“From Rob the cooking-show yenta to Boaz,” Emily’s mother, Phyllis, had said to her as they talked in Phyllis’s hotel room the night before the wedding. “Bless his heart . . . Boaz seems sweet, but he’s as quiet and slow as a herd of turtles.”
“Ma! Mother-daughter time doesn’t mean—”
“I’m sorry, hon, but it’s true.”
“He’s just shy until you get to know him.”
“I’ve only got a few days.”
Another one of her stinging remarks. Emily fumed to herself and then glanced at the other bed, on which her father would have slept. He would have liked Boaz, she knew. A kindred spirit, her father would have said.
“Well,” her mother finally drawled. “I reckon as long as he’s nice to you. And I know you want someone who won’t do to you what Rob did.”
Standing under the wedding canopy, looking at Boaz in his plain white button-down shirt and dark blue trousers, Emily felt a pang remembering her mother’s words. But what was wrong with sweet, quiet, and slow? She gazed at him with grateful affection for having saved her from life as a forlorn divorcée, something akin in her mind to an unwanted secondhand dress.
Rabbi Lapid stood in front of them. He was a somber, measured middle-aged man whose salt-and-pepper beard climbed like ivy up to his half-lidded eyes. But once he got going reciting the Sheva Brachot, the seven traditional wedding blessings, he belted out the prayers in an unabashed, wholehearted, off-key voice. Boaz slipped a gold wedding band on her finger and stepped on the glass and all the guests shouted, “Mazel tov!” and then he kissed her.
The party began immediately afterward with food and drinks—and centerpieces with lots of baby’s breath, as Emily had requested—and soon the DJ was playing lively music. Boaz and Emily danced and danced, and then some of the villagers lifted Boaz and Emily up high on chairs, the way they did at every wedding. Emily looked at Boaz’s sweat-drenched face and then glanced away, wishing her mother had never said anything about Boaz because Emily couldn’t help noticing the bead of saliva stuck in each corner of his wide lips. She glanced at her mother, who was whispering something to Lauren’s mother. Emily didn’t want to know what.
Emily sighed now. “So, Boaz, what do you want to name the boys?”
“Emily, you choose the names.”
“Seriously?” She picked up her head from the pillow. “These past nine months, you told me we’d talk about it when it was time. I understand you didn’t want to jinx anything before, but they’re here and they’re healthy. You weren’t even with me in the delivery room. So please help me pick out the names.”
Emily looked down at their tiny dark-haired sons cradled in her arms. Their squished faces, red cheeks, dark eyelashes. She looked back at Boaz. He had made it out of all those battles to create new life, yet she had a terrible apprehension that the inner core of Boaz had disappeared.
“Lauren was with you in the delivery room.” Boaz had the surprised look of a sea turtle washed ashore. “I’ve seen enough cows and dogs give birth—I didn’t need to watch you go through the same thing.” He stopped talking for a moment. “The names you choose are fine with me.” Then he pressed his weight forward, balancing his arms on his knees, staring under the hospital bed. “Mah zeh?”
“What’s what?”
“That bag under there.”
“Oh, nothing. Lauren brought me a book of baby names and some clothes and stuff, and I was so exhausted that I dropped it there and haven’t had time to put it away.”
“Don’t ever pick up a stray piece of litter or garbage,” Boaz warned. “It could be an explosive device.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You’re naïve about life here, so don’t.”
“I won’t. Come on, Boaz, please. Let’s talk about our boys. What fun we’ll have on the beach. You can take them kayaking and bicycling. What are we going to call them? Do you like the name Zohar?”
“There was a Zohar in my army unit,” Boaz said. “He was blinded, but he does marathons. He has a guide running next to him.”
Holding her sons for the first time, Emily had felt joy: so much joy, pure joy, unadulterated joy like a primary color on a blank, fresh canvas. But now the scar where her skin had been cut for her cesarean stretched tight. Lauren said it would ache when Emily laughed, but she hadn’t warned that it would ache more when Emily cried. She looked down at the boys. “Maybe by the time our sons grow up, there will be peace and they won’t have to go to war.”
