The Crystal Circle: A Paranormal Romance Novel (20 page)

08/30/2013 - Two and a half months since the disappearance, the Rosen family house, Migdal Haemek

Miriam repeatedly revised the dinner table. She was very excited. Plenty of American cuisine filled the table: cornbread, pumpkin pie, broccoli, salad, and the potato and cheese fritters that Gaya loved. Miriam glowed, as if someone had suddenly taken ten years off her life in one fell swoop. Mark smiled at her and went off to fix the porch swing for Eden. The door opened immediately after a light knock, and Dave came into the dining room.

“David! How elegant you look!” Miriam admired his outfit and gestured at the button-down shirt and ironed pants.

“Yes, Miriam, it’s a festive dinner - Michal’s birthday!” Honestly, there was another cause for celebration. After a month and a half in custody and after the court repeatedly examined the evidence and the testimonies brought before it, it had been decided to drop the charges against Michal- conspiring in an illegal organization and illegal use of a stole firearm. She had been released just three days earlier, and the family’s joy was unbound.

Dave smiled at Miriam. He was not yet used to saying “Mom.” That title was reserved for the late Violetta, her image fading in his memory over the years. Since Miriam had been so excited when he first addressed her like that, he’d tried to overcome the embarrassment and call her “Mom” from time to time. With Mark, it was a lot easier. Mark said he should continue to call him “Mark” because it sounded very strange to him to hear the word “Father” from a grown man, rather than the young boy who’d disappeared so many years ago.

The relationship between them was discovered when Michal had introduced them less than two months earlier at the police station.

“Mom… Dad,” she told them excitedly while introducing them to Dave, “I owe Dave my life! He took me in when I had nowhere to go, he defended me, and even partnered up with me in a little schnitzel restaurant we established.”

Mark and Miriam looked at him, at his limp, his embarrassed smile and she continued. “He’s a true leader in the trailer park, as well as a security officer, a scholar, and a teacher to the children, a successful fisherman and in general – Superman!”

Dave turned red as Lynn piled up the praise, and then she corrected herself jokingly - “actually not Superman. SuperDavid!”

At that moment, it hit him like a hammer to the stomach, like lightning burning neurons in his brain. He turned pale and crashed into the chair. He looked at her with widening eyes, and Michal, who was also frightened, looked into his eyes. And then... it was as if the Earth had fallen away beneath her. She whispered, “Dave… come with me outside.”

They went out of the room to sit in the hallway, and she demanded to know his date of birth and questioned him about a birthmark on his back.

“Yes,” he said sheepishly. “I had a tattoo done there a few years ago to hide it...” And when he told her his date of birth, it only confirmed what she already knew.

“Dave, you’re probably already understanding this... it’s incredible! It’s absolutely crazy, but I know it’s true! David… you’re my little brother, who disappeared when we were kids. You had an accident... you were kidnapped and disappeared -”

“Hey, hold on,” Dave stopped her. He turned pale and sweat dripped from his forehead. “What do you mean? Your brother was kidnapped and disappeared?”

“You’ve no childhood memories, right?”

He shook his head, looked at her and blinked. He tried to suppress that horrible conversation with his Aunt Paula, which had struck him like an axe since its occurrence.

“My brother, David, suffered leg injuries because of a car accident when he was two. He was hospitalized, but when my parents arrived the next day at the hospital, he was gone. Since the operating-room nurse who was tending you had also disappeared, we assumed that, perhaps, she was the one who’d kidnapped you. In any case, we never found you. How much we looked for you...” She started to cry and hugged and kissed him. “How many years I cried over you, David! I felt so guilty because I was responsible for taking you to the nursery. You don’t remember me reading you the
Superman
book again and again? ‘Super David’?”

Dave held her shaking shoulders. He shivered. Flashes of images began to appear in his mind. A girl with pigtails holding his hand, a road, a huge car, darkness... pain... Ee-ra-fh...

“You’re Ee-ra-fh?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered through her tears.

All pieces of the puzzle worked out. Mark and Miriam came out looking for them and listened in amazement to the story. That day in the police station was a day that would be forever remembered. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

After confirming the details and before they parted from Dave, Miriam turned to her husband. “Mark, what about our annex downstairs?” It was an annex in the house that she’d always wanted to rent out, and she said she’d be very happy if Dave moved there, at least for a little while, and maybe go looking for a job in Migdal Haemek. For the first time, Mark voiced no objection to Miriam’s proposal. It was like a dream. After the commotion had died down, Dave thought about it and decided to try it out for a short period. “I’ll move there next month. For a short while. To see how it goes. What do you say?”

Miriam looked at his damaged leg. She recalled that terrible day, many years ago. He’d left the house happy and laughing, his hand in Michals’. She’d looked at him with concern and Mark had said, “Let her take him, she’s a big girl, and she’s very responsible.”

The last time she saw him, he was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. He’d become a very tall man. It had been thirty-three years. Most of her adult life had passed without him. She remembered the race to the hospital, the frustration of not knowing the language well enough yet, the impatience of the officials, and the fact that they had no telephone at home, and so no one told them about his disappearance. She thought about the precious hours they’d lost, waiting silently and obediently in the corner of the hall, while the receptionist who went to find out where their son was had already gone home, and they hadn’t dared to ask again. In the evening, somebody sent them home because, “There’s no one to talk to about it, ma’am,” and the next day they discovered, after dragging the immigration clerk to the hospital, that the boy was hospitalized as ‘anonymous’ at another hospital. She remembered her shock and how she collapsed when they told them at the second hospital, a children’s hospital, that her son had not yet returned from a second surgery, and when, after exhausting hours, it became clear that the child had simply disappeared. A few days later it turned out, through an interpreter who was more patient than others, that their son had disappeared with the nurse who had been caring for him, and neither could be located.

The grief and shock of returning home without their little boy had never left them, and every year they’d celebrated his birthday by going to the beach, laying a stone on an imaginary tomb, and returning home with red eyes. The tragedy had turned Miriam bitter, bleak, and shaky as a leaf in the wind, an extremely weak support for her adolescent daughter. It turned Mark into a quarrelsome, petty tyrant, cruel to his wife and daughter, and Michal into an independent girl with a strong desire to grow up and escape quickly from the house of sadness where she grew up.

For Dave, this was a strange meeting, and completing the circle with his lost parents did not dispel the sadness stemming from the realization that he was reluctant to accept – that Michal could never be his; perhaps she would forever belong to Yossi. But he could continue to love and protect her as a brother. His true love was waiting for him somewhere, and one day he would find her. The most important thing was that he’d found his roots. He had a family. He was not alone in the world.

While Dave set the dining room table at the Rosens’ home and helped with the serving, the door opened again and an exuberant, curly-haired creature jumped in, skipping. It was Eden, carrying a bouquet of spring flowers for her grandparents. The whole family came in after her.

Michal had decided to officially change her name to Lynn, a name she loved much more than her former name and which emphasized the last metamorphosis of her soul. She’d brought a schnitzel platter, of course; Yossi brought salads, and Gaya brought a sign for Dave’s door, which she made herself. She was excited, because she’d never had any uncles, certainly not this kind of uncle.

Wine glasses were raised. When Lynn and David looked deep into their reflections in the wine glasses, it seemed to them that they could see Raz’el’s face there, smiling his famous grin, from ear to ear.

Rules of the Crystal Circle (from Lynn’s journal)

1.        
   The members of the Circle are not forbidden to remove any information.
   
2.        
   The information released will be for the good of the soul and for other members of the Circle.
   
3.        
   The members of the group can be simultaneously members of the group and a parallel circle, if the parallel circle’s members allow it.
   

The End