.
Mara finished crossing the aisle. She leaned against the front counter. She tried to conceal her heavy breathing, but she knew that her face must be flushed. Abba waited at the edges of her peripheral vision, his arms stretched in Mara’s direction as if he expected her to collapse.
Gerry glanced between Mara and her father, assessing the situation. Settling on Mara, he tapped a stool behind the counter. “You look wiped. Take a load off. Your dad and I can handle ourselves.”
“Yes, Mara,” abba said quickly. “Perhaps you should sit.”
Mara glared. “Abba.”
“I’m sorry,” abba said, looking away. He added to Gerry, “She doesn’t like help.”
“No help being offered. I just want some free work. You up for manning the register?” Gerry tapped the stool again. “I put aside one of those strawberry things you like. It’s under the counter. Wrapped in pink paper.”
“Thanks,” Mara said, not wanting to hurt Gerry’s feelings by mentioning that she couldn’t eat before appointments. She went behind the counter and let Gerry hold her crutches while she pulled herself onto the stool. She hated how good it felt to sit.
Gerry nodded decisively. “Come on,” he said, leading abba toward the fresh fruit.
Abba and Gerry made unlikely friends. Gerry made no bones about being a charismatic evangelical. During the last election, he’d put up posters saying that Democratic voters were headed to hell. In return, abba had suggested that Republican voters might need a punch in the jaw, especially any Republican voters who happened to be standing in front of him. Gerry responded that he supported free speech as much as any other patriotic American, but speech like that could get the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of his store. They shouted. Gerry told abba not to come back. Abba said he wouldn’t even buy dog food from fascists.
The next week, Gerry was waiting on the sidewalk with news about a kosher supplier, and Mara and abba went in as if nothing had ever happened.
Before getting sick, Mara had always followed the men through the aisles, joining in their arguments about pesticides and free-range chickens. Gerry liked to joke that he wished his children were as interested in the business as Mara was. Maybe I’ll leave the store to you instead of them, he’d say, jostling her shoulder. He had stopped saying that.
Mara slipped the wrapped pastry out from under the counter. She broke it into halves and put one in each pocket, hoping Gerry wouldn’t see the lumps when they left. She left the empty paper on the counter, dusted with the crumbs that had fallen when she broke the pastry.
An activity book lay next to where the pastry had been. It was for little kids, but Mara pulled it out anyway. Gerry’s children were too old to play with things like that now, but he still kept an array of diversions under the counter for when customers’ kids needed to be kept busy. It was better to do something than nothing. Armed with the felt-tip pen that was clipped to the cover, she began to flip through pages of half-colored drawings and connect-the-dots.
A few aisles over, near the butcher counter, she heard her father grumbling. She looked up and saw Gerry grab abba’s shoulder. As always, he was speaking too loudly. His voice boomed over the hum of the freezers. “I got in the best sausages on Wednesday,” he said. “They’re kosher. Try them. Make them for your, what do you call it, sadbath.”
By then, Gerry knew the word, but it was part of their banter. “Shabbat,” Abba corrected.
Gerry’s tone grew more serious. “You’re losing too much weight. A man needs meat.”
Abba’s voice went flat. “I eat when I am hungry. I am not hungry so much lately.”
Gerry’s grip tightened on abba’s shoulder. His voice dropped. “Jakub, you need to take care of yourself.”
He looked back furtively at Mara. Flushing with shame, she dropped her gaze to the activity book. She clutched the pen tightly, pretending to draw circles in a word search.
“You have to think about the future,” said Gerry. His voice lowered even further. Though he was finally speaking at a normal volume, she still heard every word. “You aren’t the one who’s dying.”
Mara’s flush went crimson. She couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger—all she felt was cold, rigid shock. She couldn’t stop herself from sneaking a glance at abba. He, too, stood frozen. The word had turned him to ice. Neither of them ever said it. It was a game of avoidance they played together.
