All I Love and Know (15 page)

“I don't know,” he said. “It's hard to know whether dreaming about him is a positive or a negative.”

“I know what you mean,” Daniel said, bringing the mugs to the table. “You wake up destroyed, but at least you got to see him.”

Gal's eyes were moving between them, in a slow drunken version of their usual sharp darting. Her nose was running, her sniffs a deep, crackling rumble. Daniel looked around for a tissue, but all he found was a roll of paper towels, which he worried would be too painful on her tender nose. “Honey,” he said, “could you get the box of Kleenex from the bedroom?”

She slipped down to the floor and left the room.

Daniel sat down across from his father. He brought the hot mug to his lips and sipped the scalding chocolate.

“You know,” his father said. “When you and Joel started third grade and were separated into different classes for the first time, Joel got massive school anxiety. He woke every morning crying from a stomachache.” He paused, and mused. “It wasn't what we'd anticipated. You, meanwhile, sailed off to school every morning without looking back.”

He picked up the cigar and ran his fingers along its stem. “It wasn't what we'd anticipated,” he said again. “Your mother wanted to let him stay home, but I felt that it wasn't going to get any easier as you boys grew up, and the sooner he got used to it the better. Nowadays, of course, there's probably some new theory about separating twins into different classrooms.”

Gal came back into the kitchen with the Kleenex box and one of her model horses, which she set carefully on the table.

Daniel helped her blow her nose, wincing when she flinched at the tissue's rub on the reddened skin around her nostrils. She climbed back onto her chair, dipped her face down to her mug, and stuck her tongue into her hot chocolate. “I a dog,” she said.

“I
am
a dog,” Sam said, correcting for the millionth time the translation mistake she always made because there was no “to be” verb in Hebrew.

Gal looked at him. “You a dog, too?” she asked her grandfather in a high, comical voice.

“Ha-ha,” Sam said, reaching toward her as though he were going to tickle her.

“Drink your
choco
like a little girl, Gal-Gal,” Daniel said, “and then we're going to brush our teeth and go to bed.” They sat and waited as she drank. Daniel rested his cheek on his propped hand and thought of his poor brother, scared to go to school without him. He was surprised his father remembered something about him and Joel that had happened so long ago; Sam hadn't been particularly involved in the details of raising them. There was a little gleam of pride: his parents had always considered him, Daniel, the fragile one; he'd been smaller at birth, stranger-shy beyond the usual age, prone to hurt feelings. But he'd obviously been hardier than they'd thought.

But then the image came to him of Joel as a little boy in his pajamas, lying about a stomachache and feeling guilty about lying, and it broke his heart. He'd heard somewhere that mourning was like falling in love, and it was, he was—thinking of Joel came with a strange, painful elation. Oh, he loved him.

THE DOG'S TAIL THUMPED
madly against Cam's thigh as Matt held his face in his two hands, scratching his chin, and asking him if he'd been a good doggie. “Were you?” he asked, his teeth clenched in play ferocity. “Were you?” He bent his face down and got a slurp right on the mouth. “You
were
? Oh, what a good boy.” He scrubbed his mouth with his sleeve and looked at Cam, who stood there with an indulgent look on her face, her own dog, Xena, staring at Yo-yo from between her legs with intense border collie eyes. Xena was an agility champion, and the boss of Yo-yo. “Was he?”

She laughed her grainy guy-laugh. “Except for an incident with a tampon that I won't go into,” she said.

“Gross,” Matt said, sorry, as he so often was an instant too late, that he'd let Yo-yo kiss him on the lips. It was good to be around dog energy, though; it made him remember walking Yo-yo on the state hospital trails in the late afternoon of September 11, standing around with the other stunned dog owners watching their faithful, goofy dogs wrestling and playing under that gorgeous blue sky.

“You wanna come in?” Cam asked. They were in the tiny hallway of her house, the dog's bed and bowl, and a bag of his food, stacked in the corner.

