by Tammar Stein
I blew my nose.
“Maya,” he said. “Look at me.”
I met his gaze.
“Accidents of timing happen everywhere. You ask someone to come over and they get hit by a car on the way. Does that mean you shouldn’t have asked them over? Does that mean you shouldn’t have any friends on the off chance they’ll get hurt? You can’t live like that. No one can. You just have to accept that. There’s no point to life if you take away all the beauty of friendships and love.” He grabbed both my hands, and his hands were so warm against mine. “So many things make sense now,” he said. “The way you behaved after you spent the night with me. Why you were always so distant with the other students in class. You tried to build a mile-high wall around yourself. But don’t you see, even when you tried not to care for anyone, you did.”
I sniffed. I didn’t know what to say.
“I need to go wash my face.” I stood up, got my crutches, and made my way to the restrooms in the rear of the café. Once inside, I took a shaky breath and splashed cold water on my red face. It was the first time I’d talked about Dov, about what happened, since I’d left Israel. It hurt, but in a strange way it felt good. I was glad Justin knew what happened, that he didn’t pull away in horror, that he didn’t think less of me. I realized I had also come close to apologizing for the things I’d said after we’d slept together. That was good. He deserved a real explanation.
I studied myself in the mirror. I saw a red-eyed girl who looked tired but peaceful and calm. I smiled at her.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” I told her. “Welcome back.”
The cast stayed on for four long, foul weeks, but I was determined to keep going to the observatory almost every night.
Payton came with me once, and even though I got her to admit that the building was beautiful and the telescope was amazing, on our ride home she shook her head.
“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked. “All alone, surrounded by a forest. It’s so dark there, and creepy. Anyone could be hiding out.”
I tried to explain, but she didn’t get it.
After I learned how to operate the telescope, I volunteered to help the graduate students with the night labs. The professor gave me a key and I would touch it during the day, running my fingers over its ridges. I couldn’t get over the fact that they trusted me with a key to the observatory. I seized any excuse to go there, and after a while I stopped needing official reasons and just went for reasons of my own.
I loved climbing that narrow wooden ladder (I’d leave my crutches leaning against the railing and hop up the stairs, one at a time). I loved settling into the padded seat and staying there, hidden from sight, my eye trained on points of light universes away.
* * *
I met Justin for lunch a couple of times a week. We talked a lot about philosophy and justice and blame. I was not the first mortal to ponder such things. I was amazed by what Justin had studied and how relevant debates from three thousand years ago still were today. The nature of good and evil, one man’s responsibility to his brother. I was especially taken by the words of Epictetus, a Roman slave from two thousand years ago. His advice: let go of what you cannot control, focus only on what falls directly under your control—your opinions, your will, your moral fortitude. I tried to follow that advice.
When I’d finally gotten used to walking around on crutches, it was time for the cast to come off. I needed to go to physical therapy to learn to walk again. Four weeks, apparently, was long enough for a person who’d been walking for twenty years to forget how to do it properly. My foot would come down flat, as if still bound in a cast, so I looked like I was limping or at least walking on the deck of a rolling ship, even though the ground was flat and the cast was off.
“It’s not serious,” the physical therapist laughed when I expressed my concern. “Your muscles have adapted to one situation, and you just need to remind them to go back to the way things used to be. Your muscles retain the memory of walking right.” She rotated my ankle, then rolled my foot in a pantomime of a footstep. “It’s like my kids going back to school after summer vacation. They just need a review of what they learned last year.”
She showed me a photocopied sheet of ankle exercises and gave me stretchy bands in two colors of resistance.
“You’ll be walking normally in a few days,” she said as she signed my chart. “But keep up the exercises for another three weeks. You need to keep building up the muscles around your ankle to stabilize it and protect it, like a built-in ankle brace.”
She was right. Within a day, I no longer walked funny. By the next day, I didn’t even need to think about rolling my foot and coming off the balls of my feet as I walked. The memory of walking returned to my foot, just like she said it would.
The orthopedist and the physical therapist said I could start running again. Not for miles, because my muscles had atrophied, but for as long as I was able to run comfortably. A week had passed and I hadn’t gone. Not yet. I believed you should walk before you run, and besides, it was running that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. I was a little hesitant to go at it again, but that left me with no outlet. No true solitude. No escape from this body.
A week after I learned to walk again, it started to snow.
When I had come up to the observatory that night, I knew I would not get any work done, not with a heavy cloud cover and the weatherman excitedly calling for five inches, unusual this late in the year. But I had come up anyway, planning to work on the computers up there and get some homework done.
After pulling away from the distractions during the day and sleeping until noon, I rode to the lab. As I got off the shuttle, the driver warned me that he might not be able to get back up the mountain to get me.
“If it starts snowing like they say it will, there’s no way I could get this thing up here. And they won’t clear the snow off O-Hill until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “If it snows, I’ll just walk back.” I wiggled my foot, still pleased I could wear shoes and that I didn’t need crutches.
