All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  “I told everybody that they didn’t!” she cried, her face scarlet and wet with tears.

  “But isn’t it good that they had heads?” Matt offered. “It must have been terrible to think they didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Gal said, gulping and hiccupping.

  She cried some more, and begged them not to make her go back to school, where she’d have to tell the class that what she had said was wrong, and then they would think she didn’t even know how her parents were buried. “Please,” she said over and over, her teeth chattering, while Daniel and Matt exchanged fierce and meaningful and appalled glances. The memory of her parents was slipping away from her; at night in bed she called to them, but the only images she could conjure were paltry and insubstantial. You couldn’t try really hard to imagine them, you couldn’t strain; they either came or they didn’t.

  “Okay,” Daniel finally said. “You can stay home tomorrow. For one day only. And you have to let Matt work and not disturb him.”

  Later, as she and her brother slept in their bed and Daniel and Matt were brushing their teeth, Daniel said, “She’s been carrying that image with her this whole time, and we didn’t know. What other horrible ideas and images does she carry with her that we don’t know about?”

  “I know,” Matt said through a mouthful of toothpaste. He spat. “I was thinking the same thing. She has this whole secret life in her head, so we can’t even comfort her about it because we don’t even know how to ask her about it.”

  “Do you think it’s okay to let her stay home from school tomorrow? I don’t want to set a precedent where every time she’s upset she gets to stay home.”

  “I think it’s okay this once,” Matt said.

  “Don’t make it a huge treat, okay?”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “I’ll make her sit in a corner, and only feed her cabbage.”

  Daniel realized that he had a pounding headache. Poor Gal, he thought, called on the carpet, for being—what? Inappropriate. Socially inept. A blurter. He knew exactly how she felt, confronted with words that had come from her heart, but which didn’t mesh with her environment. The words came back at her blazing and crazy, revealing something deep and frightening about her that couldn’t be unsaid. He knew exactly how she felt.

  He rubbed the big muscle on the side of his neck. Matt came up behind him and massaged it gently, his other arm clasping Daniel’s torso vertically, over his shoulder. He clasped Matt’s massaging hand and squeezed it, then eased himself away and into the bedroom.

  Early the next morning, Daniel called Gal’s teacher and explained that she hadn’t been trying to shock or scare the other kids in the class—that she actually believed that her parents were buried without heads, and felt that she was honestly sharing. As Ms. Wheeler murmured, “Oh boy” and “Man oh man,” he told her that they’d be keeping her home for the day because she didn’t know how to face the other students, now that she realized she’d told them something that wasn’t true. “I think it’s important to collaborate on a strategy for her, a way to tell the truth without her losing face, or feeling mortified,” he said.

  She told him she’d talk to the school psychologist for advice on how to help Gal do that.

  He hung up and sat down at the table. “Maybe when I get home I can talk with Gal about how to make it comfortable for her to return to school.”

  “I can do that this afternoon, too,” Matt said.

  “You don’t have to,” Daniel said.

  Matt closed his eyes, trying not to snap at him. The baby was slumped back on his lap, sucking loudly on a bottle of milk, stopping every once in a while to catch his breath with a big gulping sigh.

  “What would you say?”

  “I don’t know what I’d say, Daniel. From your standpoint, I’d no doubt recommend she do something highly inappropriate.” He didn’t want to say it because it would sound mean and competitive, but he kind of felt that if Daniel would just leave the house already, he and Gal could work it out. Because he got her.

  Half an hour later, having sent Daniel off with Noam, he made pancakes, against the small voice in his mind that was reminding him not to make the day a fun one. Gal came into the kitchen as he was spooning a ladle of batter into the pan, a small stack of finished pancakes sitting beside him on a plate on the counter, draped with paper towels.

  “Pancakes!” she sighed dreamily, sitting on a kitchen chair in her monkey pajamas and plopping her elbows on the table.

