by Judith Frank
“It’s like . . .” Daniel’s voice caught. “It’s like, okay, I won. I won, and he lost.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like, Joel was always barging ahead, making all the noise. Now he’s dead, and all that’s left is me.” He closed his eyes as tears overwhelmed him again. The tiny sound with which he said the word me made Matt grip his hands.
“That’s a lot! A lot that’s left!”
Daniel shook his head, his shoulders deflated.
Matt asked, “Do you feel like he abandoned you?”
“No, I feel like I’m abandoning him,” he said. “I feel like he got punished, and I . . . I could have been like him, I just pulled back and let him step into the limelight so I could have”—his lip curled—“so I could have my precious quiet space by myself.”
Matt didn’t get it. It sounded as though he were saying that he’d tricked Joel, let him walk into the path of the bomb. He stroked Daniel’s hands with his thumbs and tried to sit quietly and just listen, not to say that that sounded crazy to him, not to try to make Daniel think the right thing. Meanwhile, a hope was racing through him, a hope that, whatever Daniel was thinking, realizing it and facing it would help him let go of this craziness about staying in Israel, would help him come home.
“Do you know what I mean?” Daniel said, looking at him with heartbreaking hopefulness, those killer Rosen eyelashes stuck together by tears into dark spikes.
“Not really, baby,” Matt said gently. “But I get how hard it must be to leave him here.” In fact, once he said that, Matt also felt a searing sadness about leaving Joel and Ilana.
Daniel sighed a long tremulous sigh and staggered to his feet. He told Matt he had to go out, alone, and left the house without telling anyone where he was going, so that Matt had to eat an awkward dinner alone with Sam and Lydia and the kids, in which Lydia fretted over whether, now that he was there, they’d all fit into the cab to the airport. Daniel came back three hours later, calmer, sunburned. He’d been sitting at Joel’s grave, Matt knew, and had forgotten to put on sunscreen. He didn’t want to eat anything, and he had a terrible headache. “You’re dehydrated, honey,” his mother said. “See?”—touching his arm—“Dried salt.”
Gal peered at it. “Och, Dani, you must drink,” she admonished with a grave look, the experienced veteran of many a sun-drenched Middle Eastern field trip.
“Here, Gal,” Lydia said, holding a glass of water toward her. “Bring this to your uncle, and make sure he drinks it.”
The two of them forced glasses of water on him until there were three glasses sitting in front of him at a time, which made them laugh.
“Is everybody ready to go home?” Daniel asked.
They turned to look at him sprawled in the chair, his eyes swollen by tears and sun but bright and steady. Daniel’s eyes.
“Yes,” they whispered.
THEY LEFT ON A late-night flight. The Grossmans came over a few hours before, with small, fragile smiles on their faces. Malka was wearing a pretty dress, and makeup to hide the dark circles around her storm cloud–colored eyes. They sat on the couch, holding Noam and talking nonsense to him, as Matt and Daniel and Sam zipped up suitcases and Gal ran manically around the house. Daniel caught her as she ran from one room to another and said, “Gal, come say good-bye to your grandparents.”
“Good-bye!” she bellowed.
Daniel laughed, and brought her over to the small hushed space of the couch. “My father gave her a brownie,” he told them, “and now she has a sugar high.”
“Gal-Gal,” Malka said. “I have something for you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small box.
“Thank you!” Gal said, the gracious gift recipient. “Oh, Savta, this is pretty!” It was a small silver necklace, a chai, from the Hebrew word for “life.” She turned around so her grandmother could clasp it behind her neck and then fell on Malka and grasped her around the neck. Malka’s face was bright over her shoulder. Then, leaning over Noam, Gal gave her grandfather a big noisy kiss on his cheek.
“We have something for you, too,” Daniel said, and Gal pulled away saying “Right!” and ran into her bedroom. She emerged shyly, holding in front of her with two hands a gift that Sam had made and Lydia had beautifully wrapped.
