The Tenth Song

by Ragen, Naomi

  They were in trouble.

  There was a way to get out of this trouble. To zap the margins with radiation to kill the cells, to stop them reproducing. The healthy, good cells, the cancerous bad cells, zap them all. Every day, for months. Hope the technicians’ fingers won’t slip and get your heart, your lungs. Hope to God they know what they are doing.

  The patient felt fine. The patient wasn’t worried. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You are not a doctor!” he’d scream, when she suggested making copies of the X-rays, biopsies, diagnosis, and sending them to other professor genius saviors who resided in other research palaces made possible by multibillion-dollar research budgets: places where husbands lived a decade after being diagnosed with liver cancer, and brain cancer, and kidney cancer, and sarcomas and melanomas and carcinomas . . .

  She’d fling her arm across her face, stretching out on the bed. “You aren’t behaving responsibly. I have to take over and do what’s best for you,” she’d tell him, echoing the words of her shrink, lately consulted. It was not what she had wanted him to say. She had wanted her shrink to give her absolution—to say: “He’s a big boy, and this is his life, his decision. You can’t tell him what to do, as much as you love him.”

  Her chest pains (or were they stomach pains, that horrible squeezing feeling on her left shoulder that seems like a prelude to a heart attack?) began. There was the sleepless wandering around a dark house, attempts at meditation. And browsing through self-help books as the clock clicked past one, past two, and on to three. And now, after the horror had finally ended with the passage of a cancer-free five years, this new horror. This new danger. And again, there was no choice.

  The day of their lawyers’ appointments, they’d get up at seven.

  She’d stand in front of her mirror thinking: What’s the appropriate outfit for the wife of an accused felon? Nothing too revealing, but also not dowdy; you’d want them to know they had to take you seriously. It’s a whole new life experience, dancing down this yellow-brick road to the wizards who hold the keys to all we want so much to keep. Like the Sarcoma Kings, the lawyers too were larger than life, legal specialists who can interpret pages of numbers, affidavits, and correspondence to distinguish between a twenty-year lockup and maximum humiliation, and absolute vindication and freedom.

  The waiting room in a legal office was similar to waiting rooms to see the Sarcoma Kings. People looked each other over, trying to guess who was in trouble and who was just along for the ride. As with the cancer specialists, Abigail wanted to wear a sign on her chest: it’s not me. She didn’t know why that was important, unless it was because she didn’t want their interest or their pity. Not wishing attention herself, she nevertheless looked everyone else over shamelessly. In the legal offices, the eyes are troubled, or bored, or both. People seem restless, skin pinched between brows. But nearly everyone is expensively dressed, well toned, made-up. In contrast, the cancer clinic was filled with a collection of the old and overweight who made her want to comb her hair until it shone, to put some demarcation line between herself and them. She wanted to be outside this club, sympathizing and admiring its membership.

  She thought of other queues: Lines in Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s. The line in the Galeries Lafayette outside the Louis Vuitton boutique. Lines in Disneyland. Now their lives consisted of waiting patiently for something they desperately didn’t want to be involved in.

  The lawyer has two others with him. Students? Colleagues?

  He goes through the files. The initial charges confuse him. He shows it to the others. Is it money laundering? Or isn’t it? Why isn’t there an exact list of charges, and the names of the accusers?

  Marvin Cahill gives them a litany of dangers involved in any litigation.

  The doctor gave them a litany of dangers involved in radiation.

  Cahill tells them what lies ahead in the best-case scenario: pretrial hearings, then the trial itself, with days for questioning witnesses.

  CTs every three months. And then a colonoscopy, bone scans, etc., etc., for as far into the future as the eye can see. Endless medical tests. Endless worry awaiting the results. For the rest of our lives, this fearful thing hanging over our heads like a sword.

  I can’t bear it. Can’t bear it.

  God has thrown a brick at me to get my attention for the second time, she thinks. “What is all this supposed to teach me? What am I supposed to learn?” Abigail agonizes out loud. Adam says nothing; his faith made of a harder metal, one that apparently has no melting point because it was forged in doubt. He will never lose the faith he has because it is so tentative, so realistic. He believes in God but does not believe that God involves Himself in the tedious affairs of men. On earth, you were on your own.

