All I Love and Know (40 page)

He watched them eat for a few minutes. Then he opened the cabinets and contemplated. Derrick was a vegetarian, and glass jars of pasta and grains, some of which Matt didn't recognize—bulgur? quinoa? farro?—lined the shelves in austere harmony. On the top shelf there was a box of schoolboy biscuits covered with dark chocolate, and although Matt preferred milk chocolate, he took out two and ate them, then opened the fridge and swallowed some milk out of the carton. He looked at the calendar hanging on the wall and saw all the dates Derrick and Brent had made in December with other friends. Steve and Bruce—he'd met them once at a concert—were marked down three times, the third time as
S&B
. They were getting ahead of him and Daniel, he thought with anxious rancor. Were they still Derrick and Brent's best friends? Well, it wasn't Steve and Bruce they'd asked to feed the cats, he thought. Surely that meant something.

THE EVENING BEFORE ILANA'S
birthday, Matt and Daniel went through the photo albums with Gal and Noam, Noam making the rhythmic
scritch-scritch
sound of hard pacifier sucking, Gal all interruptions and whipping hair and knees on the page and knocking the wind out of them with hard plops onto their laps.

The birthday fell on a Saturday, and after breakfast Daniel gathered them in the living room, where they sat in their separate spaces with their feet on the ground and hands in their laps, made self-conscious by the aura of solemnity. On the coffee table he'd set the most recent photo album, the one taken after Noam was born. He had set a yarhzeit candle beside it, which Yaakov objected to, since it wasn't the anniversary of Ilana's death. “I know, Yaakov,” he said, “but I wanted a memorial candle.” Gal was cross-legged on the floor, and next to her, Matt sat with his legs spread, Noam between them, playing with a stacking toy.

Daniel scraped a match against the box and it flamed, and nearly went out as he brought it to the candle's wick; then they both blossomed into a glow. They watched the candle wobble in its small glass. “Can I speak about a memory?” Daniel began in Hebrew, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed. “Well, my brother was always a pretty happy guy—successful, tons of friends. But when he got together with Ilana, it was different. His eyes glowed as if he had a special secret. He looked satisfied, completely comfortable in his skin.”

They sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, until he said, “That's all.” Then Malka reached over and pulled Gal onto her lap on the couch. “I remember, like it was yesterday, the day you were born. Of course, your
ema
read all these books about childbirth, and had ideas of how she wanted it to go. Very strong ideas, as she always had, you know her. She had a CD she made of songs celebrating life, and children, and the waves, and new beginnings, and when she got to her room at Shaare Zedek they told her the CD player was broken! I thought she'd be furious! She worked very hard on that CD, and wanted you to come into the world with those songs in your ears. But she gave a big laugh and said, ‘My first lesson in having children! It just doesn't always go the way you think it will!' ”

“Really? She said that?” Gal said, craning around to look into her grandmother's face.

“Yes, she said that. I was so proud of her. She was such a wonderful mother. She loved you two more than anything in the world.”

“Yes, she did,” Yaakov said. “But for some reason I remember her most as a little girl herself. I remember teaching her to ride a bike, how she howled and howled till she could do it by herself. She was like that with everything—crawling, tying her shoes, every new thing she had to learn, until she learned it, she made our lives miserable. And then suddenly: sunshine! ‘And I love you, Abbaleh, and I love you, Shmabbaleh.' ” He said that last in a high-pitched, grateful, obsequious way that made Gal laugh and Daniel narrow his eyes, hearing the derision in it, milder and more comic than the derision he'd aimed at his wife, but there just the same.

Then it was Gal's turn; she saw them look at her. She looked at the picture of her mother, looked at herself in the picture, her hair plastered by drying seawater across her forehead. These days she was having more and more trouble remembering her mother, which she kept secret from everybody, even her grief counselor. What remained were tormenting snatches of sense memory: being lifted under the armpits and rising into the air, the pain of a comb being pulled through her hair, her mother's arms bobbing on the water as she encouraged her to swim to her, ballooning huge in the water's reflection, then contracting, the feeling of dark and thunder when her mother was displeased. But no funny stories. Nothing she could tell.

Matt and Daniel were looking at her with unbearable sweetness; her grandmother's chin rested on the top of her head. Finally, Matt's eyes narrowed. He turned to them with a bright expression on his face. “I have a story,” he said.

