All I Love and Know (22 page)

“That's me,” Gal said.

“That's you,” Daniel said, putting his hand on her head. “You and Ema. Look how much she loved you.”

Gal studied it, then placed it carefully on the correct pile.

“Thanks, honey,” Sam said.

“Was I a good baby?” Gal asked in a small voice.

“Yes, you were,” Daniel said somberly, turning her face to his. “And a good girl, too.”

Did she take it in? Who knew? She looked at him with enormous eyes, then got up and opened the snack drawer. The baby squawked and Daniel picked him up and jiggled him.

Matt flew back home to return to work, and another few weeks passed, in which Daniel had to appear in family court twice. The judge seemed taken by the fact that he and Joel were identical twins, which Daniel hoped meant that he was considering that, genetically speaking, the kids could actually be his.

Then one day Daniel got a call from Assaf, who had gotten a call from Yaakov and Malka's lawyer. “They want to settle, Daniel,” Assaf said. “They agree to have you and Matt take the children, under the condition that they can visit them once a year, and that you bring them here once a year. That's fantastic news. Of course, the court has to approve.”

Daniel sank onto the couch with the cordless phone. “What happened?”

“There was a car accident,” Assaf said. “A minor one, but it looks as if Malka blacked out for a second behind the wheel, and that frightened them. The attorney said they simply want the best for the kids. But I have a feeling that they also didn't do too well with the parental competency visits.”

Poor, poor Malka,
Daniel thought.

Assaf said that he most likely wouldn't be allowed to adopt the children, at least not yet. Adoption, he reminded him, was the most binding form of custody a court could award to a nonbiological parent. But there were other gradations of custody, ones that were more temporary and contingent upon follow-up visits and testing.

Daniel nodded. They had been over this before.

His mother came into the room and saw the expression on his face, and was hovering around him whispering “What? What?” as he flapped his hands at her to shush her so he could hear Assaf.

“I'll call back when I know more about what comes next,” Assaf said. “Daniel. I'm glad.”

Daniel hung up, told his mother what had happened, hugged her and his father.

“Thank God,” Lydia said, clutching her chest. “Thank God.”

“I have to call Matt,” he said, taking the phone into the bedroom and closing the door. He sat down, placed the phone on the desk, and buried his face in his hands. Then he placed his hands on the desk and took a deep breath. He dialed, and the phone was picked up immediately by a breathless Matt.

“Hey, it's me,” Daniel said. “Who were you expecting?”

“Hey!” Matt said. “The woman from the Forbes Library, who might have some design work for me.”

“Not your new lover?”

“You mean the young one without the crying children?”

Daniel laughed with a tiny wounded pang. “Speaking of the crying children, Assaf called today to say that Malka and Yaakov have decided not to contest custody.”

Matt shrieked.

“It still has to go through the courts,” Daniel said. “But who else can they give custody to?” He was listening very hard for Matt's response, but all he could hear was the sound of his breathing on the other end. “Are you hyperventilating?”

“Kind of.”

“Do you need to put your head between your knees?”

“Let me just lie down.” Daniel heard a grunt and a sigh. “Okay,” Matt said. “Phew. How long do you think before we can bring them home?”

“I don't know.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. Daniel took off his glasses and covered his eyes with his hand.
Here it is, bucko
, he thought: the moment your bluff is called. “Do you think we can do this?” he asked.

“You're asking if I think
I
can do it, right?” Matt said.

“No, both of us.”

“Oh my God, you're such a liar,” Matt said. “Absolutely.”

MATT LAY ON THE
bed for a while after they hung up. It was still morning in Massachusetts, and the bed was unmade; he hadn't had coffee yet. He would have to move his study up to the guest room, an attic refinished by the previous owners. His current study, a big, boxy, sunny room across the hall from their own bedroom, would be perfect for the kids' bedroom. The guest room was smaller, and the roofline slanted down to cut off some of the usable space.

