All I Love and Know (28 page)

“I want to see my album,” she said quickly.

Daniel rose and brought over the album her class had made for her before she left. It made a sticky sound as she opened it. She went through it and pointed to every child in every picture, naming him or her ritualistically in a mechanical voice, without lingering or musing. When she was finished, she thrust the book at Daniel and pulled the covers up to her chin.

He remembered the advice of her grief counselor, that he should offer words to her, words she could use to name the different shades of her grief. “You must really miss your friends,” he said, aware that this was not his best effort. She'd been wearing on him since they'd gotten home to Northampton, and he was tired, and helping her find words for her feelings was starting to feel overrated. If she'd only let him hold her, as she had in the early days of their loss, he felt sure things would be better. These days when she got upset, her body stiffened and her voice got shrill. “Tell me what you're feeling,” he'd say, and she'd shriek in his face or stomp out of the room.

When she didn't respond, he bent down, kissed her cheek, told her he loved her. He left the door ajar. Gal watched his hand slip along the door frame and out of sight, until he'd left her in the cool dark. She swallowed her desire to call after him. She looked toward the bathroom, where the night-light glimmered. Let's say she had to get there without touching her feet to the bedroom floor. Let's say that if she didn't, a terrorist would kill
her
, too. Could she do it? She could certainly climb onto the bottom slats of the bedside table. But how would she get onto the low dresser next to the bathroom door? Her mind worried it; she gazed at the drawers, which had little bits of clothing sticking out of the cracks, like tongues from the mouths of people concentrating hard. She knew that when Daniel and Matt went to bed, Daniel would go around and tuck all those clothes back into his dresser drawers, because he couldn't sleep unless all the closet doors and drawers were nicely shut, which made Matt laugh and call him OCD.

Her eyes scanned the floor. Matt's sandals were lying there, splayed, their buckles open. She could stand on them to get to the dresser; she imagined stepping down on the straps, the ball of her bare foot pressed by the buckle, pulling them out till she stood on the shiny-worn leather soles. She could do that, and then shuffle with them to the dresser, move everything—the coffee mug with spare change in it, the little wood box that held Matt's bracelets and rings, the bibs and rattles and half-full cups of water—carefully to the side, and get onto the dresser, knee-first. And from there, slide down onto the bathroom's tile floor, to safety.

T
HEY CALL IT
vanishing twin syndrome. The vanishing twin begins as a twin to another fetus, but disappears during the pregnancy, spontaneously aborting and absorbing into the other twin, the placenta, or the mother. It is believed that a significant number of singletons start out as twins.

Metaphorically speaking, he had always thought of himself as the vanishing twin. He knew that when he and Joel were infants, Joel cried for milk while he was a good baby who waited quietly in his crib to be fed. That, in high school, when Joel ran for president of the student council, he ran for treasurer because Joel wanted to be president so badly.

He was so self-sufficient and contained. He always chose the smaller piece—of cake, or of attention. And somewhere, in some tiny, proud place of his consciousness, he'd imagined that he'd be rewarded for it.

But instead there was this grotesque, vindictive punishment of Joel, a punishment straight out of ancient tragedy meted out by a tantrum-throwing god, in which Joel's children would be taken from him and given to Daniel to raise. In which Joel would die and Daniel would be featured in the newspaper, raising Joel's children.

He was in his office with the door ajar, his jacket hung over the back of his chair, his desk a mess of galleys. Looking at the picture of himself and Matt with Gal and Noam on the front of the features section, Yo-yo's big head resting on Matt's knee, he had an uneasy feeling that the article was unseemly, almost gloating. The article's headline read “Children Find Shelter from Terror's Grip.” In the picture, Gal was on his lap, and his chin rested on her head. Matt sat back with one arm behind him along the back of the couch, his T-shirt riding up; the baby was on his lap and pressed against his other forearm with both hands outstretched, trying to grab something—a rattle, Daniel remembered, a rattle that the photographer, a hassled and stylish woman who had described herself as “running catastrophically behind” that day, had grabbed and shaken to get the kids' attention. The gesture had mortally offended Gal, who was giving her famous petulant shrug.

