This year is different because he has a new sister who is coming with them. He has never met her. She is fifteen. He told Alexi this and Alexi didn’t believe him. They are picking her up not at her home, which would take them too far out of the way, but in a city near her home, called Albany, which is a fine name, smooth and pale; he imagines tall towers, white as soap, rising steeply from a hillside. The sister’s name is Jessica and she will sleep (he has asked) in her sleeping bag on the couch in the cabin’s main room.
“What time is it?” asks Paul.
“Ten twenty-eight,” says his mother.
“What time did we leave?”
“Around nine.”
He figures it out, drawing an invisible clock on the window. “So we’ll be there in thirty-two minutes?” He’d been told the ride from their house to the Albany train station was two hours. Then another three to Cabruda Lake.
“I don’t know. Something like that, if we don’t hit traffic. I don’t know if we left exactly at nine.”
“Is Biscuit still sleeping?” asks his father.
His mother looks over her shoulder. “Biscuit is.”
Biscuit is fat. She is strapped into her car seat, which is stained with cranberry juice and gritty with graham cracker crumbs. Her face is pink and her wispy hair is curling and damp at the temples, even though she is wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a diaper.Thin red crescents made by her pacifier mark her cheeks, but when his mother tries to slip the pacifier out, Biscuit, without waking, begins sucking on it hard. “Paul, honey, are you hot back there?”
Paul shakes his head, forgetting she cannot see him.
“Paul?”
“I said no.”
“You didn’t say anything,” says his father, rubbing his fingers down the side of his beard as Paul has seen him do hundreds of times. “You have to answer when someone talks to you.”
“I did,” says Paul, but in a voice too low for anyone to hear.
Biscuit has stopped sucking again, her mouth gone slack. They drive another mile. Paul pinches the ring on the pacifier. He holds perfectly still while the trees rush by the window; then, quick as lightning, he plucks it out. At first Biscuit does nothing. Then she smacks her lips. She makes a sound like a creaky gate and scrunches up her face. Here it comes. He can feel the pressure mounting like excitement in his own chest. She kicks out with both legs and, even before she has completely awoken, begins to cry.
“What’s the matter, little one?” says their mother, her voice all of a sudden musical, pastel, all pinks and blues, a voice she uses often for Biscuit, never for Paul or for his father. Paul studies the back of his father’s head, the slice of profile he can see from where he sits. He is frowning, concentrating, both hands on the wheel.
“Were you sleeping?”
“Pie-oo.” Biscuit can talk all right, but when she first wakes up she refuses to.
“We’re still in the car, sweetheart. Did you have a nice nap?”
Biscuit grunts.
“In a little while we’ll stop, and you can get out of your car seat.”
“
Pie
-oo.”
“Oh, her pacifier. Paul, did it fall down under her? Would you please feel around for it?”
Paul turns toward his sister and grins. One of his bottom teeth is missing.The other one is loose. He wiggles it at her with his tongue. She scowls. He brings out his hand from behind his back.The pacifier dangles from his fingers.
Biscuit’s eyes widen. “Mm!” she says, one fat heel thrusting forward.
He is grinning so broadly his cheeks hurt.
“Did you find it, Paul?”
He doesn’t answer. Biscuit is making short, furious shrieks, like dog yaps.
“Give it to her.”
He circles it slowly in the air, closer and closer, before popping it in her mouth. Instantly she resumes sucking and it is quiet except for the rhythmic, rubbery squeak. “You’re not my only sister,” he whispers. She blinks at him slowly, like a bored queen. Already her lids are growing heavy again, her eyes glazed. “I’m your only brother. I have two sisters. You only have one.” She lets her head rest back against the wing of her car seat. Paul watches without blinking. They are having a staring contest, which he officially declares in his head, starting:
now
. He is confident; he is the master of staring, and he stares and stares. Sure enough: her eyes fall shut.
IN THE MIDDLE of their first night at the lake John gets sick, throwing up on the flat stone just outside the cabin door, which is as far as he gets before being overcome. Paul and Biscuit do not wake. Jess does and calls softly from her sleeping bag, spread out on the couch, “What’s the matter? Should I do something?” but Ricky, having followed him out, replies in a low voice through the screen door, “No, it’s all right—go back to sleep.”