“What could this be?” Yaakov asked, while Malka murmured, “You really didn’t have to.” The baby reached for the shiny ribbon, his eyes glittering.
“No, Noam!” Gal instructed.
“You open it,” Malka told Yaakov, and he handed the baby to her and worked delicately at the paper with his big stubby fingers.
Sam had found a picture of the whole family—Joel, Ilana, and the kids—in a pile of pictures that hadn’t yet been put into an album. It had been taken at the beach, and they were all in bathing suits, sprawled together on a towel, Noam in a diaper, the kids both caked with sand, Gal chewing a peach that was dripping over her fingers. They all looked windswept and relaxed, but the eye was drawn primarily to Ilana, who was sitting with her legs stretched out, leaning back on her hands, her eyes closed, raising her face to the sun.
Sam had had it enlarged and framed in a gorgeous, simple wood frame.
Gal hovered over them as they took it in. “Doesn’t Ema look like a movie star?” she asked.
“Yes, she does,” Malka whispered.
“So now you can remember us,” Gal said.
“Oh, motek, it doesn’t take a picture to remember you,” Yaakov said, his voice husky.
Daniel was sitting on the edge of the armchair. “We’re hoping you’ll come visit us for Chanukah,” he said. “And we’ll be back for Purim.”
They nodded, unhearing, looking at the picture.
Leora and her parents arrived, and the Grossmans said good-bye, clutching the children with ashen faces, Gal chirping, “We’ll see you soon! Very soon!” Lydia had packed the perishables from the refrigerator and freezer into a box, and she pressed it upon them to take it home, so they left the house bearing leftovers. Excruciating symbolism, Daniel thought.
Gal and Leora disappeared into her room, and Gabrielle hovered around tearfully asking what she could do, until Matt finally dumped the baby into her arms. They’d sent the toys and baby stuff ahead, and they were essentially packed. Finally, after a cup of Nescafé that they drank quietly while standing, Gabrielle holding and nuzzling the baby, Daniel looked at his watch and they decided it was time to roust out the children. When the girls came out, Gal was clutching a small stuffed horse Leora had given her, and she wore the passive, polite expression on her face Daniel was becoming accustomed to—the look of someone accepting a slightly embarrassing prize. “Look, Ema!” Leora demanded, holding up the necklace she had clasped around her neck.
“Wow, that’s beautiful, Gal-Gal,” Gabrielle said. “What a fantastic sentiment, too.”
They stood, nodding, smiling. “Well,” Moti finally said. He hugged Daniel’s parents, reaching for the easy ones first, and Gabrielle followed. Then he bent and lifted Gal into his arms. “You’re a very special girl, Gali. Very special in our hearts.”
She nodded solemnly, and he buried his bearded face into her face, looked over her shoulder at his wife with stricken eyes. Gabrielle was standing with an arm around Daniel, crying. She reached for Gal and squeezed hard, then set her down before Leora.
“Bye,” Leora said.
“Bye,” Gal said. “But it’s not really good-bye, not totally, because we’ll see each other again.”
“C’mon, guys,” Daniel said, “let me walk you to your car.”
Afterward, he came up and checked the kids’ room to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything. He picked up a pillow on Gal’s bed to fluff it a little, and noticed a scrap of folded paper underneath it. Unfolding it, he saw that it was written in Gal’s wavering and uneven print:
Dear Ema and Abba,
I and Noam are at Uncle Dani’s and Uncle Matt’s.
Love, Gal
He laid it carefully
back under the pillow, tears stinging his eyes. She’d learned only recently to write those letters, and some of them were still backward, and the spelling experimental. She’d learned how to address and sign off on a letter. Maybe the words would be magical, Daniel thought, thinking of the surprise that lit up Gal’s face when any of them read aloud a word she’d written. Letters were already magical, the way they conjured actual words, which in turn conjured actual things. Maybe if she wrote them very correctly, very neatly, they could conjure her parents.