  They finally print out all the pictures from their around-the-world trip. They sit at night at the dining-room table dividing them into groups chronologically, then geographically, finally putting them into an album. There they are, smiling in Park Guell in Barcelona. There is the beach in the Dominican Republic. The black-and-white cactus pictures taken in Tucson. The rainbow in Waikiki Beach that fell over the whole city and into the water like a child’s drawing. There she is holding a croissant at breakfast at the Four Seasons in Maui, her face tan against the white blouse, beaming at the camera. The licorice-smooth backs of whales protruding from the waters off Kauai. New Zealand bungee jumpers. Australian rain forests. The orchids in Singapore. And that picture, her favorite, of Adam in the rattan chair framed by the veranda in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, looking like some F. Scott Fitzgerald expat. He is so young, so handsome, she thinks, in that picture. They smile, even though they know now that in every frame there had been this lump in his chest, which they kept telling each other was nothing, and anyhow, it wasn’t growing. No, it was exactly the same, and, anyway, it’s nothing. They were so committed to this nothing (“the doctor said it was nothing”) that even when they got back home and were only given an appointment two weeks away with the surgeon, who needs to go over the results of CT scans they took before they left, they didn’t think to speed it up, to call back, to insist . . .

  That night, she had a dream. They are in Germany with Shoshana and Matthew. They are in a nice hotel, on vacation. Suddenly, Adam falls on his back on the floor. He can’t breathe. She thinks: He is going to die, right here. She asks the waiter: “Please, get him an ambulance. Please!” But the man doesn’t seem to understand her. She wants to take Adam in a taxi to the hospital, but she doesn’t speak the language of this new place. She doesn’t know how to help him, so she watches him gasping. And then, suddenly, he stops. He gets up. He looks fine. He says he feels fine. “But you aren’t fine. We have to get you to a hospital. It could happen again. You could die!” He is upset with her. “I feel fine,” he says, and they leave the hotel. It’s a lovely day. And the grandchildren are with them. After all, they don’t want to ruin it for them; they are on vacation. The urgency she felt a moment before leaves as her footsteps slow to match her husband’s. She looks down the block at the foreign landscape, wondering which direction the hospital is in, but there is no way to know. “I’m fine,” Adam repeats. There are two benches in front of the hotel, at right angles. Adam sits down on one, and she on the other. It is the kind of bench she’s never seen, the kind that has to be opened up, like a convertible. When she opens it, she sees a big, sticky stain on it. I wish I could wash it, but I can’t, she thinks. So she sits down next to it, trying not to let it worry her.

  Later that morning, she tried to tell Adam her dream, but he didn’t really want to hear it. He said: “But what does it tell you about reality? Nothing. It’s just some reality in your head that has nothing to do with anything. It’s all just in your head.” He didn’t want to interpret it, as she did, wanting to crack open its secrets like an oyster.

  The other side of midnight. The barking dogs, the faint streetlight. The hope that it will be 4:00 A.M., not 2:00 A.M., so there is less time to kill
until morning. Each time she touches her husband, she feels a tiny tug of desperation. Each time she looks at him, she loves him more. She can see that now. Understand it the way she never has in all the forty years they’ve been together. So many wretched times. So many fights. And yet, a partnership that let us run our “business” and succeed beyond our wildest dreams. The children, all grown now.

  I’ve had that, a father for my children, a husband to help me all those years, she thinks gratefully, which is more than my poor mother ever did; more than some women ever have. A good man, who went to work willingly, and came home willingly, and cared for his children willingly, and with all his heart. An honest man. A kind man, despite his temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. I wish I could sleep, and not worry, and have the courage to face God; to ask Him for things I’m afraid I don’t deserve. I wish I wasn’t afraid to pray, to bang down His door. I wish I had more faith that my prayers will be answered. But this terrible trouble, this is from Him, isn’t it? Or are misfortunes and illnesses something we bring on ourselves by our own choices? And when, when, when will it all be over?

  “There is someone at the door,” Adam said.

  “What?” She propped herself up on one elbow, then reached toward the radio alarm. “It’s three o’clock in the morning!”

