The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  Tatiana taught her to love dusk on Fridays, calm Saturdays, Saturday evening suns slipping behind the curved horizon, and she, so young, was enraptured by the soft sound of pages turning backwards, her grandmother exhaling incantations.

  “Prayer is as elusive as snowflakes, fingerprints, the dreams we each have,” Baba would say before opening the prayer book and reading aloud the Hebrew Roma had never been taught. And Roma listened to prayers that were haunting chants, dirges, exultations, a musical susurrus.

  During one of her monthlong visits, Tatiana said, “We are ringed by fragility, so listen, Roma, listen well, because this is my gift to you. Do you see the white trilliums, the pink daffodils?” There was no vase of flowers in the guest room where Baba slept, and the garden was two floors below, but Roma nodded, and when Baba closed her faded eyes, she closed her own.

  “Meyn lieb, can you imagine somebody you love? Can you imagine the rain on your bare skin? Can you imagine what I am saying when I talk in a language you do not know? This is what I want for you: to learn to read the truth struggling inside that person you love; to see the colors disguised beneath a rainbow; to listen to my foreign whispers and understand, without knowing the words, that I, your old baba, am flying toward the Almighty, toward transcendence. I may not reach that light, but my own father and mother raised me to believe in its existence, and I do, despite the dark world into which I was born.”

  The next year Tatiana had gone into the ground. The insects coming in waves, scuttling through the white pine box, gnawing the white funeral shroud to shreds, feeding upon the aged breasts that once had somehow managed to nourish Roma’s mother, devouring the eyes that had seen and recorded for posterity the horrendous, rejoicing in the leftover flesh of the lips that had recounted the brutality and miracles she had witnessed. Her down-and-up life whittled into bones. When she was young, Roma had imagined her grandmother’s bodily dissolution that way, her own body rigid with terror before the tears came. But on this terrace, with her hand on the glass of scotch, her eyes sealed shut, Tatiana’s face is not bone scraped clean, but ivory flesh with the familiar etched whorls and crosshatches, the skin surely still satiny, the eyes clouded by cataracts, a wan blue that could blister to a stormy navy, all primal potency, the all-seeing power of an ancient who would not, would never be annihilated.

  What is she to make of this visitation? That praying might make a difference? That having faith might stave off some abysmal end for her husband? Should she try to pray, take comfort in a way she’s never needed before?

  Roma brushes her tongue across her teeth, tastes her frantic worry. She presses hands to ears to muffle the strident desperation and fear, the sound of all those feet in dress shoes and fragile high heels moving across the terrace, to the elevators, to the stairs, to begin trawling all of this space. People already calling out “Harry,” “Harry,” “Harry.”

  This is the first hour of her life when everything is different, the dividing line between before and after, between then and now. She knows this with absolute certainty.

  She is sinking, sagging, disintegrating, her sixty-eight years at last catching up to her. Taut skin collapsing, honey-colored dye striping right off her graying hair. Vivacious, effervescent, ebullient at the start of this evening, she is now crushed, and old. She feels so very old.

  After Tatiana’s funeral, she and her parents attended Friday night services as they never had before. In the car before sundown, heading to the synagogue, her father said each time, “This is simply to honor her. We believe in none of it. Understand, Roma, nothing exists out there that might help you at some future time.” And yet her parents had been able to read easily from the prayer book, had known the Hebrew, had closed their eyes and swayed as the cantor sang.

  She had understood her father meant nothing existed the way Tatiana believed it did, that there was no God watching out and watching over, but how else to explain her own life, with its marvels, and the luck her grandmother and her mother taught her to trust in?

  But right now, that luck she considers first when she opens her eyes, that balance she maintains about its nature, that luck can offer her nothing.

  How she desperately wishes she could believe as Tatiana believed, with unbreakable faith. But Roma’s mind, always her guide, is telling her that whatever Tatiana relied upon to see her through, it’s not out there.

  What her mind is telling her is that even if she prays, spends hours and hours baring her soul, promising everything, it would come to nil.

  What her mind is telling her is that even if every square inch of the desert is searched, Harry will not … No, no, no, that’s a place she refuses to go.

  THIRTY-NINE

  ROMA? ROMA? I’M SORRY to intrude, but I’m constructing a timeline. When did you last see Harry?”

  She can’t open her eyes, and she can’t place the voice, though she’s heard it recently. It’s not the voice she was expecting, the low rumble of Chief Hernandez, gala guest, guest in their home over the years, father of five, his eldest son a childhood friend of Simon’s, the man now in charge of figuring things out. This voice has a vacillating quality that exposes its owner’s insecure complex of youth and ego.

  “When did you last see Harry?”

  She looks down at her wrist, for her watch, and finds it bare. Then she looks up, into pale eyes that belong to Owen Kaufmann. Yes, she had pegged him right, just from that voice.

  “What time is it now?”

  “Eight thirty.”

  “We arrived at seven. We were together until—”

  She takes her phone from her purse and checks the incoming call log.

  “We were together until seven fifteen, when I had to take a call. It couldn’t have lasted longer than two or three minutes, and when it ended, I looked for Harry, but he wasn’t where I had left him. I didn’t think anything of it. I assumed he was caught up greeting guests.”

