All I Love and Know (23 page)

“Whoa,” Matt said.

“Look, I can't talk right now, okay?” Daniel waited. “Let's talk later.”

“Sure,” Matt said, hanging up the phone before the word was even out.

MATT COOKED DINNER FOR
Cam later that evening, and he told her about his dilemma as he cleared the dishes and put them into the dishwasher, spooned the leftovers into Tupperware containers. He wanted to be part of their coming home. He was wondering if he could just show up a few days before they left, or whether that would be unpleasant or unhelpful in any way. But even if it seemed unhelpful, he still wanted to do it! “We really can't afford it,” he said. “Already, two round-trips to Israel for me, and one for Daniel, have been about thirty-six hundred dollars, although I think Daniel's father's going to pay for one of those. This would bring it up to almost five grand, and we'd have to float it on a credit card.” He paused. “But I just don't think that money should be the issue here.”

“Oh, go!” Cam said.

Matt laughed. “Of course you'd say that.” Cam was an impetuous girlfriend, a lover of the grand gesture. She loved to do things like spring a weekend trip to Miami Beach on a girlfriend, secretly canceling all the girlfriend's appointments and packing her suitcase, and then, when she showed up for a supposed coffee date, whisking her away in her car to the airport without telling her where they were going. Matt and Daniel privately thought that that wasn't romantic, it was controlling.

“So I should just show up, even though Daniel said not to?”

“Did he say not to, or did he say he doesn't
need
you to?”

Cam was arguing exactly what he wanted to argue, and that made him doubt himself. He wet a sponge and wiped down the counters. It really wasn't a good idea. It would be far more sensible to wait for them at home, to pick them up from the airport, and have everything lovely and welcoming when they arrived. But the impulse to go was persistent, and he believed in listening to your instincts, too.

D
ANIEL DREAMED THAT
he was in the café. It wasn't the Peace Train Café, it was one he'd never seen before, a café with a huge mirror on one wall that made it seem as though there was a whole duplicate café on the other side. A man entered, bulky, his face sweaty, and Daniel knew he was the bomber. He tried to get someone's attention, but the waitress was talking to a group at another table, with her back turned to him. An enormous cappuccino stood steaming on the table before him, crisp brown grains of sugar speckling and staining the foam. Sunshine slashed across one knee, and he scooted his chair over into the shade. Then Ilana was sitting across from him—she must have been there all along—and he felt embarrassed that he was so baldly standing in for Joel. Someone laughed and shouted in Hebrew, “I told you so! Didn't I tell you so?” His chest was knotted, and he was sweating. The bomber had disappeared, but Daniel knew with terrible dream-certainty that the man's fingers were reaching for the cord that hung under his coat. In the spinning chaos of his thoughts, Daniel pictured his flesh blown from his bones, wondered murkily if his brain would register the agony even if his head was blown clear off.

He woke up screaming, and sat up, stunned, his voice echoing in his ears. He'd never produced such a sound, and for a second he thought someone else was screaming. When he realized where he was, he leapt out of bed as though it were on fire, and burst from his room. The house was quiet in the early dawn light: Incredibly, no one had heard him. He sank to his knees on the living room rug, then sat on his heels and bowed his head and breathed, waiting for the panic to stop.

His headache didn't go away; it persisted through the packing, the visits to various government offices to arrange papers and passports, the accelerated pace of bringing the children back and forth from their house to their grandparents'. A
hamsin
moved into Jerusalem, the sky turning white, hot wind whipping up sand and garbage and twisting laundry on the line. His eyes became swollen, the skin under them chafed and tender. They pulled down all the blinds in the apartment, making it into a dark cave, and congregated whenever possible in the master bedroom, which had the apartment's only air-conditioning unit, as the wind rattled the blinds. They ate cold foods, yogurt and salads and spreads on bread. Lydia complained about crumbs in the bed, where Gal was eating her snacks in front of the TV. “Use a plate, honey!” she said, swiping at the crinkled bottom sheet. Even Noam was cranky, shrieking when they took anything sharp, or a choking hazard, away from him. Daniel took him into the bathroom to splash cold water on his pink, sweaty face, and laughed when he saw Noam's thrust-out lower lip in the mirror, it was the very picture of infantile indignation.