“I don’t recommend it,” he said. “It’s a long walk, and it’ll be cold and slippery.”
“I know.”
“Look, I can’t be responsible—”
“You’re not. I am. Thanks for the ride.”
I got out of the van before he could say anything else. He grumbled under his breath and then pulled away. I watched him go with an odd feeling of satisfaction.
As I let myself in and waited for the lights to stop blinking and stay on, I could see how someone might find it creepy. Alone, on top of a hill, with a snowstorm coming. But it wasn’t creepy to me. It was wonderful.
I booted up one of the computers and flicked on the electric kettle. I made a cup of instant coffee, turned it creamy with powder, and settled down in front of the computer.
The door opened a few hours later. I saved my work and got up to see who had come.
I was taken aback as he took off his heavy coat and rubbed his hands briskly.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Justin looked up. His gray eyes were so clear that they reminded me of rain puddles when the skies clear and the sun shines again.
“I came looking for you,” he said. Then he turned and carefully shut the door behind him.
He looked around, taking in the large photographs of the Horseshoe Nebula, the silver craters of the moon, a spiral galaxy. They had become so familiar to me I hardly saw them. I looked at them again now. We stood side by side in silence, once again the only two people in the world awake so late at night. It was past midnight. I wondered if he couldn’t sleep. I wondered why he’d come.
“Did Payton tell you where I was?”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“No,” I said. “Do you want me to show you around?”
“Of course.”
I wondered if Payton had called him because she was worried about me getting stuck here in t
he snow. It would be like her.
We walked into the dome and I showed him the telescope, the reading instruments, and pointed out the pulleys and gears used to turn this graceful beast. I spoke softly, my voice low, my accent softer than usual. He listened quietly, and I felt that perhaps we were the only two people in the world.
“It’s cloudy out and about to snow, otherwise I’d show you the stars.” I smiled because it sounded like a pickup line. He didn’t smile back.
“You remind me of a medieval monk, hiding out in your sanctuary on top of a mountain, removed from society, sheltered from life.”
“I wish I could live here,” I said. “I would if I could.”
I knew he thought this was a bad thing, that I was still scared of being a part of life, but he was wrong. I wished I could show him the rings of Saturn or the icy moons of Jupiter, or the gas nebula in Orion’s Belt. But clouds had covered every inch of sky and there was nothing to see through the telescope but gray cotton. He joined me in the computer lab, a small cream-colored room with more photographs, mostly from the Hubble Telescope.
“I brought work with me,” he said. “I’ll stay until you’re ready to leave.”
He unzipped his bag and took out his papers. We settled in to work in silence. Every so often I could feel him looking up from his work and glancing at me. I refused to look at him. I stared straight at my computer, typing. I couldn’t remember why I was so afraid of falling in love with him. At half past two I gave a big stretch. He yawned. We smiled.
“You about ready to give up?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m done.”
We gathered our things, and I began the long process of dressing to go outside. On came the sweater, the scarf, the thick wool coat, the gloves, and the fleece-lined hat.
“You look like you’re going out to do battle,” he laughed.
“I am. I hate the cold. Between me and the cold, it’s war.”
“At least you’re guaranteed victory. In two months the war will be over and you’ll have won.”
I smiled.
I couldn’t believe I’d ever longed for snow, for frost to settle on the ground. Now that it was here, I couldn’t stand it. He shrugged into his jacket, clearly at ease with the thought of heading out with a bare head and a neck vulnerable to any passing gust.
“Can I walk you home?”
While we had been inside studying, the snow had started, and now everywhere, everything was coated in white. All the edges in the world had been erased. Everything was soft and out of focus, and even though it was night, the land glowed.
I should have known that looks were deceiving. We had been walking in silent companionship for nearly half an hour. We’d already come down Observatory Hill and had entered the main body of the university, our steps muffled by thousands of tiny white flakes. The next thing I knew, my feet shot out from under me. I was suspended in midair for a moment before I came crashing down. There was ringing in my head. I could hear the trees laughing.
“Are you all right?” he choked out.
It wasn’t the trees I heard laughing.
“This is not funny,” I said, grumpy and embarrassed. “Not funny at all. I could have broken my ankle again.”
He didn’t hear me. He couldn’t hear me. He was howling with laughter. He said something that sounded like “The look on your face …” and then “Sorry” and “Sorry” again. But each time he tried to speak, he only laughed harder. I struggled to my feet, disgusted with him and myself. The snow was sticking to my jacket and pants, coating them in white.
He rushed to help me up.
“Oh, stop it.” I pushed at him and fell down again. He looked like he wanted to laugh again, but this time, valuing his life, he took some deep breaths instead.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his lips barely twitching at all. “Is your ankle okay?”
“I’m fine.” I sat up.