Abba pulled away from Gerry and started down the aisle. His face looked numb rather than angry. He stopped at the counter, looking at everything but Mara. He took Abel’s leash and gestured for Mara to get off of the stool. “We’ll be late for your appointment,” he said, even though it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. In a louder voice, he added, “Ring up our cart, would you, Gerry? We’ll pick up our bags on our way out of town.”
Mara didn’t like Doctor Pinsky. Abba liked him because he was Jewish even though he was American-born reform with a degree from Queens. He wore his hair close-cut but it looked like it would Jew ’fro if he grew it out.
He kept his nails manicured. His teeth shone perfectly white. He never looked directly at Mara when he spoke. Mara suspected he didn’t like children much. Maybe you needed to be that way if you were going to watch the sick ones get worse.
The nurses were all right. Grace and Nicole, both blond and a bit fat. They didn’t understand Mara since she didn’t fit their idea of what kids were supposed to be like. She didn’t talk about pop or interactives. When there were other child patients in the waiting room, she ignored them.
When the nurses tried to introduce her to the other children anyway, Mara said she preferred to talk to adults, which made them hmm and flutter. Don’t you have any friends, honey? Nicole had asked her once, and Mara answered that she had some, but they were all on attic space. A year ago, if Mara had been upset, she’d have gone into a-space to talk to her best friend, Collin, but more and more as she got sick, she’d hated seeing him react to her withering body, hated seeing the fright and pity in his eyes. The thought of going back into attic space made her nauseous.
Grace and Nicole gave Mara extra attention because they felt sorry for her. Modern cancer treatments had failed to help and now Mara was the only child patient in the clinic taking chemotherapy. It’s hard on little bodies, said Grace. Heck, it’s hard on big bodies, too.
Today it was Grace who came to meet Mara in the waiting room, pushing a wheelchair. Assuming it was for another patient, Mara started to gather her crutches, but Grace motioned for her to stay put. “Let me treat you like a princess.”
“I’m not much of a princess,” Mara answered, immediately realizing from the pitying look on Grace’s face that it was the wrong thing to say. To Grace, that would mean she didn’t feel like a princess because she was sick, rather than that she wasn’t interested in princesses.
“I can walk,” Mara protested, but Grace insisted on helping her into the wheelchair anyway. She hadn’t realized how tightly abba was holding her hand until she pulled it free.
Abba stood to follow them. Grace turned back. “Would you mind staying? Doctor Pinsky wants to talk to you.”
“I like to go with Mara,” abba said.
“We’ll take good care of her.” Grace patted Mara’s shoulder. “You don’t mind, do you, princess?”
Mara shrugged. Her father shifted uncertainly. “What does Doctor Pinsky want?”
“He’ll be out in a few minutes,” said Grace, deflecting. “I’m sorry, Mr. Morawski. You won’t have to wait long.”
Frowning, abba sat again, fingers worrying the collar of his shirt. Mara saw his conflicting optimism and fear, all inscribed plainly in his eyes, his face, the way he sat. She didn’t understand why he kept hopin
g. Even before they’d tried the targeted immersion therapy and the QTRC regression, she’d known that they wouldn’t work. She’d known from the moment when she saw the almost imperceptible frown cross the city diagnostician’s face when he asked about the pain she’d been experiencing in her knee for months before the break. Yes, she’d said, it had been worse at night, and his brow had darkened, just for an instant. Maybe she’d known even earlier than that, in the moment just after she fell in ima’s studio, when she realized with strange, cold clarity that something was very wrong.
Bad news didn’t come all at once. It came in successions. Cancer is present. Metastasis has occurred. The tumors are unresponsive. The patient’s vitals have taken a turn for the worse. We’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say.
Grace wheeled Mara toward the back, maintaining a stream of banal, cheerful chatter, remarks about the weather and questions about the holidays and jokes about boys. Mara deflected. She wasn’t ever going to have a boyfriend, not the way Grace was teasing her about. Adolescence was like spring, one more thing buried in endless snow.