“I don't think so,” Matt said. “I need to unpack and straighten up.” He dreaded going back into that bedroom, but what, he wondered, would he even say to Cam? She was looking at him with big, sad eyes. She was still in work clothes, her black striped oxford shirt tucked into belted pants, a man's watch gleaming on her wrist. The prospect of putting into words what he'd been through made him feel like a third-grader tossed an ink pen and ordered to write an epic poem. On the way home, he'd imagined telling their story to his friends, and found himself struggling with something inchoate and hard, that Israelis had become somehow
real
to him; the lawyer, the social worker, Joel and Ilana's friends, the children. The sound of Hebrew had become at home in his ear. He knew these people would be received sympathetically by anyone who heard his story, and he wanted them to be, he supposed, but he wanted his interlocutors to have to move through the whole deadly political judgment first and then cross over to the other side.

“When's Danny coming home?”

Matt shrugged. “We don't know yet. And I'll probably have to go over there at least once for a parental competency exam. You know, to make sure we're not the type of parents who will have homosexual orgies when the kids are home.”

Cam laughed. “Bummer,” she said. “No more orgies.”

“How was your month?”

She shrugged. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Same old, same old. I broke up with Diane.”

Matt vaguely remembered, but didn't have the energy to figure out, which of Cam's many short-lived relationships she was referring to. “That's too bad,” he said.

“Nah, whatever.” She shook her head dismissively. “Compared to what you guys have been through, c'mon.”

“Well, that's okay, Cam, it's still your life. What happened?”

She paused, then gave him an apologetic grin. “Too much drama. When they throw a clock radio at you and scream that they're sick of your passive-aggressive bullshit after you've been together for just two weeks, you know it's probably not gonna work out.”

Matt laughed, and bent to clip on Yo-yo's leash.

“Come over if you get lonesome,” Cam said. “We can get takeout or something.”

“I will. And thanks so much, Cam. You're the best.”

She reached over and clasped his shoulder, and Matt smiled to himself; he and Daniel liked to pantomime being on the receiving end of one of Cam's alarming handshakes or backslaps, writhing in pain with polite smiles frozen on their faces.

It was getting dark as he led Yo-yo across the tiny lawns, stopping to let him sniff and pee, the cold air encasing his forearms under the sweatshirt he wore. The forsythia and azaleas were in bloom; soon his neighborhood would be fragrant with lilac. He'd left the front door unlocked, and they pushed into the house, which had grown dark in the few minutes he'd been with Cam. He turned on every light he could reach. The answering machine in the kitchen blinked with seventeen messages; just looking at it made him tired. He dreaded going back upstairs, into that bedroom. But he'd have to clean it up sometime, and it might as well be now, while he still had all that weird jet-lag energy. He got out a jumbo-sized garbage bag, found a sprinkle of pot in a sandwich bag and his rolling papers in the stamps-and-matches drawer, and rolled a thin joint. He trudged up the stairs with the lit joint at the corner of his mouth, smoke curling up his face, and at the door of the bedroom, turned on the light. He stood looking at it. The garbage can was brimming with used tissues, the bedclothes were thrown back, the pillowcases still furiously rumpled, the closets open, the cap off the Tylenol bottle on the bedside table. Clothes—discards from his frenetic packing—lay in heaps on the dressers. He took a big drag, held it in, set the joint on the edge of one of the dressers. He sat on the bed. His breath was heavy, his throat scorched.

Gently, his buzz began to run over him, as though someone had cracked an egg on the top of his head and the yolk was seeping down. Daniel's pants were crumpled on the bedroom floor, the still-belted seat atop two accordioned legs. Matt rose and picked them up; they were dirty at the seat, where Daniel, his knees buckling as Matt led him out, had sat on the damp asphalt in front of his work building in his jacket and tie. Matt drew out the belt and stuffed them into the dry-cleaning bag. He took the joint off the dresser and, his hand cupped under it, went into the bathroom to tap off the long filament of ash. Then he finished it in two big hits and doused it in the sink. He emptied the trash in the bedroom and bathroom, threw the rest of the strewn clothes into the laundry hamper, stripped the bed and made it up with clean sheets, unpacked his clothes, ran the empty suitcases up to the attic.

And suddenly he was so tired his legs almost buckled.