He thought that all in a rush, then felt a pang: No more guest room! Guests would have to sleep in the living room or in his study. And what, he wondered, would they do with the beautiful guest bed? Was it appropriate to put a six-year-old in a double bed, and would it even fit in the room with a crib? Not if they put a little desk in there, for Gal to do her homework. And when Gal got older and needed her own room, she'd want the attic one, a funkier and more private space than the bedroom she'd be sharing with Noam, so he'd have to move his study again. He supposed he'd rent office space in town. Would they have to buy a bigger house? He sat up and placed the phone back on the night table.

He got up and washed his face, then went up the creaky, bowing stairs and stood in the guest room doorway, running his hand through his hair and trying to imagine where he'd put his computer, his printer, his bulletin board. He sighed. When he moved in, he'd poured his energy into trying to put his own stamp on Daniel's house, becoming a regular at the local antique shops, stripping and refinishing tables and benches, repainting the drab conventional white walls in a palette of boysenberry, deep olive, and lemon. He'd put mismatching chairs, of a variety of materials, around the dining room table. Daniel had put up a fight about the changes, arguing that Matt's sleek tastes didn't suit a farmhouse, but Matt convinced him that Daniel needed to expand his
idea
of the farmhouse, and besides, he needed to feel as if the house were his, too. Daniel had come to love the warm colors of the rooms. And now they'd have to remake the house again, only this time, making it uglier. He'd do something nice with these walls, though, which he'd never gotten to. And get a small air-conditioning unit. He looked glumly at the antique two-pronged electrical outlet under the window. And call an electrician.

He went downstairs and made himself coffee, fed the dog. He opened the door onto a sunny day, and late-spring cold surged into the kitchen through the screen door. He got Yo-yo's leash and snapped it onto his collar, a lingering heaviness at his heart over what was about to happen to his house, thinking,
Let it go, it's okay, let it go
.

DANIEL WENT TO COURT
the next week, and Judge Fuchs, a man with a flat bowl of black hair and enormous wire-rimmed glasses, awarded him custody of the children, and permission to take them to the U.S. Daniel had come with his father and Assaf, and the whole thing felt a little anticlimactic. What had he expected? he wondered later. For the judge to rehearse the course of this tragic case, sum it up in sonorous Hebrew? To exchange a hearty, moved look with him? After all, he'd been ruling on their case from the beginning, and Daniel had developed a transference attachment. But the judge's eye contact was sporadic and impersonal. There were certain conditions, which he switched to English for the first time to say. Daniel looked at his father. “Excuse me, Judge. May my father come up and listen?” he asked.

“Of course,” the judge said.

His father approached and put his hand on Daniel's shoulder. Daniel, the judge said, was to bring the children to Israel once a year to visit their grandparents for a minimum of two weeks, and allow their maternal grandparents to visit in the U.S. at least once a year, also for a minimum of two weeks. They were to be followed by a social worker in the U.S. They were to return to this court after two years, so that it could follow their progress.

“Do you understand?” he asked Daniel.

“Yes.”

“The court expresses its hope that you will give the children every opportunity to express and cultivate their Israeli heritage, and will foster in them love of Israel. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Judge,” Daniel said. He did understand, but he'd have to think about how to do that later.

And that was that. Nothing about Matt, about the fact that he was awarding custody to two gay men. No comment about how well they'd done on their parental competency exams, and how great the tests showed their personalities were, and how they had confounded the court's expectations. He didn't even give a knock of the gavel. They filed out of the court and Daniel and his father embraced, Sam clutching the back of Daniel's head with his hand. When they let go, they were flushed. Daniel turned to Assaf and took his hand in both of his. “Thank you,” he said.

Assaf took them to lunch in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel, where they sat at an elegant iron table on a flagstone floor, surrounded by a burbling Turkish fountain and olive trees and flower beds. Daniel brought up the fact that there had been no mention of Matt, and Assaf pointed out that the actual custody, after all, was to Daniel alone. “But you're right,” he added. “I think he probably left that out so there won't be any gay rights implications to the case.”

