Stay With Me (16 page)

Um, no. I don't need Raphael to know this is not the year for Da to take me to Auschwitz.

That night Da says he's gotten something for me.

"I ordered it," he says. "It finally arrived at the hospital."

The hospital?

"I had to order it at work," he says. "Connecting to the Internet here is like racing a snail."

"Have you ever done chat?" I ask, imagining my father and Jacques as little boys, trying to get snails across a finish line.

I know there are snails in Egypt because a few years ago my mother worked with someone who was studying the effects of snail-related parasites in the Nile.

"Of course," Da says. "That's how I know it's slow to connect."

"No, I meant snails," I say.

"What about them?"

I'm reminded of how very much talking to my father is like taking a test. Hanging over me are the same dangers of misunderstanding or providing the wrong answers.

Da pulls a paper bag from his briefcase and hands it to me.

"It was the first book your sister ever enjoyed," he says.

The Count of Monte Cristo.
Great, another book. But then I consider what I'm holding. A book disguised as a present from my father.

Of all the conversations I've overheard, there's one I wish I'd never remember. My mother's favorite book as a little girl was
The Secret Garden.
She'd read it aloud to me many times when I was small, and at some point I decided I wanted my own copy. Mom was thinking of giving me one just like hers—an early edition and therefore very expensive.

"Why bother?" Da asked her. "It's not like she'll read it. She's worse than her sisters ever were."

To which my mother probably said something like
Julian!
I did get a copy, although I was no longer so anxious to have it. He's never given me a book, but he buys them often enough for Clare—endless biographies or short novels translated from French.

"Clare read this?" I ask him. "It was her first favorite book?"

"Rebecca's favorite," Da says, his whole body deflating just a little, before continuing. "It's the abridged version. Skip the first four paragraphs, if you like. They're boring and might be hard to follow. All that happens is a ship docks in France. In 1815."

He's really making an effort, and I tell him I'm so grateful he got this for me and (here's the lie) I'm so looking forward to reading it.

"It's for you to enjoy," he says. "If it brings you one iota of the pleasure you bring me, that will be a lot."

"Thank you," I say.

I put my arms around his neck, being careful to notice the fabric of his jacket, the smell of soap mixed with coffee, and how his beard stubble is all silver even though the hair on his head is still mostly black. I hope it will be many years before memories like this one are all I have left of him.

I
NEVER MAKE IT TO THE
J
EWISH MUSEUM
, which will no doubt find its way onto a list of missed opportunities, but the city has other draws. I go back to wandering around on Kanonicza Street and through the grand square, whose Polish name I have to write down three times before I stop transposing the
y's
with the
n's.
Rynek Glowny. Imagine being dyslexic in this language, where the name Casimir is written out as Kazimierz.

Ben phones almost every day while I am here, which is sweet, but also hard, because I don't have a day's worth of things to tell him. There's a limit, after all, to how interesting my favorite buildings are. His parents gave him a calling card, though, and who am I to decide how he should spend it? He tells me funny stories about kids at the camp and I know they must be following him around the way little kids always do—as if he were the Pied Piper.

I hope that by the time I see him again I'll know as clearly as he does what I want for us. In the meantime, I fail to close what feels like a huge distance on the phone.

"It's hard to be on the phone with someone you're dating," Clare says when I mention this on one of my calls home. "Even if you're not totally back together, it's hard."

I decide she knows what she's talking about and not to think so very much. When, on my actual birthday, an enormous arrangement of yellow tulips arrives at the apartment, I assume they're from Ben. Or, as they look very expensive, from Clare and Raphael. My mother carries them up from the ground floor, where the woman who runs the building lives.

We're going out for dinner, so I head to my room to change.

My mother stops me, saying, "Leila, who's Eamon?"

"They're from Eamon?" I ask. "Let me see."

For Leila, who, unlike her name, is as bright as I hope these are. Enjoy the day. In spite of what it's not, seventeen's a good number. Eamon.

