All I Love and Know (32 page)

Matt paused, said humorously, “I'm not sure I like your tone.”

“Well, come on, Matt,” Daniel said. “If she doesn't know how to conduct herself, she'll be hurt by people.”

“Really?” Matt said, recoiling. “
Conduct
herself? How about being encouraged to
be
herself?” He was physically repulsed; how priggish could you get? He looked at Daniel and saw a thin, bearded man in sneakers and socks, and wondered if he'd look at him twice if he didn't already know him. A small well of panic bubbled in his chest. He was used to wanting sex wanting sex wanting sex. Could it be, he wondered, that he was no longer attracted to Daniel, rather than the other way around? He stopped to fish a pebble out of his sandal, and his eyes blurred as his mind shrank from that possibility.

“I'm calling her therapist,” Daniel said. “This is ridiculous.”

When they got home, he went up to Matt's study, closed the door, and called Gal's grief counselor, Peggy Sheridan, at home. “Do you have a moment?” he asked, knowing she'd say yes, because having a child whose parents had been killed by terrorists made therapists cut you a lot of slack.

“Sure,” she said.

“I just wanted to check in,” he said, “because Gal's been pretty volatile at home. And yesterday, she told the kids at school something kind of inappropriate. That her parents were buried without heads.”

“Oh dear,” Peggy said.

He sat down on the love seat and put his feet up on Matt's Lucite coffee table. “I guess I wanted to ask how you think she's doing.”

Peggy was quiet for a moment, and he could hear the clink of dishes in the background, a dishwasher being loaded, or maybe emptied. He conjured her red hair with strands of silver, her freckled skin and clear gray eyes, the Eileen Fisher clothes in earth tones, and wondered if she was in sweats and a T-shirt now, barefoot maybe. Derrick had referred them to her, and Daniel had chosen her without interviewing anyone else based solely on the way she'd first greeted Gal, with a warm seriousness that made Gal visibly relax and open.

“She's struggling,” she said. “There's a lot of anger there. She was dreading starting school.”

“Do you think there's been any progress?” he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.

Peggy paused again, and then asked him if he minded holding on for a second while she went someplace quieter. When she returned, she asked, “Are you concerned that the therapy isn't working?”

“No,” he lied. “I just thought it might be good to check in.”

“I'm glad you did,” she said. “You must be having a helluva time yourself. I mean, your twin brother!”

Why was it always the simplest statements that filled your eyes with tears? During that first session, he'd told her what had happened to Gal and she'd said softly, “That's so sad.” Just that, and Gal had started to cry. He was quiet for a moment now, knowing his voice would catch if he tried to answer.

“Who's helping you get through this?” she asked gently.

“Well, my partner,” Daniel said. “My friends.” He paused. “You probably mean I should be in therapy.”

“Well,” she said, “if it were my twin sister, I'd be running to therapy as fast as my legs could carry me.”

Daniel closed his eyes to absorb this. It felt as if she were crossing a line. Was she suggesting that
he
was the problem? His left leg had fallen asleep, crossed under his right up on the coffee table. He uncrossed them and stood and stomped. “We're trying to do right by Gal,” he said.

“Of course you are.”

“We're trying to be stable and loving, and to help her remember, and put her feelings into language. We've read the books about helping a grieving child. Not to mention consulting with you.”

“And you're doing a terrific job,” Peggy said. “I guess what I want to say is that she's very attuned to you, Daniel; she's watching, and she takes her cues from you.”

That surprised him. Gal was so difficult these days, flinging herself from him, stomping around the house and putting them all on edge—it didn't feel as if she were attached to him at all. He wanted to ask Peggy what she was trying to tell him, but didn't want to come off as confrontational. He told her that he heard Noam crying, and pulled his way off the phone despite some concerned follow-up questions; she knew she'd pissed him off. Then he sat back down, angry that they hadn't had the conversation he'd hoped for. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the couch with his elbow crooked over his face. Let Matt handle baths and bedtime, thinking he was still on the phone. He knew Matt cheated sometimes in just this way, retreating to the bathroom and sitting there longer than necessary, reading a magazine on the toilet while Daniel was getting the kids into pajamas or reading them stories.

