The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  And now her mother is in the bedroom long shared with her husband, pulling on a bathing suit so she can submerge herself in water. Is this her mother’s own rite, ritual, or magic to bring Harry back?

  The very tall detective is at the wall of her father’s books. He pulls one out, holds it by the spine, lets the pages fall open. What is he expecting to find?

  The other one is leaning over her father’s desk.

  “I’m sorry. Did someone ask me something?”

  “Do you know the password to your father’s computer?”

  Zhang, that’s his name. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about and it comes to her that she needs to stall.

  “The password?” she says.

  “Do you know what it is?”

  Camille shakes her head. “I don’t.”

  “Can you write down the family’s birthdays, and your parents’ wedding anniversary. It’s usually one of those.”

  Although her father never hid himself away in here, she thinks of it as a sanctuary, peaceful in the dawn light. Paintings on the walls, books on the shelves, several now stacked on the floor because of what the tall detective is doing. The room is organized. Nothing out of place. On the neat desk, only a leather cup filled with pens, a stack of pads, and the laptop he finally purchased a couple of years ago. When she’s checked her email here, she plops down in his chair, bellies up to his desk, and opens the lid. Never has she had to find him and ask for a password.

  But Detective Zhang has just said it’s password protected. What does that mean? That her father’s now hiding something? If he is, what it could it be? And if he is, maybe everyone is looking at this disappearance the wrong way. She’s not sure what the proper perspective might be, but if she reveals the password is new, and what it might suggest, will the detectives decide this is a voluntary act by a man of sound mind, a family matter, not for the police?

  She reaches for the pad on the desk, Harry Tabor across the top in blue ink, clicks the pen hard, CST running up its side, and begins writing.

  FORTY-THREE

  ALONE IN THE LIVING room, Simon watches the sun dispelling the cold pewter light, rendering sharp what has been indistinct, bringing forth the reality of this new day. His thoughts refuse to align; they circle, skew, loop, jump forward and back, head in one direction, then reverse course, and he reins them in repeatedly, starts over again and again.

  If Harry had taken a fall, or fallen ill, or had a heart attack somewhere at the resort, he would have been found. The gala guests or the police search teams would have located him and called for an ambulance. There would have been the wail of the siren, the glare of the rotating red lights. The party guests would have lined up, watched EMTs placing Harry on a stretcher, sliding the stretcher through the opened back doors, the van roaring off in screams of sound and color. Chief Hernandez would have arranged transportation for the Tabors to the hospital, and they would be sitting in Emergency or outside the ICU. But they are here on Agapanthus Lane, waiting. Waiting to learn something, or for something to happen, everyone gone to their separate corners. Neither his mother nor Elena has reemerged. Camille is still in their father’s study, where she led the detectives at their request. Phoebe is still in the kitchen, or she was; she could have gone to her bedroom through the kitchen’s other door without him being aware. For a while, he heard her crying, but even that sound has disappeared.

  The white couch is a Rorschach test of spilled coffee. He knows it’s too late, those splotches are permanent, and unless the couch is sent out for professional cleaning, or the fabric replaced, those stains will return them repeatedly to the previous night when the jubilance died, to this morning of bewilderment.

  He looks at his watch. It’s six thirty. He had expected them all to be happily groggy a few hours from now, at the table at the big pool, their hangovers doctored by Harry’s Sunday mimosas, laughing and talking over one another as they dissected the evening, Harry perhaps carrying out to the table whatever commemorative piece had been ceremoniously given to him. The fresh bagels from Baum’s on East Sunny Dunes Road would still be warm and easily torn by their teeth, the bowls of different kinds of cream cheese fluffy, knives speared into the mounds. He expected to draw his father aside, suggest that hike, ask him for his steadying advice. Instead, the family is scattered and this trauma is surreal.