The message is a computer printout, but it's still a note. From a man. On my birthday. Gyula's card to Clare—
So glad you were born. Please allow them
—floats through my mind. I read the slip of paper again.

Although all the words are there, it doesn't say I'm
bright as day,
but it's what I feel like. A shiny blonde-goddess type of flower. How ridiculous I am to be this pleased. There are, I count, twenty tulips. He's gone to some thought and trouble to get them here. I just wish he knew how much I'd rather have seen him again after that day.

"Honey, are you all right?" my mother asks, and I recall her first question.

"I ... he's someone I ... he's from work," I say. "From Acca."

"Someone you like?"

"I think so," I say, aware that she's really asking,
Is he important?
"He was nice to me."

"'Was?"'

"He's thirty-one," I say. "He got a little skeevy when he found out I was sixteen."

"I see," she says. "Are you okay?"

"It made me sad," I say, fingering one of the flowers. "But only a little."

"Do you want to tell me about it?" she asks.

I slip the note into my pocket as if to protect it from questioning.

"There's nothing to tell," I say.

"He sent you these because of nothing?"

"I'm fine," I tell her. "Nothing happened. Really."

My mother almost never misjudges what's important. She sees what needs to be done and does it. She's the one who hired my tutor while Da was still screaming at the school for having taken so long to spot the dyslexia. In a way, I'm relying on her judgment. If she believes I'm fine, then I'll know I am.

"I know you to be true to what you want," Mom says. "So I'm not going to worry."

She sounds a little worried. Not about my being fine now, but that I won't be later.

"Eamon in no way wants to date me," I say.

"So it's come up," she says. "Dating."

"Briefly."

No doubt she's remembering our conversation from last August. The one about honoring my body's uncertainty. I should tell her that I've already slept with Ben. In spite of my doubts. And that while I don't intend to spend my life making mistakes, making that one hasn't irrevocably harmed me.

"I want you to promise me that you'll always trust yourself," she says. "Especially when you don't."

There's a gift here bigger than flowers, although I'm not sure I could put what it is into words.

"I might want to take a year off before college," I say, to test her faith in my trust and because I'm done talking about Eamon. "Or design sets when I get out of college."

"You know, there are apprentice programs," she says. "Maybe not for set design, but things like carpentry are taught to apprentices. It's an option."

"Thank you," I say, but knowing that if I take a year off it will be to find a way to work in the theater.

"Leila, you're not obliged to do what you think we want," she says. "Your father never made that clear to the girls."

As if that were the thing that might have kept Rebecca here. Being true to what she wanted.

"Does Da ever say why he thinks she did it?" I ask. "Like, if there were a specific thing."

Mom finishes arranging the tulips in a vase she's unearthed from the kitchen.

"For him it's bad enough that she did it," she says.

"He seems better," I say.

My mother nods, saying, "He's fighting so hard to keep from being wrecked."

And that is the word for my father. He's not better, he's less wrecked.

"Remember that if she had a reason," Mom says, "it won't help anyone."

"Clare thinks there wasn't any one reason," I say.

"Who knows," my mother says.

I decide against asking if she has a theory. Finding out what other people think isn't going to help. I need to discover what, if anything, other people
know.

Later that night, after the birthday dinner out, Da knocks on my door.

"May I come in?"

"Of course," I say.

I've been reading the book he gave me. I hope I'll enjoy it but for me reading is work. On this day that I am seventeen, having to work just so as to read feels, more than usual, like a great injustice. My father sits down on the end of my bed, the way he used to when I was little and afraid of the giant spider I thought lived in the radiator.

"Your mother tells me the flowers are not from Ben," Da says.

This is getting ridiculous. Poor Eamon.

"I don't think that the person who sent them was expecting to be discussed quite so much," I say.

"This is the thirty-one-year-old who's feeling
skeevy
about your age."