Why had he let them write the article at all, if not to gloat just a little? To gloat about how the kids were his responsibility now, and to show what a great and thoughtful job he was doing with them, what a loving home they'd come into? He studied the picture, the intense, propriety expression on his face. He looked like a patriarch in a yellowing photograph with scalloped edges. He had to admit to himself that a secret feeling of exultation came over him whenever he called Gal and Noam “my kids.” At home he walked around in shorts and undershirts, his chest hair curling up through the V of the neck, his upper arms, hairless with long, light muscles, exposed. When he looked at himself in the mirror he saw an image of manhood—strong and sweet—that thrilled him. For a boy who was good at music but bad at sports, a teenager who felt there was a big hole where his sexual cachet should be, this was a tremendous transformation.

How did the idea of
dad
carry so much marvelous emotional pull? He'd always envied the natural masculine authority Joel accrued simply by virtue of holding his children. So now he had it, too.

His stomach growled from a mix of hunger and nausea. Matt had made him eat two soft-boiled eggs before he left the house. In the days before Matt's parents had left, Shirley had taken to making him a mash of graham crackers and milk after dinner, into which she slipped a splash of half-and-half. His pants were belted to the last buckle hole now, and his shirts sagged under the armpits. At night, in bed, he ran his fingertips over the prominent jut of his ribs, feeling them rise and fall with his breath, imagining how easily they could be smashed, shards driven into the soft, moist, pulsing organs underneath. He remembered one of the clichés of twinship that people used to pester him with, asking whether when his brother was hurt, he felt his pain.
No,
he'd scowl; to him, it was a stupid question. But now he could feel his body being ripped out of the world. What happened in your consciousness at that moment? Somehow he imagined it crying out
Whoa!—
bewildered over this thing that had never happened to it before, managing only the most banal and inadequate of responses.

He turned to the opening of the article:

Daniel Rosen and Matt Greene never expected their elegant Northampton home to be the refuge of two small, grieving children. The life partners of four years were thrown into turmoil four months ago when Rosen's brother, Joel, and sister-in-law, Ilana, were killed by a terrorist's bomb in a Jerusalem coffee shop. In their will, they had designated Rosen the guardian of their children—Gal, six, and Noam, one—should they predecease them.

Rosen admits that he was surprised by that decision, and his eyes fill with tears when he talks about it. “There's such a powerful stigma against gay men raising children, especially in Israel, where it's unheard of. So my brother and Ilana were demonstrating an unusual degree of love and trust. That's how I see it.”

It took the couple three months to get the children to the U.S., because the custody arrangement had to be approved by the Israeli courts. Rosen is grateful to be home, and to live in a community like Northampton, where people are accepting of two men raising children together.

There was a passage about Matt; there was a section about Joel being an English-language talk-show host, and about his and Daniel's history at Jewish summer camp, and how that got them initially interested in Israel. “When asked about summer camp, the normally reserved Rosen lights up, and he says, ‘I
lived
for camp!' It was there that the boys first learned Hebrew, and their love for Israel was cultivated.” The rest of the paragraph covered Daniel's education at Oberlin, and his gradual transformation on the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It got several details wrong, such as his major and the year he graduated. He paused for a minute, irritated, then decided it didn't matter. His eyes skipped ahead:

Rosen admits to having complicated feelings about the suicide bomber who killed his twin. “Look,” he says, “the safety and prosperity of an entire society is based upon shutting the Palestinians up where they can't be seen. So I can understand trying to violently place yourself within the Israelis' field of vision, in a way they can't ignore. I don't condone it, but I do understand it.”

Reading that, he remembered the reporter sitting back in her chair and contemplating him. “You're a very understanding man,” she'd said. “A forgiving one. If someone blew my brother up, I wouldn't be making these fine distinctions, I can tell you that.”

Were the distinctions really so fine?

He folded the paper neatly and put it in his briefcase, and turned to the email messages waiting for him in his inbox.

