All I Love and Know (53 page)

Rotem studied his face for a few minutes, and then wiped her mouth and set her crumpled napkin on top of the salad remnants on her plate. “Well, tell me you'll at least think about doing the show,” she said. “Mark is a wonderful interviewer. And it would mean a lot to people to see Joel's face again.”

A laugh sprung out of him. “You do realize that I'm not Joel, right?” he said drolly.

“I do,” she said.

He'd hurt her feelings, he saw. He felt bad about that, although there was the slightest flicker of satisfaction that he had that power.

An awkward silence followed, then they both spoke at once. “Which shows were the famous ones?” Daniel asked, just as Rotem was bursting out with “It's just so amazing, how much you look, and sound, alike!”

“Oh, quite a few,” she said, sitting back. “The profile of Amos Oz, where Joel got him to sing with him. The one about the security barrier. He interviewed the construction workers who were building it. There are parodies of it all over the place all the time.” She laughed. “A columnist in
Ha'aretz
compared it to the gravedigger scene in
Hamlet
.”

She put her finger up for the waiter, and when he came over she ordered an espresso, and Daniel said he'd have one, too. Another silence opened up the air. Then Daniel spoke. “You miss him,” he said.

“I do,” Rotem said, her eyes glistening.

“I do, too,” he said, but he was thinking something else.
It would mean a lot to people to see Joel's face again
. What would Joel have said about that comment? Daniel imagined viewers from all over the country seeing him on their televisions, gasping, recovering, gabbling to their spouses about how fooled they'd been. Twinsism, of course, that's what Joel would have called it. Because how was it different from one of them sitting in on the other's exam? And then a thought followed that sank and spread into his chest. He was staying in Israel, sleeping in his brother's bed, raising his children in his house, taking on Joel's friends as his own. How was
that
different?

They parted outside in the windy square, Rotem's hair whipping across her face. “
Ad machar
,” they said. Until tomorrow. Daniel watched her walk back toward the station, hitching her purse higher on her shoulder. He walked to the bus stop and stood under the Plexiglas shelter with the cleaning women going home for the day. The wind battering its sides made his thoughts whirl like debris caught up in it. People stood and crowded toward the curb as the bus approached. He shouldered his way forward, snaking his arm around several bodies and clasping the cool bar to hoist himself in.

He could stay here and be Joel, fulfill the life Joel had been robbed of. But as he handed the driver his
cartisia
, saw the strong blunt fingers curled around the hole punch, he remembered that time so many years ago when he'd been staying in Joel's house, when stealing out of bed at night and hurrying out into the Jerusalem darkness to find men like himself had been his heart's desire.

THE UNVEILING HAD BEEN
held at the
shloshim
, thirty days after the burial, but they'd decided to hold a service at the twelve-month anniversary as well, now that they could all come together without a custody battle to divide them. They stood on the outcropping of rock looking over the city, whose colors were muted under cloudy skies, the stone chalky and pale, the conifers dark gray-green, listening to the rabbi praying. Daniel held Noam on his hip,
kipot
on both their heads; lately, Noam had taken to putting his arm around Daniel's neck when he held him that way, which Daniel found totally heartbreaking. He counted around seventy people clustered about the headstones, which stated the dates of Joel's and Ilana's births and deaths in Hebrew and English, their love of their children, the love of their children for them. Their colleagues were there, standing with hands behind their backs and heads bowed, including the teachers and school administrators Daniel had come to know and Joel's coworkers too, Mark, Rotem and her husband, and the others.

The warm wind whipped at their hair and the women's skirts. Daniel's eye kept being drawn to movement in the distance, and he realized that part of him thought Matt might magically appear, surprise them as he had a year ago, the day before they loaded up their ark and sailed to Northampton. But when he looked up, it would just be a tree branch, or once, a solitary mourner approaching someone else's grave. Across from him, Gal stood next to Leora and Rafi, who had a
kipa
pinned to his hair and the spaced-out look he got when undirected speech was going on around him. Looking at them, Daniel saw that Gal did have friends, that among these children she didn't count as awkward or inappropriate at all, and that gladdened him.
I'm doing my best with them
, he silently told his brother and sister-in-law.
I really am
. He also vowed to do better.

