Authors: Naomi Ragen
He let out a sharp, quick sob.
She moved off the chair, slipping in beside him on the floor.
“It was Passover. We went to the hotel where my grandparents always stayed for the holiday. That way we could join them for the Seder. My whole family was there, sitting around the table upstairs, laughing, waiting for the Seder to start. And then my daughter said she had to go to the bathroom. We were in the middle of toilet training, and we had this thing about encouraging her. I offered to take her, but she only wanted her mother. A few minutes after they climbed down the stairs, I heard the explosion. It blew out all the windows, like in some kind of cartoon: The slivers just flew inward toward us. But not a single person at our table was hurt. No one even had a scratch. I ran down the steps. It was black with smoke. I couldn’t see anything. There was blood everywhere, and dripping water, and hanging disconnected electrical wires, and dead bodies. I finally found them. They each had a slight pulse. I had to decide who to work on first. I chose my wife. But I couldn’t save her. And when I turned to my daughter, it was too late.
“I loved them so much. So much. And yet, I couldn’t save either one. My baby. She was only three. Nothing. Their hearts were not beating. I tried and tried and tried, but I couldn’t get their hearts to beat…” He shook his head. “It’s too fragile.”
“Too fragile? What?”
“That thin, flickering flame inside us. One gust, and poof! It’s out. And no skill in the world, no mountain of books, no years of study, can teach you how to rekindle it.”
Wordlessly, she placed her hand over his strong, beating heart. Then she took his hand and placed it over her own. “We’re alive,” she said.
He held her close, stroking her hair, breathing her in. “Kayla, Kayla. Who are you?”
She moved away. “I am nothing. A failure in every way. I’ve abandoned my fiancé, turned my back on my parents when they needed me most. I’ve been
looking and looking inside myself for one tiny spot of goodness, like Rav Natan said, but I can’t find it.”
“You are full of good!”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Well, then I guess it’s your turn now to talk about all those things you came here to hide.”
She thought about it. He might despise her. And he’d probably be right. She shrugged. It had to be done. “Come with me.”
They walked together back to her caravan. He sat down on her bed.
“Here, read this,” she said, handing him
Newsweek
. “Page thirty-five. That man in the handcuffs? Samuels? That’s my father. And that girl on the left in the family photo? That’s me. You see how ironic it is, your worrying about tainting my peaceful, happy world?”
He sat, gripping the magazine in both hands, his eyes straining in the dim light to make out the words. He looked up, his face horrified, his hands shaking. “Has he done these things? The things he is accused of?” he asked her searchingly.
“He is the most honest person I know, Daniel.” Her voice caught. “He would NEVER have transferred money knowingly to terrorists. NEVER. But that doesn’t mean his innocent mistake hasn’t helped kill people.”
“And I drove my family to that hotel. And if I had been faster, more decisive, or more skillful, perhaps I could have saved my wife or my baby. So if it’s only consequences that matter, not intentions, then I guess you could say I’m also guilty of actions that got people killed.”
“No! A terrorist killed your family!”
“And terrorists are responsible for taking the money your father transferred and using it to kill. That’s the way they work. They take innocent people and destroy them to get what they want. So why have sympathy for me, but not your father, or yourself?”
“Because what happened to you is so clear. But my father can’t explain what happened to him. He doesn’t know. And if we can’t find out and prove his innocence, he’s going to wind up in jail for the rest of his life.”
He was strangely silent. “Can I hold on to this magazine, Kayla? I have an idea.”
“About what?”
“There is a familiar ring to your father’s story. I can’t really say more. I need to check it out with the people who would know for sure. But you must promise me you will never reveal to anyone the source of the information I give you.”
“I understand. I’ll give it to my father without any explanations…”
He hesitated. “Kayla… I… that is… it shouldn’t come from you at all.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it. This information can only help your father if he takes it seriously, if he passes it on to his lawyers.”
“And if it comes from his silly, capricious daughter who has gone off the deep end and is in some desert hippie fairyland, he won’t.”
