Judith’s moans filled Lauren’s ears, a welcome distraction. “You’re getting close.” Lauren tried to muster some conviction. She could no longer pretend to be excited about her work; she couldn’t do much more than go through the motions. She glanced at the monitor again and then turned to Judith’s husband, Yishai, a skinny slice of a man with carrot-colored hair and a smooth, hairless face, who stood near the floor lamp, a prayer book opened in his small hands. He swayed back and forth, reciting prayers in a voice just loud enough for Judith to hear.
“I feel like I have to push! I can’t take this! I have to push!”
“Judith, hold on for one more minute while I check.” Lauren moved to the bed. “Ten centimeters. Good. When you feel the next contraction, push.” In the light that was like the early hour before dawn, Lauren saw the top of the baby’s head, and waited for the next contraction.
“Help me!” Judith cried, her voice drowning out Yishai’s prayers.
Lauren readied herself. Judith shouted and Yishai’s prayers swelled. “Come on, Judith,” Lauren urged. “Push hard. Push now.” Lauren cupped her hands as if she were a nun in a convent of devotion. As if she had faith. As if she believed in the power of prayer. As if she were convinced that only goodness and beauty would greet this newborn baby falling through space, ignorant of the pain and grief that came with being part of this world. Lauren steadied her hands and the baby slid out, slid right into her palms. A baby boy. Lauren lifted him, clamped and cut the umbilical cord, wiped him off. She wrapped him in a white hospital blanket and handed him to Judith so that he could rest on the outside of his mother now, listening to the familiar beat of her heart.
“Baruch HaShem.” Yishai closed his prayer book with a kiss. “Thank God, thank God, thank God everything went well.” He moved to the bed, reached for his newborn son.
“Thank God.” Judith fell back on her pillow, trembling with relief and joy.
“You did great, Judith.” Yishai’s face glowed as he stared down at his baby. “I’m going out to call your mother. I promised she’d be the first to know.” He gave his son a kiss, said another prayer, and left the room.
Lauren turned on the ceiling light. She checked the baby once more, put a hospital bracelet on his wrist, and gave him back to Judith.
“You must love working as a nurse here,” Judith said.
Lauren looked at Judith holding the baby, not saying a word.
“It’s such holy work.” Judith tucked some stray hairs back under her scarf, her pink face filled with nothing but awe.
“I do love it.” Lauren hesitated. “It’s just that sometimes . . .” She stopped, opened her mouth, and grew quiet again, looking down at the diamond pattern of the floor. “The war was so, so horrible. And I know what I’m about to say sounds so wrong, but a few hours ago, there was a Muslim woman in here who gave birth to her fourth son. Of course, I helped her the way I helped you, but I couldn’t help thinking that when he grows up, he’ll probably hate us.”
“You can’t look at a newborn baby and think like that.” Judith’s voice was charged, resolute. “New life is new life.”
“But he might turn into a terrorist!”
“You are God’s hands on earth.” Judith stared up into Lauren’s eyes. “You are His helper and each baby born here is partly because of you.” She gazed down at her son. “So hold that newborn and take care of him like you did just now.” She clasped her son close. “And remember, God put you here for a reason. He wants your hands to be the very first hands to touch that child.”
LAUREN’S SHIFT ENDED a few hours later. She left the hospital and headed home, the streets jammed again. Buses, taxis, vans, bicyclists, old people riding in those golf carts, pedestrians. And the cars. Israeli drivers were like geese, Lauren thought, always honking. Lauren turned into Peleg and drove down the main road just in time to see Maya, now in first grade, standing at the school bus stop with the other kids. Lauren got out of the car and gave Maya a kiss, but she shooed Lauren away, embarrassed.
Lauren continued home, where Yael was sitting on her tricycle in the driveway. David stood next to her, holding a kitchen towel in one hand, his motorcycle helmet in the other.
“How was your night?” he asked.
“Enlightening, actually.” Lauren got out of the car and gave David a kiss.
