The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  It hadn’t crossed her mind to first wash her face, to remove the expensive gems from her ears, to extricate the pins from her hair, now a wet, matted mess on top of her head, to brush her teeth before keening in the pool. And she is keening, she must be keening, because she doesn’t recognize the sounds she is making, like an injured porpoise or dolphin or whatever other aquatic mammal she was thinking about yesterday when she was swimming her morning laps.

  Then her daughters are pressing against her, hugging her tight, these bodies she has held since they were slippery and fragile, since heads had to be carefully cradled, tiny pursed lips seeking that which only she, their mother, could provide, these beings she and Harry had such tremendous fun creating.

  “Why is Savah crying? Why are you crying, crying, crying, Savah?” It is Lucy, sleep-tossed and naked, looking down upon her grandmother, who is clutched between her aunts, and then throws herself in.

  She sputters up and flings her arms around Roma’s neck. Over her niece’s head, Camille whispers, “What about his safe?”

  “I’m safesafesafe,” Lucy says.

  “You are,” Phoebe says. “So, so safe. You want to play a game with me in the shallow end?” Lucy grins and swims sloppily, and Phoebe nods at her sister and mother, and follows Lucy back to the steps.

  “Did you check the safe?” Camille asks Roma. “Would you know if anything’s missing? If he’d taken anything out recently?”

  “I would,” Roma says, “because I took these out yesterday,” pointing to her earrings. Then she is climbing the silver ladder out of the pool and dripping her way through the house, to their bedroom, to Harry’s closet. Is this why he closed the closet door last night, as he never has before?

  She punches in the combination—the numerical months and days of their children’s births—and pulls everything out. A large assortment of small boxes filled with her fine jewelry. Mordy and Lenore’s marriage license. Her mother and father’s marriage license. Their own marriage license, their flowery ketubah. The originals of their social security cards. Copies of their children’s birth certificates. The ten pounds of shrink-wrapped bills, in ones, fives, and tens, that she knows total $100,000, the flight money Harry insisted they keep on hand after 9/11, what he calls “our survivor cash.” The wrapping is a little dusty, but intact, no tears in the plastic at all. If he’d willfully escaped from this life, from their life, it would have involved premeditation, planning, and Harry is a planner. He would have needed this money, would have taken this money; otherwise what would he use to live on? He’d know the police monitor usage on credit cards, withdrawals from bank accounts in a suspicious circumstance like this. That the money is here, her jewels are all here, slightly eases the pain in her soul. But it’s a mixed blessing. Not even mixed, not really any kind of blessing. If Harry doesn’t have the money, then he didn’t plan to disappear, and if he didn’t plan to disappear, then his disappearance means something else. She doesn’t know what it might mean. She doesn’t know what that something else could be.

  FORTY-SIX

  I THANKED BLANCA FOR sleeping over and tried to pay her, but she said your mother already did before we left last night. She knows something’s wrong and wanted to stay, but I thought she should go. I didn’t tell her what’s happened.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “Does she have a car? How is she getting home?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  “I should see if she needs a lift.”

  “If she needed a ride home, wouldn’t she have said so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He ought to find Blanca, make sure she has a ride, or a car, or drive her home himself if need be, but exhaustion overwhelms him, and he stays seated at the edge of the bed next to Elena, holding his mug of coffee as tightly as she is holding hers, and he wonders why hers, that he poured at the same time as his own, still has rising heat. In the detective’s car with his mother, he’d felt volcanic, as if he could erupt in molten, boiling lava, but now he is ash that is graying and cooling, turning cold even hot coffee.

  “Are the girls still sleeping?” he asks.

  “Yes. Lucy was starting to turn over, so I left, hoping she’d stay asleep.

  “Simon?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel terrible. When I saw Harry last night, I let him walk by. I didn’t go and join him. If I had, maybe I could have prevented this whole thing.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. They might never know. And he backs away from that thought. But Elena’s waiting for him to say something, perhaps to absolve her of whatever she didn’t do that she should have done, and he says, “It’s not your fault.”

  She moves closer, lays her head on his shoulder. Is this an apology for yesterday or the provision of comfort or a wordless declaration that their love is still intact? Whatever the reason, he’ll take it.

  “Simon?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want, but should the girls know Harry is missing? Be in the middle of everything with the police? Should I take them home? You don’t have to decide this minute, but think about it. And I’d like to find a church this morning, go to a service, or just sit alone and pray for him.”

  He looks at her, then says, “I think the girls will be a diversion for my mother, for all of us. Maybe we’ll know something by this afternoon. Maybe he’ll have been found. And if not, then yes, you and the girls should go home.”

  “What if they ask where Sabba is?” “We’ll tell them he’s at the office.”

  Elena takes his hand and holds it tight. “It’s going to be all right. Everything is going to be fine.”

  He’d like to believe everything’s going to be fine, but he thinks he disagrees.

  They hear something, someone calling out from a far distance, and Simon is up and through the door, down the long, long hall, a right into the other hall, hoping it’s the detectives looking for him, telling him they know where his father is. But it’s not. It’s Isabel, standing in his old bedroom, rubbing her eyes, calling out, “Sabba.” He looks to the other bed, where Lucy sleeps. It’s empty, the covers thrown back.