Sam had spent the morning at the kitchen table, writing numbers on a pad of paper, with quick punches at the calculator. He called Daniel into the kitchen in the tone he used for important matters, usually financial, and pulled out a chair for him. “Listen, Daniel,” he said, “I'd like you to be able to keep the apartment for the next few years, so you'll have a place to be when you bring the children to visit their grandparents. So I'm going to pick up the mortgage and taxes, to make that possible. Maybe we can find someone to manage it and rent it out for the periods when you're not here.”

“Really, Dad, are you sure?” Daniel asked, and when his father nodded, he said, “Thank you so much. I can't tell you how nice that is of you.” In the past, he'd turned down all of his father's attempts to help him out financially, except for this most recent gift of Matt's plane ticket, because those offers made him feel that his father thought he couldn't make it on his own. But this gift didn't feel like that at all. It felt like an amazing act of understanding and empathy. The apartment felt to him like a living thing, its light and smells, its tiled floors and thick, strong blinds, the sheets they put on the beds, the gas stove that clicked noisily four times before lighting, the nicked and pocked coffee table, the broom closet stuffed with pails and plastic bags, the mop handle falling down every time someone opened the door. Living in it was like loving a middle-aged person who'd been around the block a few times.

And then their departure was only a week away. Gal's class threw her a going-away party, and when Daniel came to pick her up he stood for a few minutes at the edge of the classroom, watching kids say good-bye with varying degrees of social competence and drama, their faces bearing the traces of chocolate frosting. Gal was flushed and wearing a crown, and when she saw him, she came over to him. “Look,” she said, thrusting a small, leather-bound book at him. They had taken pictures of themselves, individually and in groups, and had composed a photo album. Daniel flipped through it, trying not to bawl. There were also cards with crazy first-grade writing all over them, and a bag of candy—candy Daniel was sure he'd be finding in corners of his house a year from now. Gal's teacher, Sari, stooped to give her a tearful hug, and Gal, with a pained look on her face, allowed herself to be squeezed. “You'd better come see me when you come visit,” she said huskily. “Or else,
oy vey
!”

They walked home quietly. Daniel didn't dare speak. The wind whipped at them and Gal winced as her hair lashed her face. They descended to the cool dark underground walkway that crossed underneath Herzl Street, their sneakers making cupped muffled sounds on the sidewalk. Daniel's hand sweated onto the photo album. How could he survive all this tiny girl was losing, when he felt her pain so sharply it made him gasp?

When they got home, Gal said she had a headache. Lydia got her to undress and gave her a cool sponge bath, and when Daniel passed by, he saw his mother murmuring to her and running a washcloth over her back as Gal stood, hands limp, turning obediently. Her face and lips had lost their color. After she was dried off, she crawled into bed and faced the wall, and she didn't stir for the next twelve hours.

MATT PAINTED THE KIDS'
room, ordered a bed, a crib, a changing table, and a dresser for it. When the furniture arrived, he and Derrick and Brent sat on the bedroom floor holding Allen wrenches and scratching their chins over large unfolded instructions. When they took a break they went out to the backyard and wiped the accumulated dirt and pollen off of the plastic lawn chairs and sprawled in the shade of the big oak, drinking beer. Matt had a heavy feeling about all the grief about to enter his house, and Derrick gave him a pep talk. Derrick was a tall, forthright man with coffee-colored skin, a shaved head, and a neat goatee—not exactly handsome, but a treat to look at, his face was so open and lively. Derrick told him, emotion catching his throat, that he was about to find himself capable of things he'd never imagined he could do.

“I want them to feel safe,” Matt said. “How do you make kids feel safe?”

Derrick looked at him gently. “Is that what you're worried about?”