Noam shifted on his hip and pointed to the headstones, let out an interested, tuneful cluck that made the people around them smile. “Ema and Abba,” Daniel whispered into his ear. He'd been thinking about Rotem's assertion that it was common for couples to break up after they lost a child to a terrorist attack. Thinking that terrorism had broken him and Matt up, not a sex act at a party. Standing there half-listening to the rabbi's singsong, he thought about the blast of rage with which he'd cast Matt out, and felt shaken for a moment by the residue of that commotion. He handed Noam to Yaakov and stood for a second with his hands on his knees, like a winded runner. Who was he kidding? Matt wasn't dangerous. A fool maybe, for wantonly flirting with danger in a world that held plenty of horrors even if you just sat home in your chair all day and read a book. But he wasn't the cause of danger in the world, or at least not more than most people were. Daniel himself had almost lost Gal.

People looked at him with kind, inquiring looks that made his face grow hot. He closed his eyes and felt the pulses beating in his eyelids.

He straightened and let out a shaky sigh. The rabbi had finished praying and they recited the mourner's kaddish, Daniel and a few others reading it off a sheet of paper they'd been handed. Malka and Yaakov, he noticed without surprise, knew it by heart. He took Noam back from his grandfather and settled him into his stroller. As mourners started to wind through the rows of headstones to the cemetery exit, Daniel waited for Gal and put his hand on her head. “Come here for one second,” he said in Hebrew. He steered her toward the headstones, and kneeled.

“What now?” she asked, kneeling.

He kissed his fingers and touched the cool granite of first Ilana's headstone, then Joel's. Gal solemnly kissed her own fingers, and touched each of her parents' graves.

THE RECEPTION AT THEIR
apartment brought back many of the same people who'd come to the
shiva
, but to Daniel it felt sweeter and quieter, as if the explosion itself had finally stopped echoing and been folded into the air. His parents weren't there, for one; they'd intended to come but had been detained in the U.S. by the death and funeral of their old friend Lou Fried. Lydia didn't even give Daniel a hard time about it, or make him reassure her that she was making the right choice; she just said, wearily, with rare understatement, “It's been a hard year.” And Matt wasn't there, of course. For a moment Daniel imagined him coming through the door, remembered how when Matt breezed into a room he seemed to change the very climate—to crisp and freshen the air there.

He let Gal take the other kids into her room, and when he looked in on them, the girls were practicing cartwheels in their jumpers and tights while Noam sat on Rafi's lap. He was slapping Rafi's
kipa
on his own head and tilting it so that it would slide off, then craning his neck to look at Rafi with an antic, expectant expression, and Rafi was saying dutifully, “That's funny.” When he got back to the living room, someone was telling a long story about how Joel had gained the trust of his Israeli crew when his predecessor, whom they'd loved, had been fired, and another did an imitation of an exasperated Ilana going off first on negligent parents and then on overinvolved ones, with a mixture of rudeness and comedy that was so spot-on, tears ran down their faces from laughter. As he wiped his eyes, Daniel felt a soft hand on his forearm; it was Malka's.

After everybody had left, stopping and turning at the door to take Daniel's hands in theirs and make him promise to keep in touch, Daniel sat with Gal and Noam in the living room, too tired to clean up all the empty glasses, the plates with blocks of half-eaten cheese surrounded by cracker crumbs, the bowls with dip crusting at the edges, the
bourekas
plate just flakes and oil. He'd turned on the TV to a cartoon. He closed his eyes and smiled again thinking of Ilana's friend's imitation of her, felt laughter pushing at his throat. His thoughts began to drift, curling pleasantly around Matt. He didn't resist them; it was as if all the Joel-love in the room had opened the spring of love in his heart, which then splashed noisily, refreshingly, over Matt as well.