THEY SAT IN A sherut minibus with other families who had been picked up before them. Within minutes they’d skirted their neighborhood and were on the road to Tel Aviv. The sun had disappeared past any lingering glow behind the hills, giving the city an ashy look. Matt sat squeezed between Daniel and his father, Noam on his lap grabbing at this and that, and finally shoving the strap of Matt’s carry-on bag into his mouth. Here we go, Matt thought, here we go. His heart was in his throat, but he thought that, for twenty hours or so, all he had to do was help move everyone from one place to another. He couldn’t wait to get rid of Daniel’s parents and start whatever life lay ahead for himself and Daniel and the kids.
Daniel closed his eyes until he was sure they’d passed the cemetery; he couldn’t bear the idea of passing it in this direction and watching it fade away in the distance. He was surviving, he felt, by warding off, by stiff-arming at least half of what he felt at any given moment. It wasn’t something you could afford to feel all at once. He was following Joel and Ilana’s wishes: that was the part he let himself feel right now. He looked across at Gal, who sat staring solemnly at the other passengers, and then at his mother, her eyes closed and head held high, her arms wrapped around the purse on her lap.
They drove down and down some more, ears popping. The air on the bus grew warm, and the odors of the passengers—body odor, perfume, the cinnamon of someone’s chewing gum—seemed to thaw and spread in the humid air. Noam whimpered, probably carsick, and Matt touched his face with the backs of his fingers. When they pulled up at the terminal, Matt forced his way out first and held the baby away from him, and Noam vomited, looked at what he’d done, and began to cry.
“Well, this is an auspicious start!” Matt said brightly, looking up from where he was squatting with the crying baby.
“I’m not going to throw up,” Gal announced.
“Good girl,” Sam said.
When they thought Noam was finished, they went into the terminal and got in the security line. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the agent, who asked for their tickets and passports.
They looked around and patted their pockets. “Matt?” Daniel asked. Matt had been carrying the bag with the passports and court papers.
Matt looked frantically at the bags piled onto the cart, and then looked up, eyes wide. He could barely bring himself to say it, contemplated lying for a moment and claiming that Lydia had been in charge of it. Then he said, “I left the bag on the sherut.”
They looked at him, shocked. “How do I call the sherut company?” Daniel asked the agent.
“The taxi companies are over there,” she said, pointing beyond the very end of their rapidly growing line.
Matt took off in that direction as she was telling them they’d have to step aside till they had their papers, and as Gal was crying, “My horse from Leora’s in that bag!”
Shit shit shit, Matt thought, sprinting past Hasidim with monstrous suitcases, the stout Arab woman handing out fruit slices to her kids, the thousand baby strollers, and the men calling out orders to their families. He vaulted over baggage carts jutting out into his path. He arrived panting at the line for Shemesh cabs and broke to the front over loud protests. “My bag is on a sherut, I left it there!” he shouted to the woman in Hebrew.
“Wait a second, sir,” she said with firm white-collar authority, giving him the Israeli hand signal for waiting, which he had thought was an obscene gesture before he’d learned what it meant.
“I can’t! I can’t! My passport, and the papers for the children—” He’d reached the limits of his Hebrew and switched into English, and then reached the limit of his breath altogether, and burst into tears.
“Okay, don’t cry!” the woman said in alarm as people started falling back and staring. Someone patted him on the back, and an elderly gentleman in a white shirt came forward, offering to translate. “I can speak English,” the clerk said irritably, tossing her long hair back as she put the phone receiver to her ear. “Everybody, please stand back.” She looked at Matt. “What was the name on the reservation and what address did you leave from?”
He told her, and she made a call, and someone radioed out, and Matt heard her say, “Is it there?” and the tinny voice respond through the static, “Yes, here it is,” and he clutched his hand to his chest and the people in line applauded and asked him teasingly if they needed to call an ambulance for him.
Meanwhile, Daniel had run over. “They found it, they found it,” Matt said. “The driver’s on his way.”