AT HOME, MATT HAD
the features section spread out on the kitchen counter, and he and Brent were reading, elbows resting on the counter, pricked by cracker crumbs, shoulder muscles pulsing through their T-shirts. The sun flooded through the kitchen's screen door, and at Matt's elbow, crackers lay cascaded out of a ripped sleeve, beside a container of hummus with its plastic top off. His parents had left the previous morning, and an airy, expansive feeling of being in charge of his own domain was mingling with irritation at Brent, who, before Matt had brought in the paper, had been telling him a long story about something one of his colleagues had said that had made him anxious about his tenure case, which was coming up in the fall. Brent's book manuscript had been accepted by a great press, and as far as Matt could make out, he was a total rising star in his field. Now that his materials were all in, he had the summer to wait till his case came up. “There's nothing more you can do, right?” Matt had said. “So you might as well try to relax this summer.”

Brent had been quiet for a moment, and Matt could tell that he was brooding about how little Matt understood about the complexity and direness of his situation. But he didn't have the energy to draw him out. He knew that made him a bad friend, but honestly, after what he'd been through in the past few months, it was a little hard to listen to Brent obsess over what was clearly a nonproblem.

Gal was upstairs in their bedroom watching
The Parent Trap
for the gajillionth time, and Matt had put Noam in the playpen with every single toy he had. He studied his own face in the picture. It was a good picture; he looked handsome; his gaze into the camera was self-assured and masculine, his hair flawlessly messy. It was a picture he wouldn't mind his old New York friends seeing, which weirdly seemed to be his criterion for what was acceptable and what wasn't, even though he didn't even care about them anymore. The dog sniffed around his ankles for crumbs. “Hey, Yo-yo,” he said, “once you're in the public domain, there's no telling what can happen. Next thing you know we'll be seeing your head on a naked Labrador's body.”

He scanned down the article to find his name.

Sitting on the floor, his partner, Matthew Greene, looks on with a small smile, his blond hair long and disheveled, and his long legs stretched out on the carpet as he leans back on his hands. He projects the aura of a man who belongs in a West Village nightclub rather than in a New England farmhouse, sitting on a crumb-strewn carpet remnant surrounded by toys and stuffed animals.

Matt tsked, irritated at how the writer was hammering at the urban gay male angle; his sensitive ear heard something smug in it. He put his finger on the paragraph. “She's all, ‘Look at the shallow gay man brought down by a dose of the real world.' ”

“Oh,” Brent said, peering at it and wrinkling his nose. “I hate that.”

They grunted, settled down, and read some more. The writer described Noam as “a genial butterball of a toddler,” and wrote of Gal:

It was hardest to move the six-year-old, Gal (pronounced “Gahl”), who had the rich social life of the kindergartener in Israel, and who, while raised in a bilingual family, is now living in a new linguistic universe. Gal is full of penetrating questions, the thirty-eight-year-old magazine editor says, about what happened to her parents and about the dangers that she or her new guardians might face as well. “There's nothing you can say to her,” Rosen admits, “that can really reassure her. If this happened to her parents, how can I convince her it won't happen to me or Matt? How can I convince her that it won't happen to her?”

THAT WAS AN EXCELLENT
quote, Matt thought. Glancing at Brent, who was reading, his face sharp and intent, he had a small feeling of excitement over being in the paper; it brought back those urgent days when he had felt himself to be a rocky pier against which dark and stormy waters pitched. Certainly the storm was still there, somewhere, but it was buried now, somewhere in Daniel's strange disappearance, and indistinguishable from mind-numbing tedium—sitting on the floor, playing endless games of Spit, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Gulo Gulo, Zooloretto, Tsuro (which Daniel called “Tsuris”), keeping Noam from putting Gal's Legos in his mouth, trying to retrieve the piece that had skittered under the couch without having to heave his whole long body off the floor and then sit down again, so slithering onto his stomach and reaching, fingers outstretched, grunting, spitting dust off his lips, a twinge shooting through his shoulder, while Noam said—mildly, regretfully—“Uh-oh.”