All I Love and Know (31 page)

A tremor went through her. She was dreading starting school, where you couldn't kiss people or go up the slide. It seemed to her that once she started, it would mean she was never going back to Israel. And yet the sense of waiting was intolerable, too.

She let Matt lead her into the shimmering parking lot and take her home. They hadn't bought anything, and she hoped, fervently and futilely, that without supplies, there was no way she could go to school.

D
ANIEL DROVE GAL
to school the first few days and walked her into her classroom, but he soon realized that she was becoming anxious waiting for him to go, and he put her on the bus on the third day. The evening after her fourth day, during dinner, Matt and Daniel got a call from Ms. Wheeler. “Do you have a moment?” she asked Daniel.

“Sure,” he said, and took the phone into the other room.

During yesterday's morning meeting, Ms. Wheeler told him, Gal had told the child she was partnered with that her parents were killed when a terrorist put a bomb in a café, and it blew off their heads. So when they were buried in the ground, she said, they didn't have heads. Then, apparently, the boy reported that to the class when it was his turn to show how well he'd listened. “It's not so much that the other children were disconcerted,” Ms. Wheeler said, “although I did get a call from a few parents. I'm calling for Gal, to make sure that
she's
all right. And, actually, to find out if she was fabricating. Just so we can know what we're dealing with.”

“Whew,” Daniel said, his mind blank. “I don't know what to tell you. I am so in over my head here,” he said, wincing at the inadvertent pun. “Can I talk to Gal and get back to you?”

He hung up, numb, and went back into the kitchen.

“What?” Matt asked.

Later,
he mouthed.

Honestly, he didn't even have it in him to say; he felt dragged down by a lead weight. When, after Gal left the table, Matt finally got him to speak, what came out was sludgy.

“Wow,” Matt said. “Why would Gal say that?”

Daniel shrugged. “To get attention? To aggress the other kids?”

They went up to her bedroom and knocked. “Don't be mad at her,” Matt said.

“I'm not!” Daniel said, insulted.

She was sitting on her bed with a book, surrounded by all her horses and stuffed animals, which formed a neat ring around her. “Hey, Boo,” Matt said.

“Hey,” she said.

“Gal,” Daniel said, easing himself down onto the corner of the bed. “Your teacher called. She said you told the other kids that your parents were buried without heads?”

Gal blushed furiously.

“Why would you say that?” Daniel asked, sitting on the bed.

“We're not angry, just curious,” Matt said.

She looked at him, drawn into his curiosity. She could see Daniel's face in her peripheral vision, and even that glance made her grow hot, made her feel as if there were something wrong with her. She didn't know how to say why. Kids were sharing, and she had had this sudden powerful impulse to take her place among them. It had come from a glistening place in her, the cold water in a lake's deepest spot. Now, though, it seemed so wrong she could hardly look at them. “I wanted to share, too,” she said, her voice wavering.

They exchanged glances.

“Gal,” Daniel said gently, “your parents did have heads when they were buried.”

She looked at him, and her expression was so full of shock and yearning and doubt that tears sprang to his eyes. “I'm not just saying that to make you feel better. You just misremembered. They were buried with heads.”

She threw herself facedown onto her pillow. Daniel stroked her back; Matt, who'd been crouching by the bed, sat down heavily on the floor, remembering with a sickening feeling his own avid, terrified scans of their bodies under the sheets they were buried in. She cried something unintelligible into the pillow.

“What?” Daniel asked, lifting her by the shoulders. “I can't hear you,
buba
.”

“I told everybody that they didn't!” she cried, her face scarlet and wet with tears.

“But isn't it good that they had heads?” Matt offered. “It must have been terrible to think they didn't.”

“Yeah,” Gal said, gulping and hiccupping.

