The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  Phoebe thinks of Camille, at eight, and ten, and thirteen, with her notebook and pen asking the children questions and writing down their answers, wanting to know the underlying stories of everything. Sometimes the kids were their same ages, sometimes older, with thicker accents, and Camille wasn’t afraid of them the way Phoebe was. Phoebe had hated those visits.

  “I remember,” she says. “But last night, he didn’t even get to be named Man of the Decade. If he’s dead, do you think he’ll still be honored? In some kind of posthumous dedication?”

  “Don’t think that way, Phoebe.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Try. I don’t know why I’m having this feeling, there’s no basis for it one way or the other, but I don’t think this is going to end in tragedy. In confusion maybe, and a hell of a lot of explanations, but not in tragedy. Or at least I keep sending that hope out into the universe.”

  Phoebe should be sending hope out into the universe, but her line to the universe is very weak. She sent out hope with fictional Aaron Green, and that has failed to bring her something simpler, like love, so how will her hope return their father?

  “I will,” Phoebe says, closing her eyes, thinking Camille has always been more naturally optimistic than her. “I’m sending that hope out right now.”

  Then Phoebe opens her eyes. “You don’t think Dad deliberately left, do you? Is that what you mean by confusion and explanations?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. They didn’t find him at the resort. He’s not in any of the hospitals. And I can’t see him ever leaving Mom, or Mom leaving him. So where is he? People like Dad don’t just disappear like this from their lives.”

  Camille may have been considering living like a native on the Trobriand Islands, but even she would not disappear this way.

  “People don’t just disappear from their lives like this,” Phoebe says with vehemence. “Families don’t just find themselves in the midst of a mystery.”

  “You’re right,” Camille says.

  SUNSHINE BEATS DOWN ON their heads as they watch their mother across the pool. Roma is still at the table, silent, motionless, hands folded together in her lap. Her face, Camille thinks, is a sort of death mask, full mouth in a straight line, a frown puckering her forehead. Camille watches until she sees her mother’s chest rising and falling, and then feels her own doing the same.

  “I can see her breathing. But she hasn’t said anything since we cleared the dishes.”

  “I know,” Phoebe says.

  “She hasn’t moved either.”

  “I know.”

  They approach slowly, not wanting to frighten, placing light hands on their mother’s shoulders.

  “Mom?” Phoebe says gently. “Why don’t you go inside and lie down? Try and get a little sleep. We’ll wake you if anything happens.”

  Startled, Roma looks up at her daughters. “I can’t go into the house. I don’t want to be in our bedroom. I don’t want to see my gown on the floor. I keep thinking about sitting alone on that terrace last night seeing Baba Tatiana and wishing I could believe the way she believed.”

  She hadn’t meant to say any of that. She meant to say, “We’re all going to be strong. We’re not going to contemplate the unknown particulars. If we do that, we’ll make ourselves crazy spinning on the wheel of conjecture. So let’s just be together right now.”

  But perhaps they ought to contemplate those unknown particulars. Perhaps she ought to tell her daughters that her mind has ricocheted from fear, to confusion, back to fear. Last night, she was sure something terrible had happened to Harry. At sunrise this morning, she wondered whether he might have left her. Now, with all these hours gone, and all their calls to his cell phone picked up by voicemail, and the survivor cash intact, which the children know nothing about, she’s terrified again that something terrible has happened to him. Perhaps she ought to tell them she keeps imagining the detectives arriving with solemn faces and whispered condolences, bringing with them the altered contours of her future, of all of their futures.

  No, no, no.

  “Then, how about a chaise, Mom?” Phoebe says. “You’ll be more comfortable. We’ll all lie in the sun.”

  “Yes, fine,” she says and finds herself upright.

