Here I Am (56 page)

It was scary how quickly and completely his past could be rewritten, or overwritten. All those years felt worthwhile while they were happening, but only a few months on the other side of them and they were a gigantic waste of time. Of a life. It was an almost irrepressible urge of his brain to see the worst in that which had failed. To see it as something that had failed, rather than something that had succeeded until the end. Was he protecting himself from the loss by denying anything was lost? Or simply achieving some pathetic emotional nonvictory by not caring?

When a friend would express sympathy, why did Jacob insist on opposing it? Why did he have to turn his decade and a half of marriage into stupid puns and ironic observations? Why couldn't he express to a single person—to himself—that even if he understood that divorce was the right thing to do, even if he was hopeful about the future, even if there was happiness ahead, it was sad? Things can be for the best and the worst at the same time.

Three days after returning to Israel, Tamir e-mailed Jacob from an outpost in the Negev, where his tank unit was awaiting its next order: “Today I fired a gun, and my son fired a gun. I never doubted the rightness of my firing a weapon to defend my home, or of Noam doing so. But the fact of us both doing it on the same day cannot be right. Can you understand that?”

“You drive the tank?” Jacob asked.

“Did you read what I wrote?”

“I'm sorry. I don't know what to say.”

“I reload the ammunition.”

Five days later, as they turned to the bookshelves to say Kaddish, Irv said, “So listen,” and Jacob knew something had happened. And more, he knew it was Noam. He hadn't seen it coming, but like someone watching the tracks from the back of a train, he saw that it couldn't have been any other way.

Noam had been injured. Critically, but not fatally. Rivka was with him. Tamir was on his way.

“How did you find out?” Jacob asked.

“Tamir called me last night.”

“Did he ask you to tell me?”

“I think I'm a kind of father figure to him.”

Jacob's first instinct was to suggest they go to Israel. He wouldn't get on the plane to fight beside his cousin, but he would go to sit at his cousin's son's bedside and offer the kind of strength that involves only heart muscle.

Tamir's first instinct was to cling to Rivka. If someone had told him, a month or year or decade earlier, that Noam would be wounded in a war, he would have predicted the end of his marriage. And yet when the unimaginable happened, it was just the opposite of what he'd imagined.

When the house shook with the middle-of-the-night knocking against the door, Tamir was at a forward operating base near Dimona; his commander woke him with the news. Later, he and Rivka would try to pinpoint the exact moment that each learned of what happened, as if something profound depended on who knew first, and what the amount of time was that one parent knew and the other still believed Noam to be OK. For those first five or thirty minutes, there would have existed a greater distance between them than the one that separated them before they met. Perhaps if Tamir had been home, the shared experience would have driven them apart, into competitive suffering, misplaced fury, blame. But the apartness drew them together.

How many times, in those first weeks, did he enter the room and stand by the door, unable to speak? How many times did she ask, “Do you need anything?”

And he would say, “No.”

And she would say, “Are you sure?”

And he would say, “Yes,” but think,
Ask again
.

And she would say, “I know,” but think,
Come to me
.

And he would say, “Ask again.”

And she would say, “Come to me.”

And saying nothing, he would.

There they would be, side by side, her hand on his thigh, his head resting on her chest. If they had been teenagers, it would have looked like the beginning of love, but they'd been married for twenty years, and it was the exhumation of love.

After being informed of Noam's injury, Tamir was given a week's leave. He was with Rivka at the hospital three hours later, and when darkness
fell, they were told they had to go home. Rivka instinctively went to sleep in the guest room. In the middle of the night, Tamir entered and stood by the door.

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

And he said, “No.”

And she said, “Are you sure?”

And he said, “Yes.”

And she said, “I know.”

And he said, “Ask again.”

And she said, “Come to me,” and saying nothing, he went to her.

He needed the distance to traverse. So she gave it to him. Every night she would go to the guest room. Every night he would come to her.

When Tamir sat with his son's body, he thought of what Jacob had told him about sitting with Isaac's body, Max's desire to be close to it. Noam's face was misshapen, shades of a purple that appeared nowhere in nature, his cheeks and brow forced together by the swelling. Why isn't health as shocking as illness, as demanding of prayer? Tamir had been capable of going weeks without speaking to his son, but he wouldn't willingly leave his son's unconscious body.

Noam emerged from his coma the day before the cease-fire. It would take time to learn the extent of his injuries: the ways his body would never function as it once did, the psychological damage. He hadn't been buried alive or burned to death. But he had been broken.

When the cease-fire was signed, there was no celebrating in the streets. There were no fireworks, or passed bottles, or singing from windows. Rivka slept in the bedroom that night. The loving distance they'd found in crisis had closed with peace. Across the country and the world, Jews were already writing editorials blaming other Jews—for lack of preparedness, of wisdom, of ethics, of sufficient force, of help. The prime minister's coalition collapsed and elections were scheduled. Unable to sleep, Tamir took his phone from the bedside table and wrote a one-sentence text to Jacob:
We've won, but we've lost
.

It was nine in the evening in D.C. Jacob was in the Airbnb one-bedroom that he had been renting by the week, three blocks from his sleeping children. He went after putting the kids down and returned before they awoke. They knew he didn't spend the night at home, and he knew they knew it, but the charade felt necessary. Nothing would be harder for Jacob than this period between houses, which lasted half a
year. Everything that was necessary was punishing: the pretending, the extreme early rising, the aloneness.

Jacob's thumb was constantly pushing his list of contacts, as if some new person might materialize with whom he could share the sadness he couldn't confess. He wanted to reach out to Tamir, but it was impossible: not after Islip, not after Noam's injury. So when the text from Tamir came through—
We've won, but we've lost
—Jacob was relieved and grateful, but careful about expanding his shame by revealing it.