It was starting to get dark in the study now, the sky outside drained of color. He squinted at his watch; it was only six o'clock. The long days of summer would soon come to an end, and his heart was heavy with the thought of coming home from work in the dark. He thought of Gal again and a little starburst of anxiety went off in his chest.

He thought about Peggy saying that Gal was taking her cues from him. What was she trying to tell him? He heard a message there, one that implied that he was sending bad cues. He tried to push aside his defensiveness and to examine himself honestly. He was a mess, he knew that. He was heavy-limbed these days, a little zombielike. But this is what he couldn't get past: How could he not be? Was he supposed to set an example for Gal by being as normal as possible?

He loved her and his heart ached for her, but above all, he wanted to do right by her. He wanted to be a parent she felt safe with, with whom she felt at home. If she didn't, it wasn't fair to get angry at her, he knew that. He closed his eyes and prepared himself to get up and help with bedtime, to enter the fray.

Later that night the principal of Gal's school called. Daniel had never talked to her before, but he'd heard she played trombone in the school band and was known to join in a soccer game when patrolling at recess. At the sound of her voice, Daniel relaxed; she had that ability. When he told her that Gal had actually believed her parents were buried headless, there was silence followed by the sound of nose-blowing. “Poor kid,” she said. She said that she wanted the record to be set straight, not just so that the other kids didn't have to imagine something that horrific, but to spare Gal any teasing that might occur. “Because otherwise she's going to be the girl with the headless parents.” She said that she'd do it herself the next morning.

“What will you say to them?” Daniel asked.

She paused. “Who the hell knows? Okay. That Gal went through a terrible experience, losing both of her parents when a bomb exploded in a café in Israel. That the experience upset her so much, it's hard for her to remember those days when they were buried. That they actually did have heads, although Gal thought they didn't. And that I'm sure they all want to help Gal, and support her. And I'll ask them if they have any ideas about what might be the most supportive.”

“Great,” Daniel said.

“May I speak to Gal?” she asked.

Matt went to get her and brought her back, shrinking and shy. “Hello?” she said. “Hi.” She listened for a little while, fingering the
chai
necklace her
savta
had given her. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Yes. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up and sighed with relief. “Okay, I can go back to school now,” she said.

SHE WENT TO SCHOOL
the next day, and Daniel called from work to say that Colleen had taken to wearing Noam around in a carrier on her back, which he seemed to like. Matt worked hard all morning, steeling himself against the impulse to clean the house instead. After lunch, he put on the kettle, took out the dog, and got the mail. There were two letters in regular envelopes, addressed to Daniel in handwriting. When he talked to Daniel at lunchtime, he mentioned them, and Daniel told him to go ahead and open them. Matt opened the first.

Dear Daniel,

2 Jews are being marched before the Nazi firing squad, and the executioner asks them, “Do you want to wear a hood?” The first Jew defiantly says, “No, I want them to see my disgust and anger,” to which the second Jew whispers, “Shoosh, you might upset them.”

You are the second Jew.

The other was typed on a manual typewriter, and the keys had unevenly pressed the letter imprints on the paper.

Dear Daniel Rosen,

I read the newspaper article in which you expressed your understanding of the terrorist who killed your brother and sister-in-law. Please do not talk about things you don't understand. Compassion is a noble impulse but it must always be balanced with WISDOM. If it is not, the result is always foolish stupidity.

