All I Love and Know (36 page)

“Hi,” Gal said. Hannah greeted her and they stood for a few minutes before Gal mustered her courage and asked, “What's a ghost?”

Hannah turned to her with interest. She had pulled up her hood, and her nose was pink from the cold. “You don't know what a ghost is?”

Gal shook her head, her face growing hot.

“It's someone who died, and then came back. They can move through doors and walls.”

Gal's eyes were moving in quick darts as she furiously thought. “What do they look like?”

Hannah pondered that one, her eyes cast up to the sky and blinking hard. “Well, when people dress up as a ghost for Halloween, they sometimes wear a white sheet, with the eyeholes cut out so they can see.”

There was a pause. “But I think that's stupid,” Hannah said.

“Me too,” Gal said.

“Because that's not scary, and a ghost
haunts
people. A ghost looks like—” She screwed her face in thought, and Gal waited, tense with anticipation. “Well, I don't actually know what a ghost looks like, except that you can see through their body.”

Gal had never heard of such a thing.

She tried to tell Matt and Daniel about the bowl of eyeballs during dinner, and they frowned and tried to understand as Daniel picked out for her the red peppers, her favorite part, from the salad. “What on earth is the child talking about?” Matt asked Daniel. He turned to Gal. “What is this ‘bowl of eyeballs' of which you speak?”

“He was in a special kind of house,” Gal persisted, her temper rising.

Daniel's face lit up. “A haunted house?” he asked.

“Yes!” she cried.

“Oh!” they exclaimed. Then Matt leaned forward urgently over his plate and said to Daniel, “Good God, has no one told her about Halloween?”

They looked at each other. “We are pathetic excuses for parents,” Daniel said. “Not to mention for gay men.”

“Why?” Gal asked.

“Why are we pathetic excuses for gay men?” Daniel asked. “Because many gay men have a special place in their hearts for Halloween.”

“Why?”

Matt scratched his face. Since Jay's death he had stopped celebrating Halloween, cold turkey. It was just too painful. He'd buried Halloween deep in his mind, back in some spot near his spine that thoroughly numbed him. It surprised him every time how even that time of year could make him so very heavy and blank; how the sharper cold and the shrill caw of geese moving south, the early dusk, could strip away all the sustaining illusions that made it possible to do things like, say, move his legs to cross the street.

“Because . . . ,” he said, and faltered.

“Gay men like dressing up,” Daniel said. “We have a really good sense of humor, and we like to make funny costumes.”

“People in Israel make funny costumes, too,” Gal said in the argumentative tone that could drive Daniel off the deep end, “and they not gay.”

“Okay, first of all, some of them
are
gay,” Matt said.

Noam took a piece of the cheese slice he'd been eating and rubbed it in his hair. “Honey, just put it down on the tray when you're finished,” Matt said, lifting him out of his chair and carrying him to the sink to wash up. Then he set him down on the kitchen floor, and Yo-yo came to clean up inside and under his high chair. The arrival of the kids had been a windfall for him, and Daniel had already put him on a diet.

“I want to have a costume of a ghost,” Gal said. “I'm supposed to wear one for school.”

“That's not hard,” Daniel said. “We'll just get you a white sheet and cut out holes for your eyes.”

“No,” Gal said decisively. “That's stupid.” She paused. “How you say
ghost
in Hebrew?”

“
Ruach refa'im
,” he said. “And you don't have to call me stupid. But I don't think it's the same thing. I don't think you have ghosts in Israel the way we do here. Do Israelis have ghosts?”

“How could you not have ghosts?” Matt asked.

“I wasn't calling
you
stupid,” Gal said.

“Well, how do you want to do it, then?” Daniel asked.

“I supposed to be invisible,” she said.

“That's the big problem,” Matt said, scratching his head in mock perplexity. “How do we make a visible child invisible?”

“Maybe I won't go to school!” Gal shouted.

“Great idea!” Daniel laughed. “ ‘Dear Ms. Wheeler, Gal couldn't be seen in school today, because she came dressed as a ghost. But I want to assure you that she was present, because Gal is a serious student who takes her attendance very seriously.' ”

“I have to look like I died and then came back,” Gal said.