  “I’ll go down,” Adam said, throwing off the covers and sliding his feet into slippers as he reached for his robe.

  “I’m not sure you should! Be careful,” she called after him anxiously, not moving, waiting to hear something. She heard the door open, and low male voices.

  “Who is it? Who’s down there?” she called out, jumping out of bed and pulling on her bathrobe. She ran to the landing in the stairwell, peering down. It was Seth. “What’s happened?” she called out, running down the steps.

  “Calm down, Abby. Seth, come in and sit down. Let me get you a drink.”

  “There’s no time!” he said in anguish.

  “No time for what? What’s happened?” Abigail said, her voice at the very edge of losing control, so many horrible things flashing through her mind.

  “Abby, Seth thinks that Kayla . . . that she’s . . . well, we don’t know where she is.”

  “She went to that job interview in Manhattan three days ago. And she still isn’t back. And my friend Bob, who works at the firm, says she showed up at the firm but left before her interview began.”

  “Why would she do that? Go all the way to Manhattan and run off before the interview? It’s not like her. It makes no sense.” Adam shook his head.

  “I agree with you, which is why I’m here. I’ve looked everywhere, called everyone. No one has seen or heard from her in two days. Have you?” His eyes were bloodshot and desperate.

  “I feel ill,” Abigail said, losing her footing. She sat down heavily on the stairs, her hand over her heart. How much more? she thought, listening to its rapid beat tattoo her palm.

  “Where was she staying in New York?” Adam asked calmly.

  “Well, that’s just it. She wasn’t staying anywhere. She was supposed to come back the same day. That was the plan.”

  “Have you tried her cell phone?”

  “I’ve been dialing for two days. Nothing.”

  Abigail stood up. “Let’s try it again.”

  Seth shrugged. “Why not?” He took out his phone and dialed. A look of wonderment came over his face. “Kayla?”

  “Is it her? Thank God!” Adam wiped his forehead, his face collapsing from stoic calm into wretchedness with amazing speed.

  “Let me talk to her!” Abigail grabbed the phone. “Kayla, darling, where are you? Are you all right? What? You’re where?”

  “Where is she?” Adam said.

  “Kayla, when are you coming back?”

  Seth and Adam watched Abigail’s face as she stared into the phone, trying to read the answers in her forehead and cheeks.

  “Kayla, darling, that makes no sense . . . how can you . . . when your father and I are going through so much . . . and Seth . . . he’s been insane with worry . . . Kayla! Hello?”

  She put down the phone. “Her battery went dead. She says she was on planes for the last two days and couldn’t call.”

  “Planes? Where is she? Is she all right?” Seth shouted.

  “She’s in Israel.”

  “Israel?” Seth’s face flushed in bewilderment and fury. “And when is she planning to come back? We are in the middle of the school year . . .” he said, barely coherent.

  “That’s just it. She says she’s not sure she is coming back.”

  “Ever?” Seth whispered, his fury suddenly gone, bewilderment and hurt taking its place.

  They stared at each other wordlessly.

  10

  How strange, Kayla Samuels mused, putting her now-dead cell phone back into her purse, that huge, life-changing decisions so often pivoted on the tiniest details. The fact that she’d taken her green and not her blue backpack to the job interview in New York. The fact that she was disorganized and lazy and the green one still contained her passport from last summer’s trip to Paris. Had any of these things been different, she would probably now be back in her room in Boston arguing with Seth, studying, and dreading the next newspaper article on her father.

  What luck, she thought with momentary exhilaration, envisioning the thousands of miles she had put between herself and everything and everyone familiar—all the people she knew, who knew her and her parents; all the newspaper-reading idiots of the Western world.

  Or was it luck? Her mother sounded heartbroken, and her father was probably even worse off. And then there was Seth “insane with worry.”

  She couldn’t let herself think about any of that, not yet! Not when she’d just tunneled out from under the avalanche of heartbreak and betrayal that had crushed and buried her over the last few months, using her own bare hands, having finally realized that the rescue dogs weren’t coming; her parents and fiancé weren’t coming. She was almost there, already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But the sides and roof, she realized, were fragile and thin. Just thinking the wrong thoughts could bring them crashing down. She just couldn’t risk it.

