It was beautiful. Hundreds of tall palms, planted in perfect grids, surrounded them. Talia hadn’t even known if they’d still be producing dates, but everything looked just as she remembered. The ground was blanketed with fallen fronds, and even the smell of donkey manure wasn’t so bad when mixed with bark and overripe dates. Parked against one of the trees was a forklift, with clippers and an old, dust-beaten radio resting beside one of the tires.
“My sisters and I spent so many hours up in these trees,” she said. “It was like this quiet place where we were safe from whatever was happening.” She couldn’t remember what she’d found so stressful as a teenager — probably just boys, slipping in math, her parents — but Gali nodded solemnly and followed her up the forklift’s ladder. She was quicker and more confident than Talia would have expected, reaching the top of the trunk and testing the fronds until she found one sturdy enough to hold her weight. They sat side by side and gazed out. Until now Talia hadn’t even noticed that the moon was almost full, illuminating the tarped-over farmland and the dairy, a couple leaving the dining hall and walking hand in hand down the narrow brick path to their cottage. Beyond, Rehovot stretched out in its entirety, looking just as Talia imagined architects and contractors like Tomer had planned it in miniature: the terra-cotta roofs, the murky gray line of the highway, the tall white apartment complexes jutting up against the hills, so small they were like plastic pieces she could move around on a game board. “We had this deal,” Talia said, “that up here we could tell each other whatever we wanted and no one would judge. That it would never leave the trees. So if there’s anything—”
“We didn’t sleep together,” Gali blurted. “Like you accused me of. Though we’ve done everything but.”
Talia eyed her sideways, and Gali continued, “It was kind of bad. I mean, I was bad at it.”
“Everyone is in the beginning.”
“Really?”
“No one knows what they’re doing. You know with my first boyfriend I took it literally and actually sucked on — his thing? Like a lollipop.” She was doing it again, speaking without thinking, but Gali looked so relieved that someone out there had humiliated herself more, that perhaps she would receive the silver medal, rather than the gold, for history’s worst blowjob, that Talia would have recited excruciating story after excruciating story if it made the girl feel any better. She remembered what it was like, all that shame and uncertainty, how the room could never be dark enough.
“I’ve been writing letters,” Gali said then. “To my mom. It was my therapist’s idea. And he’s sort of a tool.”
“Your dad likes him.”
“My dad’s a tool,” Gali said, and sighed. “I’m supposed to write what’s going on with me, at school or whatever. Just to feel like she’s still with me,” she said. “And sometimes I’ll write about Nir. Nothing graphic, obviously, but, you know, just who he is and stuff. You know I don’t even know if she had another boyfriend before my dad?”
“Because you were too young to know which questions to ask,” Talia said quietly.
“Sometimes I write other things,” Gali said. “Like how I wish I’d died first, just so I wouldn’t have to miss her this much.”
Right then Gali looked so small and confused and lost in the world, her eyes wide, sugary lipstick smeared across her chin. She was playing with the hem of her satiny sleeve, pulling at the delicate threads with her fingers. “Would it be alright if. I stayed over tonight?” she asked, and Talia thought about how good it might be if she just said yes. She could see it all unfolding as clearly as if clicking through a series of digital photos: Tomer on her parents’ kitchen floor, telling goofy jokes while he scraped off their linoleum, already entrenched in a new fix-it project now that the counters were done. Her sisters over on weekends: a house of mothers so ready to dote on Gali, their toddlers worshipping her and following her from room to room. Her parents, relaxed and smiling at the table, grateful to have their family back together again, Tomer and Gali such an intrinsic, immediate part of it. She thought about Tomer asleep on the sofa in his apartment, how any moment he’d awake in that dark, empty room and start calling his daughter. Maybe she should stop this back and forth with him and just accept how easy it could be with a man who already knew how to be a boyfriend, a husband, a father. Maybe her need to travel, to hear other people’s stories, to make a name for herself — maybe it had never been ambition and curiosity that drove her but the plain and simple fear that she wouldn’t know how to face real life.
But even sitting there in the tree, even just entertaining the fantasy, made Talia feel restless and slight. As if the brown hills surrounding her just kept rolling out into nothingness, the great unknowns in Kiev and beyond so distant they no longer belonged to her. As if it were someone else’s future, some girl Talia had always envied from afar who she bumped into now and again, when everyone was home visiting their parents over Chanukah Break.
“My therapist tells me other things,” Gali continued. “I go in and he talks and talks. But I wish he’d stop giving me homework and just tell me how to be happy again,” she said, and Talia wanted nothing more than to give her an answer. For so long, she’d told herself happiness came from finding the thing you loved most and figuring out a way to make it central to your life. But that seemed so unreachable now, some abstract theory, and Talia knew she’d come up here as much for herself as for Gali, hoping everything might look clearer from this vantage, that she’d be able to reach a decision about what to do next.
“When I’m with you, I feel — not alone,” Gali said suddenly.
And then something seemed to kick inside her and before Talia knew it, Gali had scooted so close she could smell the bonfire in her hair. For a moment they sat there awkwardly, breathing silently in the tree, and Talia had a flash of what that night of Everything But must have been like for Nir, graceless and unnatural, Gali’s advances clunky and poorly timed. Then Gali leaned in to hug her. The gesture was so sudden, so jarring, that Talia jerked back — and Gali, arms stretched wide, wobbled on the frond and lost her balance.
“Gali!” Talia yelled, reaching for her. But Gali had already grabbed the trunk to keep from slipping. As the thorns pierced her skin, she let out a cry so loud people might have heard her on the highway. Talia knew she’d be fine — she’d steadied herself in time, was in no danger of falling. But sitting there on the frond, holding tight to the tree, she looked so shocked and afraid that Talia’s heart seized. She gathered the girl carefully in her arms, resting Gali’s head against her chest, wiping her damp, hot face with the back of her hand. Gali winced, and Talia, left with no real words of comfort, no guarantee things would ever get easier, said the only thing she knew for certain: that any moment the poison would kick in, numbing the places that hurt the most.
The Unknown Soldier
Fridays were busy outside Alameda Point. Women shouldered past Alexi, coiffed and perfumed and in pumps and pearls and fuzzy sweaters, calling for their children to hurry up and take their places in the inspection line. For the past twelve months, Alexi had only known the other side to these afternoons, the men’s collective anticipation of those sacred hours in the cramped visiting room or, on sunny days, at the picnic tables in the yard — men who had stopped, at a certain point, asking Alexi about his own family once it was painfully clear they were never coming to see him.
Standing at the entrance now, watching his ex-wife and son pull up to the correctional facility, Alexi felt jumpy and nervous and a little out of breath. And not just about his release, or the fact that Katherine was giving him their son for the weekend, but because she’d agreed to come to begin with. He wondered what it meant — a move toward forgiveness, maybe nothing at all. He couldn’t even tell if, after a year inside, he looked any different. Maybe a few pounds thinner but wearing the same slacks and button-down they’d known him in last, clutching, in a flimsy plastic bag, all his remaining possessions: his wallet, containing a mere twenty-two dollars; house keys that would no longer work; the sports section from the morning he was brought in, August 12, 1950, which felt like a cruel joke, as if flaunting that on top of everything else, he had missed the Yankees’ repeat as world champions.