Daniel doubled over in relief. “Jesus, Matt,” he said. “Our papers are in there! What were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” Matt said, steering Daniel off to the side so that this crowd of upstanding Israeli Samaritans wouldn’t witness a fight between two hysterical queens. The adrenaline was just burning off; he could feel it prickle his fingers. “I was trying to get the baby out before he barfed all over us and the cab. I’m really sorry. They found it, it’s okay now.”
Daniel just shook his head. He was still shaking it and muttering to himself when the driver came up with the bag and they wrung his hand in thanks and headed back to Daniel’s parents and the kids, who now stood anxiously at the back of a long, winding line. Matt had taken out the colorful patchwork stuffed horse Leora had given Gal, and was waving it in the air grinning, singing, “Ta-da!”
II
CHAPTER 10
ON A HOT day in July, in a Northampton backyard, Gal was hiding. She was being quiet quiet quiet: “Shhh,” she whispered, like Dani did when she was crying; the sound reminded her of her mother too, in a part of her mind balanced somewhere against the very back of her palate, rising sometimes like a taste, or like fumes, into her head. She had closed the shed door behind her; a line of fuzzy gray light marked its edge. She reached out her hands, feeling her way forward in the dark; she hit the handle of a lawn mower, and stubbed her sandaled foot on the edge of something else, and when the pain came, tears sprang to her eyes. In the back of the shed was a pile of cardboard boxes, some flattened, some thrown whole onto a sagging tower. She stepped behind it, and lowered herself onto the floor.
She rubbed a spiderweb off her face, once, twice, then a third time, hard. Her toe still smarted, and her arm glowed with the itch of mosquito bites. She pressed a fingernail into a bite on her elbow till the pain was as intense as the itch. Try not to scratch, Matt had instructed her as he rubbed ointment on them, squirted a slug of ointment on her finger so she could rub, too. In the yard, the boy, Yossi’s son Rafi, crept, looking for her. He was deaf and had a machine in his ears; he spoke Hebrew with a flurry of hands and a muffled foghorn voice, and at first she’d had to try not to stare, knowing it was rude. They said he was her age, but he was littler, with flyaway curly hair almost as big again as his face. Matt said she had to play with him, so she was, even though she couldn’t tell if he understood her when she spoke.
It was quiet here, and that felt good. In the daytime there were always people in the house, and Noam was crying because he was fussy or bumped his head, and someone would wave the others off, saying, “I’ll get him.” Dani and Matt’s friends waggled their fingers ruefully at her, and she said, “Hi,” and they asked her how she liked her purple room, and told her how excited Matt had been when he was painting it, and how much he couldn’t wait for her and Noam to arrive. Most of them were homos—gay, Matt told her to say. Like Derrick, who was the first brown person she’d ever talked to, with his shaved head and
big kind eyes, earrings that twinkled on both ears, like a girl’s. And Cam, who Gal thought was a man until she heard her uncles talking about her; her mistake mortified her, and she kept it to herself. Agility obstacles were arranged throughout Cam’s backyard, and Gal liked running through them, jumping over the jumps, weaving through the poles, crawling on all fours through the long cloth tunnel that she had to barge through face-first. Sometimes Cam let Xena out, and the dog would give Gal a scare by running at her heels and nipping; sometimes Gal had to stop because she didn’t like it, although when Cam asked if she was scared, she always said no.
There was something draped over her, as though the sky was a different shade. The air was hot and heavy and damp, and she would forever associate humidity, and the infuriating whine of mosquitoes, with grief. The town she lived in now seemed to her like a circus. She walked with her uncles down the streets of Northampton: the square, honest New England brick buildings with their rippling slate roofs and steeples and clock towers ringed with strange and fascinating looming faces, girls with shaved heads and rings in their noses, fat women holding hands, teenagers crouching in doorways smoking and holding puppies with bandannas around their necks by the leash, men with beards and tattered green coats asking for a quarter. And whenever Daniel or Matt introduced her to a new person, that person beamed at her with a lacerating benevolence, and she had to turn her face away.