  He brought her the finished stack, and set butter and syrup on the table. “Do you want me to pour the syrup for you?” he asked.

  “No, I can,” she said, with mild indignation. As he returned to the pancakes in the pan, she wrestled the top off the syrup bottle and tipped it carefully, her hand trembling with concentration.

  When Matt’s pancakes were cooked, he brought them to the table and sat. He pushed the side of his fork into the stack and glanced up at Gal. “So. No heads, huh.”

  She shook her head through a thick mouthful.

  “That must have been a crazy thing to imagine.”

  She nodded, and crammed another forkful into her mouth.

  “Why didn’t you say anything to us?”

  Her eyes met his as she chewed, cheeks bulging. Yo-yo groaned from his station at Gal’s feet and lay back; a lawn mower several doors down sputtered and roared. Gal swallowed. “I thought you already knew about it, and you didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Especially Dani.”

  Matt nodded gently.

  “Because if you knew your twin brother didn’t have a head . . .” She trailed off and gave him a solemn look.

  Sometimes, Matt couldn’t believe the conversations he was having, couldn’t believe the sequence of words and thoughts uttered in his presence. Had anybody on earth ever uttered that sequence of words, and what were the odds that anybody on earth ever would in the future?

  “But you had to think that your mother and father didn’t have heads! That’s even worse!”

  Gal considered this, shrugged. “But I knew that in heaven they have their heads.”

  “Okay.” In heaven, Matt thought, everybody will be reunited with his or her head. “So when you said this in your class, how did the other kids react?”

  “They just looked at me.”

  “Do you think they were freaked out?”

  She laughed. “Maybe.” She’d finished eating and was dragging the side of her fork into the pool of syrup that remained on her plate, then lifting it toward her outstretched tongue and licking it clean.

  He watched her, a faint smile on his lips.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She gave him a miserable shrug. “Lots of those kids already know each other. I’m the only one who doesn’t know anybody.” There were other reasons too, reasons that didn’t find their way into her conscious mind. Her accent, which made her the weird kid. The fact that many of them read better than she did in English, when she was used to being the smartest kid in the room.

  “You’ll make friends, Gal. It’s only the first week of school!”

  “I don’t think I will make friends,” she told him.

  “Why not? You’re a cute and fun kid. You know how to make friends—you had a lot of them in Israel.”

  She craned her head toward him and lowered her voice. “I don’t think I’m so fun anymore.” She was thinking about the small groups of kids who milled together talking about things, and how she sat by herself at a table, her stomach churning unpleasantly, trying to look busy with paper or markers or scissors, because she didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t bring herself to just stand among them silently.

  His eyes stung when she said that. “Gal-Gal,” he said, then cleared his throat and looked hard at her. “You’ve had a life unlike any other kid in your school. The hardest thing most of them have had to face is losing their favorite teddy bear, or falling down on the playground and getting a boo-boo.”


  She cracked a reluctant smile.

  “Honestly,” he insisted. “Not one of them has had to be as brave as you have to be every day. So if you’re not the funnest kid in the class, so be it. You don’t have to be like everybody else. Not everybody has to like you. Lots of people didn’t like me when I was a kid. Hell—heck—a lot of people don’t like me now.”

  “I know,” she said, deadpan.

  “Oh, that’s hilarious,” he said.

  That evening he and Daniel snared Cam for an hour of babysitting, tossing at her a bag of Goldfish and vanishing out the door, grabbing the rare chance to take Yo-yo for a walk in the woods behind the abandoned state mental hospital, just the two of them. Yo-yo plunged into the river, wading and slurping, and Daniel threw sticks for him to wear him out in the current. “Drop it,” he’d command as Yo-yo emerged from the river, circling with the stick and shaking furiously, until setting it down. Then Daniel would snatch it up and throw it high over the river.