  “So you didn’t see him after that?”

  “No.”

  “Your daughters and son say, after you all arrived, they didn’t see him again. Your daughter-in-law says she saw him around seven thirty, but she didn’t see where he was going. That’s the last sighting we have.”

  “The last sighting? People must have seen him. Talked to him.

  This party was for him. There were hundreds of people here.”

  “Seven hundred and ninety-two, to be exact. We have the guest list. About three hundred reported seeing him early on, in that seven-to-seven-fifteen range, saying their hellos, offering their congratulations.”

  “Yes, there was a lot of that going on, of course.”

  “They all said he smiled, but said nothing in response to their greetings.”

  “He said nothing? That can’t be true.”

  Roma pictures entering the party with Harry. He reached for her hand and the champagne glass got in the way, but was that then, or later when they were making their way through the crowd, or just before Jeanine McCadden phoned?

  “I can’t imagine him not talking, he’s a talker. But maybe he didn’t. I just don’t recall. Then I had that phone call. And after that, I was waylaid by you.”

  Owen Kaufmann bows his head in an apology of sorts. Earlier, before all of this, when he’d been telling her about interviewing Harry, his height made her mistake him for a man. But he is a boy, skinny and wiry, face still caught in his sullen, pimply teens. Only his hands have a maturity, and a familiarity with hard labor, and belong to the adult he might grow into.

  “Who was the call from?” he asks her.

  “A patient’s mother.”

  “Who?”

  “Confidential and not your business.”

  “Was Harry feeling well?”

  “Are you asking if he’s ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. He’s in perfect health. He played tennis this morning. Everyone was at the house. We swam, ate lunch. He put one of our granddaughters down for her nap. He slept, too.

  “
Mr. Kaufmann, are you asking me these questions in a professional capacity? Have you been deputized by Chief Hernandez?”

  “In a professional capacity, yes, as a reporter. But not deputized. Just doing my job.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think this is a proper use of your time.”

  Owen Kaufmann looks up at the stars, then back to Roma.

  “I think I feel guilty.”

  “Guilty? About what? Did you see him leave? Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “No. But I interviewed him and the story will be in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “Is there something you need to tell me? Is there something you know that will help? If you do, tell me right now.”

  For a moment, they stare at each other, and she wishes her mind were clearer so she could interpret his eyes, his body language.

  “No, there’s nothing,” he finally says.

  “Do you need anything?” he asks.

  “Just for him to be found.”

  Owen Kaufmann nods and Roma looks away from him, into the impenetrable desert.

  There is a hovering pause, then his tread across the wooden terrace, the planks creaking.

  She is alone. She no longer hears the search parties, their calls of “Harry,” no longer hears anything at all.

  SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHEN the sounds reach her, of nocturnal animals awake and alert and busy in the desert. Out there in the night, a coyote yips sharply. Then a second one. Then a third. And it’s a concert of yips and cries, and she listens and listens, considering the incremental differences in tone, wondering what they could be saying to one another. She hears hysterical human laughter from a great distance, and it goes on and on and then cuts out, as if a hand has been pressed over a mouth. She pictures her family in the future: Phoebe a bride, Camille in love, Simon rested, Elena happy, Phoebe pregnant, Lucy speaking without repetition, Isabel cuddling on her lap. She focuses on the sensation of time passing, but can’t distinguish one minute from the next. The thought she has refused to consider, that she hoped she banished, circles and circles, buzzing all the while, and when it lands, she thinks of a wasp going in for the sting, and she feels faint with knowledge.

  Then Chief Hernandez is kneeling next to her, taking her hands in his large calloused ones. He is not calling her Roma, and he is not calling Harry, Harry, but rather Dr. Tabor and Mr. Tabor, and his peculiar formality soothes, when she would have expected the opposite, for calling friends by their full names when one is missing surely is a sign that all is not well.

  She holds her breath, preparing herself for whatever he has come to tell her. But it’s nothing like that, no specific bad news, not yet, only that the search has been under way for eight hours. Detectives and uniforms were brought in immediately, to formalize the search for the guest of honor and take statements from the partygoers, who were sobered up with coffee, and then sent home.

  Roma looks up in surprise, that eight hours have vanished, that Harry has been missing for at least that long.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wish I had something solid to tell you. But we’ll keep on until we do.”

  She wants to tell him they might as well stop the hunt, that they are all wasting their time, that the search will prove fruitless, but she cannot speak at all, cannot utter the words she knows to be true, that Harry Tabor will not be found.

  FORTY

  THE GLOW FROM THE half-moon and the high beams of the two cars barely dent the darkness. There are five Tabors returning home, detectives chauffeuring. She and Simon in this car, Phoebe, Camille, and Elena in the one behind. Her son is holding her hand, his body angled toward her, as he stares out his backseat window, just as her body is angled toward him, while she stares out hers. The tires on the macadam sss-sss when they run over squiggles of tarred repairs, but otherwise there is only the sound of air rushing past the windows. She wonders if the girls are silent and holding hands, too.

  This is the long stretch between Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs—land that is indomitable, inhospitable, defiantly unpicturesque, unflagging in its ability to wear down human ingenuity.

