Tinderbox (20 page)

Gingerly, Adam lowers himself back onto the bed, careful not to touch her. He’s seen
Rachida cry only once before, at Omar’s birth, when she had cried from joy and exhaustion.

At seven, Adam wakes alone, ashamed that he fell back asleep. He goes downstairs where
Rachida, dressed and dry-eyed, is seated at the farm table, drinking coffee with his
mother.

“We’ve decided,” Rachida says, “not to tell Omar until the afternoon. Can you give
him breakfast and take him to school? I need to get on the phone with the airlines
to make reservations.”

“Okay.”

“There’s usually an eleven o’clock night flight direct to Casablanca. I’m going to
try to get us on the one for tonight. If not, we’ll have to fly to Paris and change
there. Tomorrow’s Omar’s last day of school before the break, so he’ll only miss one
day. I’ll call the school once we figure out when we’re leaving.”

Adam’s mouth goes dry and his heart pounds. Dark spots float before his eyes. He clutches
the lip of the table. Does Rachida think he is going to get on an airplane with her?
He sees his mother watching him. She nods slightly, as though to say, Just go along,
don’t challenge Rachida now.

8

When Adam returns from taking Omar to school, his mother is alone in the kitchen.
“I’ve moved my first two patients,” she tells him.

“Where’s Rachida?”

“She’s upstairs making phone calls.”

“I can’t fly.”

“Yes, you can. You have to. You can’t not go to your father-in-law’s funeral.”

“I’ll be more trouble than help. You remember the time I tried to fly to Dad’s? I
had a panic attack on the runway and they had to let me off the plane.”

“That was fifteen years ago.”

“Well, that was enough for me. I’m not going to try again.”

“I talked to Caro. Tomorrow’s the last day of school for her too. She wants to go
to Uri’s funeral, and she said she’ll miss a day of school so she can fly with you.
I’ll ask Jim Meyers, he’s the psychopharmacologist I use for my patients, to write
a prescription for something to help you relax.”

Adam closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath. He tries to imagine buckling a seat
belt, allowing a stranger, a man, he assumes, to take the controls and lift them into
the air. “Rachida didn’t even tell me what happened. How did he die?”

“A massive coronary. Apparently Uri told Rachida’s mother that he’d been having chest
pains and was going to make an appointment for January to go to the doctor. Rachida
cannot believe that her mother or sister didn’t insist he go immediately. And she
feels guilty that she didn’t know.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes you can.”

9

Adam sits on the sofa in the parlor reading
The Times
cover to cover, an attempt to distract himself from thinking about the night flight
to Casablanca—two pairs of seats, with a return flight the day before New Year’s Eve—Rachida
has succeeded in booking them on. She is upstairs packing for Omar and herself. His
mother has sent Eva to pick up the prescription for Xanax that Meyers called in for
him. She is downstairs now seeing her late-morning patients.

He plows through a long piece in the Science section on the genetics of birds’ innate
migratory patterns. The thought of dissecting the birds to examine the differences
in their pituitary glands makes him nauseous. By the time he reaches the second column
of a piece on hormone replacement therapy, the meaning of each word dissolves with
the arrival of its successor.

A little before eleven, Caro calls.

“How’s everyone?”

“Off doing their thing.”

“Do you even have a passport? You’ve never left the country, have you?”

“Good question, Sherlock. But the answer is yes. Rachida insisted I get a passport
when she got Omar his. She thinks I won’t fly as a way of annoying her.”

“Maybe she has a point.”

“I could dream up less unpleasant means of bugging her than breaking into a cold sweat
and feeling like I’m going to shit my pants.”

“You went on that rafting trip. That had to have been scary.”

“Put me on a boat, on a train, I’m fine. It’s things that go up in the air, where
you can’t get out, that terrify me.”

“We have this theory at school that the kids do better approaching new experiences
if we talk them through what it will be like first. Do you want me to do that for
you with flying?”

“So I can go through it twice?”

“What exactly frightens you?”

“Taking off. I imagine this huge centrifugal force overpowering me as we lift off.
Losing altitude mid-flight and falling in accelerated free-fall straight down. Landing—crashing
into the runway.”