  It was a late-summer evening, thick, with a warm wind that seemed to coat their faces and arms. Dogs and their humans walked the paths that ran between the river and the harvested cornfields that looked as if they’d been trampled by a wanton giant. Matt told Daniel about his conversation with Gal, which he was pretty proud of: he felt he’d brought the topic into the light of day and maintained a light touch that encouraged her to confide in him.

  Yo-yo emerged from the river, shook himself, then flung himself on his back on a patch of grass, where he writhed ecstatically while they uttered a mild, sad “Oh, Yo-yo,” anticipating the dirt he’d be bringing into the house.

  “Did you talk to her at all about how to make friends,” Daniel asked, “or did you just tell her it was okay for people not to like her?”

  Matt paused, said humorously, “I’m not sure I like your tone.”

  “Well, come on, Matt,” Daniel said. “If she doesn’t know how to conduct herself, she’ll be hurt by people.”

  “Really?” Matt said, recoiling. “Conduct herself? How about being encouraged to be herself?” He was physically repulsed; how priggish could you get? He looked at Daniel and saw a thin, bearded man in sneakers and socks, and wondered if he’d look at him twice if he didn’t already know him. A small well of panic bubbled in his chest. He was used to wanting sex wanting sex wanting sex. Could it be, he wondered, that he was no longer attracted to Daniel, rather than the other way around? He stopped to fish a pebble out of his sandal, and his eyes blurred as his mind shrank from that possibility.

  “I’m calling her therapist,” Daniel said. “This is ridiculous.”

  When they got home, he went up to Matt’s study, closed the door, and called Gal’s grief counselor, Peggy Sheridan, at home. “Do you have a moment?” he asked, knowing she’d say yes, because having a child whose parents had been killed by terrorists made therapists cut you a lot of slack.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “I just wanted to check in,” he said, “because Gal’s been pretty volatile at home. And yesterday, she told the kids at school something kind of inappropriate. That her parents were buried without heads.”

  “Oh dear,” Peggy said.

  He sat down on the love seat and put his feet up on Matt’s Lucite coffee table. “I guess I wanted to ask how you think she’s doing.”

  Peggy was quiet for a moment, and he could hear the clink of dishes in the background, a dishwasher being loaded, or maybe emptied. He conjured her red hair with strands of silver, her freckled skin and clear gray eyes, the Eileen Fisher clothes in earth tones, and wondered if she was in sweats and a T-shirt now, barefoot maybe. Derrick had referred them to her, and Daniel had chosen her without interviewing anyone else based solely on the way she’d first greeted Gal, with a warm seriousness that made Gal visibly relax and open.

  “She’s struggling,” she said. “There’s a lot of anger there. She was dreading starting school.”

  “Do you think there’s been any progress?” he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.

  Peggy paused again, and then asked him if he minded holding on for a second while she went someplace quieter. When she returned, she asked, “Are you concerned that the therapy isn’t working?”

  “No,” he lied. “I just thought it might be good to check in.”

  “I’m glad you did,” she said. “You must be having a helluva time yourself. I mean, your twin brother!”

  Why was it always the simplest statements that filled your eyes with tears? During that first session, he’d told her what had happened to Gal and she’d said softly, “That’s so sad.” Just that, and Gal had started to cry. He was quiet for a moment now, knowing his voice would catch if he tried to answer.

  “Who’s helping you get through this?” she asked gently.

  “Well, my partner,” Daniel said. “My friends.” He paused. “You probably mean I should be in therapy.”

  “Well,” she said, “if it were my twin sister, I’d be running to therapy as fast as my legs could carry me.”

  Daniel closed his eyes to absorb this. It felt as if she were crossing a line. Was she suggesting that he was the problem? His left leg had fallen asleep, crossed under his right up on the coffee table. He uncrossed them and stood and stomped. “We’re trying to do right by Gal,” he said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “We’re trying to be stable and loving, and to help her remember, and put her feelings into language. We’ve read the books about helping a grieving child. Not to mention consulting with you.”