  He searches his mind for past traumas visited upon the Tabors, to remember how everyone behaved, handled it, got through. His mother’s baba and mother had suffered greatly before she was born, but that was a long time ago. And if he doesn’t count the deaths of his mother’s and father’s parents, deaths in the normal course, deaths that occurred when he was too young to stand at the graves, this, he realizes, is the first one. And that fact dumbfounds him, and he’s unsure if it’s gratitude he should feel or mortification that their great luck means there is no one inherently capable of leading the rest through whatever might come. He knows how to take control in a courtroom, at the negotiating table, but this situation is neither of those. For this, he is unprepared, ill equipped. How different he might feel if he had nurtured his spiritual self all these years, found sustenance in a rabbi’s words, in prayers read collectively, the feeling of community when seated in a synagogue. If he had worked at a belief in God. He tests himself, psychically pressing hard on the frangible spots in his brain, to see if yesterday’s decision to investigate his Jewishness has been blanched away by his father’s disappearance. It hasn’t. Instead, there is a small seam of strength running inside of him when he thinks of finding answers in the Torah about what is happening, will happen. But still, where his father might be remains an unsolvable question.

  When the sun glints off his tuxedo trousers, he walks to the front door and opens it. There it is, the mezuzah on the outer doorpost. In Hebrew school, he must have learned about it, but he recalls nothing. Later, whenever later arrives, he will research the mezuzah thoroughly.

  He looks at the flowers and thick shrubs, at the Margaret Mead palm tree reaching to the sky, then along the long, curved driveway. The newspaper has been delivered, but he heard nothing, no slight thwack when it landed, though he was sitting near the living room windows. It’s the local Palm Springs paper for a population that numbers under fifty thousand, no thicker than he remembers it being in his youth. Not all that much happens here, at least until last night. Then he’s thinking about Elena, the tension between them while dressing, and at the party, and how they joined different search teams instead of searching for Harry together, and rode home separately in the detectives’ cars.

  He carries in the paper, drops it on a small white stone table next to the ruined couch, and feels as if a match has been set to his heart. For a moment, he’s able to smother the flames, but then he breathes, and mixed with his own oxygen, those flames burst into higher heat, boiling into livid colors.

  No, he won’t wait. He’ll research the mezuzah right now on his phone; maybe what he learns will provide aid or comfort.

  What he reads is only partially helpful—for the mezuzah’s power to be effective, one must touch it upon entering and when leaving the home, and recite the Shema, the most famous Jewish prayer.

  He’s never done that, never known to do that, and likely his family hasn’t either. Do any of them know that prayer by heart? His father surely, maybe his mother. But he does not. The mezuzah has been nailed there since he was a boy, but they are all a day late, or decades late, and if he’d known this yesterday, known to do this yesterday, who knows? Its power, the Shema’s power, might have been invoked, and his father would be here at home where he ought to be at this hour.

  He touches the mezuzah, then kisses his fingers, as the article suggested. He imagines buying one and affixing it to the door of his and Elena’s house in the hills, reciting the Shema each time he leaves and returns, praying that God will keep those who live within safe and well. A brief punch of shock when he imagines himself no longer living there, forced by Elena into exile.r />
  He dials his father’s cell phone and an anonymous digital female voice announces the number Simon has reached. His father never figured out how to personalize his voicemail, which means if he is gone, or for as long as he is gone, Simon has no recording anywhere of how his father sounds.

  Shattered by tiredness, by fear, by the remnants of the adrenaline from this very long night that has now turned into day, he refills his coffee mug and pours one for Elena, and goes looking for the woman who is still his wife.

  FORTY-FOUR

  CAMILLE UNHOOKS HER FEET from the stiletto sandals, unbuttons the white satin jacket, steps out of the trousers, drapes the suit on her bed, and looks at it. Did she learn anything in Melanesia about the Trobrianders’ views on handed-down clothing? Did they believe that a previous owner’s bad juju settled into the weave and thread? Did they have special bonfires for burning what is contaminated?

