The Tenth Song (41 page)

The ringing phone woke him.

“Dad?”

He held his breath. “Tell me, Kayla.”

“She’s out of surgery. They say she had a very close call. But they think she is going to be fine.”

He put the book of Psalms to his lips, kissing it.
Thank you, God,
he mouthed silently.
Thank you.

He had gotten one miracle. He could not depend on another.

He sat down at his computer and composed an e-mail to Marvin.

Marvin. I am ready to settle. Just make sure my family will be taken care of.

Best,

Adam

33

“Mom?”

The voice came from a distance.

Fear clutched Abigail’s heart. Am I still alive? she wondered. She did not want to die. She did not want peace, she admitted to herself. She wanted the uncertainty and pain of living. She wanted to live until her throat was dry with singing and she could not utter a single new note.

“Mom, are you all right?”

Kayla stood beside her bed, holding her hand. Her eyes were bright with tears. “What happened to me?”

“You were very, very lucky.”

Luck, she thought, had nothing to do with it. “Thank you, God.” She closed her eyes and slept.

The room was dark when she awoke again. Kayla was sitting at her bedside along with Daniel. “Water,” she said weakly.

“Here.”

She felt her head lifted gently by a strong male hand. Her eyes focused.

“Adam?”

“How are you, my love?”

Was she dreaming? She pushed herself frantically off the pillows. “You can’t be here! They’ll arrest you…”

He pushed her shoulders back gently.

“Abby, it’s over.”

“What?”

“They’ve dropped the charges. The CIA picked up Van in an airport in Nairobi on his way to Libya. I guess life in Saudi Arabia didn’t appeal to him.” He chuckled. “He was carrying a bunch of documents that prove I was set up. Hurling and Van were longtime accomplices, longtime Hamas and Al-Qaeda supporters. They wanted a Jewish accountant to do their dirty work. Dorset was blackmailed into helping them: Hurling’s friends paid his Vegas gambling debts. It was Dorset who suggested they pick me. The feds have asked me to testify against them!”

“Thank God! I can’t believe it. That is so wonderful! But how did it happen?”

“The feds told my lawyer off the record that the CIA got a tip from a foreign intelligence agency. Isn’t that wonderful? He couldn’t tell me anything more. If Van had made it to Libya, that would have been the end of me. Is Seth around? I’d like to tell him.”

Kayla took her father’s hand. “He’s on his way back to Harvard, Dad.”

“So then, is it over between the two of you?” Adam winced.

Kayla nodded. “It’s over.”

Abigail examined her feelings. She tried to remember her sense of joy as she walked down the street planning her daughter’s engagement party to the perfect son-in-law. But it was so distant a memory, something that had happened to someone else, someone she had known long ago.

“And where is Daniel?” Abigail asked.

“He just went out for a minute to talk to the doctors.”

“I want to thank him for saving my life. But most of all, I want to thank him for saving my husband and our family.”

Adam stared at her.

“For saving me?”

“It wasn’t Seth, Dad, who found out about Hurling. It was Daniel. But he made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. And it’s probably Daniel who is responsible for the CIA being tipped off just now as well…”

“You’re joking!”

“No. I’m serious. He’s never said exactly how he got the information, just that he was in a special unit in the army and that he has what he calls ‘contacts.’ I asked Seth to pass the information on to you because I knew you wouldn’t take anything coming from me seriously.”

Daniel walked in.

“Dad, this is Daniel.”

Adam looked in confusion at the wild-haired young man.

Daniel looked from one to the other, equally confused.

Adam walked over to him, hugging him wordlessly. “Thank you!” he said, his voice husky and full of emotion. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She saw the tears well up in Daniel’s eyes. She squeezed his hand: “Just say ‘
bevakasha
.’ ”

He took Adam’s hand in his: “
Bevakasha.
You are most welcome!”

“And what now, Adam?” Abigail asked.

“I’ve bought plane tickets that are good for the next two weeks. Whenever you are feeling up to traveling.”

