A Remarkable Kindness (19 page)

“On my one day to sleep in?”

“We can sleep afterward. You gotta get up in the dark if you want to see the sunrise.”

He didn't answer at first. Then, “I'll think of something. That will give me something good to think about.”

Rachel didn't know if what she was about to say would make him feel better or worse, but she blurted out, “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. That's the problem.”

She hesitated, picturing him in his army uniform, the way the drab green color drained the sparkle from his eyes. “Take care of
yourself, Yoni, okay? You'll see, in no time at all, you'll be home and we'll be together again.”

“I gotta go.”

Yoni hung up and Rachel waited there in the cold. She was on one side of the dark night and Yoni was on the other. She imagined Yoni in the desert, digging as if he were digging his own grave in the sand. With the stars staring down. Doing nothing at all except flicker their lights, dim, helpless, and faraway.

W
hen Rachel was fifteen, she had walked down a long corridor in a Milwaukee hospital and then stood with her mother by her grandmother Shirley's bed. Without her teeth, and with her once dyed, coiffed hair hanging in limp white strands, Shirley looked like a frail and emaciated bird that had fallen out of its nest, eying Rachel with desperation.

“Help me,” Shirley moaned faintly, lifting her arthritic hand toward Rachel as if trying to claw her way back to life.

And Rachel, who used to love spending every chance she got with Shirley in her eighteenth-floor apartment in a fancy condominium, shrank back.

Rachel's mother quickly said, “Rachie, why don't you go out and wait in the cafeteria for me?” and Rachel nodded and turned. She walked away swiftly, gratefully, relieved to be young and absolved from witnessing someone she loved dissolve into death. She
didn't look back. Rachel had never told anyone this, but joining the burial circle was a way to make amends to her grandmother.

Rachel had participated in her first
tahara
for Sophie, and then another for Edna. Now she came for Hilda Mosseri, feeling less queasy and more at ease. As Aviva slipped her hand into the sleeve of the shroud, Rachel no longer hung back, and she helped Aviva tug Hilda's arm through the sleeve. Hilda's skin was not cold, Rachel thought. It was frigid. It was unresponsive flesh. Rachel bit into her lower lip. She forced herself to breathe, unable to bear the smell. But she stood there, for she had made a vow to herself. She would not shrink from death.

And she would not shrink from life.

W
ith her eyes closed, Emily counted in Arabic as Ali's fingers traveled down each notch of her spine.

“Ali,” Emily whispered when she got to
asara,
ten. “That was so nice.” She could feel her body reawakening, as though it had been asleep. She let out a lengthy sigh. A few hours earlier, she had met Ali in a bed and breakfast about twenty miles from Peleg, somewhere up in the hills. The late-afternoon sky was saturated with dusky purple light. A wintry fog was rolling in, hiding the hills, sloshing over the lawn, wrapping around the trunks of the trees.

“I finally get to enjoy all of you.” Ali's hand slid over her behind, lingering between her inner thighs. “It just took so long to get you to agree to come here with me—and how long did it take you to get undressed? My ex-wife could have peeled ten oranges in the time it took you to peel off that one pair of jeans.”

“She's a lot thinner than me. And her skin is the color of wet sand by the sea. And my skin is the dry hot sand you burn your feet on.”

“You remembered I told you that,” Ali said. “But tell me something else. Tell me the very first time you felt something for me.”

“I think it was that time you came to the reception desk to talk to me about Svetlana the cook.” Emily looked at Ali's smooth coppery skin, his sharp-angled nose. “You said she was stealing food and hiding it in her pocketbook to take home to her husband and you decided to give her the food to carry home in a shopping bag so she wouldn't feel like a thief. And what about you?”

“The first time I met you. The very first time. I remember when I walked toward you at the desk, thinking that you were a person I wanted to get to know. You had just started to work at the hotel. You hadn't met Boaz yet, and you had a lost look in your eyes.”

“Do I still have that look?”

“No. You look content, like one of those cats with golden eyes that just got a free meal at the hotel.” He smiled, patted her hip, and then opened the window, leaning his body over the sill. “This is the smoking section.”

“You like breaking rules, don't you?”

“I don't care what the neighbors think, if that's what you mean.”

But even being with Ali, Emily knew she loved rules. When she was growing up, her father's rules gave order and meaning and sense to life. It was her mother who enjoyed forays into lawlessness, like the time she took Emily to lunch in Charleston and ordered a shrimp cocktail for them to share. Emily had never tasted
shrimp before, and her mother confessed that she'd been eating it every time she got a chance.

“Mom, I can't believe you!”

“Emily, don't tell your Daddy!”

“What are you thinking?” Ali asked.

“I dread going back to Peleg and seeing Boaz.”

“What's the point of continuing your marriage if you're so unhappy?”

