by Judith Frank
They walked home quietly. Daniel didn’t dare speak. The wind whipped at them and Gal winced as her hair lashed her face. They descended to the cool dark underground walkway that crossed underneath Herzl Street, their sneakers making cupped muffled sounds on the sidewalk. Daniel’s hand sweated onto the photo album. How could he survive all this tiny girl was losing, when he felt her pain so sharply it made him gasp?
When they got home, Gal said she had a headache. Lydia got her to undress and gave her a cool sponge bath, and when Daniel passed by, he saw his mother murmuring to her and running a washcloth over her back as Gal stood, hands limp, turning obediently. Her face and lips had lost their color. After she was dried off, she crawled into bed and faced the wall, and she didn’t stir for the next twelve hours.
MATT PAINTED THE KIDS’ room, ordered a bed, a crib, a changing table, and a dresser for it. When the furniture arrived, he and Derrick and Brent sat on the bedroom floor holding Allen wrenches and scratching their chins over large unfolded instructions. When they took a break they went out to the backyard and wiped the accumulated dirt and pollen off of the plastic lawn chairs and sprawled in the shade of the big oak, drinking beer. Matt had a heavy feeling about all the grief about to enter his house, and Derrick gave him a pep talk. Derrick was a tall, forthright man with coffee-colored skin, a shaved head, and a neat goatee—not exactly handsome, but a treat to look at, his face was so open and lively. Derrick told him, emotion catching his throat, that he was about to find himself capable of things he’d never imagined he could do.
“I want them to feel safe,” Matt said. “How do you make kids feel safe?”
Derrick looked at him gently. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it. How can you promise a kid she’ll be safe when she already knows, better than you do, how dangerous the world is?”
Derrick sat up straighter, narrowed his eyes in thought. “I’m remembering a study done by Winnicott—he was this big English psychoanalyst—with I think it was English children after World War Two, who were evacuated from London, away from their parents, during the blitzkrieg. The ones who were assured that they and their parents and their houses were going to be safe, even though there was no evidence for that—on the contrary, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction—those kids fared better emotionally in the long term than the ones who were told by adults that they honestly didn’t know what was going to happen. Which goes against everything we’re normally taught, that the most important thing when dealing with children going through trauma is telling them the truth.”
Brent got up and set his bottle on the small brick patio, then roamed the borders of the yard, doing miscellaneous weeding. They were quiet for a while, watching him stoop and grip and wiggle gently, bringing up small balls of dirt and root. They commiserated over the political situation, Israel’s ravaging of West Bank towns; as a black man, Derrick thought of Israel as a colonial power, but as a social worker he tried to conscientiously examine his own potential anti-Semitism.
“When you’re there,” Matt said, “it seems really complicated. There are all these Israelis with their funny personalities, kind of assholes but also really human and likable, and no contact whatsoever with the Palestinians who are living through hell just a few miles away. And then you come home and see from here what Israel’s doing, and suddenly it seems very simple: it’s a nation committing terrible crimes against another people.”
They sat for a while longer, directing Brent here and there as though he were their sexy lawn boy.
“I’m going to fly back with them,” Matt said. “I bought a ticket.”
Derrick looked at him quickly. “Does Daniel know?”
“No. I can’t bring myself to tell him; I’m afraid he’ll be mad, or tell me not to come. So I’m just showing up. It’ll be kind of like a sitcom!” he said brightly, and Derrick laughed.
THREE DAYS BEFORE THEIR departure, Lydia took Gal to the mall to look for a good-bye present for Leora, and they returned with a necklace that said Friends forever.
“Good job, guys!” Daniel said as he and his father bent over, looking at it together, Gal nervously holding open the box close to her body, as though the whole thing might be ruined if they disturbed it. He shot his mother an impressed look, and she said, “It’s perfect, isn’t it.”
It fell upon Daniel to help Gal with the card. He sat with her on the living room rug, legs open over construction paper, scissors, and markers. “What do you want to write?” he asked.
Normal summer weather had returned to Jerusalem, and a soft, warm breeze came in through the open windows, ruffling Gal’s hair. She was barefoot, sitting between her heels, in shorts and a hideous T-shirt she loved that said Princess in curly script studded with rhinestones. “I don’t know,” she said. “What should I say?”
“Do you want to tell her that you love her and will miss her?”
“Yes,” she said gravely. “And also that she should come visit me in Massachusetts.” It had taken her a while to be able to pronounce the name of the state, which they still sometimes playfully called “Massachoochay.”
“Okay,” Daniel said.
“And I want to draw a picture,” she said, her energy gathering.
“Good idea.”
She bent forward till she was lying on her stomach supported by her elbows, selected a brown marker, and began to draw. Daniel was pretty sure it would be a horse. He sat facing her with his legs crossed, in a posture of watching and supporting as he brushed the newspaper off the coffee table and snuck looks at it.
“Oof!” she cried, and violently crumbled the paper.
“Wait,” he protested, “let me see!” He unfolded it. “What’s wrong with this?”
She gave him a withering look. “The head is all . . . it’s disgusting!”