  She waited on line at passport control, filled with dread at being recognized. But when her turn came, the pretty Sabra with long dark hair just stamped her passport. “Have a good stay!” she said in heavily accented English. See, Kayla told herself, exulting. My name and face mean nothing to her!

  She walked out into a wall of greeters anxious to gather some beloved wanderer into their arms, holding flowers and helium balloons in the shapes of Dora the Explorer and Dumbo. They looked her over; then they looked away. No one was waiting for her.

  “Taxi, young lady?”

  “No thanks.”

  But he wouldn’t budge. “I have nice car. Big, American Buick. Where the young lady go? Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem?”

  She shook her head, moving on. She had managed to avoid thinking about the answer to that question the entire eleven-hour plane ride. In any case, she couldn’t afford taxis.

  She’d cashed a check drawn on her college tuition account, viewing it as a personal loan she fully intended to repay. Someday. Depending on whether or not a law-school dropout could ever find employment. When that ran out, she’d be on her own.

  “Jerusalem, motek? We have five. We need six. You come?” the driver of a shuttle service accosted her. The other passengers eyed her hungrily. They, at least, were happy to see her, she told herself climbing in. A black-clad Chassidic man began arguing with the driver about where she would sit, piously adamant that it would not be next to him. Finally, a husband and wife agreed to separate, allowing her to sit down without controversy.

  “Where you are going?” the driver asked her, slamming the door shut.

  He started the engine.

  “Hotel,” she answered, shouting over the noise. “Maybe you know someplace central, and very cheap?”

  “Try the little hotel off Ben Yehuda Street
,” the wife offered. “My American nieces always stay there.”

  “Uff.” The husband shook his head. “Such a hole.”

  “She wanted cheap.” The wife shrugged.

  “The place. You go?” the driver asked Kayla again, insistently.

  “Okay, okay. Ben Yehuda Street.” Her head swirled. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, a whirlwind had picked her up, hurtling her through time and space. She didn’t think, as any sensible person would far from home, in a strange country where she knew no one: What am I going to do? No, she didn’t think at all. Closing her eyes, she happily gave in to fatigue.

  “Geveret! Your stop!”

  Were they here already? She opened her sleepy eyes, peering out the dusty window. The white-stone walls of Jerusalem stared back at her. A shiver went up her spine. Excitement? Fear? Dread? She didn’t know.

  Jerusalem.

  Exhausted, barely conscious of her surroundings, she found the hotel, checked in, and without even undressing fell into a deep sleep.

  She awoke feeling like a desert nomad, her hunger and thirst fierce and unfamiliar, her throat a bed of gravel clogged with mud. She coughed, spitting up and half choking on phlegm. She rushed to the bathroom, washing out her mouth and bringing cupped fistfuls of water to her lips to drink. She washed her face, cleaning the pus from the corners of her eyes, drying herself. The towel had seen better days, but at least it was clean.

  She pulled back the frayed drapes, opening the dusty shutters. Bright morning light streamed through. She was in the middle of a city street, with lively outdoor cafes and shoe stores and clothing shops. Even two flights up, she could smell the pizza. She was starving, she realized. And filthy.

  She stood beneath the burning-hot water, imagining solar water-heating panels baking in the Middle Eastern sun. She diluted it with as much cold as possible, to no avail, finally closing the hot-water tap altogether and making do with cold. Scrubbing off the accumulated grime of the last few days, she watched with pleasure as her skin turned pink and raw. But when she was done, a heap of sweaty clothes confronted her. The idea of putting them back on was disgusting. Rummaging through her backpack, she found one clean pair of underwear, a less sweaty bra, and her dress-for-success interview suit, wrinkled beyond recognition. Even if the room had an iron, which she highly doubted, pressing it would take at least an hour, at which time she’d be dead of hunger. Taking pleasure in the underwear—an unexpected treasure—she reluctantly pulled on the dark blue skirt, slipping her arms into the white blouse, then the blue jacket. She looked at herself in the mirror, appalled. Although she knew she would suffocate, she pulled on her coat, hoping at least to keep the outfit hidden and thus salvage some self-respect, surprised she still had any left.