The Devil's Light (26 page)

In two months, Brooke well knew, she was due to return to Israel.

The knowledge shadowed his pleasure. Away from New York, their conflicting attachments to different lives, he felt the life they could have together. His need to say this nagged at him. Cabo San Lucas, he felt certain, was more for them than a state of mind.

On the fourth morning in Mexico, they walked in the surf. Abruptly, Brooke asked, “What do you tell Meir?”

She gave him a guarded look. “About what?”

“Us.”

She turned her gaze to the surf ahead. “That I've met someone I like. That we spend time together.”

“That's all?”

“Not all.” She stopped, facing him. “What would you have me say?”

He was not quite ready, Brooke realized; perhaps he was afraid. “Let me sleep on that,” he said. “Then maybe we should talk.”

“All right,” she responded matter-of-factly, and continued marching through the surf. But in the next days, there were moments when she seemed subdued. Silence made Brooke a keen observer of her moods.

Two evenings before the end of their time in Mexico, they took a picnic to the beach at sunset. Shoulders touching, they shared cold lobster and ceviche and a chilled bottle of Mexican Chardonnay. As darkness enveloped them, they slipped out of their clothes. “I want you,” she whispered. “Now.”

They made love with a new, almost desperate intensity that seemed to come from Anit. Afterward, she lay on his shoulder. The night sky was crystalline with stars; the air smelled faintly of salt. Perhaps Brooke only imagined the silent tears he felt where her face touched his bare skin.

The next morning, they climbed on a rock and sat watching the water glisten with first sunlight. After a time, Brooke said, “You asked what I'd like you to tell Meir. As hard as it may be, I have an answer.”

Though trained on the water, her eyes seemed troubled. “What is it?”

Brooke paused, then spoke with far more confidence than he felt. “That you've decided to finish school at NYU.”

She faced him now, her gaze hooded yet unsurprised. “Why would I do that?”

“So we can live together.”

She smiled a little, though this seemed tinged with sadness. “And then?”

He took her hands in his. “And then the next year, and the next. The beginning of our life.”

Her hands were limp, as though all her energy were absorbed by their words. “Where do you imagine us living?”

Brooke tried to feel encouraged. “We'll pick a place together,” he said lightly. “Somewhere warmer than New York.”

“But not Israel.”

“That's not what I was thinking, no.”

Anit stiffened. “So this life of ours requires that I abandon my homeland.”

Pausing, Brooke framed his answer. “Without being sentimental, America is everyone's place. For a host of reasons, Israel is a Jewish place; that's its reason for being. It's not meant to be my place.”

“And our children,” Anit asked bluntly. “Will they be Americans, too?”

Brooke shook his head. “If we're both academics, we could spend the summer in Israel. Our kids would be dual citizens.” He summoned a smile. “If both of us don't start cross-breeding, our descendants will have sloping foreheads and crossed eyes. We owe this to the species.”

She shook her head with a mixture of fondness and dismay. “You would say that, Brooke Chandler.”

“Actually, Ben said it first.”

“Then maybe I'll take it more seriously.” The trace of humor vanished
from her eyes. “I promise to think about all you've said. But I can't talk about it now. Just give us this time, okay?”

Hopeful and deflated, Brooke pledged that he would.

A decade later, in a city fearful of extinction, Brooke Chandler drove to Langley in sparse commuter traffic. The exodus was swelling.

He worked alone for several hours, refining al Qaeda's route from Iraq to the Bekaa Valley. In midafternoon, Terri Young opened his door.

“Good news,” she told him, “if you can call it that. I've found something—two things actually. They may help you look a little less like Captain Ahab.”

F
or an hour, Brooke and Terri reviewed their theory with Carter Grey. At the end Grey, satisfied, called Noah Brustein to request a meeting.

The deputy director's schedule was jammed: after huddling with the president's task force, he was scheduled to brief leaders of the House and Senate. All Brooke could do, Grey told him, was to prepare himself for whatever time Brustein could spare.