“Okay,” he said mildly, taking a new piece of construction paper from the pile, which she carefully folded in half.
She completed the next horse before deciding that it was a failure too, and this time her small fierce face darkened into tears. Daniel snatched at the paper before she could destroy it.
“Sweetie, tell me what you want to do that you’re failing at. Because I think this one’s really nice.”
“You always say that!” she cried. “Even if it’s shit! Where will I put the writing?” She sat up and swiped at the markers, which went flying off the carpet and clattering over the linoleum floor.
Daniel looked soberly at the drawing, turned it every which way in his hands. “Can’t we put the writing on the back? I think that’d look really nice. And then you could draw even more around the horse, like grass and the sky.”
“No! It’s a card, so it’s supposed to be inside!”
“Not always, people write in all kinds of places,” he said. He patted his lap. “Come sit here for a second.”
“No! I have to do this!”
“Just to calm down for a second, and then we’ll take another look at it.”
She stood and he took her wrist to pull her down, and she smacked his arm and ran into her room and slammed the door so loudly the baby started crying.
Lydia and Sam came out of their room.
“Let her stay there for a little while and calm down,” Daniel said, meeting them in the hallway. His face was red, and he was trying to calm down himself, to stop being furious at Gal for refusing his help and comfort.
“What happened?”
“Just a fit of anxious perfectionism,” he said.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” Lydia asked.
“No, please, Mom, let me, just let her be alone for a little while.”
“Let me at least get Noam,” she said, venturing into the room. She emerged with the crying baby a few minutes later, her lips pursed. Daniel looked at her, knowing Gal had snapped at her. She caught his eye. “Brat,” she said.
He laughed. They went into the kitchen to start dinner. Sam sat the baby a
t his high chair and, instructed by Lydia, brought out the little containers of shredded chicken and rice. She handed him an apple and a paring knife and he peeled and cut it into careful slices. Lydia glanced from time to time toward Gal’s room, and then at Daniel, until he impatiently said, “Mom, stop, I’ll get her in a few minutes.”
He sat slumped in his chair, and his anger slowly wound its way through glumness and on into sadness so acute he had to rise again. He went into Gal’s room. She was on her bed, folded into a rocking ball, murmuring to herself. He picked up some toys and some Noah’s Ark pieces and sat on the floor quietly until he almost dozed off. He started awake and reached for his guitar, which stood propped against the wall. From the open window came the sound of a honking car, and of children shouting. “Gal,” he said quietly. “It must be so hard to leave your best friend.”
She quieted and lay still, alert.
“If I had to leave my best friend. Oysh. I’d be so mad.” Offer her something positive to hang on to, he told himself. But he couldn’t think of anything. What was there to offer? The promise of new friends?
How could they do this to her?
He sat and tuned the guitar, then softly strummed the mellowest chord progressions he could manage. He found himself humming the words to a Hebrew folk song called “Shores Are Sometimes” that he and Joel had learned together, in Joel’s dorm room on Mount Scopus, the Hebrew-English dictionary between them on the floor.
Shores are sometimes longings for a stream
Once I saw a shore
deserted by its stream
left with a broken heart of sand and stone.
So may a man
be left abandoned spent and worn
just like the shore.
He remembered the sound of their voices rising in unison—he could hear it so clearly! Joel had a heartier voice than Daniel’s, while Daniel’s was richer and more textured. He closed his eyes and tried to press the memory into his mind so he’d never forget it.
Matt sang with him sometimes too, and he had the best voice of all, a lovely tuneful tenor. When they first started living together, he had been embarrassed to join in with Daniel, joking that his irony forbade him to encourage the corny Kumbaya action. But he was drawn irresistibly to the clean, resonant sound of Daniel’s guitar, and before long, Daniel had him sitting with him as night fell, softly singing.
“That’s a sad song,” Gal said around the thumb still in her mouth, and Daniel said, “It sure is.” She sat up on her bed and slapped at her eyes the way she wiped them, a gesture that always made him wince, it looked so punishing. She rose and went to the Noah’s Ark box, reached in and took out some animal pairs in her fist. “Why don’t any of these have a boy and a boy together?” she asked.
He looked up at her, laughing with surprise, and pulled her into his lap for a rough nuzzle.
THAT EVENING, HE TRIED to reach Matt but kept getting the machine. Where the hell was he? It was early morning in Northampton. He’d better not be having an affair, he thought—not while his own days were composed of one mind-numbing task after another, among either bureaucrats or children. He thought of calling Derrick’s, but it was too early. The need to talk to Matt brimmed and swelled in him, and Daniel cursed him for being absent when he needed him most. He despaired of its success, but he had to run it by him anyway, had to propose again that they stay in Israel, at least for a few years. The reasoning seemed so unanswerable to him. And even if Matt couldn’t live here, maybe they could spend a year apart.
When the kids were asleep, he told his parents he had something he had to talk to them about, and told them his idea. They looked at him, stunned.
“We’ve made all these preparations for leaving, we have unrefundable plane tickets,” his father said. “Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
His mother’s face was pale and taut. “Honey,” she said. “I know it’s hard to take Gal away from her home—”
“We really don’t need to,” Daniel interrupted.