MATT LAID THEM CAREFULLY
on the kitchen counter, smoothed them with his hand. “Christ,” Daniel was saying, and Matt said, “What are the odds that after not receiving any mail at all, you'd get two letters in one morning? And who even sends hate mail via snail mail these days?” Then he thought:
These people know where we live, and they want us to know that
. The thought came gulping up and swallowed him. His eyes scanned the windows. Would he and Daniel be like those abortion doctors, shot in their living rooms by deranged snipers? If one of the kids got hurt . . . At the very thought of that happening, his chest swelled and his blood seemed to roar through his heart.

The whistle of the kettle broke into his consciousness, and he went and turned off the burner. “I gotta go,” Daniel was saying. “Let's talk about this when I get home.”

Matt opened the letters once more and reread them, and calmed himself with the observation that they didn't seem threatening, just officious, condescending, obnoxious as hell.

H
E TRIED TO
cultivate a sense of superiority—they didn't deserve to be even considered—but the letters got to Daniel; a reflexive feeling that he'd done something terribly wrong nagged at him, and made it hard to fall asleep.

“That's just what they want you to feel,” Matt said hotly. “They want you to think that
you're
the crazy person.”

Daniel knew that. Still, sometimes, just sometimes, he had the heart-stopping thought that he'd missed something, or breached an important code of conduct, or failed at some response crucial to the common human enterprise. Wasn't there, just possibly, something strange—even disturbed—about the fact that he couldn't muster any anger at the man who had killed his brother?

Now he looked at Matt, who was sitting cross-legged on the playroom floor and taking apart the foam puzzle alphabet floor. He thought about how irritated Matt was that people who hadn't given him the time of day before suddenly fell all over him in camaraderie once he had kids. Yes, he got why Matt was irritated, but it wasn't entirely sinister, was it? Wasn't having and raising children simply part of the common human enterprise?

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder, are we so perverse, so used to thinking against the grain that we can't even recognize a normal human sentiment when we stumble upon it? Like, for example, that it's bad to kill people?”

Matt tsked. “We know it's bad to kill people, Daniel. We know that.”

“But understandable,” Daniel said, feeling the ugliness press at his eyes and face.

Matt looked at him and sighed, stood and put the stack of alphabet floor pieces in the corner. “Is that it?” he asked, looking around the playroom. “Kitchen clean?”

“Yes,” Daniel said.

In the living room Daniel threw himself on the couch, covering his face with his crooked arm, while Matt found the newspaper and sank into the armchair. Legs crossed at the knee, swinging a bare foot, he read. The news was all horrendous, the depredations of the Bush administration terrifying; but Matt felt it was his duty to witness it all. So he read and groaned, and his heart sank and swelled.

“What if,” Daniel said, sitting up. “What if you said—in print!—that you understood Matthew Shepard's killers? And then the whole gay community turned on you? Would you call
them
lunatics?”

Don't bite, don't bite,
Matt told himself, and then he said, “It's
so
not the same thing! When did gay people ever do anything to straight people to warrant being killed?”

“So you think Israelis deserve to be killed!”

“Oh God,” Matt groaned.

THEY GOT MORE MAIL,
some snail mail, most via email. Much of it—laced with the straining, acid language of political extremism, words like
brutal
,
mockery
,
hypocrisy
,
bloodthirsty
,
fanatics
,
agenda
—gave them a headache.
Nothing worse than a Semite who is anti-Semitic. Do your homework before speaking. You're the same type of so-called intelligentsia that propagated Hitler's Holocaust.
A few letters came in the form of long treatises so strenuously argued—one of them was even footnoted—they sounded like the ironclad cases the insane make about their persecution. Then Adam called to tell Daniel that his name was up on a website by a group called TheCancerWithin.com. Matt and Daniel logged on and scrolled down the luridly fonted home page. “Islam, a religion of peace? Or is it preparing to sodomize the world?”

“Lovely,” Matt muttered. He pointed to a link titled “His Ugliness Yasser AraFART: decades of stinking lies.” “AraFART. Clever!”

“Here,” Daniel said, clicking on a link called “Israel-hating Judenrats.”