“That will never happen.” Boaz glanced at the curtain that separated Emily’s bed from that of her roommate, an Arab woman who’d given birth to a daughter the day before. It was only nine in the morning and already there were a dozen relatives crowded around the woman’s bed. Boaz lowered his voice and said in English, “They hated us the moment we got here, and no matter how good they have it here, they always will.”
A cleaning woman swished a wet rag past the doorway. Emily smelled ammonia. She took off the boys’ little cloth caps and breathed in the delicate tops of their heads, which smelled of intoxicatingly new, fresh life.
“I’d better get back to the groves.” Boaz stood in his green thermal shirt, the sleeves pushed up past his scaly elbows, his cargo pants’ pockets sagging. “There’s been a lot of damage to the trees from last night’s rain. And one of the cows is sick.”
“Aren’t you happy at least about our sons?”
“I am happy.”
“Don’t you want to hold them?”
“They’re so tiny.” He glanced at his hands. His rough-edged fingernails were lined with dirt, and there was a new scar on the outer side of his thumb. “I’ll hold them later, when I come back and I get cleaned up, okay?”
“Okay,” Emily said, although she didn’t believe it.
After Boaz left, a Russian nurse with green eyes and an upturned nose came to take the twins back to the nursery room. Emily lay in bed too jittery to sleep. She reached for the book of baby names under her bed. She wanted to give them modern Israeli names because she had cast in her lot with Boaz and this was where they were living, where she wanted to stay. She flipped through the pages of the book and decided that wherever it opened, she’d find the names that her sons were meant to have. The first time, she landed on the letter shin. A soothing, soft sound, tender as satin. Shhh, like putting a baby to sleep. She closed her eyes again and pointed to the name Shoval.
“Shoval: pronounced Show-vaal. Meaning: the tail of a boat or a comet.” A comet’s tail: something that might exist for only a fleeting moment but is so full of light. Then, something else came to Emily: her father’s name had been Shimon. Shoval was the perfect name in her father’s memory. She closed the book and opened it again, this time on the letter tet. And then her finger landed on another name. Not random but preordained: “Tal: pronounced Taal. Meaning: the morning dew.”
“What about Shoval and Tal?” Emily asked when Lauren stopped by to visit in the afternoon. “I like the way they rhyme.”
“Those are perfectly good Israeli names.” Lauren always had a no-nonsense, reassuring way about her. She was in her nurse’s uniform, her hair pulled back, small diamonds flashing in her ears, sitting in the chair where Boaz had been a while ago. “But I have to warn you that your mother will probably call them Shovel and Tall.”
“She’ll say, ‘I got me two new grandsons named Shuh-vel and Taw-aall,’” Emily mimicked. “She’ll stretch Tal into at least five syllables. And then she’ll tell her friends, ‘I know she’s my daughter, but I don’t know what the heck she was thinking!’”
Lauren laughed and then asked, “How are you feeling otherwise?”
“I’m okay. But Boaz is so out of it. He doesn’t even seem happy about the babies. Like he’s lost in his own world . . .”
“He’s got scratches.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never heard that Hebrew expression? Post-traumatic stress disorder. Scratches in the head.”
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br /> “Why didn’t you tell me?” Emily asked, but before Lauren could even respond, Emily continued, “Oh, what the fuck. You didn’t have to tell me. I should have figured it out myself.” Through the window, dense, gray clouds cobbled across the sky. She did know about Boaz, but she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She had known it since that first night in the restaurant on the water, when he was there but not totally there. She had sensed it, yet she hadn’t wanted to see it. His quiet had seemed peaceful and encouraging compared to the way Rob talked her ear off. And Emily knew he’d be loyal. Someone who would never leave her.
