Here I Am (53 page)

Tamir was sitting on the terminal's floor, his back against the wall, his eyes on the phone in his hands. I went and sat beside him.

“I'm having second thoughts,” I said.

He smiled, nodded.

“Tamir?”

He nodded again.

“Can you stop texting for a second and listen?”

“I'm not texting,” he said, and turned his phone to face me: a grid of thumbnails of family photos.

“I'm having second thoughts.”

“Only second?”

“Could you talk this through with me?”

“What is there to talk through?”

“You're returning to your family,” I said. “I would be leaving mine.”

“Would be?”

“Don't do that. I'm asking for your help.”

“I don't think you are. I think you're asking for forgiveness.”

“For what? I haven't even done anything.”

“Every thought after the first thought will lead you back to Newark Street.”

“That's not necessarily true.”

“Not necessarily?”

“I'm here. I said goodbye to my children.”

“You don't owe me an apology,” he said. “It's not your country.”

“Maybe I've been wrong about that.”

“Apparently you were right.”

“And like you said, even if it isn't my home, it's yours.”

“Who are you, Jacob?”

For three consecutive years, Max's eyes were closed in his school portrait. The first time, it was a small disappointment, but mostly funny.
The second year, it was harder to excuse as an accident. We talked about why such photos are nice to have, how much his grandparents and great-grandfather cherished them, how it was a waste of money to spoil them on purpose. The morning of picture day that third year, we asked Max to look us in the eye and promise to keep his eyes open. “I'll try,” he said, his eyes blinking wildly, as if to flush out a fly. “Don't try,” Julia said, “do it.” When the photos came back, all three boys had closed their eyes. But I've never seen more genuine smiles.

“Maybe this is who I am,” I said to Tamir.

“You say that as if you couldn't choose to be who you wanted to be.”

“Maybe I choose this.”

“Maybe?”

“I don't know what I should do, and I'm asking you to talk this through with me.”

“So let's talk it through. Who are you?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘Maybe this is who I am.' So who, maybe, are you?”

“Come on, Tamir.”

“What? I'm asking you to explain what you meant. Who are you?”

“It's not the kind of thing that can be articulated like that.”

“Try. Who are you?”

“OK, never mind. I'm sorry I came over here.”

“Who are you, Jacob?”

“Who are
you
, Tamir?”

“I am someone who goes home, no matter how difficult.”

“Well then, you took the words out of my mouth.”

“Maybe. But not out of your heart. Wherever you go, you won't be going home.”

When my mother first got sick, she mentioned that my father visited Isaac's grave once a month. When I asked him about it, he deflected, as if I'd confronted him about a gambling addiction.

“Penance for burying him in America,” he said.

“What do you do there?”

“Just stand around like a jerk.”

“Can I go with you next time?” I asked my father; I told Tamir, “Stay.”

“Then who would go?” Tamir asked.

“No one.”

“Then what would save it?”

“Nothing.”

“Just let it go?”

“Yes.”

I was right: my father cleaned the site of twigs, leaves, and weeds; he wiped down the gravestone with a wet rag he'd brought in a ziplock in his jacket pocket; and from another ziplock he removed photos.

“The boys,” he said, turning them toward me for a moment and then laying them on the ground, facedown, above his father's eyes.

I'd wanted to make an eruv around the suicides and carry the shame away from them, but how would I bear my own shame? How, coming home from Islip, would I face Julia and the boys?

“It feels like we were burying him five minutes ago,” I said to my father; I said to Tamir, “It feels like we were picking you up at the airport five minutes ago.”

My father said, “It feels like everything was five minutes ago.”

Tamir brought his lips to my ear and whispered, “You are innocent.”

“What?” I whispered, as if I were looking at stars.

“You are innocent.”

“Thank you.”

He pulled back and said, “No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.”

“What,
gullible
?”

“I don't know that word.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Of course Steven Spielberg wasn't in the men's room.”

“You made up that whole thing?”

“I did.”

“You knew who he was?”

“You think we don't have electricity in Israel?”

“You're very good,” I said.

“I see you,” my grandfather would say from the other side of the glass.

“You're very innocent,” Tamir said.

“See you,” my grandfather would say.

“And yet we've never been older,” my father said, and then chanted the Mourner's Kaddish.

HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE

Six closed eyes, three genuine smiles.

HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE BEING REINCARNATED

The
EMERGENCY
exit from MacArthur Airport's terminal; the
EMERGENCY
entrance to the world.

HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE

Unbuckle your belt. Slide it back out the five loops of your pants. Wrap it around your throat and tighten, buckle on the back of your neck. Place the other end of the belt over the door. Close the door, so that the belt is held firmly in place between the top of the door and the doorframe. Look at the refrigerator. Allow full body weight to fall. Eight closed eyes.

HOW TO PLAY REINCARNATION

A few months after moving out, on yet another day without a letter in the mailbox on my bedroom door, I was emptying the kids' hampers and found a poop in a pair of Max's underwear. He was eleven. I got several such dispatches in the coming weeks. Sometimes I was able to turn the underwear inside out over the toilet, scrub at any stain that was left, and throw them into the wash. Usually they weren't salvageable.

I didn't mention it to Dr. Silvers, for the same reason I didn't mention my persistent throat pain to my actual doctor: I suspected it was a symptom of something that I didn't want revealed. I didn't mention it to Julia, because I didn't want to hear that Max never did it at her house. And I didn't mention it to Max, because that was something I could spare him. Spare us.

As a child, I used to leave bowel movements on the lilac carpet of my grandfather's bathroom, a few inches from the toilet seat. It was on purpose. Why did I do such a thing? Why did Max?