Matt and Daniel studiously kept their eyes away from each other. Daniel thought:
What the hell is she supposed to do with that information?
He said carefully, “You know that there's no such thing as a real ghost, right?”

“Okay,” Gal said.

Later, Daniel said to Matt, “I don't love this new compliant
okay
of hers. What does it even mean? It sounds as if she's saying that she'll play along with whatever horrible or confusing thing you throw at her.”

“God, that's so true!” Matt said. “It's like
you
say, ‘There's no hope left, there is no God in heaven or goodness in the world,' and then
she
says”—he made his eyes go blank and slackened his face in a spot-on imitation of her—
“Okay.”

“So what do you think a ghost would look like?” Daniel asked her now.

She thought of Cam's skeleton and then her mind stalled out and she looked at him, finding angry tears gathering between her eyes. “I don't know!” she cried. “You tell me!” She stood, knocked her chair over, and ran out of the room. Noam looked up, startled, and began to wail.

“Here we go,” Daniel said, sitting down heavily and patting his knees for Noam to come over.

Matt rose to clear dishes to hide the tears stinging his eyes. “I don't know if I can do this, Dan,” he said.

“Let's think it through,” Daniel said, lifting Noam onto his lap and grabbing the long transparent plastic tube with the tiny plastic beads that clattered down through a maze, and turning it vertically so Noam could watch them drop. “She needs a costume for school. That's the very minimum. And we should probably count on trick-or-treating, which means a costume for Noam, too.”

“I don't think I can handle this,” Matt said.

“I heard you,” Daniel said.

“So can you take this one?” Matt asked.

“Sure,” Daniel said.

“Thanks, honey,” Matt said, his voice thickening as he loaded dishes into the dishwasher.

“Are you crying?” Daniel said. “Don't cry.” He turned the toy upside down and inhaled sharply in mock surprise as the beads cascaded down again, making Noam laugh. “It's just such a huge bummer,” he burst out. “She's totally weird and unpredictable, and now she's being totally morbid. What are we paying the damned therapist for?”

“It's Halloween,” Matt said gently. “She's supposed to be morbid.”

They were quiet, aside from the sounds of clattering beads, as Matt filled the dishwasher with soap and turned it on, lifted the tray off the high chair and brought it to the sink to wash off the tomato slime and seeds, and the warm, gunky cheese plastered to it. He wanted to thank Daniel more profusely, Daniel who wasn't good at crafts and preferred to leave that stuff to him, but he didn't want to press the volatile Jay issue. He ran the tray under the water, rubbing off the cheese with his fingernails, then shook it off and wiped it with a towel. He looked at Daniel and Noam, who were watching the tube toy with lazy eyes and the same faint smile, Daniel barefoot in jeans and his Oberlin sweatshirt, the baby slouched against him. Noam's wispy brown hair was darkening, coming in the color of Daniel's, and his eyes, too; they'd become the chocolaty color that Matt had fallen in love with in Daniel.

“I'm going to encourage her to be something more innocuous,” Daniel said, “like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or something.”

“Dude, don't,” Matt groaned. “That's so twentieth century.”

“Or Pocahontas.”

“Please.”

“Then what? What's an appropriate and benign cultural figure?”

“SpongeBob,” Matt said. “Any Harry Potter character. Batman. He's a classic—he never goes out of style.”

“Okay,” Daniel said, standing and lifting Noam into Matt's arms. “I'm going up. Wish me luck.”

He tapped gently on the bedroom door and waited, but didn't hear anything. He opened it slowly and peered in to see Gal sitting cross-legged on her bed with her horses arranged around her.

“Hi,” he said. “I have an idea.” He came in and stood against the door frame, his arms crossed. “How about dressing up as one of the Harry Potter characters? You could be Hermione.”