Abigail nodded, feeling her eyes closing. She would talk to him soon, explain things when she had the strength, explain that like those animals that shed their skins, she had shed hers. The old life was over, an empty shell that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, crawl back into.

What would happen to her? she wondered. What would her Tenth Song sound like? Rav Natan was right. She couldn’t imagine it. She would only know that answer once she was in the middle of singing. All she knew was that it would be the best song she had ever sung.

She closed her eyes, giving in to sleep.

Epilogue

When she was released from the hospital, Abigail and Adam took a hotel room in the center of Jerusalem, in an unimposing but friendly little place. It had a small balcony that overlooked a street full of waiters scurrying to serve leisurely tourists and laid-back natives sitting in open-air cafes. Religious women in hats wheeling baby carriages, soldiers, Abyssinian priests in long, dark robes filled the avenues. She watched, fascinated by the variety, the energy. It reminded her in a strange way of her birthplace, New York City. Tiny as it was, Jerusalem was still a bundle of energy, optimism, and diversity.

In the afternoons, she and Adam would take long, slow walks that brought them to stone archways and rows of very old stone dwellings, which looked both mysterious and strangely familiar. She couldn’t explain that: the familiarity; the sense that she had always been destined to live in this place, of all the places on earth; the feeling of comfort and relief at having been lost and now having been found, or rather, finding herself. A feeling she had never once experienced in her own birthplace.

These low stone houses, built at the turn of the century by wealthy, kindhearted Jews for their poor immigrant brethren, somehow whispered her name, inviting her to partake of whatever magic they held in the matrix of history,
community, and tradition. In the dark shadows of a bare streetlamp, she touched the stones, and they touched her.

When it finally came, the inevitable conversation with Adam had been harder than she’d imagined. He was not a man who lost his temper or cried easily. And yet, there had been shouting and tears. Later, in the many conversations that followed, he seemed to have spent his anger and his grief, and was simply bewildered.

“We have lost a great deal of money, it’s true,” he told her. “But we have some left. Especially if we sell the house. It’s too big for us now anyway,” he said. “And I know now you never really liked it; I forced it on you.”

She didn’t protest.

“I called home last night to get my phone messages. The rabbi called. Apparently he’s read the newspaper stories exonerating me. He even apologized.”

“You aren’t going back to that synagogue, are you?” she asked, appalled at the thought.

“Why not? So many of our friends left messages congratulating me. My clients called, wanting me back.”

“Of course they did,” she murmured. “But how can you just forget what you’ve seen, Adam, the faces without the masks?”

“I don’t know. If the situation were reversed, I don’t know if I’d have acted any differently.”

That was so Adam. She had no doubt he would have acted completely differently. He would never have betrayed anyone the way he himself had been betrayed. As for herself, what did it matter how she would have behaved in a theoretical situation that had never occurred? What did it matter if she would have been no better? The facts remained the facts. Even if she could find it in her heart to forgive the people who had behaved so unfeelingly, still, she didn’t want them in her life anymore, just as they had not wanted her in theirs when the situation was reversed, and she’d needed them the most.

“I want to put it all behind me, Abigail. I want my life back, exactly as it was.”

“Adam, that’s the difference between us. I want nothing back. I only want to go forward.”

“Abby, be reasonable! At least come back for a little while. Help me to sell the house. Come with me to visit our children and grandchildren…”

It sounded perfectly reasonable. But the thing was, she just couldn’t. She didn’t even know why. It was like something written in stone that had been chiseled and completed, impossible to change. “I’m sorry, Adam. I can’t.”

“Ever?” he asked her, flabbergasted.

“Ever,” she answered honestly. “I want you to come here. I want the children and grandchildren to come here, at least for a visit.”

“Maybe, in a few years…”

“Now.”

There was nothing left to say. At the end of the two weeks, when she was feeling better, he took a plane back to Boston.

“Will you take care of yourself, Abby?”

“I will. I’m happy, Adam. I will wait here for you. For as long as it takes.”

They held each other close; then he was gone.