“It's complicated.” Right then, Emily thought of Boaz with a deep jab of remorse. She remembered the time she had watched through the kitchen window as he hoisted a bale of hay on his broad back and carried it toward the cowshed, the muscles straining in his neck, the meandering vein on the side of his forehead swelling like a flooded river. She knew how hard he worked to provide for the boys—and for her.

“You can end something to begin something better.” Then Ali's phone rang.

“I can't just—” Emily began but Ali said, “Hello, Yoram,” and comically rolled his eyes. Emily listened to the conversation for a while, then dozed off. When she awoke, darkness was sweeping into the room like floodwater. All she could see was a stroke of light under the bathroom door.

“Ali?” Emily propped herself up on her elbow. “Are you in there?”

No answer.

Shit.

Oh, shit.
Emily picked up her cell phone—ignoring the two missed calls from Boaz—and phoned Ali. “Where are you?”

“Back at the hotel, unfortunately.”

“How could you have left me?”

“Yoram did a Yoram. One of the stoves wasn't working and there's a huge wedding and he said nobody else could fix it. I told you I had to go, don't you remember?”

“No!” Emily's heart went cold. “I fell asleep and I didn't think I'd wake up in a hotel room by myself. It's like a horror movie where a woman is alone in all this fog—”

“Emily, I'm sorry. Don't you have to leave now, anyway?”

“Do you think I'd stay here alone?” Emily yanked the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around herself.

“I wouldn't have left if I didn't have to get back to work. I want to be with you—that's what I've been trying to tell you. Please drive carefully and call me later so that I know you got home safely, okay?”

She was too angry to say anything.

“Emily—”

“Fine, I'll call.” Emily hung up. She went into the bathroom, washed up, combed her hair, and pulled it back with two rhinestone barrettes. She put on the same pair of jeans and black sweater jacket, but she felt as if she were dressing in a Purim costume. The phone rang. It was Boaz, but Emily wasn't ready to talk to him or hear his voice in her ear. She wasn't ready to think of being with him. Wasn't ready to think of being without him.

She grabbed her things, closed the door of the room, and drove slowly down the winding hills. At the edge of Peleg, the car wheels rolled over the seams of the straight road. She tried to see
the chicken coops, the cowsheds and farmhouses, but they were all lost to the gloom. As she parked the car in their driveway, her phone rang again. Boaz, for the fourth time. But she was already out of the car, slamming the door and hurrying up the stone path. She stopped.

Boaz stood in the path holding a twin. Tal? Shoval? Emily squinted and in the faint light coming from the kitchen window, she caught sight of Shoval's birthmark by his ear. His arm was in a cast.

“Shoval!” Emily jabbered. “Shoval, honey child!”

“Where were you?” Boaz's eyes narrowed in on her.

“At the gynecologist's.” She forced a weak smile. “Thank goodness, all is—”

“And your cell phone?”

“I was just parking the car so I didn't pick it up.” Emily was aware of the quiver in her voice that she couldn't quite master.

“You should know by now that in this country, you keep your cell phone on at all times and you answer it.”

“I left the boys their lunch,” Emily said. “Didn't Danielle tell you? I put carrot sticks on their plates and made funny faces with red pepper slices for the mouths—”

“Here's your mother you were crying for.” Boaz passed Shoval to Emily.

Emily held Shoval close. She couldn't get her heart to stop thrashing. She kissed her son, thoroughly relieved that he was okay, thoroughly ashamed that she hadn't even known what had happened to him. “
Mah karah
?” she asked Boaz.

“Tal pushed him at
gan
and Shoval kept saying his arm hurt, so Sara called me and I took him to the hospital,” Boaz replied, and before Emily could even respond, he walked into the house.

“Tal pushed me!” Shoval repeated.

“I'm very sorry, my brave boy.” Emily's face still felt hot. She looked at the dense fog creeping in between the hedges, inching around the blurry outline of the boys' swing set. She kissed his blondish-brown hair. “You smell like a puppy. Are you hungry?”

“Abba buy me falafel.”

“Sounds yummy.” Emily's voice still sounded unnatural. “So then, it's time for your bath.”

She carried Shoval into the house. She'd always liked its competing smells: soap and mud, eggs and toast, oranges and the occasional sharp tang of Boaz's cigarettes. But the smells of the house seemed unfamiliar now, as if they belonged to someone else's house. Emily passed the couch strewn with toys, Boaz's solitary armchair with newspapers on the cushion, and the shelf lined with seashells she'd collected with Shoval and Tal on the beach.

In the bathroom, running water in the tub, Emily suddenly noticed the sea-foam-green tiles that Boaz's ex-wife had chosen long ago. Why had they never irked Emily until now? She found a plastic bag for Shoval's arm in the cabinet under the sink (another ugly shade of green) and gave him a quick bath, not thinking.
Don't think.
She wrapped Shoval in a towel and carried him to his bedroom, helping him into his Superman pajamas. Tal was in the narrow bed that lay catty-corner to Shoval's, sleeping upside down, his feet on his Spider-Man pillow. The boys were always restless, even in their sleep.