They looked at him with surprise.

“I know I came late into Ilana's life,” he said, blundering forward in Hebrew, “and didn't know her very well, but wow, she made a big impression on me! I remember the first time Joel and Ilana came to visit us here. I was waking up, and I heard yelling downstairs. So I stayed, cowering, in the bedroom. I thought they were having a big fight. I didn't want to interrupt.
Lo na'im!”
He spoke with élan and many hand gestures, stumbling over this word and that, gripping his upper arms with his fists and shivering to convey his fear, suddenly worrying even as he was telling it that his story might be a little inappropriate. It was the familiar feeling of the blurter: he was into it now, and he'd gone too far to turn back. “Finally, I came downstairs and approached the noise, and when I went into the kitchen I saw that they were just having a conversation!”

It didn't go over very well. Malka and Yaakov were looking at him with amazed puzzlement. He was telling Ilana's parents that their daughter was loud. He was a gentile telling Jews that they were loud.

For her part, Gal was still lost in thought, staring at the framed photograph of her mother till her vision blurred, trying to think of something to say. And then it came to her, descended upon her like an angel's touch, and she looked up brightly. “I want to go back to Israel and live with Savta and Sabba,” she said.

In the few seconds before the din of dismay and confusion set in, Matt felt relief: This certainly overshadowed his inappropriateness! Then Yaakov slammed his hand on the table, making them all jump, stood abruptly and walked out of the room. Malka squeezed Gal and rocked her, her chin still on her head, her eyes shut. Daniel slumped in his chair with a stunned expression.

Matt stood and went into the kitchen, which held a big messy pile of syrup-covered plates, coffee mugs, a griddle glistening with the residue of melted butter. There were a few cold pancakes left on a plate, and he picked one up with his fingers and tore it in quarters, dragged a piece through the syrup streaks on the top plate, wadded the sweet mess into his mouth. Then he ate the other three quarters as well. From the other room he could hear Gal talking excitedly, saying “No offense,” her favorite new expression. “I love you and Matt and Yo-yo. I just think Noam and I should be in Ema's family. Don't you think Ema would be happy if I was?”

Matt found the screw top to the syrup bottle, set it on top, and twisted it closed over a ring of sludge. Then he sighed and headed back into the living room.

“Actually, I don't, sweetie,” Daniel said. “Ema and Abba wanted you to live with us, and we have to honor their wishes. And we went to court, and the judge agreed that you and your brother should live with us.”

Matt turned around. Gal said, “But back then, I was still pretty little, and didn't know how to talk to him myself. Maybe we should go back to the judge and this time I'll talk to him.” She was still sitting on her grandmother's lap, and Malka was pressing her lips against the side of her head, whispering, “Shh, shh.” He saw that Gal didn't look so much defiant as exalted, although uncertainty was beginning to cloud her face. The front door slammed: Yaakov taking Yo-yo out for a walk.

“There aren't any do-overs,” Daniel said evenly. “The judge thought very carefully about what's best for you, and once he made his decision, we had to obey him. Otherwise we're breaking the law.”

Matt opened his mouth with the urge to say something like, “But we understand how much you love Sabba and Savta and how nice it is to be with them,” then closed it. It wasn't really his place. Instead, he asked, in Hebrew, “Malka, would you like another cup of coffee?”

But she was standing. “There's no reason to be cruel,” she said to Daniel. “ ‘Breaking the law'?”

“That's true, Dani!” Gal said. “There's no reason to be cruel!”

Daniel turned to Matt with a shrug of puzzled and angry dismay.

“It's a hard day for everybody,” Matt said.

Gal was sitting by herself on the couch now, crying. She'd tried to make a grand gesture, Matt thought, now sitting heavily beside her, and it had given all the grown-ups a heart attack.

“Oh, sweetie,” he said.

THE NEXT MORNING THEY
couldn't get Malka out of bed. She lay on the air mattress with her hand splayed over her face, emitting an occasional animal whimper. Yaakov was up and dressed in stocking feet, his steely gray hair standing up, hovering over her with a cold washcloth and a mug of warm tea that shook in his hand. “She has a migraine,” he told Daniel.