Mara felt exhausted as they pulled into the driveway. She didn’t have the energy to push abba away when he came around the truck to help her down. Mara leaned heavily on her father’s arm as they crunched their way to the front door.
She vomited in the entryway. Abel came to investigate. She pushed his nose away while abba went to get the mop. The smell made her even more nauseated and so when abba returned, she left him to clean up. It made her feel guilty, but she was too tired to care.
She went to the bathroom to wash out her mouth. She tried not to catch her eye in the mirror, but she saw her reflection anyway. She felt a shock of alienation from the thin, sallow face. It couldn’t be hers.
She could hear abba in the hallway, grumbling at Abel in Yiddish. Wan, late afternoon light filtered through the windows, foreshadowing sunset. A few months ago, she and abba would have been rushing to cook and clean before Shabbat. Now no one cleaned and Mara left abba to cook alone as she went into ima’s studio.
She paused by the barre before sitting, already worried about how difficult it would be to get up again. “I want to watch Coppélia,” she said. The AI whirred.
Coppélia began with a young woman reading on a balcony—except she wasn’t really a young woman, she was actually an automaton constructed by the mad scientist, Dr. Coppélius. The dancer playing Coppélia pretended to read from a red leather book. Mara told the AI to fast-forward to ima’s entrance.
Mara’s mother was dancing the part of the peasant girl, Swanhilde. She looked nothing like the dancer playing Coppélia. Ima was strong, but also short and compact, where Coppélia was tall with visible muscle definition in her arms and legs.
Yet later in the ballet, none of the other characters would be able to tell them apart. Mara wanted to shake them into sense. Why couldn’t they tell the difference between a person and a doll?
Abba lit the candles and began the prayer, waving his hands through the smoke. They didn’t have an adult woman to read the prayers and abba wouldn’t let Mara do it while she was still a child. Soon, he used to say, after your bat mitzvah. Now he said nothing.
They didn’t celebrate Shabbat properly. They followed some traditions—tonight they’d leave the lights on, and tomorrow they’d eat cold food instead of cooking—but they did not attend services. If they needed to work then they worked. As a family, they had always been observant in some ways, and relaxed in others; they were not the kind who took well to following rules. Abba sometimes seemed to believe in Hashem and at other times not, though he believed in rituals and tradition. Still, before Mara had become ill, they’d taken more care with halakha.
As abba often reminded her, Judaism taught that survival was more important than dogma. Pikuach nefesh meant that a hospital could run electricity that powered a machine that kept a man alive. A family could work to keep a woman who had just given birth comfortable and healthy.
Perhaps other people wouldn’t recognize the exceptions that Mara and her father made from Shabbat as being matters of survival, but they were. They were using all they had just by living. Not much remained for G-d.
The long window over the kitchen counters let through the dimming light as violet and ultramarine seeped across the horizon. The tangerine sun lingered above the trees, preparing to descend into scratching, black branches. Mara’s attention drifted as he said Kiddush over the wine.
They washed their hands. Abba tore the challah. He gave a portion to Mara. She let it sit.
“The fish is made with ginger,” abba said. “Would you like some string beans?”
“My mouth hurts,” Mara said.
Abba paused, the serving plate still in his hands.
She knew that he wouldn’t eat unless she did. “I’ll have a little,” she added softly.
She let him set the food on her plate. She speared a single green bean and stared at it for a moment before biting. Everything tasted like metal after the drugs.
“I used turmeric,” he said.
“It’s good.”
Mara’s stomach roiled. She set the fork on her plate.
Her father ate a few bites of fish and then set his fork down, too. A maudlin expression crossed his face. “Family is Hashem’s best gift,” he said.
Mara nodded. There was little to say.
Abba picked up his wine glass. He twisted the stem as he stared into red. “Family is what the goyim tried to take from us with pogroms and ghettoes and the shoah. On Shabbat, we find our families, wherever we are.”