She cried some more, and begged them not to make her go back to school, where she'd have to tell the class that what she had said was wrong, and then they would think she didn't even know how her parents were buried. “Please,” she said over and over, her teeth chattering, while Daniel and Matt exchanged fierce and meaningful and appalled glances. The memory of her parents was slipping away from her; at night in bed she called to them, but the only images she could conjure were paltry and insubstantial. You couldn't try really hard to imagine them, you couldn't strain; they either came or they didn't.

“Okay,” Daniel finally said. “You can stay home tomorrow. For one day only. And you have to let Matt work and not disturb him.”

Later, as she and her brother slept in their bed and Daniel and Matt were brushing their teeth, Daniel said, “She's been carrying that image with her this whole time, and we didn't know. What other horrible ideas and images does she carry with her that we don't know about?”

“I know,” Matt said through a mouthful of toothpaste. He spat. “I was thinking the same thing. She has this whole secret life in her head, so we can't even comfort her about it because we don't even know how to ask her about it.”

“Do you think it's okay to let her stay home from school tomorrow? I don't want to set a precedent where every time she's upset she gets to stay home.”

“I think it's okay this once,” Matt said.

“Don't make it a huge treat, okay?”

“Okay,” Matt said. “I'll make her sit in a corner, and only feed her cabbage.”

Daniel realized that he had a pounding headache. Poor Gal, he thought, called on the carpet, for being—what? Inappropriate. Socially inept. A blurter. He knew exactly how she felt, confronted with words that had come from her heart, but which didn't mesh with her environment. The words came back at her blazing and crazy, revealing something deep and frightening about her that couldn't be unsaid. He knew exactly how she felt.

He rubbed the big muscle on the side of his neck. Matt came up behind him and massaged it gently, his other arm clasping Daniel's torso vertically, over his shoulder. He clasped Matt's massaging hand and squeezed it, then eased himself away and into the bedroom.

Early the next morning, Daniel called Gal's teacher and explained that she hadn't been trying to shock or scare the other kids in the class—that she actually believed that her parents were buried without heads, and felt that she was honestly sharing. As Ms. Wheeler murmured, “Oh boy” and “Man oh man,” he told her that they'd be keeping her home for the day because she didn't know how to face the other students, now that she realized she'd told them something that wasn't true. “I think it's important to collaborate on a strategy for her, a way to tell the truth without her losing face, or feeling mortified,” he said.

She told him she'd talk to the school psychologist for advice on how to help Gal do that.

He hung up and sat down at the table. “Maybe when I get home I can talk with Gal about how to make it comfortable for her to return to school.”

“I can do that this afternoon, too,” Matt said.

“You don't have to,” Daniel said.

Matt closed his eyes, trying not to snap at him. The baby was slumped back on his lap, sucking loudly on a bottle of milk, stopping every once in a while to catch his breath with a big gulping sigh.

“What would you say?”

“I don't know what I'd say, Daniel. From your standpoint, I'd no doubt recommend she do something highly inappropriate.” He didn't want to say it because it would sound mean and competitive, but he kind of felt that if Daniel would just leave the house already, he and Gal could work it out. Because he
got
her.

Half an hour later, having sent Daniel off with Noam, he made pancakes, against the small voice in his mind that was reminding him not to make the day a fun one. Gal came into the kitchen as he was spooning a ladle of batter into the pan, a small stack of finished pancakes sitting beside him on a plate on the counter, draped with paper towels.

“Pancakes!” she sighed dreamily, sitting on a kitchen chair in her monkey pajamas and plopping her elbows on the table.

He brought her the finished stack, and set butter and syrup on the table. “Do you want me to pour the syrup for you?” he asked.

“No, I can,” she said, with mild indignation. As he returned to the pancakes in the pan, she wrestled the top off the syrup bottle and tipped it carefully, her hand trembling with concentration.

When Matt's pancakes were cooked, he brought them to the table and sat. He pushed the side of his fork into the stack and glanced up at Gal. “So. No heads, huh.”

She shook her head through a thick mouthful.

“That must have been a crazy thing to imagine.”

She nodded, and crammed another forkful into her mouth.