"Yes," I say.

Yes, yes, now leave it alone. I have a sudden and unwelcome insight into Rebecca's craving for privacy.

"I'm clearly not an expert on women," Da says. "But I know a little about men."

He pauses, looking away for a fraction of a second.

"I think," Da says, "I think that perhaps I forgot to tell your sisters that they deserved kindness from the men they loved."

I consider this. William was kind. And Rebecca left him, telling me she simply could not think with William so anxious to think for her. Raphael is the definition of kind, but Janie thought Clare needed someone a little less anxious to please her.

"Clare benefits from a difficult man," Janie said. "It brings out the best in her."

Maybe Da did forget to tell my sisters to look for kindness, but it seems more likely that other things are involved.

"Don't settle for anything less," my father says. "Never give any part of yourself to someone who is unkind."

Ben is kind. So if I've made a mistake at least it wasn't that one.

"And about college," Da says. "If you want to take a year off, that's fine."

"I haven't decided anything," I say.

"Janie always thought I made too much of this," Da says. "But no one can take an education away from you."

This is a familiar refrain of my father's. My sisters called it
the prison argument for good grades.
Da liked to tell them (and me) that if we ever found ourselves in prison, we'd at least have everything we'd ever read or studied. People can take away a lot, he says, but nothing you
know.

"I'm not going to go to prison," I say. "I promise."

"When I was your age, I was never going to leave Egypt," Da says. "I knew where my office would be. Which hospital I'd train at. I'd even timed the walk from the hotel."

"I'm trying," I tell him, picking up the book he gave me. "It's hard. If I were meant to have a brain worth taking into prison, wouldn't it be easier?"

I tell him how impossible
Tender Is the Night
was. That I had to read it twice and still needed help in order to figure it out.

"Maybe that wasn't the book for you," he says, echoing Eamon's comments about the book's being a bad fit with me. "But, Leila, the truth is that nothing valuable is easy."

***

Something to think about, I suppose, on the flight home. My parents' importance could be measured by how much I love them. Or by how very difficult it was to see them.

O
NCE MY JET LAG HAS VANISHED,
I call Eamon to thank him for the flowers.

"They made an impression on everyone," I say.

"Your parents, huh?"

"Oh, yeah," I say.

"Sorry about that," Eamon says. "I hope they told you not to make friends with strange men."

No, actually, they said to trust myself and to remember that I deserve kindness. In order for this not to sound too bizarre, I'd have to give Eamon the history of my sisters' love lives, and I don't think any phone call is long enough for that. Instead, I settle for,

"They did not say that."

"Okay," he says. "I won't ask."

"I told them you were horrified by my age and that I didn't think I'd see you again."

"I wasn't horrified, I was being cautious," he says. "Being friends takes more work than dating."

I wonder if I believe that and know I'll have to ask Clare what she thinks before deciding.

"So do I get to see you ever?"

"I'll return to Acca," Eamon says.

I tell him I have a new job. I try to make it sound snazzy, although I know it will be mostly taking messages and xeroxing. I am, I say, interning for a theatrical producer.

"Who is it?" Eamon asks.

Charlotte's never worked in television, which is where he's heard of everyone.

"She's a friend of my sister's mother," I say. "She's doing the new Isaac Rebinsehn play."

Da took Ben and me to one of his plays last year and I didn't like it, but you could tell it was the kind of play that's important. The characters are more ideas than people. In this case, as Da explained, the two halves of Germany when Berlin still had a wall. Plays like that are a nightmare to read, but if you see them it's not so bad.

"Charlotte Strom?" Eamon asks me.

"Yes," I say. "How did you know?"

"My father is Isaac's lawyer."

"So I would have met you anyway," I say.

I think of how Rebecca used to say that the city was really a small town. You could disappear here, but only within limits. Even after switching careers, she was forever running into people she either knew or had heard of from friends. There's no escape, she said.