“You told me you knew he seemed a little troubled,” Lauren said after a time. “But he’s still a good husband, isn’t he? Nice to you? Hardworking? A good provider? He’s not going to go off to be with—”
“He’s not Rob, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Emily agreed grouchily. She understood that even if Lauren had tried to warn her, she still would have gone through with the marriage. Because it had seemed like it was meant to be; as her father was fond of saying, “Nothing happens by mistake—it’s all part of God’s secret plan.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren soothed.
“I’m sorry, too.” Tears leaked from Emily’s eyes.
“This is a very intense time.” Lauren handed her a small box of tissues from the cabinet next to the bed. “After you give birth, one minute you’re laughing and the next minute you’re crying. Life suddenly becomes extreme.”
“At least these tissues are clean.” Emily blew her nose, falling back upon the pillow. “Tell me I’ll be okay,” she pleaded. “Tell me, what am I supposed to do? How do I live with someone who has one foot in reality and one foot God knows where?”
Lauren paused. “You just do the best you can, like me. You know I’m not always thrilled being here . . .”
“Doesn’t David know?”
“Of course he knows,” Lauren said. “I try not to be too obvious about it—but if I were such a good actress, I’d get an Academy Award. And sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting to go back.”
“You’d really leave him?”
“That’s the problem.” Lauren shrugged. “Boston or David? I’d still take David. I love him.”
And Emily saw it written all over Lauren’s face, the way she had seen it when they had talked in Lauren’s parents’ living room in their enormous Georgian house in Brookline, a fire blazing in the fireplace, antique furniture, original artwork on the walls. Lauren had told Emily about an Israeli doctor she’d met, and Emily knew it was not the fire causing Lauren’s cheeks to flame red. Emily could probably count on the fingers of her left hand the number of times that Lauren let herself reveal too much, and this had been one of them. It was before Lauren got pregnant, before fate had brought her to Peleg (even if she did not believe in fate), and before Emily had moved, too. Their lives unfolding, following an unseen course. Or would Lauren say they had unraveled?
“I’d better get back to work.” Lauren stood. “There’s a woman about to go into labor. When she’s done, I’ll come check on you again.”
Emily lay in the bed, watching the rain. She thought of her father, who’d never get to meet his grandsons, and at that exact same moment, she felt him walking into the hospital room. She imagined him saying, “Mabruk,” to her Arab roommate and all her visitors, charming everyone with that one Arabic word for congratulations. “Where are you?” Emily asked her father out loud, but no answer came back to her.
“BOAZ, WHERE ARE you?” Emily asked into the phone by her bed.
“In the orange groves.”
“What’s it like?”
“The wind’s stopped and the rain’s coming straight down. The trees love it. It’s a perfect rain.”
“And a perfect day,” Emily agreed. “What do you think of the names Shoval and Tal?”
“Shoval and Tal,” he repeated. “They’re fine.”
“If you could have chosen the names, would you have chosen those?” Emily asked slowly, enunciating each word carefully, as if they were practicing an “if-then” statement in English together.
“If you choose the names, then they are the names that I want.”
Emily listened, and though she waited for him to say something else, he did not. Through the phone, she could hear the rain falling, splattering against the earth.
She hung up. She knew Boaz had always been quiet, but she had refused to see the breadth of his silence. And they’d always done things that were fun, activities that didn’t entail much talking—bicycle riding through the fields or kayaking.
One afternoon, they had gone out on the sea, and Boaz had paddled close to Emily, holding a black velvet box. “I know you have to renew your lease next month.” He had looked at her from under the brim of his cotton hat, its long, floppy flap hanging over the back of his neck. “You don’t want to live forever at Leah Zado’s, do you?”
Emily opened the box.
“It’s beautiful!” A ring with a ruby glittered inside. Rob had told Emily to pick out her own ring; after he’d left her for Taylor, Emily had sold it back to the same Charles Street jewelry store she’d bought it from.
“Try it on,” Boaz said.
With Boaz holding on to her kayak, Emily slid the ring onto her finger. She leaned across the kayak to kiss him, and they almost tipped over. Finally they were able to balance and they kissed. On his lips, Emily tasted salt. How come she hadn’t noticed that seawater tasted like tears?
