The Angel of Losses (22 page)

And my veins prickling, the intricate weaving of my capillaries.

And my breath blooming like a flower, constricting like a pupil trained at the sun.

And my bones locking, hard and white as the moon.

And my nerves humming, a thousand compass needles spinning.

And my being circling, like the rings of a tree, from my core to the limits of my body, and then beyond my sense of—

THE KNIFE CLATTERED AGAINST THE FLOOR. THE EDGE SHONE
dark with blood, and there were three drops of blood on the tile, perfectly round and a thousand feet deep, wells that trapped the scribes of history and the rumbling of eternal trains.

“What is going to happen to me?” I asked.

I didn’t want to be like Solomon—circling like a prehistoric shark through the dreams of a hundred lifetimes, his destination vague but insistent, his heart stowed away in a tarnished box. I didn’t want to be like my grandfather, not how he was at the end, bitter and mean and alone.

I didn’t want to be angry anymore.

“Eli wouldn’t be told what to do, and I doubt you will either, even if your instructor is an angel.” His coat sleeve was black with blood, dripped onto the floor in a rhythmic tapping.

The old man held up one finger in warning. “But don’t get cocky.” I sighed, and he reached out and held my hand. “You’re a good sister,” he said, comforting me as his tremors reverberated in my skin. “You’ll give your sister her family back. You have a strong will. Just don’t forget who you are. Whatever you lose, whatever you must let fall away from you.” He tapped his temple. “Keep that.”

I watched him walk carefully back across the living room, his steps uneven, a brand-new limp. The shadows swallowed him as he opened the front door.

“Holly won’t even know,” I called after him.

He stopped. His shoulders moved with his breath. Slow. Deep. “No,” he said. “But you will. Isn’t that enough?” And then the old man called forth the strength for another step, and then another, and he was gone.

THE CLOSED CEMETERY WAS UNLIT. I HAD BROUGHT A FLASH LIGHT, BUT
I was reluctant to use it. What if there were guards, night watchmen? Was this trespassing? How could I explain myself? If I was caught here, in the middle of this story, before I could bring it full circle, I would be lost. I wouldn’t be able to pick up the thread again. I cupped one hand over the lens of the flashlight and thumbed the switch, sending the light through my fingers, highlighting streaks of green grass and white stones, fragments of engraving flashing black, as I tried to orient myself.

I listened for the penitent’s lament. “Arise,” I said under my breath, and something did—a wordless sobbing over the hill, and I followed it to my grandfather’s grave, which was strewn with charms and papers and an open book, brown pages flapping in the breeze. And there, amidst it all, was Nathan. My brother-in-law crouched, hunched over, his forehead in the grass. He rose from the ground, his face streaked with tears and dirt and, yes, blood, his beard glistening and his jacket open, his shirt torn, multiple necklaces hanging against his chest, his sleeves pushed above his elbows, a knife in hand. I recognized it. It was the blade that had sawed and smoothed a thousand leather boxes for a thousand miniature scrolls.

“I tried everything. Poultices. Amulets. Prayers. Eli has a secret name—even that didn’t protect him. I have no choice,” Nathan said. “You know who the man in the stories is. You know what he can do,” he said, accusing, his voice ragged.

I said nothing. The blade had absorbed my voice.

His left forearm was slashed with angry red lines that didn’t quite coalesce into a flame or a spiral or a hand. Blood flowed from his elbow to his wrist, from his palm to the knife, from the metal to the earth. “I can’t write it,” he confessed, his voice hoarse. “I see it on the page. I see where the lines should go. Here.” He dipped the knifepoint toward his arm, and I flinched. Could he sever an artery, bleed to death before me? “To here.” He moved it through the air. “But when I do it. It’s wrong.”

“Only one person can know it,” I said.

The lens through which I had once seen the world had slipped, and what I saw now was at once extraordinarily old and entirely new, lines sharper and distances longer, colors brighter and shadows layered. I had to learn to focus again. I was standing in the bitter night, in a graveyard, alone but for a sad man huddled on the earth, his eyes like two small moons, his hands bloody, his shoulders trembling.

He looked at me with the despair of a lifetime, beyond what his brief years should have brought him. “You’re Akiba,” he said. “I’m Ben Zoma.”

The night air slid between my clothes and my body. I felt whole; more than whole, as if anything I wanted, I could take.