A week later, she found an apartment. It was tiny, especially by American standards. A small kitchen with ancient appliances and wooden windows that barely closed. A claw-footed tub, and a handheld shower wand the Israelis called a “
tush
.” That always made her giggle. It came furnished with a beat-up table and some unmatched chairs. To complete the décor, she bought a used convertible couch she found for sale on a local English-language Web site, and a new, comfortable bed she found in a mattress store in Talpiot.

Her life took on a kind of rhythm. In the mornings, she would cross the street to the Machane Yehuda shuk, where she bought pita bread with zaatar still warm from the oven, fresh figs, and Israeli goat cheeses. For lunch, she would do the same, except buying fresh Nile perch, or St. Peter’s fish, ripe tomatoes, and strawberries.

She read a great deal, books she found in one of the many English-language used-book stores that dotted the city. She was always surprised at what people brought in: almost new hardcover novels, signed first editions, paperbacks so yellow with age that the pages crumpled even as you turned them. A few times a week she taught English to adults. The money was enough for most of her expenses. Not that she was worried about money. She had transferred enough to her Israeli account to last a long time, money she had earned as a teacher all
those years, which Adam had insisted go into a separate account in her name. On Sunday afternoons she took art lessons with a young woman, a recent Bezalel art-school graduate. And on Tuesdays, she took music lessons, learning how to play the clarinet. She had no television. Instead, in the evenings, she went to local concerts and lectures and art galleries, or simply visited with newly made friends. Ariella sometimes called with news about Metzuke Madragot, and sometimes she traveled into Jerusalem to visit. They would sit over coffee and delicious cakes in Beit Ticho, talking about the strange turns that lives take.

She never ceased to marvel at how easy it was to make friends even if you couldn’t invite them over for ten-course gourmet meals in a palatial dining room. Abigail knew her living conditions were temporary and that eventually she would buy something larger and more modern. And yet she felt no rush to change anything. She was strangely, perfectly, content.

She and Adam spoke almost every day. In the beginning, they’d ended every conversation the same way: “When are you coming home?” he’d ask plaintively. And she would answer gently: “I
am
home, and I have no intention of leaving.” But finally, he’d stopped asking. Now, mostly they discussed Kayla and Daniel.

The day after Adam left for the States Kayla had broken the news that she and Daniel had also decided to go back to America. It had come completely out of left field. In Abigail’s mind, there had only been two choices: Seth and America and law school, or Daniel and Israel and no law school. Kayla and Daniel had chosen door number three. It had been hard for her to accept at first.

“But why, Kayla? Aren’t you happy here?”

“Happiness is a by-product of doing the right thing. Moving on with your life. I’ve looked into my life, and I know what I need to do now. I’m a mediocre poet and a worse archaeologist. But I was a very, very good law student. I realize it was never practicing law I rejected. I just didn’t want to practice Seth’s kind of law. It took me a while to understand that. So I’m going back to finish my degree with the same intent that I started it: to change the world, and make it more just, one lawsuit at a time. This is what I know how to do. I just have to learn how to do it better, as Rav Natan said.”

“And Daniel?”

“He’s coming with me.”

“Really?” She was stunned. “And what is he going to do in Boston?”

“Daniel has also come to realize that he loves medicine, because even if you can’t save someone, you can give them comfort and help to make whatever time they have left a blessing. And that is an awesome skill. He’s going to retrain in geriatrics, to specialize in hospices so he can help people sing their Tenth Song. In the meantime, he’s planning to get a job in a nursing home. We’ll live the student life for a while, and then who knows? It doesn’t matter.”

“You aren’t going back because of your father, are you?”

She hesitated. “I admit, partly. I owe him. But no, the decision was mine and Daniel’s, and it was made for many reasons, ninety-nine percent of them selfish.”

It was painful to know she was leaving, just as they’d become friends. But Abigail felt, instinctively, it was the right decision.

“Will you ever come back here?”

Kayla’s face lit up. “Always.”

They’d been back in the States now for two months.

“Kayla got a job working at the Family Advocacy Center. She loves the work and is putting aside money to refill the hole in her tuition account,” Adam informed her. “She’s looking forward to starting law school again in the fall.”