  It’s automatic, Roma thinks—their arranging three chaises with breathing room between them. It’s the gene that Tatiana possessed, and passed down to Inessa, who passed it down to Roma, who passed it down to Phoebe and Camille. A shared gene that, in times of trouble, or conflict, or dissension, or an unprecedented major crisis, like this one, demands simultaneous closeness with a touch of physical distance. It isn’t the kind of gene that splits on gender lines, and yet it is missing in Simon. If he were here, he wouldn’t be giving himself extra room. He’d be a restive, inquiring dog, pacing, and insisting on discussing everything, saying, “Can’t we be closer together so it’s easier to talk?” and flummoxed when his mother and his sisters shook their heads.

  “I’ll get you something cold to drink,” Phoebe says.

  Camille floats towels onto the chaises. “Take off the caftan, Mom,” and Roma finds she’s wearing Harry’s caftan, and underneath, her bathing suit from early this morning.

  “I don’t think I washed my face. I didn’t take off my good earrings.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” Camille says, taking the caftan from her. “Sit down.”

  Roma sits.

  Phoebe reappears with a pitcher of Arnold Palmers and pours Roma a tall glass. “Sweeter than you like, but you need the sugar now, so drink.”

  Roma drinks as if she’s been parched for years.

  “Lie down, Mom,” her daughters say, and then she is prone.

  HELL IS DISCONCERTINGLY VACATION-LIKE, the temperature hovering at a comfortable hundred degrees, the flowers bright, the bees busy, the blue water of the pool inviting. It feels so very wrong to be stretched out like this, as if it were a regular lazy mid-August Sunday.

  What would she be doing today if her husband were not missing? Reading the newspaper, or reading a book, or reading session notes about tomorrow’s patients, or talking to Harry. Since the children are here, conversation would revolve around their interests, and she would carefully extract from them the state of their lives, explore a particular spot of concern, but the only subject of interest is the one she wants to avoid.

  She instructs herself to stop thinking, to concentrate on the vitamin D she’s taking in. A body absorbs that vitamin best not from a pill, but direct from the sun. Most days she tries to sit outside for fifteen minutes because she is the age that she is and vitamin D regulates the absorption of calcium and phosphorous, aids the blood and the gut, averts the weakening of aging bones, reduces the risk of developing multiple sclerosis or heart disease.

  Her sense of time is still absent. She’s not sure how long Simon has been gone, or how long ago Elena and the children left, or how long she has been out here under the sun’s undiluted rays. She can feel her skin crackling. She needs sunscreen, but the girls are as inwardly occupied and quiet as she. She doesn’t want to disturb them, and can’t rouse herself. Her thoughts are cacophonous, and she hushes and hushes herself, until the noise calms, converts, becomes a wobbly internal blankness; then she hears Camille whispering to Phoebe, “I wonder if she really saw Baba Tatiana on the terrace.”

  Roma thinks about that, because the question is absurd, because her brilliant daughters sometimes say silly things, because no matter how clear-eyed they think they are, they should recognize the truth when they hear it. Roma never needed to teach them about luck—that belief they adopted naturally—but she passed down to them something else she was taught: to listen for the truth. And Roma was listening for the truth about Harry’s disappearance when Tatiana appeared on the terrace. Of course Tatiana was on the terrace last night, in some form or another. It’s true she’s never appeared outside of Roma’s dreams before, but last night she did, as she had to, because the past is always part of th
e present.

  FIFTY

  SIMON IS GROWING UP: he is a boy with a kite; a teen with long hair and fingers raised in an old-fashioned peace sign; a very young high school graduate grinning in gown and mortarboard; a college freshman on his dorm-room bed, knees poking through jeans; an eager law school student pointing to a high tower of first-year case tomes from which he would begin to learn jurisprudence; a married man of five seconds, holding his happy bride in his arms; a proud father, with one, then two daughters on his lap. There are photographs of his sisters, too, sporting evidence of their own crazier rides through those stages. Under glass, the three Tabor siblings mature in black and white and Kodak colors somehow still vibrant. He doesn’t recall these shelves of remembrance, but the last time he was here, he was maybe nine.