“Tell me all about it later.” He handed her the towel, put on his helmet, and got on his motorcycle. “I’ll be back about six.” He blew her a kiss. “And can you surprise me with something besides noodles for dinner?”
“Very funny,” Lauren called after him.
“Eema, it’s Avigail’s birthday in gan today,” said Yael, dressed in Maya’s hand-me-down bright red shorts and a matching shirt with a strawberry on the front. “Let’s go already!”
“What are you waiting for?” Keeping pace with Yael, whose tricycle wheels rattled over the sidewalk, Lauren observed the clear light and the bright white clouds against the deep blue sheen of sky. “Yael, watch out!”
“What?” Yael turned so suddenly that her front wheel slid into the bushes.
Lauren disentangled her, set the bike upright, brushed her off, and they started out again.
“Yael,” Lauren said after a while, “this is taking so long.”
“I don’t care!” Yael shook her head so her braided pigtails swung back and forth.
“I’m inviting a coach from the Tour de France to give you private lessons, because by the time you get to Avigail’s birthday party, she’ll already have turned five. Don’t you want me to go back, get the car, and drive you to gan?”
“No!” Yael turned down her lower lip in the same defiant way that David did. “I’m old enough to ride just like the big kids.”
“Fine, fine. Just keep pedaling.”
Tricycles and bicycles lined the front of the gan. Yael left hers there, quickly hugged Lauren good-bye, and ran inside. Lauren wanted to get home, take a shower, and collapse on the bed. She walked past the bomb shelter, now cleaned, locked, and empty. She let out a long sigh. Then her cell phone rang. Emily.
“Can you get over here fast?” she asked.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as you come—please?”
“I’ll be right there.” Lauren walked as fast as she could to Emily’s house, knocked on the door, and didn’t wait for a response. “Emily?”
“In the boys’ room!”
Hurrying past the living room—as disheveled as always—Lauren found Emily sitting on the floor in Shoval and Tal’s bedroom surrounded by all the boys’ things. Two partially packed suitcases, their unzipped flaps flipped back, lay open next to her.
“What’s going on?” Lauren pushed aside a pile of red and blue sweatshirts to sit down next to her.
“You won’t believe it.” Emily looked at Lauren with dazed eyes. She was still in her tiger-striped pajamas. “This guy named Hussein Zureib came here looking for Boaz.”
“Hussein Zureib?” The name sounded familiar. Then Lauren remembered Jasmine finding Tala Zureib’s name in the newspaper. “Tala’s husband?”
“Tala’s husband,” Emily repeated. “He said that Jasmine had gone to their house and accused Tala of having an affair with Ali. Of course, Tala denied the whole thing, but Hussein didn’t believe her and went to confront Ali last night. Ali told him the truth. That it wasn’t Tala, it was me.”
“Oh no!” Lauren shook her head, wishing more than anything that she had been able to talk Jasmine out of believing that Ali was having an affair with Tala. But that would have meant incriminating Emily. Could Lauren have done anything differently?
“And even though this whole thing had absolutely nothing to do with Hussein,” Emily went on, “he still came over here at the crack of dawn to talk to Boaz, who was out in the cowshed. The next thing I knew, Boaz walked into the kitchen where I was making a cup of coffee for him and said that Hussein told him everything about Ali and me. Hussein told him that if I wer
e his wife, he’d kill me. Then Boaz told me to go. Just like that. Not even raising his voice. And the boys slept right through the end of my marriage!”
“Oh, Emily, this is awful!” Everything ricocheted inside Lauren: shock and sadness and a sense of being completely powerless, unable to stop the dismal chain of events.
“Before I could even defend myself or ask for a second chance or even suggest counseling—not that Boaz would go—or anything like that, Boaz took his thermos of coffee and walked out of the kitchen and went to milk the cows as if nothing even happened. Can you believe that? So I called Ali. He’s coming to get me later and we’re going to be together.”
