by Dara Horn
Itamar had driven them both to work afterward in a huff. “You can see how much that woman is enjoying this,” he grumbled in the driver’s seat. “This is probably the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to her. We’re her entertainment. I can’t even look at her without thinking of that interview she did on that stupid local TV show after it happened. Cry, cry, cry. How do you say it in English—a princess?”
“Drama queen,” Judith said. She was still surprised by how much she enjoyed correcting him, teaching him. It was an unfamiliar delight to her, knowing what someone else didn’t know.
“Drama queen,” Itamar repeated. “Exactly.” This seemed to please him. In the cold car, the slight smile on his face warmed Judith’s bones. But what the teacher had said bothered Judith, tormented her. At last she decided to speak.
“I didn’t think she was so awful,” she ventured carefully. “At least she’s paying attention to Tali now. Josie was always complaining that this teacher barely remembered Tali’s name.”
Itamar fiddled with the radio, looking for a traffic report. Judith could feel him shutting a door in her face, and tried to prop it open.
“Do you think we should do something about Tali?” Judith asked.
“Do something?” Itamar asked. “Like what?”
Judith was thinking of a psychiatrist, someone to whom they could outsource the girl’s apparent rage and despair. But as she watched Itamar fidget in the driver’s seat, she knew that the very idea would set his nerves aflame. Instead she decided to broach the smaller subject: the relatively trivial question of Tali’s mind.
“I don’t know, maybe find her a tutor?” she tried.
Itamar clicked his tongue. The noise used to irritate Judith, but now she considered it a kind of secret code, part of the language she was learning. “A tutor? She’s in first grade.”
“But she’s not even trying to learn how to read.”
Itamar grinned, a gesture that flooded Judith with relief. “You saw the books in that room. Would you want to read them? ‘I lost my puppy.’ ‘I’m a whining, self-absorbed pigeon.’ ‘I’m a pig whose parents indulge all my whims.’ I was more concerned that they’re barely teaching any math. What did that drama queen say, that subtraction was ‘not age-appropriate’? Maybe it’s time to change schools.”
Or maybe, Judith thought, it was time to change Tali.
THAT DAY AFTER SCHOOL, when Tali asked Judith to read her a story while she was eating her snack, Judith told her, “No. Today I want you to learn to read to me instead.”
With her mouth full of cookie, Tali frowned, a superior frown. Judith recognized that frown. “I don’t like reading,” Tali announced.
“Why not? You like stories, don’t you?”
Tali slowly broke her cookie into pieces, eating each piece until the entire cookie had disappeared into her mouth. Her movements were deliberate, annoying. As she sat down at her sister’s kitchen table, Judith was suddenly jolted by an odd memory: sitting at her family’s kitchen table at Tali’s age, and marveling as she watched her impossibly tall, impossibly thin father piling astounding amounts of food into his mouth—oblivious to calories, oblivious to the laws of conservation of mass that he had tried to teach her, oblivious to the world. He had remained oblivious. After Josie’s death, he had sent Judith a message online, wanting to be her “friend.” He had seen the news reports, he wrote, and had wept for days. Where did Judith live now? Could he come to the shiva? His wife and children, he wrote, sent their condolences too: “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. Blessed be the True Judge.” It was the first time Judith had heard from him in twenty years. In honor of her dead sister, Judith ignored him.
“Can I have another one?” Tali asked with her mouth full.
Judith had already learned a few things about dealing with Tali. If Judith showed the slightest hint of frustration, she would have already lost. She took out the box that she had already put away and pulled out another cookie, which Tali immediately snatched. “Tali, I asked you something,” Judith said patiently. “Don’t you like books?”
“Sometimes,” Tali said, spewing crumbs. “But I hate reading. Because the letters are big liars.”
“What are you talking about?”
This time Tali stopped eating. “They lie,” she said. “You try to read them, and you think you’re right, but then it turns out you’re wrong, because they lied. They have an E in them, or a G or an H or a W or a K, and then when you try to read them, it turns out those letters are just faking and they actually make a different noise from their real one, or they don’t even make any noise at all. There are supposed to be rules about how they sound, but that’s a lie too, because the letters hardly ever follow them. It’s all just a big lie.”