  He is at CST, in his father’s office. The late-morning sun through the windows illuminates another set of photographs pinned to an enormous white corkboard that runs the length and height of an entire wall. There must be twenty thousand passport faces hanging up there, of all the people Harry Tabor has released from their exhausting existences, brought to Palm Springs in twos, threes, fours or more. Simon used to think of the planes by which they made their escapes as airborne arks, his father as Noah. How often has his father looked up at these faces when he’s on the phone arranging their transport, or fighting with foreign authorities to free them, his people?

  The bookcases are crammed, too: history, geography, ancient civilizations, and what Simon would call miscellany, and then a large assortment of language-translation dictionaries—from English to Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Russian, Romanian, Moldovan, Lithuanian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, and standard Chinese.

  He removes a scuffed black book, its spine bare. It’s a prayer book, inscribed:

  TO HIRAM TABOR

  IN CELEBRATION OF YOUR BAR MITZVAH LOVE

  YOUR PARENTS

  The handwriting belongs either to grandfather Mordy or grandmother Lenore, and one of them was not simply inscribing an important gift for an important day, but issuing an order, a directive, a reiteration of one of the Ten Commandments: Love Your Parents.

  He finds himself laughing, and then he actually can’t stop laughing, and then he’s crying, stumbling to his father’s worn leather chair, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

  “HEY, MAN. LISTEN, WE’RE going to figure out what’s going on,” Detective Aaron David says when he walks into Harry’s office and finds Simon sobbing.

  Simon feels the detective’s hand on his back, patting as he would a child, humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which is Lucy and Isabel’s favorite lately. Simon’s face is wet with tears, and he says, “I sing that to my kids. Drives me crazy, but, you know, it really is calming.”

  “Part of my repertoire. My sister’s got four under the age of six.”

  “Tough.”

  “Brutal. Listen, my partner called. The password on your father’s laptop is probably nine characters. Without a brute-force program, it can take up to five days to decode something that long, but the techs are confident they’ll figure it out by this afternoon.

  “I’d like to check this computer of your father’s, but I can give you more time.”

  “No, take the seat.”

  The detective sits, rolls up to Harry’s long gray desk and powers up the computer.

  “No password here,” he notes.

  “Exactly. He’s never had passwords, so I don’t understand why he had one at home.”

  The detective opens Harry’s browser and scrolls to History.

  There’s nothing listed under Earlier Today.

  There’s nothing listed under Saturday, August 18.

  He moves down to Friday, August 17.

  “Okay, on Friday he checked out something called the Cactus to Clouds Trail.”

  “That’s a hiking trail on San Jacinto,” Simon says. “The steepest day-hike route in the country. Net elevation gain of ten thousand three hundred feet. It’s a hike I’ve always wanted to do with my dad, but the thought of it makes him seriously nervous.”

  The detective looks up. “He’s an avid hiker?”

  “Avid to the extent that we’ve hiked some part of San Jacinto together at least once a year since I was a kid. But always an easy trail. I was going to suggest the two of us take a hike this weekend …”

  “Maybe he was going to make the same suggestion?”

  “Maybe. But he wouldn’t choose Cactus to Clouds.”

  “Would he hike San Jacinto on his own?”

  “Never. He always says, ‘The mountain’s inherently dangerous no matter how easy the trail.’”

  “He’s right.”

  The detective scrolls to the next entry and Simon looks at the screen.

  “He was looking up Leonard Cohen?”

  “I would say he looked up a lot about Leonard Cohen,” the detective says.

  The Official Leonard Cohen Site

  Leonard Cohen—Wikipedia

  Leonard Cohen Dead at 82—Rolling Stone

  Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker—The New Yorker

  Leonard Cohen, Epic and Enigmatic Songwriter, Is

  Dead at 82—The New York Times

  Leonard Cohen Explains “Hineni Hineni / I’m ready, my Lord”—Cohencentric: Leonard Cohen Considered

  “He must really like Leonard Cohen,” Simon says quietly. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Whoever knows anything about his father? I sure don’t,” the detective says, then taps on the music icon.