  In the past, Camille always politely declined whatever her friend Marni was handing out, and maybe she should have this time. Marni thinks herself a generous person, but her generosity arrives with false cheer that does not completely hide her not-so-faint condescension. Maybe that satin suit retained the bad parts of Marni, and Camille carried those bad parts into the gala, and Marni’s bad juju ruined everything.

  She will give the outfit away. No, she’ll throw it out, let it go to the dump, or the landfill, or wherever, be buried under tons of garbage where it shouldn’t be able to do any more harm.

  Perhaps that’s what she should do with all the furniture in her apartment, and all of her clothes, with everything she owns that once belonged to others. The expensive sandals she’ll keep. Only she has worn them, and until last year, she’d thought her juju was of the best kind.

  She crumples up the suit, stuffs it into the bag that held her toothbrush and soap, knots the handles tightly. She will toss out these cursed clothes immediately.

  She picks up her phone. If it is just past sunrise in Palm Springs, it is past three in the afternoon in the Cradle of Humankind, where Valentine Osin is working at the Dinaledi Chamber, the “chamber of stars” complex of limestone caves where fifteen skeletons and fifteen hundred other fossils of an extinct species of hominin were recently discovered and provisionally named Homo naledi. At three in the afternoon he’ll be at the paleoanthropological site, dating and tagging or brushing away what might be two-million-year-old sand from skeletons or fossils, deliriously happy to be working with the most extensive discovery of a single hominid species ever found in Africa. The phrase deliriously happy she added herself.

  Yesterday, he’d written her: We are all still amazed that the H. naledi appear to have intentionally deposited the bodies of their dead in the remote cave chamber, because we previously thought such behavior was limited to humans. And the find is also remarkable because of the light it will shed on the origins and diversity of our own species. Reading that, she had curiously simmered with outrage for that hominid species, who might very well have had their own name for themselves, who might very well have always protected their dead from scavengers, who might very well have viewed the retrieval of the fossilized remains of their fathers, mothers, siblings, children, as a prohibited exhumation, a deconsecration, who might not have liked or wanted to be known forevermore as H. naledi. Valentine’s emailed excitement transmitted itself despite his scientific distancing, and she had felt a wave of disgust for the arrogance of scientists, a group in which she herself would be included, notwithstanding current personal struggles.

  She looks at the phone and doesn’t think it’s Valentine she wants to call to tell of her father’s disappearance. Still, it’s true that tragedy clarifies—she can’t keep pretending with him that her old intensity might return. It is her intensity he adores, and it’s unfair to leave him hanging, waiting for that to occur. He should be free to give his rapacious energy its lead, to bestow his special love on someone who hasn’t lost her way and sense of herself. Is she considering refusing Valentine Osin’s proposal of marriage, his descriptions of their children? Those big questions are not for now, and she tucks them away.

  It’s Lilac Love she wants to call, Patty Donaldson she wants to talk to, with her broad smile and her electric-colored outfits and that laugh of hers and her daily whisper into Camille’s ear, “How’s my favorite social anthropologist?”—a fact Camille has kept from everyone else there. Patty is at her desk every day at eight on the dot, and it’s Patty she’ll call, when it’s no longer dawn. Not to tell her what’s going on here at home, but to say she’s been delayed, won’t be starting the drive back to Seattle this afternoon, won’t be back at Lilac Love on Tuesday as planned. And to ask Patty how her favorite dying people are doing, if they’re wondering where she is, if they’re missing her, have letters they want her to write. She’s not ready to lose their quiet wisdoms, their hard-won certainties, that experiencing all of life’s mysteries is worth the attendant suffering that becomes embedded in the skin, the organs, the heart. She’ll ask Patty to implore the nurses and the volunteer physicians to keep them alive until she returns.