She'd been waiting for him to come, hoping he would, and now she was torn by the impulses to draw him in and push him out. If she closed her eyes, she could hear her father's voice, and it pained her to have this strange and difficult shadow-father instead of her real one. “I don't want to be a Harry Potter character,” she said, pronouncing it scornfully with chewy American
r
's, instead of the Israeli way with guttural
r
's—“Herrie
Poe
-tair”—as if it were the English way that was bastardized. “I want to be a ghost.”

She eyed him as he lowered his backside to the floor and sat up against the wall. “Why is that so important?” he asked. “You can be anything you'd like.”

“I don't know why, it just is,” she said. It was the one costume she knew for sure was appropriate, that was one thing. She feared that if she listened to one of his or Matt's suggestions, she'd be dressed as something that would make grown-ups laugh but kids wouldn't even know what she was supposed to be. And she'd looked forward to it! She had a vague but urgent sense that she'd be scary as a ghost, only scary in a way that was acceptable, even fun. Not scary as the girl with the accent, with no-heads parents. She imagined drifting through her school, Hannah looking at her with admiration for wearing something so much better than a white sheet.

“Can you explain why?” he asked. “If you could explain, I'd understand it better.”

A hitch of ire, of defeat.
Takshivi la'milim sheli
—Listen to my words—it was something Sari, her teacher in
gan
, used to say, stooping and turning her face toward hers. Why did she have to explain it to him? Hadn't she already explained? She felt winded; talking to him was like trying to blow into a recorder, where you couldn't get your breath to gather into a note and all you could hear was panting and spit. “You never listen!” she said. “Forget it, I don't want your help!” She threw herself facedown on her pillow.

Daniel rubbed his mouth with two fingers, picked up a barrette from under his thigh, closed his hand over it, and looked at the cluster of totemic objects sitting on her desk among the messy piles of workbooks and the spray of pens and pencils: a tiny framed picture of herself with her parents, various rocks, beads, and small plastic animals, a flashlight powered by a hand crank, a coral bracelet Val had brought her back from a trip to Florida, a Lego helicopter. He wanted to help her, but everything he could think of he knew she'd reject. He proposed to himself that her difficulty was bigger than just one of arts and crafts, that it had to do with the concept of returning from the dead. Maybe it was his job to help release her from her painful fixation on that idea. That thought warmed in him and became pressing.

“You know that people don't come back from the dead, right?” he said gently.

“
Oof!
” Gal shouted. She rose abruptly and kicked over the little stool she used as a side table; her clock and cup shot across the room and the clock burst open as it hit the wall, its batteries clattering to the floor. “Why you keep saying that?” she screamed. “You say you're helping me but you're
not
helping me, you never help me!”

“Fine,” Daniel said coldly. He got up and left the room, fuming, closing the door behind him, hearing her angry sobs as he went downstairs.

Matt had risen from the couch at the noise, and come to the bottom of the stairs. “What happened?”

Daniel moved past him and sank into an armchair, his face rigidly set. “Nothing. I'm a terrible person who refuses to help. A ghost? It's not even original.”

“Did you say that?”

“No,” Daniel said, indignant. “Why does everybody keep treating me like a monster?”

Matt regarded him thoughtfully. “I'll tell you what,” he said. “I've been thinking, and I've made a decision.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I'm going to pull myself up by my bootstraps about this Halloween thing.”

“What?” Daniel said, mouth agape. He pounded himself on the ear. “I hear someone saying something, but it's very faint, very foreign, I don't know what language it's in.
Sprechen sie deutsch?
”

“Are you finished?” Matt asked. “Are you pleased with yourself?”

“Kinda,” Daniel said.

“Okay, forget it then.”

“No, tell me. Tell me your decision.”

“Don't condescend to me,” Matt said.

“I'm not. I really want to hear.”

Matt's hands were on his hips. “Okay. I've decided to use the kids' presence as an opportunity to get over my Halloween issues.”

“Really! Good for you, Matt,” Daniel said.

Matt shot him a look, a spot check for condescension, and when he saw none, his voice picked up with eagerness. “Don't you think this is a good moment for it? I can honor Jay by channeling his spirit into the holiday. And what do you think about this? I'm thinking of calling Kendrick.”