Judith held her breath as Tali took another bite. Then, aware of the risks, she said, “You’re right. Most of the letters are liars.”
Tali, who was breaking off another piece of cookie, paused. She stared at Judith. It seemed that she and Judith had something in common: it was so rare that anyone heard what they were saying that when someone did listen, they were both, despite themselves, stunned. Tali held the cookie halfway between the table and her mouth, its chocolate chips and her long tangled hair dark and striking against her bright orange shirt. She did not speak.
Judith saw her chance, and seized it. “But the good part is that some letters have superpowers,” she announced. “They can do things that are supposed to be impossible.”
Tali continued staring. Judith leaned back. No one had ever looked at her that way before. “Like what?” the little girl asked.
Judith breathed in, profoundly aware of the likelihood of failure. “Like E,” she said. “If an E is hiding at the end of the word, then he’s almost always a secret agent E. He doesn’t make any noise, like you said. That way everyone thinks he doesn’t matter at all. But even though he seems like he’s not important, his superpowers let him change the way the rest of the word sounds.”
“Huh?” Tali asked. To Judith’s surprise, it wasn’t a dismissive sound, but an intrigued one. The girl was sitting up in her chair, leaning forward, listening. She had put the cookie down.
Judith stood up quickly, knowing that the window of wonder was about to close. She grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil from the kitchen counter behind her, and brought them to the table. Tali was still staring.
“Look. If I write H–A–T—” she began, and turned the paper toward herself, writing the letters as large and clearly as she could. It was odd how familiar it felt, this gesture of turning around a page with giant letters on it while sitting at a kitchen table, across from a dark-haired girl who took the paper from her hand. She shuddered as she recognized the moment: sitting at a table long ago with Josie, as Josie wrote simple words in patronizingly large letters—four-year-old prodigy Josie, teaching her older sister how to read. Josie had given up quickly, then. But Judith wouldn’t. “See, H–A–T. That’s—you can read that, right?”
Tali struggled, quietly. In the girl’s silent refusal to ask for help, Judith recognized her mother. “Hat,” she said finally. It took her far too long.
“That’s right,” Judith said simply. She knew by now not to overpraise; Tali found it insulting. “But if I put an E on the end, what is it?” Judith asked, drawing the E’s thick perpendicular bars on the end of the word.
Tali stared at the paper again, working. “Hatty,” she finally said, defeated.
“That’s what it should be. Except that this is a superhero E, so he used his superpowers to change the word!”
Tali groaned. “See? I told you. Liars.”
“No, see, the superhero E makes the other letters stop lying. He tells the other big sound in the word”—Judith deepened her voice, and made an exaggerated frown—“ ‘Tell me your real name.’ ” A rush of pleasure flowed through Judith’s body as Tali laughed. “And then the other vowel in the word—that’s the letter that makes the big soun
d, like ‘ah’ or ‘oh’—has to say his real name. So now the A in the word isn’t allowed to sound like ‘ah’ or ‘a,’ like in ‘hat,’ because he got caught by the superhero E. Now he has to stand up and say, ‘I’m an A,’ and sound like his name. So it really spells—”
Tali was staring at the word now, tracing the A with her finger. She looked up at Judith in wonder. “Hate?”
Judith nodded.
“I read it myself?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I HATE reading,” Tali announced, exactly as she did nearly every day. This time she was grinning. “But I like this game. Are there other secret superhero letters?”
Judith smiled. “Sure, lots.”
“Can you tell me about some more?” Tali asked.
“Only if you promise to listen,” Judith said.
WITHIN WEEKS, TALI HAD begun reading back to Judith. Judith selected Tali’s reading list carefully, going to the library and the bookstore on her own to eliminate Tali’s interference. She avoided books involving characters who were mothers, though in the realm of children’s picture books this was next to impossible, leaving her only with books about inane animals and their friends. Even the inane animals often had mothers. It worked better with longer chapter books, which she had begun to read aloud to Tali before putting her to bed. To Judith’s amazement, these books nearly always featured a main character who was an orphan. Invariably this orphan character was neglected and abused in a manner worthy of Dickens, until some sort of larger-than-life supernatural figure—whether an actual giant, or merely a teacher or another adult endowed with superhuman powers of empathy and love—came along to rescue the child and unlock the child’s secret magical powers. These were Judith’s kind of stories. And Tali, as Judith gently taught her, slowly began to recognize the words.
