The Belief in Angels (26 page)

Wendy and Jack rarely eat dinner. As far as I can tell, they exist on alcohol and drugs with occasional hidden-cookie cache indulgences for Jack. Wendy’s most current fad diet food obsessions range from grapefruit to the grass in our yard.

I walk to the other side of the kitchen and peek around the corner into the den. David sits in the aqua easy chair staring at the screen, but Moses isn’t there.

“Hey, do you know where Moses is? I’m gonna make dinner soon if you’re hungry.”

David pretends he can’t hear me, so I yell: “Hey, hard-of-hearing, do you know where Moses is? I thought he went with you today?”

David breaks his silence to say, “Ask Freddy.” He still answers this way sometimes. It’s bizarre and I hate it when he does it. I’m outnumbered by the loony people in my family.

I’m frustrated now and a bit worried that maybe Howard did come here but David avoided the visit as well. I ask again,
“David,
did Dad come today and take Moses? I stayed at Leigh’s until late this morning and when I got back there wasn’t anyone here.”

“No, Dad never came.” He scowls. “I called Aunt Doreen and she found out he’s not flying back. He cancelled his flight. She doesn’t know when he’s ever coming back.”

“Figures. So where is Moses?”

I guess David is starting to worry now too, because he actually speaks nicely to
me. “When I left, he wanted to keep sitting on the front steps to wait. I told him Dad wasn’t going to show up and he could come play ball with my friends, but he said he’d rather hang out here and wait for you to go fishing. What time did you come back?”

“Around ten thirty. What time did you leave?”

“About nine. Maybe he’s out somewhere on the beach?”

“Maybe.” It’s been a long time for Moses to have been alone this whole time. He usually tags along with David during the day. I decide to hike down to the beach and search for him.

I tell David, but he only nods, already lost in
Lost in Space
again.

Down on the beach, the sun dips below the cliffs. The sun shines out in the ocean to the east, but the cliff casts shadows on the beach and it’s chilly. I shiver in my T-shirt and wish I’d brought a jacket with me.

If he’s down here he’ll be cold and come back soon.

Still, I walk the beach all the way past the rocky cove toward my hiding spot. Moses may have found it. But he isn’t there. Past the cove the tide swells against the cliffs. I turn and head back.

I find David still sitting in the den, watching TV.

“No Moses yet?”

David shakes his head.

“He’s not down there,” I say.

David stares back and I can see the realization cross his face that something must be wrong. It’s starting to darken outside, tomorrow is a school day, and it’s rare for Moses to be doing anything on a Sunday night except playing in his room or finishing homework. “I’m gonna check around the neighborhood,” he says. “Maybe you should call his friend? Do you know his number?”

“Good idea,” I say, and as I’m standing there trying to remember his friend’s last name so I can look him up in the phone book, it hits me, hard. It hits me so hard my body goes numb.

David tries to move past me on his way out.

“What is it, Jules?” he asks, impatient.

“The b-b-boat,” I stammer.

“You think Moses used the boat by himself and went fishing without you? Well, if he did, he might still be out there! Let’s go down to the yacht club and check. But I don’t think he’d do it. He knows he’s not supposed to. Come on.”

He grabs my arm and pulls me towards the door.

I’m grateful to David for many things in this moment. The terrible dread I feel makes it difficult to move my limbs. Normally I am all action in a bad moment, but standing there on the steps it’s as though my body knows something my mind is finding it difficult to believe. I’m grateful for David’s kindness in ignoring my stammer. I’m grateful because he’s helping me move toward a moment when we will both be present.

He pulls me toward the front door, but I struggle to go outside through the den.

The shed.

In the shed, I think, I will find two fishing poles, and then I’ll know he hasn’t gone to the boat. I try to loose myself from David’s grip, but he holds me too strongly. When did he get so strong? I don’t have the strength to pull myself away. I have to talk again.

“Th-the sh-sh-sh …” I point toward the backyard and David understands. He runs ahead of me now toward the back of the yard, under the weeping willow, where the shed stands. He pulls it open and we search inside. Moses’s fishing pole is missing, along with the tackle box.

“No t-t-tackle.”

My body gathers energy. David and I run down Withensea Avenue toward the yacht club.

I run faster than I’ve ever run before. David stands over a head taller than me and is three years older, and I’m running as fast as he is.

I think how angry I’ll be with Moses for using the boat without me. I imagine what I’ll say to him, how he should be punished, even how it might benefit me to keep the secret and hold it over him. I know David would do this. David might demand twenty trips to the store for candy, for free. No splits.

Those thoughts alternate with others. Hope that he’s back at the house, maybe hiding someplace, playing a trick on us? Hope that he decided not to take the boat after all. Hope that he followed the rules, that he was good and waited for me to show up at the yacht club when I didn’t find him. Maybe fished on the dock all day.