“Exactly.”
She thought for a moment. “It’s all right. I know exactly the right person.”
16
Shoshana’s baby was born in December, a beautiful little girl they named Annie. Adam and Abigail drove down to Greenwich in the snow to see her. Shoshana seemed exhausted. Matthew was correct and cool. Abigail and Adam held the baby, left their presents, and drove home, their hearts heavy as much as they tried to pretend otherwise.
The federal grand jury indictment came in January, just as one of the worst snowstorms hit the East Coast. There was a phone call from Marvin, then the dreaded ring of the fax machine that Abigail had come to view like the tolling of doomsday bells in some Victorian tragedy. Out spewed pages and pages of closely typed text in the shocking language of the law.
She did not read them. Could not. But sometimes, as the wind howled, driving huge icy sheets against the windows which piled up on the front lawn, barricading them against the world, she’d peek inside Adam’s office, studying his wrinkled forehead and intense gaze as
he
pored over them, hoping to absorb some of their meaning secondhand by watching him. He gave almost nothing away.
And when, finally, she asked, he answered curtly: “The lawyers say this is standard. Nothing to worry about.”
She knew she shouldn’t believe him, but it was easier to pretend to herself she did. “So, what’s next?”
“I have to go to court for the arraignment and to enter my plea.”
The day of the court appearance, Abigail woke up weary after only a few hours of exhausted sleep, and even that made possible only by overgenerous doses of tranquilizers. They were due in court at ten.
All these weeks, the vision of Adam in handcuffs, that angry red welt on his damaged wrist, had stayed in her mind. She remembered their first court visit, that feeling of defeat they got by merely walking into those paneled rooms under the wary gaze of unfriendly guards; the very walls seemed to impose their authority over the fragile human beings they enclosed.
A chill crept up her back in her well-heated bedroom as she stood at the window in her nightgown looking out. The sky was silver, the branches of her majestic oak iced with a white-crystal glaze like some bakery confection. It was freezing, a Boston winter day. Here inside we are still safe and warm, she thought. But the moment we walk out the front door, all that will change. Nothing will shelter us but the hired guns of our uberexpensive legal team. She hugged herself against the goose bumps that sprouted on her arms. Were their lawyers up to the task? Would they stand firm, holding the line, keeping the vicious tidal waves from sweeping her and Adam out to sea? Or like the dikes of New Orleans, would they give way to the ferocity of the storm?
The feds had so many lawyers. As for the judge, some “helpful” acquaintances had explained that federal judges back up federal investigators and federal prosecutors. “That’s their job.” More probably, federal prosecutors had no reason to lie, while well-paid defense attorneys certainly did. Who would anyone find more trustworthy?
Being targeted by the legal profession was like being hunted by a redneck wearing an expensive suit and carrying a machine gun, she thought. She would have loved the prosecutor to look like a bulldog: short and stocky, with heavy-lidded, wide-set eyes, a bulbous nose, and a large, mean mouth. Instead, he looked like Thomas Jefferson, an elegant lanky WASP, a Supreme Court Justice to-be.
He was just doing his job, she tried to tell herself. But she couldn’t help
hating him when she remembered his cool, convincing arguments before the judge, which twisted some facts, made up others, and wove the whole into a garment that looked seamless. Would the judge—a beleaguered éminence grise, who seemed amused and entranced by the prosecutor’s performance—examine the underside of the prosecution’s case, discovering all the ugly stitching that held it together?
She didn’t know. And so she clung to the last and only hope they had: that there really existed such a thing as
justice.
She rolled the term around in her mouth like a tiny expensive button fallen off a beautiful blouse, a button you do not want to lose. It seemed such a fragile, abstract term when pitted against the concrete reality of iron bars, steel handcuffs, armed guards, and the powerful juggernaut that was the American government’s legal team, paid for by billions of tax dollars.
Years ago, in the fifties and even the sixties, she had believed in America, believed in its systems, in living in a just and free land among an educated, free, and decent people.