  Did Harry fall and hit his head and wander off? Is he somewhere out there, in one of those dry riverbeds prehistoric creatures might have stomped through? Is he trudging through gritty sand in his patent leather tuxedo shoes, his Luigi-made jacket catching on scrub? Is he aimlessly seeking shelter, lost in misdirection, unaware he is moving farther away from where he wants to be? Has he lost his memory, his wits, his mind? Will he be consumed by this flat desiccation that wins again and again? Hours ago, on the reverse drive, she thought about how much she liked nature besting man in this place she has long called home, but now everything out there is horrific. There are no words for her alarm.

  Desert and more desert.

  Then a clustering of palm trees announcing domestication.

  A development with black roads winding around low boxy homes, each thinly aproned by velveteen grass. Grass, when the nearest body of water is the landlocked Salton Sea, its high saline content rendering it unusable. In the summer, the algae dies off and stinks. There is the entrance, the houses dark, the people within safe in their beds. A tennis court off to the right, the net an ethereal lattice caught in an arc of momentary light.

  Desert and more desert.

  The four-lane road divides, a meridian with twiggy-armed scraggly trees. Did someone plant those trees? Or were they always here, pushing themselves up through the poured concrete, as if to say, “This was my home before you, Homo sapiens, and will be my home after you”?

  A professional plaza expertly landscaped. Rows and rows of magenta flowers caught by the car lights, a colorful false barrier against the unremitting desert that stretches as far as the eye can see.

  Civilization—if that plaza was civilization—recedes again, and the San Jacinto mountain range looms up. The peak is ranked sixth among prominent peaks in the United States—Roma knows that. Harry and Simon have regularly hiked it, but from the back of the detective’s car, the range looks flat, shorter than the ten thousand feet it actually is at the escarpment.

  Tall wooden poles to the left strung with telephone wires.

  The elevation changes, hiding the mountain range, leaving only a single hump visible in the distance. Is that actually the peak, like a tooth worn down? She doesn’t know.

  The Agua Caliente Indian Reservation off to the left.

  Billboards on poles anchored into the shifting sand announce the tribe’s Casino Resort Spa has Seafood Fridays, famous magicians, a revue of half-naked men from Down Under. A Vegas vibe to the signs, but the casino-resort-spa is a squat sixteen-story monolith plunked alone in the endlessness. The parking lot is mostly empty, the casino doors shut tight.

  Desert and more desert.

  A billboard of an embracing gray-haired couple happy to be living in the rental community being advertised, and Roma thinks, Maybe they aren’t selling a community of rental homes, but a community where you rent people to bring into your narrowing world, to help avert the next and lonelier stage of your life. Then she thinks, Please don’t let the next and lonelier stage of my life be upon me.

  Every so often, a green speed limit sign stating 50. On this stretch of uncultivated land that naturally slows down time, the detective is gunning the engine, and they are moving incredibly fast, but even if they were going 120, this trip, under these circumstances, would be ceaseless.

  Desert Memorial Park cemetery.

  She and Harry have never been to a funeral there. Everyone they know is healthy. No one has died. The last funerals they attended were those of their parents. Harry’s parents died within months of each other; hers a short time later, two years apart. Death is never easy, but all four parents died painlessly, no agonizing, debilitating illnesses, no illnesses or diseases at all. No last days hopped u
p on opiates, thrashing and groaning in hospitals, or motionless in vinegary, claustrophobic homes for the aging, the decaying, the dissolving. Peaceful ends in their own homes, in their own beds. If there are lucky deaths, then they had them, in recompense, she’s always thought, for what had gone before. They went to sleep and ended up in some form of eternity.

  The land here falls into three categories: untouched desert; or tilled acreage that reaps the citrus, mangoes, figs, and dates for which the valley is famed; or golf courses, evidence of man’s desire to force the sand to submit.

  The airport.

  Wasn’t Harry staring up at a plane when she received the call from Jeanine McCadden? She had seen the lights and thought he was looking up at them, but who knows what her husband was looking at.

  The San Jacinto mountain range grows large again through the windshield.

  On either side of the highway, ruler-straight streets lead to manicured colonies where people in their beds dream.

  How many of them will remember their dreams?

  As a seasoned psychologist, she is used to remembering her dreams—those of her grandmother and mother, or of people she doesn’t recognize, or of animals she can’t describe, or of oceans in which she swims and swims. And she is used to her rarer nightmares, which lack any coherent precision. When she comes to, panicked or gasping, the air tastes sweet when she realizes that she’s awake, that it was only a nightmare, already evaporated, the tough bloody edges gone. She wants this to be one of those nightmares, but it’s the waking kind, from which there will be no liberation from the fear.

  Desert and more desert.

  Then finally the outer edge of Palm Springs. She’s never truly noticed how empty and uninteresting it is at the start, nothing to look at, no one out at all.

  Sunny Dunes Road, Mesquite Avenue, Morongo Road, Camino Real, Sunrise Way. Who decides what is designated road, avenue, camino, or way? City planners, she knows that, but what is their criteria? What distinguishes one from the other from the other?