Splendor (6 page)

“This is a really nice mare you’ve got here,” she said. “What will you do with her and the foal when you go to college next fall?”

“They’ll stay here. But I’ll have to go somewhere I can take them with me my sophomore year.”

Dr. Rhonda whistled. “That’s a pretty tall order. Limits your choices a bit, huh?”

I shrugged.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. That’s a lot of money, though, to transport two horses off the island and to who knows where.”

Suddenly I was tempted to grab the good doctor’s bolero and cinch it tightly around her neck. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Sure you will.” Dr. Rhonda gave me what felt like an evaluating look. “You seem like a girl with her head on pretty straight, Scarlett. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

Later, after she was gone and Delilah was pulling up chunks of fresh grass in the back field, I sat on the fence and looked again at the ultrasound pictures.

The photos didn’t look that different from the ones I’d seen of a human fetus: the spine and head were curved in the same C shape, there were four limbs and the beginnings of a face.

Looking at the pictures, I started to get the strangest tingle of déjà vu…as if I’d been here before, as if I’d seen inside a pregnancy.

Then like a wave, the dreams I’d been having crashed into me. The strength of them was so visceral that I almost toppled from my perch on the fence. I grabbed the rail to balance myself, the streamer of pictures floating to the grass.

I remembered someone floating, turning, breathing water in and out. I remembered the rhythmic, soothing sound of a heartbeat.

Had I dreamt it? It seemed too much like a memory to be just a dream. Another wave of sensations flooded my mind. A pressure, a squeezing, as if my own body was being compressed.

As if I was being birthed.

And then I was myself again, sitting on a splintery wooden rail, and my pictures were blowing away. I hopped down and retrieved the photos of Delilah’s baby.

When I got back home, where I’d left my cell phone, I found two messages waiting for me. One from my mother, the other from Will.

My mother’s was first.

“Hi, Scarlett. Just wanted you to know that I made it to the mall this morning and I picked up the cutest bedding for your room here! I sure hope you can come visit soon. I know you’re busy, of course…but I’d love to show you around, and maybe pick up some back-to-school clothes for you. Anyway, call your old mom when you get a chance, okay? Love you.”

I hit 7 to erase the message.

Then Will.

“I bet you’re at the stable. Today’s the day, huh? The visit from the vet? Give me a call, let me know about the…what do you call it? Yearling? No, that can’t be right; it would have to be a year old. Colt? Foal? Whatever. Anyway, I hope everything is good. I sure do miss you, Scarlett.”

There was a long silence before he hung up, as if he didn’t have anything else to say but was unwilling to disconnect, anyway.

I hit 9 to save.

I found my father out by the koi pond. He was staring down into the water, scratching his head.

“Hi, Dad.”

He blinked up at me, smiling vaguely. “Hey there, hon.”

“How are the fish?”

“You know, it’s the darnedest thing.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.… We seem to be missing a few of them.”

“Well, they couldn’t have walked away.” I peered into the shadow-deep water. I counted three fish, their long, slippery orange-and-white bodies lazing through the pond. “Didn’t we have five?”

“I thought we had six. So we’re down two, then, not three.”

“What happened to them, do you think?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? A hawk, maybe, or an overzealous neighborhood cat. I would have thought they were too big to be picked off so easily, but I guess I was wrong.”

It took me a minute to define the emotion I was feeling. Not frustration or annoyance, but something stronger. Anger. I felt it welling up in my chest. I wasn’t angry at the hawks or the opportunistic house cats, I was angry at my
father,
of all people. He just looked so damned
complacent
! “Jeez, Dad, aren’t you even
upset
about this? I mean those were
your fish
!”

He laughed and rumpled my hair. “Easy, Scarlett! They’re just fish. No use fighting Mother Nature. Say, how about a pizza for dinner?”

I swallowed back the words I wanted to say. I wanted to shake him. Didn’t he have any
fight
in him? Any desire to hold tight to what he had, even if it was only a few stupid fish?

I couldn’t help wondering whether Mom would have stayed if Dad had been willing to fight for her. Had he watched her with that same bewildered smile on his face as she boarded the ferry and moved on to a different life, one in which she was buying me new, color-coordinated sheets and pillows?

Would he put up a fight if I decided to follow her to the mainland? Or would he just scratch his head and wave goodbye?

Was anything worth fighting for? Or would Mother Nature win out every time?

I sighed.

“Yeah, Dad, pizza. That sounds good.”

W
ithout Will, his house should have felt like an empty shell. That was what I’d prepared myself for, in the days leading up to my dinner with Martin. When I pulled the Volvo up in front of the little brown-shingled cottage, I sat for a few minutes before I walked up to the front door, dreading going inside.

I wasn’t expecting it to feel
good
in there. I knocked, and Martin called, “Come in, Scarlett!”

I pushed open the door slowly, uncertainly, waiting for the wave of Will’s absence to slam into me. But it didn’t come. Instead I felt a release, a relaxing of muscles I hadn’t meant to tense. The leather couch and chair, softened by years of use, beckoned me to sit. Stacks of books, many folded open, covered almost every available surface. A low fire burned in the hearth, even though the late-September air held barely a chill.

