All I Love and Know (14 page)

“Are you sure?” Lydia was asking. “Maybe just a little plate?” And Gal was asking, “Is Matt on an airplane?”

He sat down at the table. “Okay, maybe just a little,” he told his mother, and turning to Gal, “Yes.”

She was blinking rapidly. “Matt's plane won't crash,” she said in Hebrew.

“That's right.” Daniel leaned over and wiped spaghetti sauce from her mouth with his napkin.

Gal's silky hair rose in wisps, and her eyes were dark. “How do you know?” she asked.

His parents were looking at him inquisitively, and he quickly translated.

“I just do,” he told Gal, but that made her face fall, and he could tell he was insulting her. “They have very, very good pilots,” he said. “Airplanes almost never crash.”

He leaned back as his mother placed a steaming plate in front of him. “Don't indulge her,” she murmured.

He whirled on her. “
Indulge
her? Are you kidding me?”

Lydia flushed. “The
fears
, I mean. Not the child.”

Gal was asking, “But do they
ever
crash?”

“I meant the
fears
,” his mother repeated.

“Daniel,” his father said.

“Almost never,” he said to Gal, speaking in Hebrew, ignoring his parents. “Really, sweetie, I'm just not worried.”

“But do they
ever
?”

“Sweetie,” he said. He scooted back his chair and patted his lap, frightened, because he'd used up the extent of his repertoire for comforting her. “Come here.”

She was crying now, and there was a sudden sweep of her arm and her plate went crashing to the floor, spaghetti and sauce splashing onto the cabinet bottoms and slithering over the tile.

“Hey!” Daniel shouted.

Gal jumped off her chair and ran into her room, and they heard the door slam. Daniel and his mother looked at each other accusatorily.

“I don't know why you have to be so hurtful,” his mother said. “You're not the only one suffering.”

“I don't like being corrected when I'm trying to manage something difficult,” Daniel snapped.

“Your mother was trying to help,” his father said.

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Dad, could you just stop?”

“We'll get this mess,” Lydia said. “You get your temper under control and go calm her down.”

In her room, Gal was sobbing. Daniel got on his knees and gently gripped her shoulders so he could look her in the face and apologize for yelling at her. She wrenched herself away and threw herself onto her bed, sobbing into the pile of the morning's rejected clothes. He stood, irresolute, knowing better than to touch her again, and watched her shoulders quaking, enduring the long moment when she went still and silent before she caught her breath and let out a shattering scream. He murmured her name, whispered, “Shh, shh.”

She screamed again, and he winced, dreading the baby hearing and melting down himself. He went over to the open window, glanced out at the geraniums Joel had planted in the window boxes, which none of them had had the wherewithal to keep alive. He wondered if it would be okay to slip out of the room for just a second and find the watering can. But then he reproached himself for really just wanting to escape the screaming. He thought about Ilana, her fierce competence, how she would hold Gal like a big butch mama-warrior when she cried, and the image made him faint with grief and longing. How would Gal ever survive losing that?

He lowered himself onto the floor. Gal's screaming was becoming hoarse and rhythmic. The minutes passed, and then an hour, and still she cried. Lydia opened the door and peeked in, and Daniel waved her away. He said, “
Oof
, Gal-Gal, so many tears.” He tried to think of a story to tell her, but it was Matt who was good at that, not he. Finally, he told her a stupid story about how when Yo-yo was a puppy, he chewed all the handles off the cabinets in the kitchen. But that elicited an outraged howl, as though he had mortally insulted her with his frivolity. Hurt clawed up his throat and stung his eyes. It astounded him how badly she could hurt his feelings. And it scared him how long she could cry. He tried to tell himself that his job was simply to be there while she cried, that when she grew up, she would be strong because someone had sat there with her long ago, steadfast, a witness. He remembered her therapist telling him, “Most people think of children's tears as a bad thing, as something they must make go away.” They'd been sitting in her toy-strewn office, where he supposed she got children to reenact their traumas with puppets and dolls. “But that's because the tears upset
them
, not because they're bad for the child. Your job is to think of
her
when she cries, not to think about your own distress. She won't cry forever if you don't try to get her to stop.”