Itamar couldn’t believe it. As far as Judith could tell, Itamar had long resigned himself to the possibility that his daughter was stupid, and had decided to love her for reasons other than her mind. Tali herself was the one who wanted to surprise him. One night when she knew he would be home in time for dinner, she wrote him a letter, leaving it at his place at the dinner table. The letter was short, but it made Itamar’s jaw drop when he saw the orange construction paper on his plate. The paper was empty except for four penciled words that had taken Tali a full ten minutes to write: Abba I love you.
“Did you—did you write this yourself, Tali?” Itamar asked. Judith could hear how he tried to make his voice sound casual, cushioning himself against hope, masking his shock.
Tali nodded, her head bobbing endlessly as she began to babble. “See, ‘love’ has a superhero E, but it’s a superhero who the bad guys tried to catch. So the ‘o’ sounds like ‘uh’ instead of ‘oh,’ because he’s a superhero who can’t use all his superpowers.”
Itamar barely heard her. He was clutching the paper, staring at the letters, running his finger underneath them, as though he were the one learning to read. As he finally bent down to embrace his daughter, Judith saw tears forming in his eyes. That night after Tali had gone to bed, Itamar lay with Judith for a long time, clasping her tightly in his arms, refusing to let her go. As she fell asleep, he whispered in her ear: “Thank you.”
ONE EVENING, WHEN TALI’S sitter had gone home—Judith had reduced the sitter’s hours, preferring to run the house without a shadow—Tali lay on her stomach on the couch off the kitchen, using Judith’s phone while Judith cooked. Judith had downloaded various animated games onto her phone just for Tali, including the ever-enduring one involving birds blowing up pigs. From Tali’s unbridled enthusiasm, Judith was fairly certain that Josie had never let Tali play with her phone. Which made the moment even more beautiful. She chopped tomatoes happily, waiting for Itamar to come home.
“I pressed something wrong and the birds went away,” Tali called from the couch, wiggling in her orange pajamas. “Fix-it-please.”
“In a minute,” Judith said.
It was late, close to Tali’s bedtime. Tali had already eaten, but Judith was fixing dinner now for Itamar, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers into what he called a salad. Learning a person was like learning a new language, discovering superpowers. Juice spurted from the tomatoes and slicked her hands with thick fertile acid. She licked a finger, wetting her lips with her tongue as she imagined Itamar licking the back of her neck.
“It’s all words on the screen now,” Tali was saying. “I tried to go back to the birds a few times, but it just keeps showing more and more words.” Tali was tapping the screen repeatedly, dragging her finger in endless circles across the glass. “Instead of birds, there’s words. Words, birds, words, birds,” Tali sang. “The birds are words, the words are birds. Birds are curds, words are turds.”
“Don’t talk about turds, it’s rude,” Judith informed her.
“Why, what’s turds?”
Judith snorted, smiling. “I’ll get the birds back for you in a minute,” she said. “Just let me finish with the tomatoes. My hands are covered with seeds.”
“Wait, look,” Tali said. “I can read the birds! I mean the words. It’s easy!”
“That’s wonderful,” Judith smiled. “Soon you’ll be able to read whole books. And then you can read any story you like. I knew you could do it.” Encouragement meant everything, she had learned. She had been reading parenting books lately, memorizing their mottos. There was a lightness to her fascination, a bright and brilliant wonder. She mattered now.
“I can already read all of these words,” Tali called. She was sitting up with exuberance, holding the phone in the air. “Except for one that’s long. An, an-yuh, an-yuh-oh-nee. Oh, wait, it’s another superhero E! An-yuh-ohn.”
“Anyone,” Judith said. “That one really is a liar.”