“I don't know, I've been thinking about it. How can you promise a kid she'll be safe when she already knows, better than you do, how dangerous the world is?”

Derrick sat up straighter, narrowed his eyes in thought. “I'm remembering a study done by Winnicott—he was this big English psychoanalyst—with I think it was English children after World War Two, who were evacuated from London, away from their parents, during the blitzkrieg. The ones who were assured that they and their parents and their houses were going to be safe, even though there was no evidence for that—on the contrary, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction—those kids fared better emotionally in the long term than the ones who were told by adults that they honestly didn't know what was going to happen. Which goes against everything we're normally taught, that the most important thing when dealing with children going through trauma is telling them the truth.”

Brent got up and set his bottle on the small brick patio, then roamed the borders of the yard, doing miscellaneous weeding. They were quiet for a while, watching him stoop and grip and wiggle gently, bringing up small balls of dirt and root. They commiserated over the political situation, Israel's ravaging of West Bank towns; as a black man, Derrick thought of Israel as a colonial power, but as a social worker he tried to conscientiously examine his own potential anti-Semitism.

“When you're there,” Matt said, “it seems really complicated. There are all these Israelis with their funny personalities, kind of assholes but also really human and likable, and no contact whatsoever with the Palestinians who are living through hell just a few miles away. And then you come home and see from here what Israel's doing, and suddenly it seems very simple: it's a nation committing terrible crimes against another people.”

They sat for a while longer, directing Brent here and there as though he were their sexy lawn boy.

“I'm going to fly back with them,” Matt said. “I bought a ticket.”

Derrick looked at him quickly. “Does Daniel know?”

“No. I can't bring myself to tell him; I'm afraid he'll be mad, or tell me not to come. So I'm just showing up. It'll be kind of like a sitcom!” he said brightly, and Derrick laughed.

THREE DAYS BEFORE THEIR
departure, Lydia took Gal to the mall to look for a good-bye present for Leora, and they returned with a necklace that said
Friends forever
.

“Good job, guys!” Daniel said as he and his father bent over, looking at it together, Gal nervously holding open the box close to her body, as though the whole thing might be ruined if they disturbed it. He shot his mother an impressed look, and she said, “It's perfect, isn't it.”

It fell upon Daniel to help Gal with the card. He sat with her on the living room rug, legs open over construction paper, scissors, and markers. “What do you want to write?” he asked.

Normal summer weather had returned to Jerusalem, and a soft, warm breeze came in through the open windows, ruffling Gal's hair. She was barefoot, sitting between her heels, in shorts and a hideous T-shirt she loved that said
Princess
in curly script studded with rhinestones. “I don't know,” she said. “What should I say?”

“Do you want to tell her that you love her and will miss her?”

“Yes,” she said gravely. “And also that she should come visit me in Massachusetts.” It had taken her a while to be able to pronounce the name of the state, which they still sometimes playfully called “Massachoochay.”

“Okay,” Daniel said.

“And I want to draw a picture,” she said, her energy gathering.

“Good idea.”

She bent forward till she was lying on her stomach supported by her elbows, selected a brown marker, and began to draw. Daniel was pretty sure it would be a horse. He sat facing her with his legs crossed, in a posture of watching and supporting as he brushed the newspaper off the coffee table and snuck looks at it.

“
Oof!
” she cried, and violently crumbled the paper.

“Wait,” he protested, “let me see!” He unfolded it. “What's wrong with this?”

She gave him a withering look. “The head is all . . . it's disgusting!”

“Okay,” he said mildly, taking a new piece of construction paper from the pile, which she carefully folded in half.

She completed the next horse before deciding that it was a failure too, and this time her small fierce face darkened into tears. Daniel snatched at the paper before she could destroy it.

“Sweetie, tell me what you want to do that you're failing at. Because I think this one's really nice.”

“You always say that!” she cried. “Even if it's shit! Where will I put the writing?” She sat up and swiped at the markers, which went flying off the carpet and clattering over the linoleum floor.