She couldn’t remember falling for someone so quickly and kept waiting for a gust of reality to swoop in and slap her out of her daze. For an awkward silence in which they realized how little they actually knew each other, or a moment when she’d step unwittingly onto some emotional land mine. Or simply for boredom to settle in, because as much as Talia liked hearing other people’s stories, the excitement of sharing her own, of pulling down the sheet to reveal her own scar from falling off her bike as a girl, then the one, higher up her thigh, where she’d sat on a rusty nail, felt, with every new relationship, more and more perfunctory. It was like a monologue she’d developed sometime between the army and college, which she updated periodically with new noteworthy events, putting less and less effort into every subsequent performance. But it was easier with Tomer. His questions were so thoughtful, so careful, that they immediately pulled her out of her routine, wanting to know names, places, unpacking even the tiniest anecdotes, as if learning about her was a serious task that demanded his concentration. She couldn’t tell if he’d always been this way with women, or if it had to do with being married so long — that perhaps dating a man who had so fully loved and admired and accepted another person allowed Talia to cross a threshold so effortlessly she hadn’t even realized she’d done it until she was safely on the other side.
On the second morning, she dressed and found Tomer in the living room with a tray of omelets and toast and coffee on the rug beside him. Talia was touched that while she was sleeping, he’d been quietly setting this up. He kissed her and handed her the paper, and she reflexively scanned the international pages for the bylines. There in Moscow, covering Medvedev’s swearing-in ceremony, was Ethan, that American blogger. Talia’s chest ached, wondering how she’d ended up fact-checking the swordfish kosher debate while this guy got to break one of the biggest stories of the year, for an international wire no less. He’d barely even known enough Russian or Ukrainian to order a beer — something Talia had discovered that night she’d first met him at Baraban, that night she’d ordered a few too many herself before taking him home. But now there he was, parachuting around Europe, building up clips. That night at the bar, he’d struck her as overconfident and young, one of those reporters whose interest in Ukraine only sparked once the protests began, and who expressed no qualms about leaving the country the moment a hotter story appeared. But he was cute and she was drunk and figured she was abroad so why not. The sex had been clumsy and fast and had sobered her up immediately, and afterward she’d looked at his hairless arm, flung across his eyes, at his cargo pants and suede Adidas sneakers strewn on her apartment floor, and told herself to ignore the regret that was already swelling into her throat — it was nothing but a silly, onetime mistake with a guy she’d eventually never have to see, or even think about, again.
But there he was, in Tomer’s living room, his byline taunting her about all the things she was missing. Then she felt ashamed — what kind of journalist had she become, so jealous she hadn’t written the article that she wasn’t the least bit interested the inauguration was even happening? — especially when the story was admittedly pretty good. That was when Tomer looked up from the food section, alarmed, and said, “Gali said she’d call from the Golan. She said she would and she hasn’t.”
“Call her,” Talia said, and Tomer said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” But when his daughter picked up, he shushed Talia, though she hadn’t said a word. “How’s it going?” he said, his voice suddenly a full octave higher. He sprang from the carpet and began to nervously pace the room, as if he were on a conference call with the prime minister and the national security advisor and the entire defense cabinet. It bothered Talia that he was so afraid of his daughter, though she’d herself felt too timid to open Gali’s door all weekend, as if there were a hidden camera lurking in that den of makeup and curling irons and stashed bags of marijuana. Plus hearing Tomer on the phone was nagging Talia to call her own parents, whom she hadn’t spoken to since she’d checked in to say she’d be gone all weekend. And though they were easygoing about it, the fact that they didn’t grill her just made Talia certain the third degree would be waiting when she got home. Which was just so frustrating, she told Tomer after he hung up, when she was almost thirty years old.
“Why do they get to you so much?” he said, and she was about to say they didn’t, that she was just being dramatic, when it occurred to her he genuinely wanted to know. So she told him she loved her parents, that they were warm and dependable and unbelievably generous to let her come crawling back home, but that they were just so judgmental and involved. Even thinking about them now made Talia feel tired: everyone gathered together in the loud, messy house on a hill not far from the airport, where her father and brothers-in-law all worked as mechanics.
“It doesn’t sound bad,” Tomer said. “Having so many people around.”
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “Growing up.” In fact, there were parts she had loved. Living in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other, her summers a blurry series of days sprinting through the backyards of all her friends. She loved the sea, the heat, sleeping with her windows open much of the year. She loved the expansiveness of her parents’ property, hills on one side, a kibbutz on the other. When she and her sisters were younger, they used to sneak onto the kibbutz at night and hang out in the date palms, careful to avoid the toxic thorns that covered the trunks. Talia had been spiked dozens of times, but even then she had wanted to be close to dangerous, exciting things. The pricklers would pierce her skin — a strange, numbing wound that always made her sisters cry but that Talia would give herself over to. They had a pact: whatever was said up there wouldn’t leave the kibbutz, and there was something so simple, so clarifying, about those nights — everything in her life seemed solvable among those trees. She even loved the walk back home, the highway desolate, the road so dark she couldn’t distinguish where the hills ended and the sky began.
She could go on, she told Tomer — there were a million things she’d missed about home. But there was no denying how painful it was to be in a family that had always seemed so confused by her for stubbornly studying the languages of all the places they’d never go, as if it were some geeky form of rebellion, rather than what learning them had always been to her, a shield against loneliness. They’d never said outright that they didn’t respect her work, but they never read her stories either — whereas at even the hint of a boyfriend they couldn’t stop talking.
“I think in their hearts they won’t think I’m safe until I’m married with kids,” she said. “And living down the street from them.”
“Well, I’m glad I met you,” Tomer said. “Even if you hate being back.”
Talia looked at him. “It’s not that simple.”
“I get it. You went to bed a journalist and woke up a fact-checker.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like — to have invested your whole life in something that doesn’t exist anymore.”