Ricky has never known John to vomit, not in all the years they have been together. She would like to stand behind him and hold his forehead, as she would if he were one of the children, as he has done for her on many occasions during her pregnancies, but he is too tall, even crouched over; she cannot both stand clear of the vomit and reach his brow.
“Poor John,” she murmurs instead, between her husband’s heaves. She’d been angry with him when they’d gone to bed, and cannot help feeling a little glad that he has gotten sick, not because she is still angry but because it makes him helpless, makes him
hers,
and draws forth her desire to forgive him.
She’d been angry because of the way he treated her all day: meanly, or at any rate, grouchily. At first, as they drove toward the Albany train station, where they’d arranged to pick up Jess, Ricky had chalked up his mood to anxiety over successfully completing the handoff. Once they arrived at the station (on time, without getting lost), she thought he’d relax, but as she began to unbuckle Biscuit, expecting they’d all go in and meet Jess together, John had said,
No, wait here,
and strode off quickly, stranding her in the hot car with the kids. He’d been grouchy in the little diner outside Lake George where they’d had lunch, grouchy again when she asked him to pull off the road so she could change Biscuit’s diaper, and of all things he’d snapped at
her
when
he
missed the turnoff for the cabin.
He did begin to lighten up after they’d finally arrived, but by then Ricky was too hurt to forgive him easily.They’d made supper and washed the dishes and taken the kids down to the dock to brush their teeth and all of that they’d done side by side, but later when he climbed into the double sleeping bag beside her, she’d turned away from him. Ricky knows it is a kind of fear that caused his foul temper today. She believes this fear is also what has made him throw up. She believes, too, that it is Jess who has brought out the fear—not through her actions but through her existence. But the fear predates Jess. Ricky does not know how she knows this. She has not seen John like this before. But she recognizes what she sees: John is afraid of being revealed in a poor light, afraid of being found unworthy, small. Who in his past has made him feel this way? Ricky does not know.
She rests one hand on the small of his back and looks up at the tall night sky. It is starless, black, and rimmed by the silhouettes of treetops that are blacker still. The silhouettes of trees are like shapes cut out of folded paper. They remind her of a stage set, not the kind John builds but the one that was part of a toy theater she had as a child. It folded out of an album like a popup book, and came with its own paper actors and props. Her mother would help her put on little plays at the kitchen table. Sometimes they’d set up a row of tea lights at the foot of the cardboard stage.
Her father never took part in the plays, except as an audience member, but he loved to tell stories, mostly the same handful of stories over and over again, sometimes from books and sometimes from memory, and as he told them she saw the action unfold in her mind as if in a play. It was here at Cabruda Lake, some twenty years earlier, that he first told Ricky the story about the rabbi of Nemirov. She’d been lying on the dock well after dark, her head on her mother’s lap, her father’s corduroy shirt spread across her legs like a blanket, her father sitting beside them. They’d come to watch the Perseids, but there was cloud cover. To entertain her while they waited and hoped, her father retold the I. L. Peretz story “If Not Higher.” It was one of his favorites, and she heard him tell it many times throughout her childhood, but it remains always fastened for her to this place, to the night sky and the tall trees here at Cabruda Lake, where she first heard it.
Ricky thinks she would like to tell John the story. She tries to recollect the way her father told it:
The rabbi of Nemirov always disappears one day a year, always during the High Holidays. On this day he cannot be found—not at home, not at the synagogue, not at shul. The villagers would always explain this absence by saying the rabbi, on this day, must ascend to heaven, to plead with God on their behalf. But one day a Litvak comes to the village, and he scoffs at this explanation.
(“What’s a Litvak?” young Ricky had interrupted.
“A scoffer,” her father replied. “May I please continue?”)