  In those lilac-painted rooms, Camille has seen how death, whether prolonged or rapid, becomes another kind of living, contains the zenith of humanity. She has been privileged twice so far to watch death growing close: the quieting, the last preparation, the decision at the final moment to go alone or in the presence of a chosen other, the breathing changing, growing shallow, then shallower, as the immediate world recedes, and the eyes turn inward, focused only upon the internal, in a place seen only once and so very briefly. She does not want any of her people to die without her holding their hands, without knowing they are leaving behind a loving witness to their souls fleeing their earthbound existences. She wants to thank them for allowing her entry into their worlds, diminished as they are, into their last days, their last hours, their final seconds. She wants to thank them for their wisdom, and make them a promise, that she will not waste or fritter that wisdom away. She wants them to know their time together is transforming her.

  When her father is found, as a corpse, or physically damaged, or mentally altered with retrograde amnesia, or somehow hale, hearty, and healthy, with all of his memories intact and explanations crucial, her own world, all of their worlds, will be radically different. However this ends, nothing will be the same again, but her dying people, hopefully they will still be in their beds, turning their faces to the light, waiting for her to return, to listen to their stories, to be a comfort while they nap, to feel her touch, to know they are seen and heard and loved.

  She drops the phone on her bed and looks at the bikini she was wearing yesterday. Hanging from the closet knob, it’s twisted into something tiny and warped, but aromatic with Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil, the scent of her youth. She stretches it out, then puts it on, because if her mother wants to be in the pool, then Camille belongs there, too.

  FORTY-FIVE

  THEY ARE SITTING ON the third stair in the pool, lined up in the same order as yesterday. Yellowy light is washing over the mountains, slowly flowing across the whitened water. In a few minutes, they will be caught fully by the day.

  “I think,” Camille tentatively says, “that Dad might be hiding something. Did you know his laptop has a password on it?”

  “Would Dad even know how to set a password?” Phoebe says.

  “He must, because there’s one on it now.”

  “What does that mean?” Roma asks.

  “I don’t know, and the detectives don’t know I was surprised by the password.”

  “We should tell them it’s new,” Roma says.

  “I’m not sure we should. What do you think, Phoebe?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you asking me?”

  “Because you’re a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer who represents artists, Camille. I don’t remember most of the criminal law I learned in law school.”

  “Criminal law?” Roma asks Phoebe.

  “If we don’t let the police know th
e password is new, we could be obstructing justice, which is criminal.”

  “But if we tell them, I’m worried they’ll stop looking for him.”

  With Camille’s unthinkable prediction, the brief conversational flurry ends.

  Roma wants to fill the void, to say out loud to her daughters that their father’s disappearance might be deliberate, that as inconceivable as it may be, he might have left her. But as a mother and a psychologist, she knows healthy parent-child relationships require certain inviolable boundaries. The marital relationship, for example, is off-limits, its inner workings never discussed with the children, no matter their ages, unless life-altering events are truly looming, like divorce or death. This is the advice she gives to the parents of her patients. But does a disappearance, without any facts, qualify as one of those events?

  Not yet, she decides. Not when she knows absolutely nothing, not when she has trusted the strength of the loving bond she and Harry have shared, not when she has been unaware of any thorny marital issues, not when she is in the dark as to the origin of those unknown issues or their compelling nature that would warrant such a draconian exit.

  And if Harry has left her, and in this way, then he has left his children in this way, too, and she does not want to add to the fearful turmoil.

  She leaves her daughters perched on the step and wades out. Only at this hour is the overheated pool warmer than the air. By ten, it will have reversed. She wades until the water slices across her neck, until head is separate from body, mind separated from emotion, then goes under. Never in her life has she cried underwater, and the tears, she feels them distinctly, despite the hot water in which she is submerged. She presses her hands to her eyes, feels flicks at her cheeks, touches her ears. She is still wearing her yellow diamond birthday earrings. When her lungs are begging, she rises, gulps in the dry air, looks at fingers streaked black with last night’s mascara.