Won what? Lost what?

Won the war. Lost peace.

But it sounds like everyone is accepting

the conditions of the armistice?

Peace with ourselves.

How is Noam?

He will be OK.

I'm so relieved to hear that.

When we were at your kitchen table,

stoned, you told me something

about a daytime hole in a nighttime sky.

What was that?

The dinosaur thing?

Yes, that.

So it was actually a nighttime hole in a daytime sky.

And how?

Imagine shooting a bullet through water.

That's all you had to say. Now I remember.

What made you think of it?

I can't sleep. So instead I think.

I haven't been sleeping too much, either.

For people who talk about being tired

as much as we do, we don't do a lot of sleeping.

We're not going to move.

I didn't think you were.

We were.

Rivka was coming around.

But not anymore.

What changed?

Everything. Nothing.

Right.

We are who we are.

Admitting that is what changed.

I'm working on that myself.

What if it had been night?

When?

When the asteroid came.

Then they would

have become extinct at night.

But what would they have seen?

A nighttime hole in a nighttime sky?

And what do you think that would look like?

Maybe like nothing?

Over the next few years, they would exchange brief texts and e-mails, all matter-of-fact updates, mostly about the kids, never with any tone or tangents. Tamir didn't come for Max's bar mitzvah, or Benjy's, or Julia's wedding (despite her kind invitation, and Jacob's appeal), or either Deborah's or Irv's funeral.

After the kids' first visit to his new house—the first and worst day of the rest of his life—Jacob closed the door, lay with Argus for half an hour, telling him what a good dog he was, the best dog, then sat with a cup of coffee that gave its heat to the room as he wrote a long, never-to-be-sent e-mail to Tamir, then stood up, keys in hand, finally ready to go to the veterinarian. The e-mail began: “We've lost, but we've lost.”

Some of the losing was giving away. Some was having things taken. Jacob was often surprised by what he found himself clutching, and what he freely released—what he felt was his, what he felt he needed.

What about that copy of
Disgrace
?
He'd
bought it—he remembered finding it at the used bookstore in Great Barrington one summer; he even remembered the beautiful set of Tennessee Williams plays he didn't buy because Julia was there, and he didn't want to be forced to confront his desire to own books he had no intention of reading.

Julia had taken
Disgrace
from his bedside table, on the grounds of it having sat there untouched for more than a year.
(Untouched
was her word.
Unread
would have been his.) Did his having bought it entitle him to it? Did her having read—touched—it? Did her having touched and read it forfeit her claim to it, as it was now his to touch and read? Such thoughts felt disgraceful. The only way to be spared them was to give away everything, but only a more enlightened or stupid person would rub his palms together and think,
They're only things
.

What about the blue vase on the mantel? Her parents had given it to him as a gift. Not to
them
, but to
him
. It was a birthday present. Or Father's Day. He could remember, at least, that it was a gift placed in
his
hands, with an attached card addressed to
him
, that it had been carefully chosen for
him
, because they prided themselves on knowing him, which, to their credit, they did.

Was it somehow ungenerous to assume ownership of something paid for by her parents, which, while undeniably given to
him
, was clearly intended for their shared home? And beautiful as the vase was, did he want that psychic energy in his sanctuary and symbol of new beginnings? Would it really give his flowers the best chance of blooming?

Most things he could let go of:

He loved the Big Red Chair, curled into whose corduroy he'd done virtually all his reading in the last dozen years. Hadn't it absorbed something? Taken on qualities beyond chairness? Was the sweat stain on the back the only remnant of all that experience? What was trapped in the wide wales?
Let it go
, he thought.

The silverware. It had brought food to his mouth, to his children's mouths. The most fundamental of all human activities, that which we can't live without. He had washed them in the sink before positioning them in the dishwasher. He had unbent the spoons after Sam's clumsy psychokinesis; used knives to pry off the lids of paint cans and scrape hardened who-knows-what from the sink; guided forks down the back of his shirt to scratch an out-of-reach itch.
Let them go. Let it all go until it's all gone
.

The photo albums. He'd have liked some of those. But they shouldn't be separated any more than the volumes of the
Grove Encyclopedia of Art
. And there was no way around the fact that Julia had taken almost all the pictures: observe her absence among them. Was her absence her claim to ownership?

The growth chart, inscribed on the kitchen doorframe. On New Year's and Jewish New Year's, Jacob would make a production of calling everyone to be measured. They stood facing out, backs flat as surfboards, never on tiptoes but always willing tallness. Jacob pressed a black Sharpie flush with the tops of their heads and drew a two-inch line. Then the initials and date. The first measurement was SB 01/01/05. The last was BB 01/01/16. Between them, a couple dozen lines. What did it look like? A tiny ladder for tiny angels to ascend and descend? The frets on the instrument playing the sound of life passing?

He would have been happy enough to take nothing and simply start again at the beginning.
They're only things
. But that wouldn't be fair. More, it would be unfair. Very quickly, the fairness and unfairness took on
more importance than the things themselves. That feeling of aggrievement reached its peak when they started talking about amounts of money that simply didn't matter. One spring afternoon, cherry blossoms stuck to the window, Dr. Silvers told him, “Whatever the conditions of your life, you're never going to be happy if you use the word
unfair
as often as you do.” So he tried to let it all go—the things, and the ideas he imbued them with. He would begin again.

The first purchases for the new house were beds for the kids. Because Benjy's room was on the small side, he needed a bed with storage drawers. Perhaps those were actually hard to find, or perhaps Jacob made the task hard. He spent three full days researching online and visiting stores, and ended up with something quite nice (from the offensively misnamed Design Within Reach), made of solid oak, which cost more than three thousand dollars.
Plus
tax,
plus
delivery.