“Noam!” Gal said in a high, bright voice.

Daniel looked over and caught his breath: Noam was on his feet, walking shakily over to him with a look Daniel could only describe as merry. He stumbled and fell against Daniel's legs, and Daniel picked him up and kissed him noisily on his plump, flushed cheek, saying, “Good job, buddy!” He looked at Gal and held up his hand for a high five; she gave it a resounding smack.

He shook out his stinging hand, smiling. “When we get back,” he said, “I think we should see Matt.”

She looked quickly at him, her face wavering with incredulity.

“Okay?” he asked.

She broke into a faint smile. “Okay,” she said.

O
N A WARM
evening in early April, Matt hauled out the gas grill his landlords kept in their tiny shed and opened the lid to see what kind of shape it was in, nodded approvingly when he saw that they'd cleaned it before storing it. He didn't know how much gas was left in the tank, but hoped there was enough to cook a piece of fish, which was marinating in the kitchen. He lit the grill and stepped through the screen door from the patio into the kitchen, just in time to hear the doorbell ring. He went to answer the door, prepared to be irritated at anyone standing there with a clipboard in his hands.

It was Daniel, standing there alone with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. He was wearing a jacket and tie, evidently on his way home late from work; Matt wondered who was home with the kids. He had a grave expression that softened when he greeted Matt. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Matt stood in front of the door, regarding him coolly as his heart buzzed. He wondered whether he should turn off the grill.

“Can I come in?”

Matt stood aside so he could enter.

Daniel came into the living room and looked around approvingly at the simple couches, the prints, the muted grays, beiges, and blacks of the room. “This is nice,” he said.

Matt took this in with an acerbic little cocktail of feelings. Wasn't this ironic—Daniel's praise of the house he'd had to rent because he'd been kicked out of his own?

“Can I sit down?” Daniel asked, gesturing toward the couch. Matt nodded but remained standing himself. He worried that he was looking like a prick. He didn't mean to be one. It was just that he was pretty sure Daniel had come over to invite him to see the kids, but still, he felt he needed to guard against surprises. His whole perception of Daniel felt different; to his eyes, Daniel's seriousness now had a ruthless tinge to it, and his gentle kindness seemed like an attempt to mask that.

Daniel sat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking earnestly at him. “Matt,” he said. It took some time, as he stammered out an apology and told him he loved him, for it to register to Matt that he wanted him back. It felt so unreal hearing the words he'd despaired of ever hearing, that Matt couldn't even revel in his own vindication. He sank into a chair, shocked, as Daniel talked.

He'd done a lot of thinking, Daniel said, about how badly he'd treated him. “I just didn't let you in at all,” Daniel said. “I was grieving, Matt, and I didn't know how to let you help me.”

Never had Matt wished more to be the kind of cool customer that could wait him out and make him squirm than when he began blurting, “I wanted to be part of it! I wanted to share responsibility. I wanted some freaking
credit
for being a partner in parenting. It was like you refused to let us go through it together! Was that the kind of love you wanted?”

“No, I didn't want
any
love!” Daniel said.

“Why not?”

“I . . .” Daniel paused, and put his hand to his forehead as if checking for a fever. “I just felt unworthy of it, and it felt like a huge pressure.”

Matt sat, stumped. “That's just so . . . wrong,” he said.

Daniel laughed, a sight so unexpectedly ravishing that Matt had to look away. “But I'm trying to say that now, I—I recognize you. Recognize what you were going through during this whole year.”

“And what was I going through?”

Daniel paused, thinking. “You were someone thrust into this impossible situation, surrounded by grieving people, trying to help us,” he said. “You threw out there all your generosity and intelligence and love and ingenuity, and you kept doing it even though we often threw it all back in your face.”

Matt felt his face twitch, once, twice, and then tears stung his eyes.

“If we can manage to find our way back to each other,” Daniel said, “I promise I'll try to make things different. Better.”