“I’m not Akiba. I’m just Marjorie. And you’re not insane. Not yet.”

Nathan let me button his coat. He looked at the wounds on his arm. “They’ll think I tried to kill myself.” I had concocted many theories about Nathan over the years, but the truth was simple. If it weren’t for Holly, and now Eli, Nathan’s life would be a desert of loneliness. He didn’t want to own her. He didn’t want to change her. He just wanted to be with her.

“You won’t tell anyone about tonight,” I instructed him. “And neither will I.”

WE STOOD IN SILENCE AT THE LAUNDRY ROOM SINK WHILE I
tested the water temperature. Nathan pressed his bleeding arm against his chest, his opposite hand white-knuckled around the wound, rocking slightly back and forth as if he were praying. Maybe he was. His eyes were open, unblinking, blind.

“Hold it up,” I said. His eyes darted back and forth at the sound of my voice. “Hold it up,” I repeated, louder, raising my hand above my head. He mimicked me, showing an arm coated in blood down to the fingernails.

“The water’s okay now,” I said. He held his forearm under the faucet until the incisions became visible, clean and narrow but deep. Blood continued to seep from the wounds, steadily but not pulsing, and while I blotted the cuts with a clean towel, I scoured my mind for first-aid rules, television trauma scenes, anatomy lessons from the college biology course I had taken to fulfill a requirement. I wound gauze around his arm from the elbow to the wrist, tight and thick. It was the first time we had ever touched.

He was right—the emergency room doctors would immediately peg him as an attempted suicide. Holds, sedatives, endless interrogations. And the explanations he would give. He would never think to lie, and even Holly wouldn’t believe him.

I led Nathan into the living room, threw an old towel over the couch, and directed him to sit. “I’m going to get you clean clothes,” I said. He sat on the edge of the sofa, his gauze-sleeved arm held in front of him in an almost commanding gesture, but his eyes remained distant. “Hold it up,” I reminded him, and he lifted it slightly higher. The surface layer of the bandage was spotless. The bleeding had stopped, or at least slowed.

I rummaged through their dresser and tossed aside Holly’s clothes—rows of navy and black tights rolled into balls, skirts that unfolded to fall all the way to the ground, high-necked sweaters, nightgowns with long sleeves; the bottom drawer was stuffed with pink and purple tank tops, jeans with fashionable slashes in the thighs. Their closet contained cheap blazers and threadbare dress shirts, Nathan’s clothes, meant for synagogues and study halls. Holly’s lavender bathrobe was heaped in the corner, and beneath it, those red and black high heels, fifty dollars, creased from wear but still shining.

She hadn’t thrown any of it away.

I draped Holly’s bathrobe over Nathan’s shoulders. The gauze was still clean. I reached around to my back, and the ache where the White Rebbe had cut me sharpened into pain. My shirt was sticking to the tattoo, but it was dry, at least. My mortal blood hardening into something indelible.

I found the last sleeping pill. I had been so desperate for them but had taken none. I held the tablet, the size of a pencil eraser and the color of a tooth, up to the light. It did seem a little risky, mixing medication with blood loss, but he needed to rest, if only to put some distance between himself and the last week.

“Hold out your hand.” He did, and I dropped the pill into his palm.

He swallowed it without hesitation and lay down on his side, still obediently raising his bandaged arm perpendicular to his body. He was following my orders. His shivering slowed, and his lids shut, though I could see his eyes moving under them.

I sank into the armchair. My body ached—from cold, exhaustion, tension, the new wound in my back, maybe, though that pain was beginning to subside again. What came next? I could call my family, tell them I had found him, and that he was okay. But he wasn’t okay. He needed time to regain his composure. There would be questions I didn’t know how to answer, and there was still baby Eli, his diagnosis lingering in the unknown. No. It wasn’t over yet.

WHILE NATHAN SLEPT, I CLEANED. I STRAIGHTENED THE LIVING
room. I scraped candle wax off the tables and got down on my belly to hunt loose scraps of paper, printed with words I couldn’t read. I went downstairs and gathered Nathan’s failed drawings of the letter. I went upstairs, collecting more of the fevered sketches from the nursery, more supplications and protections and commands pinned to the walls and tucked under the mattress. I found more slips of paper in the drawers beneath the changing table, between the undershirts and tiny socks, and once I was sure I had found them all, I went into the backyard. The first time the White Rebbe spoke to me, he told me not to throw away old books but to bury them, and Nathan’s writings deserved the same respect. I knelt and dug through the loose earth with my hands, scooping dirt away, the hole growing deeper and deeper until I could reach down nearly to my shoulder.