He clung to that, but Gal cried for longer than he thought a child could cry. Around midnight she began to hyperventilate, and he panicked a little, wondering whether he should rouse his parents, or call the doctor. Before he could do anything, she fell into a coughing fit and vomited all over her bedding. Daniel picked her up and looked for a place to set her down while he stripped the bed; he finally set her in a tiny rocker in the corner of the bedroom. “Oh, it got on your shirt, sweetie,” he said, and pulled gently at the arms, shimmying it over her head. He stood and pulled at the sheets, which gave off the acidic reek of half-digested tomatoes, swearing when they caught on a mattress corner. He took them, and all the soiled clothes, out to the laundry porch and threw them in a corner on the floor. Then he walked softly to Joel and Ilana's room. His parents were in bed, watching TV with no sound. “Sorry, I'm looking for fresh sheets,” he whispered as they sat up.

“Turn the light on,” his father said.

The light made them blink. Noam was in a diaper, curled against his grandfather's side, sleeping with his thumb in his mouth and a massive scowl on his face. Lydia was sitting up, drawing her nightgown to her throat. “Let me take over, honey,” she said.

“No,” Daniel said. “Let me see it through.” He found sheets in the closet and eased himself quickly out of the room again.

In the kids' room, he'd turned off all the lights except for a little lamp on the desk. Gal sat in the chair, hugging herself and rocking and making an unholy keening sound through clenched teeth. Daniel turned on the little boom box to a CD of Israeli songs he knew she liked. He turned it down low and talked to her as he made the bed, making chitchat about how nice the sheets were and what a comfy bed she had and how it was okay to throw up sometimes, even though it was gross. He told her about how once, when he was a kid, he'd thrown up thirteen times, after eating an entire bag of gummy bears. And then he glanced over at her and she was so desolate and so alone on that little chair—her chest naked and skinny, her hair matted around her small face—that his eyes filled with tears.

He lifted her and set her gently on the clean bed, where she crawled weakly onto her pillow. Her chest was still convulsing, the tears still spilling down her face and into the creases of her neck. He lowered himself to the floor again, laid his head back on the wall. He dozed on and off, more or less, a headachy agitation buzzing through his consciousness, and then he awoke. He looked at his watch; it was 1:30 in the morning. Gal was making a racket breathing through her mouth. He got stiffly to his feet. She was curled on her side, her eyes open, shaking and whimpering. He grabbed a box of tissues from near the changing table and crawled clumsily onto the bed, leaning his back against the wall and wrestling her into a seated position between his legs. He wrapped his arms around her, smelling shampoo and vomit. He took a tissue out of the box, held it to her nose, and said, “Blow,” and she did. “Again,” he said, and mopped her up the best he could. He reached for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her, then gathered her in tight again. For a while he just sat there breathing against her back, hoping that the swell of his chest and the beat of his heart would calm her with their warm and steady animal rhythm. She was hiccupping now.

“Gal,” he whispered into her ear. “Something terrible happened to us.” He was whispering in Hebrew, and his voice broke. She began crying again, but she was tired now, and limp. “Gali, we'll stick together, okay? We will. We have to live in this terrible world.” He didn't know whether that was a horribly wrong thing to say to her, whether it would poison her whole idea of the future. But the night had burned him down to ember and ash. “It's going to be very hard. We're going to have to be very brave. But I love you very much and I'm going to take care of you and Noam. Me and Uncle Matt.” It occurred to him that Matt would be home soon, and that they could call him to reassure Gal that he was okay. But then he remembered what his mother had said about indulging her fears and suddenly he understood what she'd meant. Why revive Gal's fears about Matt's plane crashing? Maybe it was better to be matter-of-fact about Matt's arrival, to display a casual confidence in the world's predictability. He'd have to move through the world performing that confidence, for her and Noam's sake, from now on.