I crossed through the living room and headed into the kitchen. Martin was standing by the back door, watching the sky fill with orange and pink light as the day ended.

We were quiet together, but it wasn’t awkward to see Martin without Will present. I could tell he’d been neglecting himself a little; his beard and hair were longer than usual, more unkempt. His eyes looked tired, like he’d been working a lot.

As the sky’s colors dimmed into dark, Martin turned to me. “Scarlett,” he said, “so good to see you.”

We hugged briefly.
“L’shanah tovah,”
he said.

I must have looked confused, because he laughed.

“Tonight’s sunset marks the end of Yom Kippur,” he explained. “I’ll tell you more over dinner. So let’s get cooking.”

It wasn’t like Martin not to have dinner already bubbling on the stove, but I didn’t say anything as he pulled a red iron pot from the refrigerator and set it on a burner, lighting the flame beneath it.

“There’s a loaf of bread in the basket,” Martin said, gesturing to the counter. “Why don’t you slice it while I warm the stew.”

I found a cutting board and a knife and unwrapped the bread. It was seasoned with rosemary and smelled wonderful as I cut into it.

As the stew heated and I sliced the bread, Martin asked me about school and my mare. What class was I most enjoying? Anatomy. How was Delilah? Right as rain. Neither of us seemed anxious to mention Will, and I suspected it was because we both missed him painfully.

When we were seated at the table, a bowl of steaming stew in front of each of us, and the bread between us, Martin spoke the words of blessing over the food, words I had come to know over the past year as I visited the Cohen household. “So what did those words you said earlier mean?”

“Ah,” said Martin, “Yom Kippur.”

I nodded. I knew Yom Kippur was the name of a Jewish holiday, but I didn’t know any more than that. Embarrassed by my ignorance, I ate a spoonful of the stew. Hot, peppery, delicious.

“Yom Kippur,” Martin said, slipping into his “teacher” voice (after all, he had been a professor of religious studies at Yale before he moved with Will to the island), “is arguably the most serious of Jewish holidays. It occurs in the fall right after Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year. It’s not a celebratory day. It’s also called the Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur gives us an opportunity to repent and speak our guilt. To seek forgiveness for wrongs we may have done—against God, against our fellow men.”

“I can’t imagine
you
have much to apologize for,” I said.

“Certainly not for this stew,” Martin said, slurping a little as he ate. “It’s definitely tasty. Pass the bread, will you, Scarlett?”

I did, smiling a little. Neither of the Cohen men was above complimenting his own cooking.

“During Yom Kippur,” Martin continued, “we fast for a day and a night, and we pray. We abstain from work, from food and drink, from bathing, from wearing shoes made of leather”—he winked at me and waved his feet, clad only in dark brown socks—“and from sex. After sundown the following day—today—we eat a simple meal prepared ahead of time.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thus the stew.”

“Thus the stew. And our tradition tells us that through prayer, through our requests for absolution, we will be absolved of our sins. We can start the New Year with a clean slate, so to speak.”

“And those words you said before?”

“
L’shanah tovah
. When we wish someone a happy new year, we are wishing that he or she be inscribed in the Book of Life and sealed for a new year.”

“The Book of Life?”

“It’s a list kept by God, of all the people whom he considers righteous.” Martin smiled. “Not unlike Santa’s nice list.”

“Is there a naughty list, too?” I asked, joking.

“Most certainly there is,” said Martin. “The Book of the Dead.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He sipped from his wineglass.

“Huh.” I took a drink too, a long sip of water. Then I posed a question, one I had asked before at this same table: “Do you really believe in all that?”

Martin laughed, remembering, I’m sure, our first theological discussion. “Metaphorically, most definitely. Literally…I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “Moreover, I’m not even sure it
matters
what I believe. What matters, I think, is what I
do.
And what I
know.
”

“So what do you know?”

He pushed his bowl, now empty, slightly away. “I know Will has been back in New Haven for three weeks now. I know that—so far—he has been safe. But I also know that this will not last forever.”

I didn’t say anything. Of course I had been thinking these same thoughts—how much time could go by in a big city like New Haven before Will felt the pull of a violent act about to be perpetrated? A few weeks? Or months? Inevitably, something would happen, and Will wasn’t the kind of person—wasn’t capable of
being
the kind of person—who just ignored it. When he felt the pull, he would answer it. And wasn’t it only a matter of time before it pulled him into a dangerous situation he couldn’t handle, just as it had his mother?

“You don’t
know
that he won’t be safe,” I said. “You just
assume
it’s true. You fear it. But you can’t
know
that it will happen that way.”

Martin didn’t argue with me, most likely because he knew that really I was arguing with my own fears. Instead he said, “Let’s have more stew. What do you say?”

Later, while Martin prepared tea, I stoked the fire and added another log. It took a minute to catch, but then it did, and the flames warmed my face and hands. I had grown cold without noticing.