Caro sighs. “Let’s take this a step at a time. There’s no huge centrifugal force.
At takeoff, you’ll feel a slight pressure pushing you back into the seat as the plane
assumes about a ten-degree upward angle from the runway.”

Adam shivers. “I better not talk about it. Just give me a bucketful of the Xanax and
let me sleep through it.”

“Did you pack?”

“Not yet. I will.”

Caro imagines her brother’s rumpled wardrobe, his stained T-shirts, his dirty sneakers.
“Lay out everything on the bed that you’re going to take. Then let Rachida check it.”

“Ha, ha. Madame Rachida—arbiter of sartorial appropriateness.”

After Adam gets off the phone, he heads upstairs. Caro is right. He should let Rachida
give her seal of approval to his clothes. He doesn’t want to be three thousand miles
away with her berating him as to why he didn’t bring his brown loafers. When he gets
to the third-floor landing, he tells himself he will start by gathering up the papers
and books he wants to take.

The outline for “Moishe in the Amazon” and some notes he took from the Internet about
Iquitos are scattered across the desk. He tidies the papers, which he puts back inside
a manila folder labeled
Research Iquitos.
Perhaps he will be able to do some research while he’s in Morocco: Moishe, after
all, comes from Marrakesh. He’ll bring a notebook. With this thought comes a little
relief to his anxiety—there will be a purpose to the trip aside from comforting Rachida,
which seems already doomed, followed then by a new wave of terror since the thought
implies that he will, indeed, board the plane.

What he wants to bring is the photograph from the magazine of the two men, the little
one held aloft by the large one. He locks the door, lowers the shades, and opens the
closet. The brown envelope holding the photographs is in the back of the bottom file
box. He takes out the picture, averting his eyes so he doesn’t actually look at it.
He folds it and places it inside the blue notebook he used when he interviewed Eva
about Iquitos.

He puts the envelope back in the file box, at the rear as before. But what if the
plane crashes and someone has to go through his papers looking for insurance information
or wills? Wouldn’t it be safer to put the photos in a file where no one would look?

He can hear someone moving around in the kitchen—either Eva back from the pharmacy
or his mother done with her morning patients.

He empties the envelope and puts the photos inside the manila folder labeled
Research Iquitos.
He puts the folder inside the file box marked
Moishe in the Amazon.
After the plane explodes on the runway, no one will care about Moishe.

10

In the end, Myra packs for Adam. Coming upstairs during her lunch break, she finds
him staring at the contents of his top dresser drawer, the suitcase Rachida dragged
up from the basement empty except for a notebook and a pile of books.

“How are you doing?”

“Caro said to lay everything out and have Rachida check it.”

“Rachida has her hands full. Why don’t we do it together?”

And so it is that Myra comes to see the shabby condition of her son’s wardrobe. After
five minutes’ looking through his closet and drawers, she quickly writes a list for
Eva to take to Macy’s: six pairs of brown and black socks, two packages each of briefs
and undershirts. Because they are largely unused, Adam’s dress clothes are in better
condition. She puts his suit in the bathroom to steam and gathers up the best sampling
of khaki pants and shirts for Eva to press when she returns.

It has been a long time since she has involved herself with a man’s clothing. With
her lovers, she was careful not to make herself available in this way. Larry, though,
had refused to pack for himself, claiming he couldn’t fold as well as she could. “If
I could fold the way you do,” he’d say, “I’d have become a surgeon.”

“Or an origami artist?”

“Just pack for me, baby.”

Secretly, she had enjoyed handling his things, the vicarious pleasure of his immaculate
wardrobe, his way, she thought, of holding on to the era before his father saw God
in nature and renounced boxers purchased in dozen-count boxes from Brooks Brothers
and Italian shoes each stuffed with a wooden shoe tree. Her own things are neat and
lovely in a simple way, but fundamentally they were a peacock family with the male
strutting the finery.

Betty, Caro says, is a slob. Myra smiles thinking about Larry living with muddy boots
in the entry hall, the kitchen sink filled with the soggy remains of the morning’s
cereal, everything covered with hair from the three dogs and two cats.