Daniel nodded, studying them for a moment. They were ashen, both of them. From outside, he heard the loud rumble of the garbage can being wheeled to the curb by Matt. “Let's move her into our bedroom,” he said. “Don't say no.” And he ran upstairs to change the sheets and straighten up, thinking with strange excitement as he pulled down the fitted corners of the clean sheets, which smelled of a long stay in the linen closet, that this was it, one of Malka's famous breakdowns. Not that he wished it upon her—God, no—and not that he wished it upon Gal, either. And yet, if Gal witnessed her grandmother's incapacity, surely his and Matt's guardianship of her would be settled in her mind, once and for all. And then he berated himself for even having that thought, for who wanted her to accept being in their family because all other options were closed off to her? At six years old?

He grabbed their shaving kits and toothbrushes and toothpaste, the hairbrush and hair gel, brought them downstairs and piled them on the bathroom sink. Matt was stomping his boots on the kitchen entry mat to rid them of snow, then bending to take them off, when Daniel hurried into the kitchen. “You went outside without socks?” Daniel said, as a bare foot emerged from the first boot. “You're nuts.”

“Tell me about it,” Matt said, giving it a rueful rub.

“Hey, listen, it's happening. One of Malka's breakdowns.” Matt looked at him sharply. “Yaakov is calling it a migraine. But I'm pretty sure.”

“What should we do?” Matt asked.

“I'm clearing out our bedroom and bathroom so we can move her up there.”

“Okay. Do you need help?”

They spoke with quiet urgency. Daniel was imagining Matt stepping into the room where one person was disintegrating and the other was trying to hide it, and apparently so was Matt. “I'm going to leave the house,” Matt said. “Not because I don't want to help.”

“Okay.”

“Because I don't want to add stress to them.”

“I know.”

Matt looked at his watch. “Yo-yo!” He reached for the leash as the dog came into the kitchen with a quizzical wag.

“Get socks!” Daniel said.

“Believe me,” Matt said. They looked at their watches again and agreed that Matt would be home in half an hour.

Back in the living room, Yaakov had gotten Malka into a sitting position, and the kids were sitting on the floor on their heels, watching gravely. “Savta has a migraine,” Gal announced. “That's a horrible, horrible headache.”

“I know,” Daniel said. “So we're going to give her mine and Matt's room, because it's darker and quieter.”

Malka was in her nightgown, her feet bare; Yaakov had placed her bathrobe over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, the lids translucent, and the skin on her face sagged, drawing down the corners of her mouth as if gravity had fought energy and brutally pummeled it. Daniel's impulse was to act quickly, to move this frightening, spectral version of her grandmother away from Gal, and yet, even a few feet away from her, he felt the energy draining from his limbs. He sat down beside Malka, and although a feeling of entropy made him wonder how he'd ever get up again, he draped her arm around his shoulders and helped Yaakov hoist her off the bed. “Stay down here with your brother,” he told Gal sternly.

They brought her upstairs and laid her on the bed, and hastened to cover her with the comforter. Daniel pulled down the blinds, and turned to Yaakov. “Tell me what you need,” he said.

“Take away your razors and medications, your scissors and clippers,” Yaakov said. “And then go. This happens. I'll stay with her.”

Daniel looked at him doubtfully. “
Lech!
” Yaakov barked, flapping his hand toward the bathroom door. Daniel saw that he was ashamed, and angry at Daniel for witnessing his shame.

“Okay,” Daniel said gently.

He got a plastic grocery bag from under the sink and gathered all the sharp things and all the medications into it. Then he went downstairs and peeked into the kitchen. Noam had climbed into the Tupperware drawer, and Gal was feeding him Goldfish crackers, placing them onto his orange, gummy tongue, saying, “Don't worry, Noam.”

Over the next few days the house was so silent they became aware of the refrigerator hum, the water in the pipes, the infuriating tinny whine of the cable box. They spoke in quiet voices that barely rose from their throats, and leaned toward each other to hear. Everything had to be murmured twice or three times, as though it required a running start before the noise it made could heave itself into something intelligible. They awoke from restless sleep with headaches, blaming the barometric pressure that had brought in unseasonable warmth. Yaakov shuffled in his slippers back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom, bearing tea and toast Malka didn't touch. Matt and Daniel privately wondered whether she needed to be hospitalized and put on a drip for nutrition. They heard Yaakov moving around at night. In the daytime he fell asleep in the living room rocker, snores blubbering out of his lips. He was both less himself and more himself, Daniel thought. Quieter and more shadowy. But also, the sole, stern sentry, the last competent man on earth.