“Be together where? Emily, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think after all that’s happened, it’s best you get over this fairy-tale romance of yours. There’s no way you both are going to live happily ever—”
“We’re moving to Boston.”
Emily’s words ripped through Lauren’s veins. They slit right through her. “What? What?”
“I’m moving there with him. To Somerville, actually.”
Lauren’s eyes jammed with tears. The friend she loved best was leaving for the city she cherished most. A double betrayal. Emily was abandoning Lauren in a country that Emily had always cared for more than Lauren did. A third betrayal. Emily was leaving Lauren here when she was the reason Emily had come. A fourth betrayal. “You’re always looking at a man’s potential, at what you think he could be, not who he really is. Emily, you’re living in a fantasy!”
“It would have been a fantasy if I’d stayed married to Boaz and pretended that things were normal!”
“And what’s Ali going to do there?” Lauren was unable to contain herself. “Wash cars on Commonwealth Avenue?”
“As a matter of fact, Ali’s cousin has been saying for years that he’d help Ali open a hummus place. It’s something he’s always wanted to do. Maybe it’s not a five-star restaurant, but he’ll be good at it, with all his experience at the hotel.”
Lauren listened but she couldn’t speak.
Emily’s head jerked toward her. “Lauren, what’s happened to you? Why did I even call you to come over? Because I wanted support from my best friend! But listen to you! And who are you to talk to me about not following my dreams? You’re the one who moved here first!”
“A lot of good it did me.” Bitterness clogged Lauren’s throat. “And you can’t just pick up and leave Boaz—you’re going to break his heart.”
“His heart was already broken. I tried and tried, you know I did, but he was like Humpty Dumpty. I couldn’t put him back together again.”
Lauren set her jaw. She had nothing to say. Too much to say. She stared up at the drawers of the boys’ dresser, opened and stacked like stairs. Going nowhere. Then she began to cry. Emily reached for her and they cried together.
“And you don’t even have your cruddy tissues.” Emily got up, went into the bathroom, and came back with a box.
“Em, I know you’ve tried with Boaz.” Lauren wiped her face. “But I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“I don’t need this right now.” Emily turned away and carelessly placed a pile of shorts in a suitcase.
“I just can’t believe you’re moving away. I can’t believe you’re leaving me, just picking up and—”
“I can’t believe you’re mad at me!”
“I’m not—”
“Seriously, Lauren? Really?” Emily stared hotly at Lauren.
Lauren looked down at a box of Legos, her cheeks burning, Emily’s stare setting her face on fire.
“You keep saying that I dream of things that can’t be, but you’ve kept up this romance with a city for so long that you don’t appreciate all you really do have. Honestly, Lauren, since I’ve moved here, you’ve done little but complain.”
“I was usually only joking—”
“Whatever. But don’t envy me because you feel sorry for yourself. And, if that’s the case, then do something about your life, and don’t be angry at me because I’m doing something about mine.”
Lauren was speechless. She looked out the window to where the sun had bleached the sky, burned a hole through all that blue. She heard some crows going crazy by the cowshed. Maybe one of their own had died and they were coming to pick up its remains. And how could their lives just go on?
She bowed her head. Listened as Emily packed more clothes into the suitcases. Lauren knew she had to compose herself. “Emily, I’m sorry.” Lauren glanced up through blurred eyes. “I’m just in shock. It’s all been so much. The war and Rachel and now you . . .”
Emily nodded but stayed busy folding some of the boys’ shirts, avoiding Lauren’s eyes.
Lauren helped pack the boys’ things, wanting to push away her feelings, push away the tension between them. “What about Boaz and the boys?”
“Boaz said I could take them,” Emily replied. “But he isn’t going to pay me child support. He’ll pay to fly them back here each summer. I know that’s fair.”
“That’s it? He didn’t fight for his sons? I thought he’d fight for them.”