  “And you’re doing a terrific job,” Peggy said. “I guess what I want to say is that she’s very attuned to you, Daniel; she’s watching, and she takes her cues from you.”

  That surprised him. Gal was so difficult these days, flinging herself from him, stomping around the house and putting them all on edge—it didn’t feel as if she were attached to him at all. He wanted to ask Peggy what she was trying to tell him, but didn’t want to come off as confrontational. He told her that he heard Noam crying, and pulled his way off the phone despite some concerned follow-up questions; she knew she’d pissed him off. Then he sat back down, angry that they hadn’t had the conversation he’d hoped for. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the couch with his elbow crooked over his face. Let Matt handle baths and bedtime, thinking he was still on the phone. He knew Matt cheated sometimes in just this way, retreating to the bathroom and sitting there longer than necessary, reading a magazine on the toilet while Daniel was getting the kids into pajamas or reading them stories.

  It was starting to get dark in the study now, the sky outside drained of color. He squinted at his watch; it was only six o’clock. The long days of summer would soon come to an end, and his heart was heavy with the thought of coming home from work in the dark. He thought of Gal again and a little starburst of anxiety went off in his chest.

  He thought about Peggy saying that Gal was taking her cues from him. What was she trying to tell him? He heard a message there, one that implied that he was sending bad cues. He tried to push aside his defensiveness and to examine himself honestly. He was a mess, he knew that. He was heavy-limbed these days, a little zombielike. But this is what he couldn’t get past: How could he not be? Was he supposed to set an example for Gal by being as normal as possible?

  He loved her and his heart ached for her, but above all, he wanted to do right by her. He wanted to be a parent she felt safe with, with whom she felt at home. If she didn’t, it wasn’t fair to get angry at her, he knew that. He closed his eyes and prepared himself to get up and help with bedtime, to enter the fray.

  Later that night the principal of Gal’s school called. Daniel had never talked to her before, but he’d heard she played trombone in the school band and was known to join in a soccer game when patrolling at recess. At the sound of her voice, Daniel relaxed; she had that ability. When he told her that Gal had actually believed her parents were buried headless, there was silence followed by the sound of nose-blowing. “Poor kid,�
� she said. She said that she wanted the record to be set straight, not just so that the other kids didn’t have to imagine something that horrific, but to spare Gal any teasing that might occur. “Because otherwise she’s going to be the girl with the headless parents.” She said that she’d do it herself the next morning.

  “What will you say to them?” Daniel asked.

  She paused. “Who the hell knows? Okay. That Gal went through a terrible experience, losing both of her parents when a bomb exploded in a café in Israel. That the experience upset her so much, it’s hard for her to remember those days when they were buried. That they actually did have heads, although Gal thought they didn’t. And that I’m sure they all want to help Gal, and support her. And I’ll ask them if they have any ideas about what might be the most supportive.”

  “Great,” Daniel said.

  “May I speak to Gal?” she asked.

  Matt went to get her and brought her back, shrinking and shy. “Hello?” she said. “Hi.” She listened for a little while, fingering the chai necklace her savta had given her. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Yes. Okay. Bye.”

  She hung up and sighed with relief. “Okay, I can go back to school now,” she said.

  SHE WENT TO SCHOOL the next day, and Daniel called from work to say that Colleen had taken to wearing Noam around in a carrier on her back, which he seemed to like. Matt worked hard all morning, steeling himself against the impulse to clean the house instead. After lunch, he put on the kettle, took out the dog, and got the mail. There were two letters in regular envelopes, addressed to Daniel in handwriting. When he talked to Daniel at lunchtime, he mentioned them, and Daniel told him to go ahead and open them. Matt opened the first.

  Dear Daniel,

  2 Jews are being marched before the Nazi firing squad, and the executioner asks them, “Do you want to wear a hood?” The first Jew defiantly says, “No, I want them to see my disgust and anger,” to which the second Jew whispers, “Shoosh, you might upset them.”

  You are the second Jew.