Emily tucked Shoval under the covers. “Now let's say Shema.”

Shoval listened as Emily recited the nighttime Hebrew prayer that her parents always used to say with her before she went to sleep:
You shall love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
But now Emily wasn't sure what it meant to love God with all her heart. Did she even have any room left in her heart? Was her soul indelibly stained after breaking one of the Ten Commandments? What did “all your might” mean? And to top it all off, she wondered, could God say the same prayer back to her?

“Be with me.” Shoval thumped his small fist against the mattress.

Emily knew she'd have to confront Boaz, who was somewhere in the house. She wanted to procrastinate so she settled next to Shoval on the bed. He looked at her, his amber eyes the same shade as her own. He didn't blink; his gaze fixed on her as if he were a sailor navigating to a distant shore and she was the harbor, waiting for his boat to come in. Emily stayed still, not moving, watching him as he watched her. Inhaling, exhaling, speeding up her breaths to match his own. When he and Tal were born, she had felt so much joy. Fireworks in her heart. Then she remembered Boaz sitting next to her hospital bed, his head bent, his elbows on his knees.

Shoval kept his eyes opened on her, taking her in, and suddenly his eyelids closed, as if the lights in a room went off. Emily counted to ten in Hebrew this time, and when she got to
eser,
she eased herself off the bed and tiptoed around police cars, plastic animals, and puzzle pieces with fuzzy cardboard edges.

The lamp burned by the armchair. The living room was empty. Boaz was slouched at the table in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. A bottle of Maccabee beer next to him, a cigarette burning between his fingers, bright tangerine peels curled in spirals on a white plate. The refrigerator throbbed in time with Emily's heart.

“Boaz,” she tried, “I'm sorry.”

Boaz squashed the cigarette into the tangerine peels and looked up. “She just got up and left me. You can do the same thing. Just pack up your bags and go.”

“I don't want to.”

“What does he give you that I don't?” Boaz's eyes widened. Darkened.

“‘He'?”

“Don't take me for a fool! You don't think I know? If I could kill him now, I would. But I don't want to sit in jail for him or for you or for anyone else. I sit in jail in my own head as it is.”

Emily wanted to apologize, but she certainly couldn't admit what she'd done: that would only make things worse. “You're never around, Boaz.” Her ragged voice cut the air. “You leave me with the boys and spend hours on the sea or in the groves. I try so hard to reach you, to get you to be with us, to
want
to be with us. We never spend time together as a family. You're never here!”

“Thank God I was here today, after Sara tried to track you down at your doctor—”

“I thought she was just calling again about the Purim party—”

“You shouldn't even try to get away with an insulting kind of lie like that.” Boaz was on his feet, coming toward her.

Emily wasn't afraid that he'd hit her, but she stepped away
from the kitchen and through the hall until her back was pressed against the wall.

“You have two choices.” Boaz stopped in front of her, his face flushed, indignant, injured. “Him or me.”

“When was the last time you even asked me how I am? When was the last time you did something with the boys and me? Just when, tell me
when
? When was the last time you—”

“Tell me what you've decided. Me or that bastard?”

“You'd give me up so easily?”

“Didn't you?” Boaz swerved around and walked out the front door.

His words pierced her, lancing her with guilt and regret. Maybe if she only tried harder, she could pull him out of his sadness instead of just letting him vanish into his own lost world. “Oh God,” she cried, and rushed after him, but the fog had already swallowed him up. She ran down the path toward the eucalyptus trees, their leaves beaded with mist, and around the side of the house. Boaz was nowhere to be found. Finally, Emily caught sight of him cutting across the clearing where the milk truck idled each day.

“Why are you walking away from me?” She caught up with him by the entrance of the cowshed. “Don't you care? Isn't our marriage worth something to you?”

Boaz struck a match, cupping his hands around the flame, and lit a cigarette.

“Please,” Emily pleaded. “I want the Boaz I fell in love with to come back to me. The one who said he loved watching things grow.” She searched his eyes, forlorn and distant. She wanted so
much to touch his unshaven face, the familiar, almost soft grizzle that covered his cheeks. How could she have almost given up her marriage and her family and her life for a few moments of passion with Ali? What was she thinking? That was it: she wasn't thinking. Now she thought hard. “All these cows moo for you. They wait for you to milk them. They eat whatever you give them. You've planned everything. You get hay from the fields to give to the cows. You give the manure from the cows back to the fields. But what have you planned for me?”

Boaz blew out smoke. All around the fog rolled in, drenching the foliage in gray.