  “I’m here, honey,” he says, lifting Isabel into his arms.

  “Not you, Daddy. Sabba. Sabba, another story now.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  PHOEBE AND CAMILLE ARE keeping Lucy entertained, timing her as she attempts to breaststroke across the pool. Lucy, kicking hard, swims one way, then the other.

  “She’s a windup toy without any sense of direction,” Camille says.

  “Every lap she swims is like four,” Phoebe says.

  “You know the sad irony? Mom always wants us to stay and we never do. We’ve never stayed longer when everything is great, and now we will, and for such a terrible reason.”

  “I know,” Phoebe says.

  Lucy grabs onto the far ledge and laughs. “Sososo fast, right, Auntie Phoebe?”

  “So fast is right! Thirty seconds! Outstanding!”

  “Nownownow?” Lucy screams.

  “Do the butterfly,” Phoebe calls out.

  Lucy shakes her head.

  “Do freestyle.”

  Lucy shakes her head again.

  “What the fuck is it called?” Phoebe whispers to Camille.

  “The crawl.”

  “Do the crawl. Ready? On your mark. Get set. GO!”

  And Lucy is off again, on a slow and circuitous route back to the shallow end.

  “I’ll get her dried and dressed after this. Do you want to set out breakfast for the kids? They’ll be hungry,” Phoebe says.

  “Maybe I should go get the bagels and everything, like we would have had this morning, if … Take both of the wee ones with me. Give you time to talk to Simon about Dad’s password, and see how Mom is. See when the detectives are going to leave.”

  A tall shadow falls across them.

  “I wanted to let you know we’re leaving now, taking yo
ur father’s laptop so the techs can break the password,” Detective Aaron David says.

  “Did you find anything that will help?” Camille asks.

  “No, but the investigation has only begun. I promise, we’re going to do everything we can to bring him back to you.”

  He’s very serious, and professional, and handsome, and his eyes lock on Phoebe’s and hang on a little too long, and she knows it’s not an accident. How bizarre if love were waiting for her in this incomprehensible situation. But it’s not, or at least not for her, not in these circumstances, not when the love would always be inextricably linked to whatever kind of tragedy this is.

  “I’m ready,” Simon says, coming through the glass door, breaking the connection between the detective and Phoebe. “Your partner is out front. And I have keys.”

  “You’re going? Where?” Camille asks.

  “To CST. See if there’s anything there that might help.”

  “Auntie Phoebe, how long, how long, how long?” Lucy screams from the shallow end.

  “Thirty seconds again. Fantastic!”

  “Great job, Lucy,” Simon calls to his daughter. Then he kneels at the edge, says quietly to his sisters, “Two things. Sabba is at the office if she asks. I’ve already told Isabel that. She wanted Sabba to tell her a morning story. And Elena is going to church.”

  “Church?” Phoebe says.

  “Church,” Simon reiterates dryly, then stands back up.

  “Ready?” he says to the detective.

  Detective Aaron David nods at Phoebe, and then at Camille, and follows Simon out through the gate that is hidden by heavy greenery.

  “Church?” Camille says to Phoebe, and Phoebe says, “I never thought of going to temple. Should we?”

  “Dad wouldn’t be there,” Camille says.

  “Not to find him, but to pray for him.”

  Lucy throws her arms around Phoebe’s neck, then lifts her head and freezes.

  “What is it?” Phoebe says.

  “Lions, lions, lions.”

  “There aren’t any lions here,” Camille says.

  “Shhhhhhhh,” Lucy whispers loudly at her aunts.

  And they hear what Lucy heard before them, the catlike roar of the detectives’ cars speeding down the curving driveway. Then the hushed engine of Elena’s SUV.

  “The lions are going to eateateat,” Lucy says, her whispering quieter now, as if she is truly afraid of lions springing over the fence.

  Camille is about to say something, and Phoebe shakes her head at her sister. She’s disconcerted by Lucy’s ferocious face, her intent stare into the distance. She doesn’t want Camille to encourage this, but Camille asks, “What are they going to eat?”

  “Bad, bad, bad people,” Lucy says without any hesitation.

  “Honey,” Phoebe says, “there aren’t any lions here and they aren’t going to eat anyone.”

  “Wrongwrongwrong. There are always lions and they always eat people. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.”

  Phoebe stares at her niece, and it hits her: the Tabor constellation depends on all of its stars—what will happen if one is lost for good, fallen out of the atmosphere? Then Lucy presses her face to Phoebe’s, wet cheek against wet cheek, and says, “I lovelovelove you, Auntie Phoebe. I didn’t know you’re a scaredy-cat.”

  “I didn’t know either,” Phoebe says. “But I guess I am.” She tries smiling at Lucy, who is smiling at her.

  “We’re all scaredy-cats sometimes,” Camille says.