“I was kind of hoping he’d fight, too.” Emily’s voice dropped. “Because that would mean that he cared about losing us. Or at least about losing them.” She reached for some sweatshirts. “Lauren, I know how much he’s suffered. But I can’t stay because I feel sorry for him. During the war, I tried so hard. I wanted to make it better between us. I never saw Ali—it was too dangerous on so many levels—and I thought, okay, this is a sign that we’re not supposed to be together. That I should be with Boaz. This was my life and I’d make the best of it. Then Rachel was killed and there was the cease-fire, but I felt like a war was still going on inside me.”
Lauren nodded.
“I know my mind works in strange ways, but I still believe what my father always told me, that nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.”
“I highly doubt your father would have said that this time.”
“But he wouldn’t have wanted me to be so unhappy.”
“He would have wanted you to try to work things out with Boaz.”
“Lauren, what else could I have tried to work out? It would have just meant living a sad, lonely life here in Boaz’s house. Maybe it happened this way because fate forced my hand.”
Emily called this fate, Lauren thought bitterly. Wasn’t it only a series of random accidents? Rash and reckless acts? Wasn’t Emily about to give up everything, with no guarantee of anything in return?
“And Lauren,” Emily added, “when I saw Rachel in the burial house, I—”
“Please,” Lauren interrupted. “Please, let’s not talk about her now.” Lauren was unable to shake the image, the cascades of Rachel’s hair falling over the burial house table, so yellow it looked golden. Cutting the curls not covered in blood. That was something Lauren would never forget. Not until she was gone, too.
“When I saw Rachel lying there,” Emily continued, “it hit me hard that life is so short and forever is so long. You’re here today, and poof, just like that, you’re gone. You only get one chance in life.”
Lauren swallowed hard, an unspeakable sorrow trawling through her. She watched Emily zip up a suitcase. All this time, Lauren had hoped that Emily would stay with Boaz so that they could watch their kids grow up, laugh, and have fun. She wanted them to be in this thing called life together. And now another thing she desperately wanted wasn’t going to happen.
Blinded by tears, her head throbbing, Lauren stood up. “I want to leave first. Anything is better than watching you go.”
38
November 6, 2006
Aviva
If there was one thing that unsettled Aviva, it was getting stuck in traffic. But there she was, trapped behind a line of cars in a Nahariya gridlock on the very Monday afternoon that she’d left school early for some personal time off. The driver in front of her honked and honked, then he jumped out and yelled at the next driver, “Mah zeh? Do you have to
just sit there and show off your new SUV?”
When the cars began to move, Aviva managed to find a parking space by the department store and then walked along the boulevard, passing a clothing store, a photo shop, and a shoe store, all open again since the war and doing brisk business.
A block away from the sea, she found Lauren seated at a table in their favorite sidewalk café, dressed in chinos and a blue-and-white pin-striped shirt, looking unflappable, as usual. She stood, they hugged hello, and then they sat down, looking over the menu they both knew by heart.
“What a treat to get to meet you for lunch,” Lauren said.
“I know. Hey, there’s Nitzan Zlotnik.” Aviva tilted her head toward a guy with ratty-looking dreadlocks.
“Who?” Lauren looked up from her menu.
“Micha Zlotnik’s son, Nitzan, the flame-thrower.”
“I thought his name was Eran.”
“His name was Eran. But Gila said that he wasn’t getting a lot of flame-throwing jobs, so Rabbi Lapid told him that when people changed their names in the Bible, they changed their luck. So now he’s Nitzan. It means the bud of a flower.”
“It means he’s just as crazy as his father is.”
Aviva let out a laugh, though it hurt. It hurt to laugh and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to live. She was obliterated by grief. She looked up at the buttery light pouring down through the eucalyptus trees. The sun was shining and Aviva took it as a personal affront that there was light still left in the world. At least she still had two sons. Raz and Yoni, Raz and Yoni. At least there was comfort in that.
A waitress with a ring between her nostrils and a dragonfly tattoo on her neck took their usual order: first, two cappuccinos, then two grilled cheese sandwiches and salads, and then another round of coffee. When the waitress left, Aviva let out a deep sigh.
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