Why didn’t I think of this before? Why didn’t I check the shed when I got back instead of thinking he’d be with Howard or David?

I was entranced with the quiet. I wanted—needed—a day to draw and enjoy some solitude for once.

Howard disappointed him by not showing up and he didn’t want to wait for me, because I might disappoint him as well.

If the boat is there, make Jack put oarlocks on the boat. Then Moses can’t take it out without someone. When he shows up, don’t leave him alone again. If Moses is okay, be nicer to both of your brothers. If he’s okay, be a better person.

David and I run around to the back of the club where we moor our dinghy, right next to a fishing boat named Elysian Fields. This makes me think of the wooden woman.

You said everything was going to be all right. You promised. Please let Moses be all right. Please. If you’re really an angel, show me now and I won’t ever ask you again.

We stop in front of the empty space our dinghy usually occupies and we simultaneously look out to the spot where Jack moors his sailboat, hoping the dinghy sits anchored there instead, which would mean Jack is using his boat today. But the sailboat is there.

The sailboat is there and the dinghy is gone.

Every ounce of energy and hope I keep in
not
finding this fact pours out of my body. My body freezes again. David seems frozen there too. We stand like statues on the dock, squinting out across the bay as the fog begins to roll in, scanning for Moses in the dusk light.

I want to make a plan. I want to take care of the situation and I want to fix the fact that this is happening. I want, badly, to see Moses rowing his way back on the horizon, and I know David does too because we run toward the end of the dock together, scrambling as close as we can to a place where we might see him.

I run, but I can’t feel my own legs moving.

We’re screaming Moses’s name, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own.

We call and call and stop to listen. Our voices echo back to us across the water. Mocking.

We stand there calling as the sky loses all the light. The dusk turns from an inky blue to an iron black, the buoy lights ghostly against the rolling fog.

There is never an answer.

Samuel, 61 years | September 22nd, 1971

WEST ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS

I STAND AT the
keyver
with the rest of the mourners.

The child. Moses.

I am aware of the
shomeret
standing at the gravesite. I find comfort in her presence. She was recommended by the rabbi, and there is something strangely familiar about this young woman, although we’ve never met before. She sat with the child at the mortuary since the death three days ago.

It is too long. We waited for the father to catch a plane from California where he lives now.

Despicable father. Disgraceful father.

It is well past the accepted twenty-four hours customary for a corpse to wait before entering the earth. But it also gave us time to find the proper
Shomer
and
Chevrah Kaddisha
to perform the washing ritual, the
Tahara.

We stand for the service as the
cantor
chants.

I look to find the father. He stands to my left, head bowed, wearing the
kipah
handed him as he approached the
keyver,
but his black suit is intact. He has not performed
k’riah.

I stare at him. When he glances up, I will point to his suit and remind him, but I realize he may not understand. This thought makes me angry—angry for his ignorance, his lack of respect, and angry for the arrogance of the modern Jews
whose freedom came at such a terrible cost to the generations before them. But this man is not Jewish, I remind myself. No, he is not a Jew at all. This man is
shlekht.

As though my anger has turned to poison, all the numbness in my body melts away and I am filled with a searing, crushing pain that courses from my head through my body and down to the soles of my feet.

I find myself standing in front of the father, and without thinking I am tearing off his left lapel—the fabric directly over his heart. He seems surprised and a bit afraid.

I think to myself,
This is good.
I want him to feel fear.

I am thinking if I could tear his heart out with the fabric, I might avenge this child’s death somehow and make this pain abate.

There is pressure of a hand at my elbow. It is the rabbi. He leads me away from the father. I let myself be led. I am too weak to tear the heart from this man. I am an old man at sixty-one years. I have barely the strength to tear anything, including the thread from my needles.

At the thought of my hands tearing thread, the arthritic pain in my hands intensifies. I shove them deep into the pockets of my mourning coat to hide the intense shaking that has begun with the pain in my joints.

This same arthritis paralyzes my body at the end of the day and meets me when I wake in the morning. It is worst on these cold New England days.

For the past week we’ve been in the hottest days of summer. But today, the fall came like lightning. The sky is like a city sidewalk. Gritty and grainy-gray.

I wear the mourning coat made for me a few years earlier by Rose.

Rose.

She passed two months ago, a year after Mocher’s death and ten months after Yetta’s death.

Rose and Mocher lived in Florida for years, but with her passing I have a deep sense of desolation. Rose was the one who helped me carry my sadness. Somehow she managed to survive our sorrow and taught me to do the same. Standing there at Moses’s
keyver,
I realize when I lost Rose, the light in my world switched off. When Rose is alive, she helped me see that my life had been a difficult struggle, but that I could also boast having fulfilled my father’s main directive: to survive.