“Why didn't you say anything to us?”

Her eyes met his as she chewed, cheeks bulging. Yo-yo groaned from his station at Gal's feet and lay back; a lawn mower several doors down sputtered and roared. Gal swallowed. “I thought you already knew about it, and you didn't want to talk about it anymore. Especially Dani.”

Matt nodded gently.

“Because if you knew your twin brother didn't have a head . . .” She trailed off and gave him a solemn look.

Sometimes, Matt couldn't believe the conversations he was having, couldn't believe the sequence of words and thoughts uttered in his presence. Had anybody on earth ever uttered that sequence of words, and what were the odds that anybody on earth ever would in the future?

“But
you
had to think that your mother and father didn't have heads! That's even worse!”

Gal considered this, shrugged. “But I knew that in heaven they have their heads.”

“Okay.”
In heaven,
Matt thought,
everybody will be reunited with his or her head.
“So when you said this in your class, how did the other kids react?”

“They just looked at me.”

“Do you think they were freaked out?”

She laughed. “Maybe.” She'd finished eating and was dragging the side of her fork into the pool of syrup that remained on her plate, then lifting it toward her outstretched tongue and licking it clean.

He watched her, a faint smile on his lips.

“I don't want to go back there,” she said.

“Why?”

She gave him a miserable shrug. “Lots of those kids already know each other. I'm the only one who doesn't know anybody.” There were other reasons too, reasons that didn't find their way into her conscious mind. Her accent, which made her the weird kid. The fact that many of them read better than she did in English, when she was used to being the smartest kid in the room.

“You'll make friends, Gal. It's only the first week of school!”

“I don't think I will make friends,” she told him.

“Why not? You're a cute and fun kid. You know how to make friends—you had a lot of them in Israel.”

She craned her head toward him and lowered her voice. “I don't think I'm so fun anymore.” She was thinking about the small groups of kids who milled together talking about things, and how she sat by herself at a table, her stomach churning unpleasantly, trying to look busy with paper or markers or scissors, because she didn't know what to say, and couldn't bring herself to just stand among them silently.

His eyes stung when she said that. “Gal-Gal,” he said, then cleared his throat and looked hard at her. “You've had a life unlike any other kid in your school. The hardest thing most of them have had to face is losing their favorite teddy bear, or falling down on the playground and getting a boo-boo.”

She cracked a reluctant smile.

“Honestly,” he insisted. “Not one of them has had to be as brave as you have to be every day. So if you're not the funnest kid in the class, so be it. You don't have to be like everybody else. Not everybody has to like you. Lots of people didn't like me when I was a kid. Hell—heck—a lot of people don't like me now.”

“I know,” she said, deadpan.

“Oh, that's hilarious,” he said.

That evening he and Daniel snared Cam for an hour of babysitting, tossing at her a bag of Goldfish and vanishing out the door, grabbing the rare chance to take Yo-yo for a walk in the woods behind the abandoned state mental hospital, just the two of them. Yo-yo plunged into the river, wading and slurping, and Daniel threw sticks for him to wear him out in the current. “Drop it,” he'd command as Yo-yo emerged from the river, circling with the stick and shaking furiously, until setting it down. Then Daniel would snatch it up and throw it high over the river.

It was a late-summer evening, thick, with a warm wind that seemed to coat their faces and arms. Dogs and their humans walked the paths that ran between the river and the harvested cornfields that looked as if they'd been trampled by a wanton giant. Matt told Daniel about his conversation with Gal, which he was pretty proud of: he felt he'd brought the topic into the light of day and maintained a light touch that encouraged her to confide in him.

Yo-yo emerged from the river, shook himself, then flung himself on his back on a patch of grass, where he writhed ecstatically while they uttered a mild, sad “Oh, Yo-yo,” anticipating the dirt he'd be bringing into the house.

“Did you talk to her at all about how to make friends,” Daniel asked, “or did you just tell her it was okay for people not to like her?”