It is probably good for him. To what had her own pristine ideals—the balanced meals,
the orderly dresser drawers, the well-behaved children—led? A husband who had sex
with his receptionist.

11

Caro calls her father to tell him about Uri’s death and their departure in a few hours
for Morocco.

“Let Rachida know I’m really sorry. What a shock. Did he have any cardiac history?”

“Not that Rachida knows of. Though he’d been complaining for a few weeks about chest
pains.”

“Adam’s really going?”

“Rachida didn’t give him a choice. Mom got him some Xanax. I want to attend Uri’s
funeral, but I’m mostly going to baby-sit him.”

“Be careful not to overdo it with the Xanax. You know what a cheap date Adam is.”

As always, Caro feels a twinge of surprise on hearing her father’s concern—a residue
of her childish belief when he first left that in so doing he’d stopped thinking about
them. “You’re going to cancel your trip now that none of us will be here?”

There is a long enough pause before her father’s answer that Caro wonders if perhaps
she is wrong. “Sure, no point now.”

12

Myra holds Omar’s hand as the car service driver loads the suitcases Eva and Rachida
have carried to the curb. Adam is chalky with fear. Without saying goodbye, he climbs
into the front seat where he’ll have more air.

Caro counts their luggage. “Three suitcases, one duffel, and four carry-ons.”

With Caro, Adam will be okay. Rachida and Caro each hug Myra. Myra hands a bag to
Omar: some travel games she’d run to a toy store to buy. “Don’t open it until you’re
on the plane,” she whispers to Omar.

“Will we be back for Christmas?”

“No, darling. We’ll have Christmas and open all of your Hanukkah presents on New Year’s
Eve—the day after you get back.”

“Remember to put water in the tree, Eva,” Omar says.

“I will.”

“You can sleep in my bed while I’m gone.”

Eva smiles awkwardly. As the van pulls away, she and Myra stand in the dark waving
goodbye. If Eva had somewhere to go, Myra would tell her to take the week off. It
would be a vacation to have the house to herself. But there is nowhere for Eva to
go.

Inside, Eva finishes the dinner dishes while Myra goes downstairs to her office. She
checks her phone messages, sorts the mail on her desk. Then she turns on her computer.

In the middle of her inbox is [email protected]. She takes a deep breath
and clicks open.

Dear Myra,

Well, I’m sorry for Rachida about her father. Sounds like someone upstairs gave him
some warning calls and he ignored them, which must be eating up Rachida. Uri and I
had a drink together at the kids’ wedding and I thought he was a decent guy—though
that wife of his reminded me of my mother, which is not meant as a compliment. He
was tickled that my grandfather was a jeweler too.

So I won’t be coming East. I have to admit that I’m sorry that I won’t get a chance
to see you. I feel damn sheepish to tell you I was really looking forward to it. Don’t
give me any of your psychoanalytic interpretations about wallowing in my guilt and
wanting what I can’t have. I just miss you is all.

In any case, I suppose I should say Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah—whichever is
now your cup of tea. On my end, I could do without the former. Kiss Omar for me when
he gets back.

Yours,

Larry

Myra reads the e-mail three times. She pushes the delete button so she won’t read
it again, then goes to get a tissue to wipe her eyes.

13

They have two pairs of seats: Adam and Caro near the front of the plane, Rachida and
Omar twelve rows behind them. Thinking Adam might feel less claustrophobic on the
aisle, Caro takes the center seat. Adam seems drowsy already from the pill he took
at the airport. He closes his eyes and falls immediately asleep. When the flight attendand
arrives with the dinner cart, Caro selects an entrée for Adam, balancing the two meals
on her tray and then, when Adam never budges, miserably eating them both.

After the dinner detritus has been collected, the lights are dimmed. Caro lowers her
brother’s seat back and tucks a blanket around him. She climbs over his knees and
walks back to check on Rachida and Omar.

Omar is sleeping with his head in his mother’s lap. A maze book sticks out of his
seat pocket. Rachida is seated upright, drinking a Scotch.

The seat across the aisle from Rachida is empty. Caro sits down.

“How’s he doing?” Rachida asks.