AFTER TOMER left, after she watched his truck grow smaller in the darkness until it was just two yellow taillights like the creepy eyes of a cat, Talia heard her parents on the phone with one of her sisters, on separate extensions, talking enthusiastically about Tomer. “We’re not together!” Talia said when they hung up, turning to her mother in the kitchen, then to her father down the hall, on the phone by the steps. “Anyway, can’t you see how unready he is?”
“He’s going through a rough time,” her father said stiffly, as if she’d insulted his friend, and her mother said that of course the age difference and the daughter situation and the timing in general weren’t ideal, but that he was obviously a good person. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but if anything the whole thing shows he knows how to be in a relationship,” she said, and Talia stood baffled in the doorway: all this time, had her family seen her as more broken than she saw herself?
She marched into her room and flung herself on the bed. But wallowing was useless, she knew, so she opened her laptop and emailed all her former office mates from Kiev who had kept their jobs to remind them she was alive and still looking for work, and when she saw that one had immediately responded, she applauded herself for being so proactive. And when it turned out to be a vacation autoreply, she spent the next fifteen minutes obsessively refreshing her email. From there she Googled herself, her bureau chief, Ethan the blogger, who was still in Moscow, tweeting live from Putin’s address to the Duma. She sat there, feeling like the world’s youngest relic, and then pulled the blanket over her head, this ladybug comforter she’d had since elementary school.
She awoke, just before eleven, to her cell phone ringing.
“Talia? It’s Gali.”
Talia sat up. “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m with Dana at the movies. Would you let my dad know I’ll be staying at her house tonight?”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Gali. We’re broken up.”
“Listen,” Gali said, “I texted him. But if he wakes up and wonders where I am, I don’t want him freaking out.”
“Fine,” Talia said, “I’ll let him know.” But after she hung up, she felt ashamed for surrendering so easily: if Tomer was this deep in the dark, didn’t someone need to make sure Gali was okay? She was certain she’d heard a boy’s voice in the background, and even if Gali was telling the truth, Talia doubted Tomer would want her staying at a friend’s house in the middle of the week. Plus it must have been an effort to find her number in the first place, as if Gali knew going through Talia was the easy route, that she was too big a pushover to say anything but yes. Most of all she felt manipulated, as if any bonding earlier that night had simply been a calculated act on Gali’s part to get what she wanted.
She called the number back. It rang and rang until voicemail picked up: This is Nir, you know what to do. She pressed redial and got the recording again, and finally, the third time, Nir answered.
“Let me talk to Gali,” she said.
“Who is this?”
“You know she’s fourteen.”
“And?”
“And give her the fucking phone!” Who was this guy, Talia thought, out with a little girl on a school night? She heard the muffled sound of a hand over the receiver, then Gali said, “Talia?”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I told you. At Dana’s.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“But I told you,” Gali said.
“Gali, I won’t call your dad, but I just need to know where you went. Tell me right now or I’ll—”
“What?”
“I’ll tell him you’re a liar who’s sleeping with a much older boy, and that you’ve got pot stashed in your room.” Talia had no idea about the truth behind any of this, but Gali whispered, “Fine. We’re at Alma Beach,” and Talia pulled her parents’ spare keys off the peg near the door. “I’m taking the car,” she called out, and her mother yelled, “Tell him hi!”
She backed out of the driveway and sped through Rehovot’s silent roads. Even the highway was nearly empty, and within twenty-five minutes she was cruising down Hayarkon Street, searching for parking. It was a pleasant, balmy evening, and as she strode down the beach, she saw people huddled around fires or playing matkot. She walked closer and found Gali and her friends by a bonfire closer to the shore. Most of them were coupled off, nuzzled on each other’s laps or making out, and a girl in Bedouin pants and a tank top was playing guitar. Gali’s arms were around this Nir’s neck, and he looked like a nice-enough kid, skinny and small and in civilian clothes, his dark hair buzzed so close Talia had a feeling he’d only recently been drafted. He didn’t even have facial hair, just some optimistic fuzz above his lip, and it occurred to Talia that he probably wasn’t all that older than Gali.
The scene was so much more hippie-ish and earnest than Talia would have imagined for a girl like Gali, and she wondered why she’d gotten so upset over one silly lie when the truth was that she didn’t want to leave the beach herself, that what she really wanted was to crouch by the fire and just relax. So she walked closer, listening to the breeze and the guitar, when she noticed the entire group was staring. They were looking at her like she was such a grown-up: still dressed for the office, her cardigan flapping behind her, her sensible leather flats disappearing into the sand — and it was right then that Talia understood she was no longer young.
Talia stood there, waving her keys like the unwanted chaperone she knew she was, until Gali finally got up, clearly humiliated, and followed her back to the car. Gali hunched in the passenger seat, and as Talia drove away from the curb, she said, “I don’t know what your problem is, Talia. This isn’t your business.”
“It is when you lie to me. I was worried.”
Talia pulled onto Tomer’s street and up to his apartment, keeping the engine running. Through the window she saw the television flashing and his bare feet on the coffee table. She couldn’t see anything past his sweatpanted legs, but she knew he was probably asleep on the couch, unaware that his daughter had gone out, let alone that any of this was happening in her life. Watching him through that window, a gloomy fish in a beautiful aquarium, filled her with such a massive rush of sorrow that when Gali whispered, “Please don’t make me go up there — I can’t deal with him right now,” Talia nodded and put the car in reverse.
She’d planned to take Gali to Rehovot, to set her up in the kitchen with a snack before sneaking off to call Tomer. But as she turned off the highway and up the hill, she saw, in the distance, the kibbutz near her house. She hadn’t been there in more than a decade, but when she drove through the gates and parked in the side lot, the familiar sounds swept right in: crickets and owls and the faint chatter of a few kibbutzniks, far away, sitting outside the dining hall.
“I used to come out here all the time,” Talia said. She led Gali down the path she and her sisters had always taken, near the ulpan classrooms where the foreign volunteers lived, people who wouldn’t be surprised by unfamiliar faces. But no one was outside the cottages anyway, and they walked past the irrigation equipment factory, the swimming pool and the avocado orchards, until they were standing at the edge of the date palm groves.
And Gali, who hadn’t uttered a word on the entire drive to Rehovot, who’d been glumly following Talia through the kibbutz as if this were one more punishment she’d have to endure, stopped and said, “Wow. This is beautiful.”