Abba paused again, sloshing wine gently from side to side.
“Perhaps I should have gone to Israel before you were born.”
Mara looked up with surprise. “You think Israel is a corrupt theocracy.”
“There are politics, like opposing a government, and then there is needing to be with your people.” He shrugged. “I thought about going. I had money then, but no roots. I could have gone wherever I wanted. But I thought, I will go to America instead. There are more Jews in America than Israel. I did not want to live in the shadow of the shoah. I wanted to make a family in a place where we could rebuild everything they stole. Der mensch trakht un Gatt lahkt.”
He had been speaking rapidly, his accent deepening with every word. Now he stopped.
His voice was hoarse when it returned.
“Your mother . . . you . . . I would not trade it, but . . . “ His gaze became diffuse as if the red of the wine were a telescope showing him another world. “It’s all so fragile. Your mother is taken and you . . . tsuris, tsuris . . . and then there is nothing.”
It was dark when they left the table. Abba piled dishes by the sink so that they could be washed after Shabbat and then retired to his bedroom. Abel came to Mara, tail thumping, begging for scraps. She was too tired to make him beg or shake hands. She rescued her plate from the pile of dishes and laid it on the floor for him to lick clean.
She started toward her bed and then changed her mind. She headed downstairs instead, Abel following after. She paused with her hand on the knob of the red-painted door before entering abba’s workshop.
Mara hadn’t seen abba go downstairs since their argument that morning but he must have managed to do it without her noticing. The doll sat primly on her stool, dignity restored, her head tilted down as if she were reading a book that Mara couldn’t see.
Mara wove between worktables until she reached the doll’s side. She lifted its hand and pressed their palms together as abba had done. It was strange to see the shape of her fingers so perfectly copied, down to the fine lines across her knuckles.
She pulled the thing forward. It lolled. Abel ducked its flailing right hand and ran a few steps away, watching warily.
Mara took hold of the thing’s head. She pressed the tip of her nose against the tip of its nose, trying to match their faces as she had their palms. With their faces so close together, it looked like a Cyclops, staring ba
ck at her with one enormous, blank eye.
“I hate you,” Mara said, lips pressed against its mute mouth.
It was true, but not the same way that it had been that morning. She had been furious then. Betrayed. Now the blaze of anger had burned down and she saw what lay in the ashes that remained.
It was jealousy. That this doll would be the one to take abba’s hand at Shabbat five years from then, ten years, twenty. That it would take and give the comfort she could not. That it would balm the wounds that she had no choice but to inflict.
Would Mara have taken a clockwork doll if it had restored ima to her for these past years?
She imagined lying down for the scans. She imagined a machine studying her brain, replicating her dreams neuron by neuron, rendering her as mathematical patterns. She’d read enough biology and psychology to know that, whatever else she was, she was also an epiphenomenon that arose from chemicals and meat and electricity.
It was sideways immortality. She would be gone, and she would remain. There and not there. A quantum mechanical soul.
Love could hurt, she knew. Love was what made you hurt when your ima died. Love was what made it hurt when abba came to you gentle and solicitous, every kindness a reminder of how much pain you’d leave behind.
She would do this painful thing because she loved him, as he had made this doll because he loved her. She thought, with a sudden clenching of her stomach, that it was a good thing most people never lived to see what people planned to make of them when they were gone.
What Gerry had said was as true as it was cutting. Abba was not the one who would die.
Abba slept among twisted blankets, clutching his pillow as if afraid to let it go.
Mara watched from the doorway. “Abba.”
He grumbled in his sleep as he shifted position.
“Abba,” she repeated. “Please wake up, abba.”
She waited while he put on his robe. Then, she led him down.
She made her way swiftly through the workshop, passing the newly painted marionette and the lonely mechanical hand. She halted near the doll, avoiding its empty gaze.