On the eve of the High Holidays, just before the Day of Atonement, the Litvak nervously hides under the rabbi’s bed. He’s determined to discover wherever it is the rabbi goes. The next morning the rabbi rises, dresses in rough clothing, and grabs an ax and a thick rope. The Litvak, with fear in his heart, follows the rabbi into the woods.As he watches, the rabbi chops up a tree and ties the wood into a bundle with the rope. He carries the bundle to the shack of a sick old woman and knocks on the door, pretending to be a peasant selling firewood. When the woman protests she hasn’t any money, the rabbi says he’ll lend it to her. When she says she may never be able to pay him back, he scolds her for having so little faith in God. When she asks who will make the fire for her—she’s too sick to get up—he does it himself, reciting, as he does, the penitential prayers.
From this day forth, the Litvak becomes a disciple of the rabbi. From this day forth, whenever he hears someone repeat the rumor that during the High Holidays the rabbi of Nemirov ascends to heaven, the Litvak does not scoff. He only adds quietly, “If not higher.”
Ricky hears these last words as if her father is speaking them now, and recalls how his voice had seemed to hang above them for a moment, like the wire of black smoke after you blow out a candle.
(“Why,” young Ricky had asked, “didn’t he just give her the wood?”
“He did,” said her father.
“But he makes it sound like she has to pay him back.”
“Because he knows she won’t accept charity.”
“Why did he have to dress like a peasant? Why didn’t he just let her know he was the rabbi?”
Her father turned to her mother. “What am I not saying in English?”)
And this is the problem with the story, as well as the real reason she has thought of it now. Ricky cannot recall the story of the rabbi without reinvoking the memory of disappointing her father. This is how it always went with them: he forever offering her something he clearly regarded as a precious gem; she forever failing to grasp the crucial thing about it, always apprehending, instead, its poorest facet. She knows a thing or two about being seen as small, as wanting.
John retches again.
“Sweetpea,” whispers Ricky.
His vomit steams on the cold ground.
Above them, above the steely black of the pines, the sky’s black is soft as a plum. Ricky listens to the tuneless chorale of the insects and the faint clues—twigs snapping, leaves rustling—that weightier creatures are awake in the forest. Her breath comes out as feathery fog, silver in the air before it disappears. Between the trees, Cabruda Lake shows yet another sort of black: slick as obsidian glass. Tomorrow they will take the canoe from the shed.
The need comes over her to make a vow. Standing with her husband, her palm on his waist while he is sick at their feet, she pledges silently to be the one who will always see in him the large. No matter what, she will be that one.The private nature of her vow, the fact that he is unaware of this new promise, her new obligation, fills her with a kind of solemn awe.
When he is finished, Ricky ushers him carefully over the prickling pine needles and hard roots to the little washstand set up between the privy and the cabin. Here is a jug of water, a chipped enamel basin, a hand towel. She helps him wash his face, rinse his mouth.When he is done she flings the wash water across the path, into the pines. Then she walks him inside, guides him over to the bed, covers him. She feels his forehead; it is not hot.
“You’re nice,” whispers John, in fetal curl, within the flannellined sleeping bag.
She whispers
“ssh”
into his beard.
There is a metal pail, which they use to heat dishwater; she takes this from atop the woodstove and places it on the floor by John’s head, just in case. Then she pulls on one of his wool sweaters, slides into her flip-flops, and goes back outside. They keep an identical pail by the big stone fireplace built into the clearing in front of the cabin. Ricky carries this down the path to the lake, walking across the strip of sand and right out to the edge of the floating dock, which sways beneath her as she kneels. She dips the pail, and the black water that swirls into it is warmer than the air.
Lugging it back to the cabin, she feels her shoulder being pulled earthward, has a graphic sense of the muscle within the casing of skin, the ligaments and bone. Her burden relieves her; she is as light—as happy—as she’s been all day. She pours the lake water back and forth over the door stone, washing it clean.
PAUL BRINGS HIS bucket up from the shallows and dumps the treasure, along with a fair amount of water and sand, unceremoniously onto Jess’s towel.
“Dude,” she says, scrambling to sit up, and—“Peh!”—spitting sand from her mouth. She has been lying with her head on her rolled-up sweatshirt, reading one of the library books she brought from home.