“What about your job?” his father asked.
“I’d resign. But I’m sure I could find freelance editing work here.” Daniel was eager and rational.
His mother’s voice trembled. “I don’t think I could lose two sons.”
“Mom, please don’t be melodramatic. You could come here all the time.”
“Daniel,” his father said. “We have a plan, a plan that we’ve made together after a lot of thought, and I think we should stick to it.”
They went to sleep troubled, his mother in tears, and in the morning they carried on a coded conversation with the two children nearby. “Let’s ask her,” Daniel said in a low voice, gesturing toward Gal.
“Don’t you dare!” his mother said, steering him out of the room with a pincer’s grip on his elbow. When they were in his room, and he’d yanked his arm away, she hissed, “Do not make that child decide. This is an adult’s decision. You cannot put the burden on her.”
Daniel slumped onto the desk chair and averted his gaze, unable to look at her, she was thrumming with such anger and resolve. He was aware that he had been stupid to suggest they ask Gal, and rankled that he’d lost ground in their argument by doing so. “I thought you didn’t want her raised by Matt,” he said, sending out his last-resort salvo.
“I don’t,” she said. And then there was a rustle at the front door and they heard a delighted shout from Gal. Lydia turned; Daniel stood and emerged from the room, stopped in surprise.
It was Matt himself, disheveled and smiling, a small bag slung over his shoulder, which he dropped as Gal ran up and flung her arms around his hips, crying, “Mordechai, you came back!”
He bent and squeezed her, kissed her hair; the baby let out a squeak and banged his spoon on his tray. Daniel and his parents stared at Matt, amazed. “Surprise,” he said, with a sheepish shrug.
Daniel was still in the shorts and T-shirt he’d slept in, morning stubble dotting his chin. “I couldn’t reach you on the phone,” he said idiotically.
“Well, that must be because I was in the air coming to be with you, honey,” Matt said, stepping forward. His shirt was damp at the armpits, and he leaned in, his lips approaching Daniel’s, then turning to kiss his cheek.
“I really . . .” Daniel said, and then could go no further.
His parents were standing with their arms crossed.
“Hi, Lydia. Hi, Sam,” Matt said.
“We were just going to take the kids to the park,” Lydia said, and started whisking everyone together as Gal hopped around and yelled, “No! No! Mordechai is here!”
“Was it something I said?” Matt asked comically. His stomach was sinking. He’d clearly walked into something bad; this had been a mistake after all.
“Of course not,” Lydia said, her eyes resolutely fixed on Gal, who was being steered by Sam to where her sandals lay on the floor.
“I was just kidding.”
And then they were gone. Matt looked at Daniel, whose face was tense and who wasn’t meeting his eyes. Great, he thought. He walked into the living room and set down his bag, then went into the kitchen to put on some water for coffee. His face was greasy from travel; he ran cold water in the sink, stooped and washed his face. He rose dripping and ripped a sizable piece of paper towel off the roll to blot himself dry with.
“Matt, I can’t,” Daniel was saying. “I tried to call.”
“Can’t what?” He turned, his heart pounding. This was it, Daniel was going to break up with him.
“I can’t take them back, I can’t do that to Gal.”
Matt sat on a kitchen chair, letting the words buzz around him without landing. Because once they landed, catastrophe would ensue.
“Matt.” Daniel kneeled at his feet and grasped his hands. “Please understand.” His face was stricken, his brown eyes huge.
Matt was nodding reflexively.
“That would mean living without me,” he said, feeling the words come out of his automaton’s mouth,
saying the words that logically followed the thing Daniel had said. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” Daniel said, tears spilling over his face.
Matt nodded. Nod, nod, nod: That was the way you were supposed to respond to somebody’s words.
But then he could hold them off no longer; the words landed, and adrenaline surged through him, making him gasp, making him feel like one of those people who could lift cars off of children. “Daniel,” he said. He remembered something—see? Adrenaline!—“Ilana asked you to take them away from here if anything happened to them.”
“No she didn’t,” Daniel said.
“She did! You’ve told me the story dozens of times, and in every version she asks you to! She says, ‘Daniel, take them away from here!’ ”
Daniel sat back on his heels, then crumpled till he was sitting on the floor. “I can’t stand it,” Daniel cried. “I can’t.”
Matt stood and carefully turned off the kettle, then sat in the chair above Daniel, bent over him, so that their foreheads touched. “Honey,” he breathed.
“How can I leave him behind?”
“What?” Matt whispered. “Who?”
And then he slid to the floor and wrapped Daniel in his arms. He stroked and rocked him for a long time, thinking about Daniel walking around in Joel’s clothes, about the two of them in the womb together, how they’d been together since before they were even human. They’d started out breathing that strange element together, their tiny astronaut bodies floating, bumping against each other in silent salutation, and then they came out with their wrinkly, scaly human flesh, and then they grew and filled out. And then their lives and desires drew them apart, and now those two bodies were going to be buried on different continents. The thought gave him chills, and he gripped Daniel tightly, feeling like the slimmest and most inadequate of lifelines.