Brooke worked into early evening, outlining his thoughts on paper in anticipation of challenges and questions. At last, confident that he had done his best, he let his mind go where it would.

Often, this was useful. He had long since learned that the subconscious, left to itself, surfaced insights that the conscious mind passed over. But on this night, as often lately, his thoughts returned to Anit Rahal.

Whatever had become of her, it was not what Brooke had wanted.

Three weeks after their return from Cabo San Lucas, the first breath of spring, breezy and temperate, had inspired Brooke to call her—a round-trip on the Staten Island Ferry was one of the city's undiscovered pleasures, and free at that. Though she sounded subdued, Anit had agreed.

The ancient boat they took was a triple-decker with its bottom deck devoted to cars, and a top deck where passengers on long wooden benches could take in Manhattan from the water. Rounding the tip of the island, Brooke and Anit gazed at the stunning, solitary heights of the
Twin Towers, impressive even at a distance. “Have you ever been there?” Anit asked.

“Twice. Once to visit Ben; once with my parents to the top-floor restaurant. Both times, the height seemed unnatural—I couldn't shake the feeling that the damned thing was destined to topple over. To be that high flattens everything out.” Brooke sipped his beer. “I told Ben that his view was a metaphor for the financial community: too much distance, too little perspective.”

“What did
he
have to say?”

“He patted me on the shoulder, promising never to forget the little people.”

Anit smiled a bit. “That's so like Ben.”

Something in her tone sounded valedictory, as though recalling a friend from her past. Warding off this intuition, Brooke pointed out landmarks—Ellis Island, where both Ben's and Aviva's ancestors had arrived from Poland; the strange, deserted landscape of Governor's Island; the Statue of Liberty, which Anit confessed that she found mysteriously forbidding; the tugboats shuttling barges filled with trash, or oil from refineries in New Jersey. But beneath the surface of the day, Brooke feared the drift of Anit's thoughts, wondering if she had decided their future. Lately he seemed to think about little else. As troubling as Anit's silence was Ben's reticence when Brooke spoke of her; beneath his banter, Ben was a tender and perceptive man. Brooke had been too cowardly to probe this.

Beside him, Anit had fallen into a trance, so still that the only movement was the breeze rippling her black curls. He looked around them, assuring himself that no other passenger could hear. “Are you okay?”

In profile, she shook her head. A single tear trickled down her cheek.

“What is it, Anit?”

“So many things. There was a suicide bombing, in Haifa. A classmate from high school, Jordana, was celebrating her parents' anniversary.” Anit closed her eyes. “Jordana was an only child. Her parents lived. It's unnatural for a family to end in such a way. And yet it keeps happening to us.”

Brooke felt a torrent of emotions: horror and pity for this man and woman he did not know; revulsion for the “martyr” who had done this, and the ideology that compelled him; a selfish relief—shameful even in the moment—that Anit's response did not damn his hopes. But when he put his arm around her, she did not respond.

“I'm sorry,” he said helplessly.

“Whenever I hear such stories, I shrink inside. But this is someone I knew.” Her voice caught, then steadied again. “If I were still on the border, I find myself wondering, would we have caught him? Then I tell myself not to be stupid—that you can't measure each day by what you've done to prevent someone else's tragedy. I can even hear your voice in my ear.” She turned to him, finishing quietly, “But then I hear my own. It's one thing to seek your own happiness, another to make that your only reason for being.”

“What are you saying, Anit?”

In that moment he saw naked sadness in her eyes. “I can't be with you, my love. However deeply a part of me may want to.”

Brooke steadied himself, determined not to give this woman up. “Then either way, Anit, you lose.”

Her eyes dampened again. “Do you think that I don't know that? Do you imagine that some other woman laughed with you, made love with you, told you when she was happy or sad? That was
me,
Anit Rahal.” She softened her voice. “This is not about Meir. I wish it were—that would haunt me less, and perhaps you would accept it more easily. It's that you're so American, while I'm completely and inescapably what I am. The terrible thing is that I love you for who you are, and yet can't live in your world. I'd lose too much of myself.”