After a moment of hesitation he lay down next to me, stretched out on his back, arms pillowing his head. I paused, looked at him, and then I lay back down too. From where we lay, looking at the sky, the snow was madly swirling. Snow-flakes landed in the corner of my eye and on my eyelashes.
Later, when I was back in my room, I would look in horror at my fingers and toes, seeing them with a blue tint for the first time in my life. But then, lying in the snow, I didn’t feel the cold at all.
“Better?” Justin asked after a moment.
“Yes.” The ache in my back was beginning to fade and my ankle wasn’t hurting. Wetness was starting to seep in through my jeans, but I didn’t move.
I looked at him lying next to me, Nordic skin only a little flushed, and I knew we were different to our cores. My olive skin didn’t know what to do about this cold. I had never seen so much snow in my life. Israel seemed as far away as a dream.
“In the Negev Desert sometimes the sky seems white, there are so many stars. Like snow.” For the first time in months, I could think of something beautiful from home without a stab of pain. “The first time my friends and I went hiking there, we walked thirty kilometers in one day, and when we finally stopped for the night, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t think of anything but sleep.” My face was numb and it was hard to talk. Snow kept falling in my eyes, so I closed them.
“People were telling stories around the fire and I was fighting sleep, trying to remember everything they said because it was so funny and I wanted to tell my brother when I got back. But when we finally all stretched out in our tents, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was too hot, closed in. The breathing of other people irritated me.” I shifted with the memory of it. I had to make him understand. I had to make him know who I was. Who I used to be. “I crawled out and dragged my sleeping bag with me and found a spot a little apart from the tents. The wind was blowing and I could hear the rustle of the sand and tiny animals. I just sat there and looked at the stars and realized this was where I was supposed to be.
“There were so many stars they kept me awake. It was hard to find the Big Dipper, that’s how many stars there were. The Milky Way was a huge bright stain. I’d never seen anything like it. I never have since then.”
The sky I was looking at now was bright. I was encircled by glowing snow and light, and only the area between sky and earth was in dark shadow, and even it was speckled with thousands and thousands of tiny silver flakes. We were in a distant corner of the campus and I wondered if I would ever find it again. That place must have been enchanted.
“There were not many times when I understood why the land of Israel is important to us, why we keep fighting for it, year after year,” I whispered. “But that night, looking at all those stars, knowing they were so far, millions and millions of light years away, but still we can see them, that’s when I knew why we keep fighting. We do it because after each war, after each victory and every death, we keep thinking and hoping it will be over.” I was frozen. An ice maiden. I could review my life floating above it all, no recriminations, no regrets, no tears.
“Even though peace is so far away, light years away, on some nights, when everything is quiet and we are with friends,” I touched his hand, “we can see peace in the distance.”
I realized I truly believed that. It made me glad.
“The old Bedouin who was our guide was also out there,” I said. “He said men get drunk from the night sky of the Negev. He said there is no place on earth like the Negev on a clear night.” I remembered how he smoked a pipe and the smoke wrapped around him like mist. “He had been offered a job in the city, he told me. But he would never leave the Negev. He said he would never leave it for a job in the city.”
We lay side by side with snow swirling around us. My beloved stars, the light in the distance, united us. Talking became harder as my face went numb. The snow beneath me had now melted, soaking my legs and back. We lay side by side and did not touch until finally he said we should get up. He slowly stood and then helped me, his arms around my waist and shoulder to k
eep me steady and stop me from falling. More than anything we had done before, this was close to love.
It was hard to recognize him through the film of crystals on his face and hair. A drop of icy water glided down my back, and I shivered with the painful chill of it. He walked me home and snow continued to drift. I pictured the twin tracks of footprints we left behind us, slowly disappearing under new snow, and I knew they were proof we were there.
I had to keep my teeth clenched to stop them from chattering. But for the first time in so long, I felt good and clean. My soul renewed. I did not know how to thank him for this gift.
When we reached my building, I thanked him for walking with me. He didn’t speak for a moment, his breath forming a cloud around his face. Snow eddied around him like a cloak.
“Will you stay here?” he asked. I knew what he wanted to know.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”
He nodded as if I’d said what he expected to hear.
“Call me when you go up to the observatory next time. I’ll walk you home.”
My face was frozen. I could barely speak.
“Thank you,” I managed. “I will.”
Then I caught his hand before he could turn away. I held his warm hand to my frozen cheek and I closed my eyes.
He leaned in and brushed his lips across mine.
I met his gaze and I smiled.
“Ani ohevet otcha,” I said very softly.
“I love you too, Greenland,” he said. “I have for months.”
I was embarrassed and surprised that he knew what I had said.
He smiled. “It’s amazing what you can learn on the Internet.”
I laughed out loud and hugged him. He hugged me back, a huge bear hug, squeezing me through all those layers of Gore-Tex and fleece and cotton.
Then he walked off into the snow, leaving a path of footsteps behind him. I climbed the stairs to my room, leaving a trail of melted snow, achingly wishing for blue skies and yellow dunes.