  “Not me, me, me,” Lucy says.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  THE SKY IS NOT yet a saturated blue, the sun still ascending. That it could be any midmorning of any day has unmoored Roma’s sense of time, rendered it amorphous. She needs her working structure, its tumbling, humbling division into hour-long increments, or she will end up flat on her back replaying her life with Harry these last eight months, last year, all the way back to their beginning.

  The truth is she has already been replaying every word and conversation between them, every look they gave each other and distinctly understood, the times when she thought she had interpreted correctly an unspoken thought in her husband’s eyes. She has been engaged this way since ripping off her gown, tearing it with her teeth, crying in the pool, reviewing the contents of the safe, showing the detectives into their bedroom, into Harry’s closet, pulling apart her husband’s suits to show them the modern push-button panel, pushing the buttons again and opening it wide, letting them sift through her boxes of jewels and their official nostalgic papers, finding nothing of use for the investigation. Before the detectives stood at the master bedroom door, she’d hidden the shrink-wrapped survivor cash under a stack of blankets on the top shelf of the closet in Simon’s old room.

  An ancient prudence dictated Roma’s action, an inherited defensible fear that being found to possess an abundance of crisp cash might insinuate guilt about something, though the insinuation would be unwarranted and wrong. But she is the sole granddaughter of Tatiana Kahanevna Marat Jacoby, who in 1881 was five years old when her father, Kahan Kahanovich Marat, was dragged from his lecture hall at St. Petersburg University, where he taught taxonomy and was called Professor, tossed out onto Universitetskaya Embankment and badly beaten. The day before, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated at the Mikhailovsky Manège, where he attended the military roll call every Sunday, and the Jews were being blamed.

  A week later, her black-and-blue father locked the door to their nice home, and in three droshkies, with one leather suitcase apiece, her father, her mother, her two older brothers, her two older sisters, and Tatiana rode to Nikolaevsky Station, and then traveled seven hundred and fifty-eight miles by rail to family in Kiev. Her father managed to secure another university position teaching young men the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. His students were a rowdy bunch of privileged boys who heckled him mercilessly as he stood at the blackboard attempting to impart wisdom. He hung onto that position by his nails until late spring, when Alexander III issued the May Laws, which deprived Kahan Kahanovich Marat of his career, his family of his livelihood, and turned him into a cobbler’s apprentice, for which he was ill-suited.

  Three years later, during yet another massive anti-Jewish riot, eighteen days after Tatiana turned eight, she was raped and her father and brothers among the murdered. The destroyed bodies were irretrievable, no graves marking their deaths.

  When Tatiana physically healed, the dwindling family reduced their necessaries into what one leather suitcase could accommodate, selling the other six for cash, boarding a series of shrinking trains that moved them three hundred more miles away, to Odessa, where one small branch of the family remained. Called the Pearl of the Black Sea, Odessa was no pearl of a city for them, despite its humid subtropical summer climate and its dry, relatively mild winters. The large house where they expected to stay, three stories with gracious rooms reverberating with the sound of the sea, had been usurped, their relations turned out. Widowed mother and daughters found a small attic room and slept together in one bed, spent their days as shopgirls in a department store, earning one rouble each a year. Life improved for them all when Tatiana married Baran Ivanovich Jacoby.

  In 1905, the Storms in the Negev were blowing again, though they had never stopped blowing, were as ferocious as ever. Tatiana was then twenty-nine, an eight-year wife and the mother of one-year-old Inessa. Out all together for a late-afternoon walk, her fine, intellectual husband and her loving mother and sisters were massacred by a mob incited by the authorities, led by priests, ignored by the police, the crowd crying, “Kill the Jews,” and Tatiana saw them and the rest slaughtered like lambs, saw babies ripped from their mothers’ arms and torn to pieces in a bloodthirsty frenzy. She pulled Inessa from her carriage, shoved her inside her coat, and fled. Of their belongings, she would miss most the ethical value of her father’s prayer book, and the sentimental value of the novels by the Jewish and
Russian writers she adored—Babel, Aleichem, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and especially Turgenev—their pages her personal Torah, softening those harrowing years hour by hour when she fell into them. To return to the three small rooms where they all lived in penurious harmony—where she had been surprised to find she could love, where she was treated with devoted gentleness, never berated for her body’s difficulty in carrying a child to term, her husband crying tears of happiness when she finally delivered a baby—would have meant certain death, and so she, an unlikely survivor, deserted the city along with the others, leaving it empty of them and their kind.

  She walked with her daughter in her arms for a very long time—days, weeks, a month, she never knew for how long, only that when she no longer smelled the salt of the sea, she lay down under a tree, her child at her breast, prepared for them both to wither away and die. A farmer roused her at dusk. He did not ask what had brought her to this tree in the countryside, some thirty miles from the coast as the crow flies. At his farm that first night, he gave them only a plate of bread. The second night only a plate of salt. On the third night, he finally dropped on the worn table plates of both bread and salt, the simple Russian offering of hospitality, but by then she already knew his true nature. By then, he’d already flung himself on her with a harsh “Krahseevahyah,” and she, a grieving wraith, had heard his Russian beautiful, closed her eyes to recall the love she had felt in her dead husband’s arms, and understood the farmer’s terms—the exchange required for a version of safety.