The nurse with the green eyes came back into Emily’s room, wheeling the babies in their little carts. Emily picked up one boy, then the other, unsure who should be whom. Rain slashed the sky. One of the babies started to cry. Tal, she thought, dew-like tears. Then she thought about how Japanese painters always left a tiny, deliberate mistake in their paintings. Because a perfect universe always contained the slightest imperfection.
A FEW WEEKS later, Emily was dangling her leg over one arm of the rocking chair and feeding Shoval while Tal slept in his bassinet, moments after she had fed Tal while Shoval slept in his bassinet. Emily could barely keep the boys straight. What was one plus one? In math, one plus one equaled two, but with twins, it was definitely more than two.
She heard a knock on the door and shouted, “Come in!” She didn’t care who was there—she was not getting up. A cold wind swooshed through the house, there were familiar voices, and then the door closed.
“We’re taking our boots off!” shouted Lauren, who then walked into the room with Aviva. “Why don’t you look thrilled to see us?” Lauren asked.
“I am thrilled,” Emily replied. “But I need Andre the Giant to hold my eyelids open. What’s with this morning visit?”
“Aviva made you some spinach quiche and then we both decided to take the day off to be with you.” Lauren surveyed the cluttered room. “Being a new mother can be so freaking lonely.”
“Yeah, you never told me that.”
“I didn’t want to scare you.” Lauren bent over the bassinet in her cream-colored woolen fisherman’s sweater, her hair swept back.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” said Aviva, who always made life seem like an obstacle course you worked your way through. “We figured you could use some company.”
“Sorry about the mess,” Emily said. Boaz’s newspapers were piled on the couch along with packages of diapers, baby wipes, ointments, Q-tips, and gifts for the boys, including one from Rob and his ballet dancer, Taylor. We wish you all the best in your new life!, Taylor had written, substituting a heart for the letter O in their names. (After you ruined my old life, thank you very much, Emily thought.)
“I’m getting us all something to eat and drink.” Lauren walked into the kitchen in her socks.
“Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare.” Emily glanced up from Shoval, who’d dozed off again.
“Make your list.” Aviva sat down on the couch, wearing an extra-large charcoal-gray crew-neck sweater that looked like it had once belonged to Rafi. “I’m going to
Aga’s after I leave here and I’ll pick up whatever you need.” She glanced at another pile of baby clothes, teddy bears, and unwrapped toys under the window. “I can help pick up all that stuff from the floor.”
“Don’t bother. There will be a new mess tomorrow.”
“It’s really not a bother.”
“You’ve been so helpful to me—I can’t thank you enough.”
“You can thank me by letting me babysit for the boys. Just keep dressing Shoval in blue and Tal in red so I know who’s who.”
“Don’t tell anyone else I color-code my kids,” Emily said. “And when they’re naked, even I have trouble telling them apart.” Emily had to look for the red nail polish she’d painted on Tal’s big toe or the birthmark by Shoval’s right ear. She might have even switched their names the first few days and not even known it.
Lauren came back into the room carrying a tray with a couple of apples and clementines, the last three slices of a Garden of Eden honey cake that Gila had brought over, and three cups of tea.
“I can’t believe this rain.” Lauren reached for an apple.
“When Boaz comes home, even after he puts on his slippers, he still manages to track mud all over the place.” Emily jiggled the bottle inside Shoval’s mouth to wake him up.
“How’s he with the babies?” Aviva asked. “He seems like he’d get the hang of it fast, considering how many baby calves he’s held.”
“Honestly, it’s like he’s vanished.”
“Some people say that after his first wife left him, his emotions just dried up,” Aviva said. “And also, obviously, because of the war.”
“Boaz told me about this one battle when his army unit lost five out of twenty men,” Emily began. “That’s twenty-five percent. Every fourth man.” She looked down at Shoval with a sad expression on her face. “He recites the names of the soldiers who were killed as if he’s saying Kaddish. Even I know their names: Baruch, Eliezer, Rami, Yair, Yigal. One guy was blinded.”
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