  Simon leans in closer. His father last played a Cohen song named “You Want It Darker.”

  “Did he listen to anything else?” Simon asks.

  The detective checks. “No, only this one,” he says, and hits Play.

  Naked melancholy stripped to the bone, haunting music with a chorus singing, “Hineni, Hineni.”

  Simon’s heard that phrase before, the doubled word emerging soundlessly from his own lips, keeping time with the singers. How does he know the word? Where has he heard it?

  When the song loops around again, the detective checks the next site Harry visited, and Simon’s question is answered.

  Hineni: On Yom Kippur, during the Kol Nidre service, the Cantor will chant a tremendously powerful prayer called Hineni. Translated, it means “Here I am.”

  Yes, of course, at Palm Springs Synagogue on Yom Kippur, Simon’s chanted, “Hineni, Hineni,” his voice joining those of his family, the rest of the congregation, the old, old cantor.

  The detective opens the next site.

  “Hineni” means “Here I am!” But you’ve got to watch out how you say it, because it is a way of expressing total readiness to give oneself—it’s an offer of total availability.

  Simon looks down at the top of the detective’s head, at the dark curls, a few wiry sprigs of white. “Did you read that one?” he asks.

  “Yes. What’re you thinking?”

  “‘A way of expressing total readiness to give oneself’? What does that mean to you?”

  From the tinny computer speakers, they both hear, “Hineni, Hineni, I’m ready, my Lord …”

  The detective looks up at Simon. “Hey, it’s okay. We don’t know what this song means to him.”

  “But you heard that, right?” Simon says. “‘I’m ready, my Lord.’”

  “I heard it.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Suicide?”

  “Would he be considering that for any reason?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Then he probably just wanted to know what the word means in English.”

  Simon prefers that explanation to the one gaining purchase in his thoughts—that there is something he doesn’t know about his father, that perhaps no one knows, like the rapid onset of a fatal illness or a form of inoperable cancer he has learned about, but has kept to himself.

  “Look at these other sites he visited. Th
ey also seem to mitigate against the idea of him harming himself.” And Simon looks:

  Archaeological biblical routes through Israel

  Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land through the Five Books of Moses

  The Exodus Route: Walking It!

  Is his father planning to undertake some crazy walk through a distant desert? Do these sites, with pictures of happy people pointing at the sand dunes around them, then raising glasses to each other at sunset on terraces of nice hotels, mitigate anything, as the detective has suggested? Simon isn’t sure; his father could do away with himself along the way. Under an incessant sun, he could find himself a sandy hole, sit down, and wait for the carrion birds to come.

  “Your family ever been to Israel?”

  “No.”

  “Is he planning a trip there?”

  “He’s never had any interest.”

  “It’s the first tangible we have to go on, so we’ll run it down. If your father bought a ticket to Israel, or to anywhere out of the country, and if he used it, he’ll be registered on the global APIS.”

  “Registered on what?”

  “Advance Passenger Information System. It’s tied into DHS, and it takes a little time to get the information.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that he would have left his own party to fly anywhere,” Simon says. “And his car’s still at home.”

  “Taxi or private car service could have gotten him to either the Palm Springs airport or LAX.”

  “What about the limo driver who took us to the gala?”

  “Cleared. He was driving all night, jobs we’ve confirmed.”

  “I’m trying to picture my father as the wandering Jew in a whole other desert, one with bombs and guns and armies and Israelis and Palestinians. But I can’t see it.”

  “Enough years in the job, I’ve seen people do things you can’t imagine.”

  “So I’ve got to go back to the house and tell my family what? That it’s possible our very own Man of the Decade has taken a runner, might literally be following the edict of ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’”