He stumbled into the bathroom, shedding clothes, and after washing his face for a long time in very hot water and giving his teeth a quick, vigorous brush, fell into bed, where he turned on the TV and watched the last hour of
Stepmom
, sad for the Susan Sarandon character but identifying immediately with poor Julia Roberts, who was so shallow and thoughtless! Oh, but they came to respect her in the end. He blew his nose, grateful to be alone in his quiet bed, just him, deliciously, no one entering the room with a tear-stained face. If that made him a bad person, he thought, so be it.

I
T WAS WILD
going through the messages. The New York friends had called! Stephen and Scott, guys he hadn't seen for years. Lindsay Price had called to say he'd seen Daniel's family on the news. The local Fox affiliate had dug up an old picture of Joel, and Lindsay said that he'd been horrified thinking at first that it was Daniel who'd been killed, and then relieved when he realized it was just Daniel's brother. There was a long silence on the tape, then it clicked off, and the next message was from Lindsay again, saying, “Not that that's really any better, it's just . . .” Matt rolled his eyes. He played it again, for signs of whether Lindsay was using, but he couldn't tell. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee for which he'd put milk through the steamer, in celebration of drinking good coffee again. Yo-yo was gobbling down his breakfast, his metal tags clattering against the bowl.

“Anyway,” the message said, “if you want to call . . .”

Matt snorted and erased the message. He had a lined yellow pad in front of him and was taking careful notes because he remembered his bewilderment in the months following Jay's death, when he'd been mad at the whole world but actually not sure whether this or that friend hadn't called after all. He wanted to keep track now for Daniel. His stomach rumbled. He had slept, on and off, for seven hours, which he thought was pretty good, and he was determined to be on a Northampton schedule today, and to stay up till nine at the earliest. He lit a cigarette he'd brought downstairs from his stash. Smoking was an indulgence of being home alone, like eating cereal for dinner and not making the bed. He rose to open the kitchen windows, and saw that the tulips along the backyard fence were in bloom, nodding and snoozing in the shade.

He wasn't even your boyfriend,
Lindsay had said one night when Matt had come down to visit, maybe a year after Jay had died. He implied, with the significant look of someone breaking a hard truth, that he was speaking for all of them, which had infuriated Matt. But in fact, as it turned out, he had been. After that, every time one of his friends asked “How are you?” it became a huge minefield: If he said he was feeling shitty, their silence implied that he was a leech on Kendrick's grief. It was just like now, when you thought about it—Daniel's loss, not his. Him brooding and lurking along the edges of tragedy, trying his damnedest to be appropriate.

He'd dropped them all because they were bad for his mental health, and because half of them were tweekers anyway and he just didn't want to be part of that scene. It was an unprecedented act for Matt, who thrived in the light of friendship. That first year living with Daniel had been a hard and lonely one for him; Daniel had a lot of nice friends, but even as he'd integrated into their circle he'd felt them to be Daniel's friends, not his. And even though it had been he who had cut off his New York friendships, it wounded him that they hadn't tried harder to bring him back—especially Lindsay, whom he'd supported through meth addiction and rehab. The friendship had briefly flared up again after September 11, when Lindsay had been his point person for checking up on everybody, but even then Lindsay acted as though only New Yorkers could possibly understand the profundity and horror of the whole thing, and Matt was sure he was using again, so after many evenings of complaining bitterly to Daniel, he stopped returning Lindsay's calls. Now the messages on his machine gave him a sense of bitter satisfaction. It was irrational, he knew, but he felt that this new tragedy proved that his sadness was legitimate, even his past sadness. He would never call any of them back. Let them just sit with their horrid fascination, and gossip with one another about how horrible it all was, and go get wasted in club bathrooms, and go to hell.

Brent and Derrick, their best couple friends, had called twice. Derrick was Daniel's steadiest, call-every-day friend—a fine, upstanding fellow, as Matt thought of him. Listening, he smiled; Derrick knew his way around a condolence call. He was a psychologist who taught schools how to introduce diversity programs, so he was trained in acknowledging others' feelings. Then Brent took the phone, and there was his voice, a melodious, demonstrative baritone Matt loved, saying in a big rush, “We can't wait for you guys to come home. Come home soon!”