I desperately wanted a dog, as a boy, but was told they were dirty. As a boy, I was told to wash my hands before going to the bathroom, because the world was dirty. But I was also told to wash my hands after.

My grandfather mentioned the poops on his floor only once. He smiled, covered the side of my head with his enormous hand, and said, “It's OK. It's great.” Why would he say such a thing?

Max never mentioned the poops in his hamper, although he came upon me hanging a pair of his hand-washed underwear on the drying rack and said, “Argus died the day we started coming to this house. Do you think this ever would have felt like home to him?”

HOW TO PLAY MATTERS OF DEATH AND REBIRTH

Never speak about them.

HOW TO PLAY BELIEF

At Julia's second sonogram, we saw Sam's arms and legs. (Although he wasn't “Sam” yet, but “the peanut.”) So began the exodus from idea to thing. What you think about all the time, but can't—without aids—see, hear, smell, taste, or touch has to be believed in. Only a few weeks later, when Julia was able to feel the peanut's presence and movements, it no longer
only
needed to be believed in, because it could also be
known
. As the months progressed—it turned, kicked, hiccupped—we knew more and more and had to believe less. And then Sam came, and belief fell away—it wasn't necessary anymore.

But it didn't fall away completely. There was some residue. And the inexplicable, unreasonable, illogical emotions and behavior of parents can be explained, or partially explained, by having had to believe for the better part of a year. Parents don't have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and parenthood so utterly beautiful: the all-or-nothing wager. The faith.

I watched Sam being born through the viewfinder of a video camera. When the doctor handed him to me, I put the camera on the bed and forgot about it until the nurse came to take him for measuring, or warming, or whatever utterly necessary thing they do with newborns that justifies the teaching of that most important life lesson: everyone, even your parents, will let you go.

But we had twenty minutes with him, so we have a twenty-minute video of the view of the dark window, with the soundtrack of new life—
Sam's new life, ours. I told Sam how beautiful he was. I told Julia how beautiful Sam was. I told her how beautiful she was. All of it was understatement, all of it imprecise—I used that same inadequate word to try to convey three entirely different, essential meanings:
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
.

You can hear crying—everyone's.

You can hear laughter—Julia's and mine.

You can hear Julia calling me “Dad” for the first time. You can hear me whispering blessings to Sam, prayers:
be healthy, be happy, know peace
. I said it over and over—
be healthy, be happy, know peace
. It wasn't the kind of thing I would say, and I hadn't intended to say it; the words were drawn from some well far deeper than my life, and the hands raising the bucket weren't my own. The last thing you can hear on the video, as the nurse taps on the door, is me saying to Julia, “Before we know it, he'll be burying us.”

“Jacob…”

“OK, so we'll be at his wedding.”

“Jacob!”

“His bar mitzvah?”

“Can't we ease into it?”

“Into what?”

“The giving away.”

I was wrong about almost everything. But I was right about the speed of the losing. Some of the moments were interminably long—the first cruel night of sleep training; cruelly (it felt) peeling him off a leg on the first day of school; pinning him down while the doctor who wasn't stitching his hand back together told me, “This is not a time to be his friend”—but the years passed so quickly I had to search videos and photo albums for proof of our shared life. It happened. It must have. We did all that living. And yet it required evidence, or belief.

I told Julia, the night after Sam's injury, that it was too much love for happiness. I loved my boy beyond my capacity to love, but I didn't love the love. Because it was overwhelming. Because it was necessarily cruel. Because it couldn't fit into my body, and so deformed itself into a kind of agonizing hypervigilance that complicated what should have been the most uncomplicated of things—nurturing and play. Because it was too much love for happiness. I was right about that, too.

Carrying Sam into the house for the first time, I implored myself to
remember every feeling and detail. One day I would need to recall what the garden looked like when my first child first saw it. I would need to know the sound of the car seat's latch disengaging. My life would depend on my ability to revisit my life—there would come a day when I would trade a year of what remained to hold my babies for an hour. I was right about that, too, without even knowing that Julia and I would one day divorce.

I
did
remember. I remembered all of it: the drop of dried blood on the gauze around the circumcision wound; the smell of the back of his neck; how to collapse an umbrella stroller with one hand; holding his ankles above his head with one hand while wiping the insides of his thighs; the viscosity of A&D ointment; the eeriness of frozen breast milk; the static of a baby monitor set to the wrong channel; the economy of diaper bags; the transparency of new eyelids; how Sam's hands lurched upward, like those of his falling-monkey ancestors, whenever he was placed on his back; the torturing irregularity of his breathing; my own inability to forgive myself for the moments I looked away and something utterly inconsequential happened, but happened. It happened. All of it. And yet it made a believer out of me.

HOW TO PLAY TOO MUCH LOVE

Whisper into an ear, listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY PRAYER

Whisper into an ear, don't listen for an echo.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

The night I came home from Islip was the last night I spent in bed with Julia. She shifted when I got under the covers. She mumbled, “That was a short war.”

I said, “I just kissed the kids.”

She asked, “Did we win?”

I said, “As it turns out, there is no
we.”

She asked, “Did I win?”

“Win?”

She turned onto her side and said, “Survive.”

HOW TO PLAY “HERE I AM”

A clause near the end of our legal divorce agreement stated that should either of us have more children, the children we had together would be treated “no less favorably” financially, either in life or in our wills. Despite all the longer thorns, and there were many, this one dug into Julia. But rather than acknowledge what at the time I assumed was the source of her distress—that because of our ages, having more children was realistic only for me—she attached herself to the issue that wasn't even there.