Desperate, Brooke took her hands. “I love who
you
are—all of it. There must be some compromise—”

The tears on her face stopped him. “I'm begging you, don't ask me this again. It will only hurt us both.” She swallowed, then went on. “I already know I'm hurting you as you've never been hurt before. But I was selfish, imagining my time with you as this special gift. I hate myself for that, and for letting both of us feel as we do. My weakness has taken this too far.”

Hearing the finality in her voice, Brooke felt a surge of bitterness. “As you say, I've lived a lucky life. No point spoiling it with excessive feeling.”

She looked into his face with a compassion close to pity. “You don't mean that, Brooke. With or without me, you'll live a happy life. You're like America—it's in your nature.”

Brooke could not imagine a future beyond this moment. “You overestimate me, Anit. I'm less impervious than you think.”

Her chest shuddered. “Someday, I hope to know I'm right. Please give
us time alone—weeks, maybe months. Then I'll call you from Israel. If you feel you can talk to me, I want that.” Tentative, she leaned her forehead against his. “I'll always love you, Brooke Chandler. Whatever else happens.”

Brooke gave her the only response he could. “And you. That's why I can't talk about friendship. At least not now.”

She nodded in silent understanding. It was the last day he ever saw Anit Rahal.

An hour later, they parted on the dock. Anit went to her dorm, Brooke to his apartment.

Usually he was good at being alone. Now he could not stand it. But the only people he could imagine seeing were Ben and Aviva.

Aviva was at Ben's place. Hearing Brooke's voice, and then his news, Ben canceled their social plans for the evening. “This calls for an emergency meeting,” he said firmly. “Dinner's on us, so you can drink all you want.”

They took him to Da Nico for the suckling pig, one of Brooke's favorites. He barely touched it. But that was not true of the wine. “I know all this suffering is juvenile,” Brooke said. “But I don't think I'll ever meet anyone like her again.”

“You may not,” Ben responded evenly. “We agree she's terrific. But there are other great women out there, with qualities of their own. You're just going to need some time.”

Brooke gazed at his friend. “You thought this would happen, didn't you?”

“I hoped not. But yes, I did.” Ben paused, trying to describe his instincts. “She's more than very Jewish. She's very Israeli. For Anit, dying for her country is a concrete possibility—if she had to make the sacrifice, she wouldn't flinch. Life for her is existential in a way we can't imagine. However she feels about you, she's not the kind of woman who could live for someone else.”

Brooke felt the wine dulling his senses. “That's pretty much what she said.”

Aviva touched his hand. “I like her, too, very much. But when you told Ben she was an old soul, that seemed right.”

“And I'm not.”

“None of us is,” Aviva answered. “We're quintessential Americans.”

“And you're you,” Ben added gently. “One of your greatest strengths is confidence—the world you see is a malleable place, which you can mold to suit you. Most days you're right. But sometimes an intact self-concept isn't enough. A person of lesser gifts would have taken one look at Anit and known that.”

As Ben had, Brooke realized. His assessment now—which included them both—was so accurate that Brooke had little more to say. Managing a smile, he asked, “Then how do you explain Aviva?”

Glancing at his fiancée, Ben laughed. “I imagined being you, and went for it.”

Aviva grinned at him. “Maybe I should marry Brooke. But we've hired the caterer, so I guess it's too late now.”

“In fact,” Ben told Brooke, “that's the only reason we're putting up with you tonight. We've got a favor to ask.”

“Which is?”

“Best man in our wedding, in case you hadn't guessed.” Ben's voice softened. “Seriously, pal, neither of us can imagine doing this without you. Seeing how we love you in our own platonic way.”

As often, Brooke was moved by Ben's ineffable kindness, expressed less in words than in actions. As painful as it was to lose Anit, he could not imagine life without his closest friend. But that he could always count on.

“Are you kidding?” Brooke answered. “I've already planned your fiftieth anniversary party at some awful place in Florida. Wheelchair races included.”