Did that country even exist anymore?
It was as if she’d woken up one morning and the world she had grown up in had disappeared as completely as any medieval village sacked by invading barbarians. But it was not just America. It was everywhere.
She had long ago ceased to feel at home in the world, which was unrecognizable compared to the place she’d grown up in. Her own country had become a brutal, foreign place. Her own culture had become alien to her, all the touchstones of her childhood turned upside down.
Take movies. In her childhood, plotlines had had a hero and a villain. The hero was usually kind to women and children and animals. He was honest and helped other people. Now, the opposite was true. The heroes were drug lords, murderers, and con men. Instead of villains, they battled the worst thing you could be in the modern world: a chump, a loser, a patsy. In fact, Hollywood—and the rest of the world—seemed to be saying that any good deed you did was a mistake that would cost you dearly. Those who triumphed over these clueless do-gooders were to be cheered.
The message of all these things—which ran through the culture like a spine holding up the entire body—was that all things were relative. There was no
good, no evil. There were such things as honest thieves and praiseworthy, deeply religious mass murderers.
If you wanted to watch and enjoy movies or read the news, you had to learn to push down your disgust, to argue away your queasiness, to reeducate your tastes, making allowances for how things were now.
No one was interested in hearing this. She didn’t like to talk about it openly because people treated you like an old fogy. “The good old days,” her kids would groan. When racism, sexism, and tobacco smoke filled everyone’s lives and living rooms!
That was also true, she had to admit. But the fact was, it had gone too far now. It wasn’t a question of censorship, or turning back the clock. These twisted values had become part of Western culture, deforming it until people had no idea what was right and what was wrong, no matter how clearly they saw both happening in front of them. They had no memories of another time, of other values, another way of life. The outrage against those endangering human life had died out.
Instead, people were outraged about climate change. They were outraged against oil prices. They were outraged against land ownership claimed by native peoples. You had to be on the right side of any conflict for your life to be worth anything. You had to be on the trendy side.
The lords of the media, whoever they were, helped to nudge people in a certain direction. They taught people when to close their eyes, to close their hearts. She, too, could no longer hear that voice inside of her, that keening over the world’s misery. It had been silenced; a heavy blanket of cold had settled over her feelings. If you wanted to survive in this world, you had to filter out the daily atrocity count. You had to grow numb.
Some people made themselves feel better by joining a group or a political party that would tell them what to care about and what to ignore, helping them to relinquish their individual responsibility in making those decisions. You could believe what you were told rather than what your eyes saw and ears heard. You could trust others to be the guardians of morality, the moral repository of the human race. They would decide, then you could write your checks, join the demonstrations when you had time, or compose the occasional letter to the editor when you had an idea. You could sweep your desk clean,
order your mind, and sew a nice blanket for your heart, tucking it into a warm bed at night, allowing yourself to cry over what
The New York Times
deemed worthy of your tears.
And now this world, this new world, which she had helped create through laziness, indifference, and moral fog, was about to judge her and Adam.
The idea terrified her.
“You look nice,” she told him.
He took her hands, kissing them. “Shoshana called, and so did Josh.”
“What did they say?”
“They were sweet. Concerned.”
“But not enough to actually pick themselves up and come…”
“Shoshana suggested it, but I absolutely forbid her to consider it. Do you want your daughter taking her new baby out on these icy roads? And Josh doesn’t have the money for the fare. You know that.”
No one brought up Kayla.
Except for a few one-line postcards from Israel over the last two months that imparted such information as “Not much rain. Working hard,” they knew nothing. It was a sore point, too painful to touch.
“It’ll be all right, my love. Get dressed. Have something to eat. This is just the beginning. Be brave.” He hugged her.
He
is comforting
me,
she thought, feeling guilty and useless.
She poked through her closet. “Clothes to be judged by,” she whispered to herself. She looked for a dark, respectable suit. Black was too funereal. Why should she project mourning? She and her husband were guiltless, she reminded herself, like a child who assures himself there are no monsters.