“Okay, NOW I can read all of it! Listen! ‘I’m still here, don’t tell ANYONE, come get me, love, Jos—Josai—Josie’?” Tali flopped down on the couch. “Hey, that’s Mommy! I didn’t know she was allowed to text. Can people text when they’re dead?”
Judith dropped the knife. It skidded through pulp, falling into the sink as ice cracked through her veins.
Tali kept talking, marveling at the handheld screen. “Why do you think she says ‘come get me’?” Tali asked brightly. “Maybe she doesn’t like being dead. We should definitely go get her if—”
Judith’s breath came back in a thick, heavy gasp as she looked up at the little girl. She stepped over to the couch, her shoes filled with molten lead.
“Give me that,” she rasped.
“I want to play the bird game,” Tali whined.
Judith wrenched the phone from Tali’s hand.
“Hey!” Tali shrieked.
“We’re going to play something else,” Judith announced loudly.
She strode back to the sink and put the phone facedown on the kitchen counter, well out of Tali’s reach. Tali scrambled off the couch and began following her, slipping across the floor in her socks.
“Hey! No fair!” Tali screeched as she skidded toward the phone. “You promised I could—”
Just then the door opened, blowing Itamar in.
“Abba, guess what?” Tali roared.
“Tali, you need to go to bed,” Judith said loudly—her voice firm, put-upon, a message to Itamar. It’s been a rough day with her, she imagined telling him later. You wouldn’t believe.
But Tali had been growing in the past few weeks, and her reach now exceeded Judith’s expectations. As Judith glanced up at Itamar, the little girl stretched herself on tiptoes and snatched Judith’s phone off the counter, knocking the air once more from Judith’s lungs. Then she ran at her father, slamming him against the wall as she threw her arms around his legs, the phone with its tomato juice clutched in her hand.
“Whoa, hamuda, slow down,” he smiled, and brushed her hair from her face.
“Guess what?” Tali panted as she looked up at him. “Remember how you told me that people who are dead aren’t allowed to talk to alive people?”
>
Itamar sighed. Judith struggled to speak, but she could no longer breathe. “Except in your imagination, or in dreams,” he said. “That happens sometimes.” He stooped down to kiss the top of his daughter’s head.
“But you were WRONG!” Tali proclaimed. “Guess what, Mommy texted us and I even read it myself!” And then she pushed Judith’s phone into her father’s face.
Itamar was still trying to smile when Judith saw his face turn pale. For a long time he stood still, his body a pillar of salt pressed against the wall. Then he moved his hand toward Tali’s, as if in a trance. Tali put the phone in his palm, dropping her own arms obediently to her sides. He straightened against the wall again and held it high in front of his face, oblivious to the tomato seeds dripping onto his fingers. Judith flinched as he squinted, moving the phone closer to his own eyes.
“What is this,” he murmured.
It wasn’t a question. He looked down at Tali. His skin was ashen. “Tali,” he said, his voice low, “at katavt et zeh, nakhon, metuka? Nu, yofi, ani ge’eh she-at yoda’at likhtov, aval likhtov mashehu kazeh al Ima? Zeh be’emet lo matzhik.”
A wave of nausea rose in Judith’s throat as she wished she understood. It ached in her that Tali knew more of him than she did. But then she saw Tali glancing at her, aware. And Tali, with a poise that would have been unthinkable for her only weeks before, answered both her father’s question and Judith’s.
“I did NOT write it. I don’t make things up about Mommy. How could I write that anyway? I couldn’t even read the big word.”
Itamar stuttered, switched to English, as if suddenly aware of Judith’s presence in the room. “You—you—you must have written it. You had to. You—”
“I’M NOT LYING. I DIDN’T WRITE IT!” Now Tali was screaming, her little body wrenching into a bright orange flame. “You don’t believe me! You NEVER believe me!”
Tali ran up to her room, engulfed in loud, gagging sobs. Itamar glanced at the phone again. Judith was sure he would stare at it forever. But instead he raced up the stairs behind his daughter, calling her name, without even looking at the phone in his hand. Judith was astounded: it was something the Itamar she knew just a few months ago would never have done.