“Oh yeah? How do you remember it?” Liam leans against the couch, arms wide, letting out a puff of smoke while half-smiling, something I’ve seen very few people pull off without looking foolish. But Liam never looks foolish. Every gesture he makes is confident yet relaxed, like he came out of the womb knowing exactly where to place his hands, stack his legs.
“Um…” I lean back against the wall for a moment. The dogs, the smoke, the trash, it’s all getting to me. I am possibly even getting a contact high from his bong hits. My head feels fuzzy and disoriented, like when you’re in a faraway place in a dream but don’t remember how you got there.
Liam stands up and touches my shoulder again. “Hey. Are you okay?”
I nod. “Just a head rush.” What am I still doing here? I ask myself. It’s getting dark, and he already told me he doesn’t know anything. I make a quick judgment, and even though it’s rude, walk out of there without another word.
If I thought this hasty exit would in any way work, I clearly forgot who Liam is. Outside, he has already followed me out. “Take my number,” he says, producing his phone out of his pocket, still looking concerned, which makes me concerned. “If you need help or something.”
“I remember it,” I say, so he puts the phone away. Then he stands there and grins, watching me, and I remember why I’d liked him so much to begin with: those eyes. No one had ever looked at me like that before. With such intensity, such focus. Now, I recognize it as a total player move, but then? I’d only ever dated one person before him, my high school boyfriend Nick, an older, melancholy musician that I’d met freshman year when I lived in Hartland, the third and most repulsive of the four suburbs my parents dragged us to post-immigration. He’d had a difficult childhood and I felt more friendship and empathy towards him than attraction. Not Liam. The second I met Liam I was a goner.
He moves forward on the steps, interrupting my thoughts. “I’ve missed you, you know.”
I clear my throat. “You don’t know how to miss someone, Liam,” I mumble. “You just find someone to replace them.”
Liam giggles again. “That’s a good one, Masha. That’s really good,” he says. “You should have been a writer. I always thought that.”
I relax a little, realizing maybe he’s right, that I am remembering things wrong. When had I become so… serious? I used to be fun. I could still be fun, right? “Sorry,” I say. “That was harsh. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did. But it’s cool, man. I can be your punching bag for the day,” he says. “I probably deserve it.”
“Oh, you definitely deserve it,” I say, smiling too, and feeling a little better about being such a grump. I put my coat back on, barely feel warmer. Then I gaze around Pierce Street, thinking about which direction I should go, what my next stop should be. It’s nearly dark outside now, or the sky is so overcast it only feels like night. Automatically my body tenses with nerves, because I’m on the exact corner where my former best friend Emily and I once got mugged. We were lucky to get away unharmed, having lost only two flip phones and Emily’s fifty-dollar bill, a Christmas gift from her grandma, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. Because worse things happen in this neighborhood every day. Beatings, robberies, murders; all of it inevitable from living in one of the top five most segregated cities in America, just behind Detroit. It’s the downfall of affordable rent, of cheap old buildings with creaking stairs and windows that breathe in every storm, of carpets molding under leaking radiators. That’s the price of living between the cracks of the world.
That, and never being able to get out of them.
I hear Liam’s voice again and turn around. He’s standing right next to me now. “By the way, what are you doing over there in Israel?” he is asking. “Are you in school or something?”
“No, I’m not,” I say. No one has asked me this since I arrived, and for a second it throws me off. But then I remember how much I love my life, when I’m not in Milwaukee, and I am suddenly very chatty. “It took a while to get settled because when I made Aliyah I had to learn Hebrew—”
“What the hell is making Aliyah? Isn’t that a singer?”
“Oh, sorry. It means to immigrate to Israel. Anyway then I had to go into the army for a year, but now, I do a bit of translating, and I tutor people in English, mostly Russian immigrants…” I trail off when I notice Liam’s eyes have grown wide.
“You? In the army?”
“I only worked in an office. I wasn’t, like, shooting anyone.” I did learn how to shoot in training, but I don’t mention this part. Nor do I mention how surprisingly good I am at it. Everything in Israel came so naturally to me, as if I was always meant to be there. The language, the culture, the repetitive customs and rules of religion, all of it. All anxiety gone. And then David had come along, and I never wanted to leave again.
“What kind of… office?” he asks.
“Just a small base in the north, near the Golan Heights. It was for one of the secret units, so I can’t really talk about anything I did there.”
“What? Was it—” Liam says, then stops himself. “No, never mind. I mean, I definitely want to know, but I’m a pacifist…”
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter if you want to know or not. I can’t talk about it. Literally can’t. I would be breaking the law. And not one of those dumb ones like don’t hang out at the beach after ten PM, that America has so much of. As if that stops teenagers from having parties and sleeping with each other.”
Liam doesn’t go along with my segue, and continues talking as if I hadn’t very recognizably changed the subject. “There’s a lot of bullshit going on that country, Masha. The way—”
“Don’t start with me, Liam. It’s easy to be a pacifist when you’re at peace,” I interject. “You might feel differently if everyone in Canada and Mexico wanted you dead just because of your nose.” Liam starts to say something in response, but I cut him off. “Or if everywhere you went people started ranting at you about how terrible America is, like it’s your fault what the government is doing.”
He deflates a little, because Liam may be many things, but he is not stupid. “Okay, I guess you’re right.”
“I know I am.” I knew before coming back here that the mere fact that I’d gone to Israel would be like carrying around a neon sign attracting political arguments; something about the place makes people aggressively reactionary, and unlike other countries with less-than-ideal ways of governing, people also don’t feel conflicted about being loud about their distaste. Growing up, it was always underneath the surface of things, that to be a Jew in Milwaukee you had to condemn Israel also. Part of why I’d been so reluctant to see the place when I was younger was because my peers spent a lot of time repeating anti-Israel talking points they’d read from headlines, and since my family was not part of the local Jewish community, I’d received no counter-education on the matter. This quiet anti-Semitism was so persistent and so fanatical that by the time I left college I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone I was a Jew. This is likely part of why friends from Riverwest were so surprised when I moved there.
I can tell Liam really wants to continue this conversation in that exact direction, so I try to change the subject again. Now that I’ve lived in Israel, I understand fully the biases and blind spots of the American media when it comes to the Middle East. But I didn’t come here to be an ambassador for the Jewish homeland; I came here to find my sister.
“Look,” I say to Liam. “You really didn’t know she was my sister?”
Liam’s thick black eyebrows knit together. He’s thrown back, I can tell. “And what would you have me do? If I had known?”