What the nurse had called a garden was a lagoon of pink cement stamped to resemble flagstone; a plastic trellis overcome by star jasmine; a clump of home-improvement-store planters. Iron fence pickets rose way up high, ten feet or more. He wondered if anyone had tried to escape.
There was one actual tree, a fig wickedly gnarled, dominating the corner, throwing long tentacles of shade, splattering the concrete with uneaten fruit.
She was there, on a corroding bench.
Her hair was dry and gone to gray. Someone had taken the time to comb it and pin it back. The pin was age-inappropriate, a cute little ladybug. Withered pouches of skin replaced the slender neck he remembered; the doughy body, too, insulted his memory. But her hands were the same, wired with sinew, and her eyes were the same electric green.
Her fingers moved ceaselessly, manipulating phantom clay.
“Hello, Bina,” Sam said. He sat down on the bench and put an arm around her, pulled her into him and kissed her on the temple.
One of her hands climbed the side of his face and rested. Her eyes closed.
Jacob turned and walked away.
Sam called, “She asked for you.”
Jacob kept going.
“She hasn’t spoken in ten years.”
Jacob reached the door and grabbed the knob.
“Don’t blame her,” Sam said. “Blame me.”
Jacob faced him. “I do blame you.”
Sam nodded.
Their three bodies triangulated long and narrow, forming an invisible blade laid across the garden. Jacob heard the natter of the dayroom TV. A thin hot breeze awakened jasmine and sweet, rotting fruit. His mother gazed up at the branches, moaning softly, lost. His father gazed at her, lost. Time passed. Jacob took a step toward them. He stopped. He felt drunk. He didn’t think he would make it. He left them there together.
Epilogue
Resting at the tip of a fig branch, she gazes down at the family, fractured into thousands of pieces, and she curls up in sadness, her legs folding in on themselves.
Her love — he stands still as a statue. She wishes she could go to him, and comfort him, and tell him that she meant what she said when she said forever.
A breeze passes over her, cooling her shell from the hot sun. The branch dances in space. Below, the woman raises her eyes to the heavens. They regard each other across a great distance. A mewling burbles up from deep in the woman’s throat, her dry lips moving without words.
She wants to remember.
As for her, she needs no reminder. It is like they met yesterday. In the grand scheme of things, they did. Forever is a long time.
She watches her love turn and leave, and she prepares to follow him. Now that she has found him again, she will crawl over the dead gray deserts to be near him. She will swim gray lakes, descend into the gray valley where he resides. They are places she knows well.
She raises her wings, bends her joints.
Leaps.
It’s the same as always: for one terrifying moment, gravity overpowers faith, and she plunges toward the earth. Then she remembers who she is, and she begins to rise.
Acknowledgments
Rabbi Yonatan Cohen, Paul Hamburg, Faye Kellerman, Gabriella Kellerman, Daniel Kestenbaum, Amy Glass, Yana Flaksman, Marc Michael Epstein, David Wichs, Menachem Kallus, Lieutenant Jan Chrpa, Lieutenant Lenka Kovalská, Slavka Kovarova.