Books. I lifted one out of its grave. The warped cover was stained with soil, but the dirt slid off the gilded page edges. I opened to the first page, careful to keep the aged spine from breaking loose.

It was
my
book—the novel with the Wandering Jew and his ghost—but it wasn’t my copy. I flipped through the pages, sturdy despite their age and recent interment, and found an annotation, text lined with ink faded to lavender.

It is surprising that in all the Chronicles of past times, this remarkable Personage is never once mentioned. Fain would I recount to you his life; but unluckily, till after his death He was never known to have existed.

And there, on the flyleaf, my grandfather’s handwriting. I held the book to my face, blowing off the clinging dirt, afraid touching it would press the particles into the fiber and seal the words away from me.

The White Rebbe fled into the night.

Grandpa had read it after all, during those last years when the White Rebbe stories returned to him, the words so difficult to contain that he scrawled them in the margins of novels. Maybe I had seen this on his shelf years ago, and the title had stuck in my subconscious. Maybe I had told him about the novel in my dreams, and he had found a copy in the infinite library where he spent his death.

I wondered what he thought of it.

A car pulled into the driveway; doors opened and closed. It must be Holly. Eli was coming home tomorrow—no, today. It was morning. I had lost track of time. I laid the novel back into the pit, burying it, I hoped, for the final time.

I HAD EXPECTED AN ENTOURAGE, BUT IT WAS JUST MY PARENTS,
Holly, and Eli. I supposed Nathan’s family had been chastened by his disappearance, my mother’s assume of command at the hospital, my own harsh words to Yael. Nathan was back, though, and there would be time to fix all that. When I came inside, he was sitting on the couch, kneading his hands. He looked up at me and nodded once, then wordlessly followed Holly upstairs, still in a daze. I went upstairs to scrub the dirt from under my fingernails and maybe borrow something to wear—my clothes were caked with dirt, a lot easier to explain than the bloodstains hidden beneath. Holly and Nathan were sitting on the edge of their bed, space enough for another person between them, looking at the ground and speaking quietly.

For now, I was glad just to have the six of us, alone at the house. Eli slept in his carrier on the kitchen table, while my mother made something to eat, finally having learned the reordered cabinets, which dishes to use, which to leave alone.

“Marjorie, tell me the truth,” Mom said, trying again. “Where was he?”

Eli’s eyes fluttered open and closed. I put my hand lightly on his chest, and he sighed, his whole body relaxing under my palm.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“He must have told you
something
. When you left I was afraid you would kill him. Now you’re telling me to forgive him.”

“No, I’m not. I just think you should give Holly a chance to forgive him,” I said.

My mother laid down her spoon. “I don’t even know why I’m doing this. No one wants to eat.”

“Yeah, but we need to eat.”

“What are they doing up there?” she asked.

“Talking. You can take it up to them.”

She paused and then filled a bowl with tuna salad. “I know this sounds crazy, but it’s nice to have the house to ourselves for a little while.” She paused. “Do you want to invite Simon for dinner?”

“I could,” I said. I had promised I would call, and I missed him. “But I thought you wanted the house to ourselves.”

She shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “Go take them lunch.”

Eli kicked again, the light-blue cuffs of his pajamas riding up his little calves, pale and traced with blurry capillaries.

“Oh,” my mom called from the stairs. “When you call him, use your cell. They’re supposed to call today with the new test results.” She disappeared onto the second floor, and Eli and I were alone.

I held the baby’s leg in my hand, and he kicked the other one, annoyed. I pulled off one of his socks. His toes, smaller than peas, stretched away from one another, and he made a fussing sound. “Shh,” I soothed, laying my hand on his chest again. I looked at the bottom of his foot, the tiny rosy palette.

Nathan’s protection ritual—the one I had interrupted the night before the circumcision—had been carefully structured. Adorning the living room with amulets, rising at midnight, the hour that the holy penitents wander and the Messiah rises to worship beyond the River of Stones.

I had no mystical program, no code, no language for this.