We sat on either side of the fireplace and Martin added cream and sugar to both the cups before handing one to me. Sipping our tea, we gazed into the fire, each lost in our own thoughts.

After a bit, Martin said, “I leave for New Haven this coming week, Scarlett. I want to ask you for a favor.”

“Anything,” I said.

He reached up to the mantel and retrieved a key. “This is for the house. If you can arrange it, perhaps you could check in on the place every week or two?”

I took the key. “Sure,” I said. “Anything in particular you need me to do?”

“No,” said Martin, “but we—Will and I—would be glad if you found this place to be something of a retreat. A place to come when you need a space of your own.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“You mean I could come inside, maybe make myself a pot of tea…and hang out?”

“Absolutely,” said Martin. “And avail yourself of any books that strike your fancy. We have quite a collection, as you’ve noticed, more than I can possibly drag all the way back east with me each fall.”

“So you’ll be back in the summer? Both of you?”

Martin smiled. “I don’t think Will would have it any other way.”

I felt warmer now, with the key tucked in my pocket. The thought of coming here, whenever I wanted to, of being in Will’s space, was certainly better than nothing.

“Thanks, Martin. I’ll take good care of things.”

“I’m sure of it.”

We sat in companionable silence. There was a plate of cookies nearby and Martin thoughtfully munched on one, and then another, and then a third.

“You know,” he said, “fasting always reminds me what a pleasure it is to eat. It’s a sacred act, I think—the taking in of sustenance, the transformation of food into energy.”

I’d had my own struggles with food; eating hadn’t always felt like such a great thing last year. Not after Ronny died. In fact, refusing to eat had been a way of punishing myself. A way that I withheld pleasure from my body. But I knew what Martin meant. Paying attention to how the food I ate was nourishing and strengthening my body gave meaning to the ritual of eating.

“Often people think of the body as something ‘other than’ themselves,” Martin continued. “As if it’s not essential to the person.”

“Right,” I said. “Isn’t the real person the soul? And the body just the vessel?”

“That’s a nice thing to think, especially when the bodies of those we love are no longer living. But it’s not something we
know.
It is something all of us
hope,
to greater or lesser degrees. What we
know
is that we each have a body. What we may or may not believe is whether or not we
are
those bodies.”

I sipped my tea, mindful of its sweetness and warmth, the way it seemed to spread through my chest and down to my stomach as I swallowed.

“Judaism says much about the body, contradicting itself in many ways,” Martin said. “The body is a temple. It is a prison. It is sacred. It is profane. It is God’s form. It is dust.”

“So which is it?”

“Maybe all of them. Maybe none.” He took another cookie and bit into it. Then he handed one to me.

It was crispy, lacy. Cinnamon and something else.

“Did you make these?”

Martin nodded.

“What’s in them? I can’t place it. Is it…ginger?”

“Cardamom.”

I finished the cookie. Then I remembered the book I’d brought and stood up. “I almost forgot to return this,” I said, digging into my bag by the door to retrieve it. “Here,” I said, passing it to Martin. “Thank you for lending it to me.”

He gazed at the golden words on the book’s blue cover.
A Guide to the Sefirot.
Martin had loaned me the book the year before, when I had asked him for guidance in dealing with my grief over Ronny and my inability to properly care for myself.

“Ah,” Martin said, “one of my favorites. Did you read it all the way through?”

I had. Each of its chapters dealt with one of the ten Sefirot, or manifestations of God. “I read it all,” I said, “but I probably understood only about a third of it.”

He chuckled. “Then you probably got more out of it than most first-time readers. I’ll tell you what—I’ll leave it here, at the house. That way you can revisit it if the urge strikes you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I do want to learn more.”

“Do you? What about?”

“All of it—the Sefirot, Kabbalah, Will’s abilities—everything.”

Martin nodded. “Then there’s someone you should meet.”

“Where—here?” It seemed impossible that anyone on the island could have anything more to teach me than Martin.

“No. But nearby. In Los Angeles. Her name is Sabine Rabinovich. I think you could learn a lot from her.”

“Like what?”

“My own knowledge is limited by my skepticism. Though I wish to believe things—even when I see with my own eyes how my son embodies the truly miraculous—I am full of doubt. Doubt and incredulity. Not so Sabine. Her energy is different than mine. She doesn’t allow herself to be held back—not in any way. You’ll see for yourself when you visit her. She and her family are not exactly traditional Jews. They have their own way of doing things.”

Martin didn’t seem to question whether I would go to the mainland to see this friend of his. And, with annoyance, I realized that once on the mainland I’d have no good reason not to visit my mother, as well.

“Sabine studies Kabbalah?”

“She breathes it,” said Martin. “For me, study is a matter of books and charts and mental exercises. My route to understanding is what is called theosophical Kabbalah. Though I’ve delved into the more esoteric Kabbalah in my attempt to better understand Will, I have found the most personal satisfaction in the language of the Sefirot, most particularly in the Zohar.”