Sam ordered a bottle of expensive champagne, and when the waiter had ceremoniously poured it, held up his glass. When they'd raised theirs, he said, “To my grandchildren, Gal and Noam. May their lives, which have gotten off to such a terrible start, get brighter by the day.”

“
L'chaim
,” Assaf said.

“And to Daniel,” Sam said, turning toward his son and contemplating him with a smile bright with love and pain. “Raise them well, son. I know you will.”

Daniel bit his lip and tried not to be a total girl in front of his father. “That means a lot to me, Dad,” he said.

THEY DECIDED THAT THEY
wanted to tell the children that they were going to move to the U.S. in the presence of their other grandparents, to indicate that it was a decision that the family as a whole was making, for their benefit. It was Daniel who called, and he spoke with Yaakov.

“Yaakov, I want you to know how much I appreciate this.”

There was a long silence, so he soldiered on, in stiff Hebrew. “I will take very good care of the children, I promise, and we'll work it so you can see them as often as possible. You're very welcome to stay with us when you come to visit them in the States. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”

“No,” Yaakov said. “Only to Europe. And Istanbul.”

“I think you'll like where we live,” Daniel said, resolutely conjuring in his mind the gentle verdant mountains and rippling streams instead of the tattooed lesbians who lounged and smoked and made out on the streets of his town. He proposed to Yaakov that he and Malka come over that evening for dinner, and to talk to Gal. “It'll be good,” he said, quietly calculating how to convey that Matt wasn't there, “if all the adults—you and Malka, my parents, me—could tell her together that we've made a collective decision.”

There was a long pause on the other end. Then Yaakov said, “I don't know what there is to talk about. You are taking the children. How hard can that be to tell Gal? It doesn't require an international convention.”

Daniel bit his lip. “Don't you want to tell her that you and Malka love her, and that we all agreed that this is how we'd take care of her and Noam?”

“She knows we love her,” Yaakov said. “There's no need for a formal declaration.”

When Daniel hung up, he had a tremendous headache. It was much harder to talk to Yaakov from the position of the victor than from the position of antagonist, because even though Yaakov was being a big prick and not thinking of what Gal needed, he felt horrible for him. He went into the kitchen to report dejectedly to his mother, who said, “You can't expect them to be happy about it, honey. Just to behave well in front of the children.”

But the bad feeling persisted through a trip to the supermarket, through picking up Gal from school. Gal had been irritable all afternoon; her teacher took Daniel aside and told him that she had hit another kid pretty hard, and that she'd had to put her in a time-out. On their way home, carrying her backpack and an art project with macaroni glued onto construction paper, Daniel had tried to ask her about what had happened, but she refused to talk, giving him a lot of the shrug/tsk combination that played such a big part in Israeli children's bad moods. “Are you feeling sad?” he asked as they approached the tiny
makolet
near her school for her traditional after-school Popsicle.

“Are you feeling sad?” she said in a mocking voice, her face twisted into grotesque concern.

“Hey,” he admonished, and she ran inside, mingling with the other little kids gathered around the square white freezer. He watched her wait obediently in line, then give her coins to the elderly man in a
kipa
, who handed her an orange Popsicle. She brought it outside, struggling to peel off the wrapper without getting her fingers sticky, and then dropped the whole thing onto the grimy sidewalk. Daniel's heart sank. She looked at it and up at him, and he said quickly, “
Ain davar
, we'll get another one.”

“I don't want!” she said, and marched toward home, and he followed her the whole way, watching her stalwart, angry back.

At home, Daniel snapped at his mother, and he picked a fight with Matt on the phone when Matt asked if he should come help them pack and fly back with them, by saying, “It's not necessary, we can really manage on our own,” and finally, after Matt persisted with further questions, saying, “You're going to have to decide this one for yourself, Matt, I already have two children to deal with.”