Gal sighed and shuddered. The desk lamp cast its warm light on the baby's crib with his stuffed bear crammed between the slats, the random toys that always littered the floor no matter how hard they tried to keep them in their box. Gal was moist and warm inside the blanket. He laid his face against her hair.

Gal turned her face up to him. It was swollen and filthy with dried snot and tears. Her dark lashes were stuck together. “I want
choco
,” she said.

“
Choco!
” he breathed. It sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. He rose stiffly and found her a clean pajama top. His left leg was asleep from the butt down, and he stomped his foot on the floor. “Should we get up and see what the house looks like late at night, when everybody else is asleep?”

She nodded and shuddered again, and he slipped the top over her head and stuffed her arms into the long sleeves. They got up and he extended his hand to her, and they walked down the hall to the kitchen, Daniel's leg woolly and tingling, Gal wobbling by his side. “Do you smell that?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. It was fresh cigar smoke.

Gal looked up at him. “Grampa,” she said sagely, with a throaty
r
.

In the kitchen, Sam sat at the table in his pajamas with a glass of milk and the plastic sleeve of a box of plain biscuits with scalloped edges, lined neatly up, one toppled into the empty space he created as he made his methodical way through them. A lit cigar was tipped onto a glass plate at his elbow. He looked up at them and cleared his throat, abashed.

“Rough night, huh,” he said. Gal clambered up onto the chair opposite her grandfather, reported that the cigar was
fichsah
, and also bad for him.

“I know, honey,” he said gently. “I just have one once in a while.”

“We're having hot chocolate,” Daniel said, finding the box and spooning generous heaps of powder into two mugs. “Do you want some?” His father shook his head. Daniel opened the refrigerator and took out a plastic pitcher with a bag of milk inside it, poured milk into a pot, and set it on the stove. He stood and turned on the burner and stared at the blue flame. He was so tired he could hardly stand. And yet, there was something curious and light in the feeling. As though he'd been scoured until gleaming, as though he were more soul than body.

His father stood and took his cigar out onto the balcony, and when he returned, it had been carefully put out. He sat down and pushed the plastic sleeve of biscuits toward Gal. She leaned onto the table with her elbows and picked one out, and bit off the scalloped pieces with tiny bites of her front teeth.

“I like dunking them into milk,” Sam said.

Daniel checked on the milk to make sure it didn't boil, and looked at his niece. What a wild little creature. One look at her, he thought—in her hodgepodge pajamas and bare feet, crumbs on her mouth, her eyes swollen into slits and her nose red and crusted—and social services would whisk her away. She looked just like the dirty-faced Palestinian refugee children they showed on the news. His mind drifted murkily, like weeds on water. He thought of the bulldozers destroying houses somewhere in the West Bank, possibly at this very moment, and the kids out there who were going through the same thing she was. He hoped they had nice relatives to take them in and hold and rock them. He thought of the news photographs of small coffins swept along on the shoulders of shouting men. It was always men. Sometimes you saw the women. They were always shrieking, which was alienating. They never showed you the quiet daily grief of the Palestinian moms; you never saw a Palestinian adult rocking and cuddling a child. It made you think they weren't a people who rocked and cuddled.

His mind skipped through some association he couldn't follow to Matt, to how much he hated those
Baby on Board
signs on the back windows of American cars. “We don't have a baby,” he'd snap, “so go ahead and slam right into us, we deserve it!”

Daniel turned off the stove, and poured the sputtering milk into two mugs.

“You know,” Sam said. “I don't sleep anymore. It's very curious.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all. I don't seem to need it anymore.”

“Everybody needs sleep, Dad.”

“So I would have thought.” Sam's hands were crossed in front of him as he watched his granddaughter.

“Are you scared you'll dream of Joel?” Daniel ventured the question shyly. It was a new way to talk to his father.

Sam looked at him and considered. His face was heavy, his nose a blunt bulb studded with pores, as though grief had rubbed his patrician veneer down to its coarse male essence.