Unlike his children, Moses couldn’t bring himself to watch it all unfold on TV or read about it online. He couldn’t believe it was happening, and couldn’t believe it hadn’t happened sooner. All the while, every Jewish person he knew had gone into a kind of mourning, removing himself or herself from society just as he’d removed the mezuzahs from his doorways. The world had finally gotten its pound of flesh—not even a century after it was founded, Israel was no more—and life for America could go on as before. Except that life did not go on as before, for even a single drop of rain there had significant consequences here, Moses thought, waking the trips up and rustling them out of bed.
“Who wants pancakes as big as Texas?” he asked them.
“I do, Daddy!” said Bronson, the first of them to rise, for he loved the mornings best, just like Moses, whom he most took after. Moses roused Bronson’s brothers, whispering, “Pancakes, pancakes,” into their ears, then dashed across the hall to wake the twins, who were already up and getting themselves dressed. A minor miracle. One of those kinds of miracles that only happened when he wasn’t looking, when he wasn’t paying attention to the here and now but rather to the fluctuating possibilities of a future in which his wife no longer resented him, his acting career picked up steam, Jacob saw Dietrich for who he was, Edith rescinded her invitation to Elias, his mom grew stronger, and his dad, terrified of finally being unmasked for the psychopath he was, fled the house, the state, the country, the world, never to be heard from again.
The twins—Dexter with his broken fingers, Baxter helping him into his shirt, then into his shorts and shoes, which he tied for his brother, double-knotting them so the laces wouldn’t come loose. Five years old and already so different from the way he and his own siblings treated one another. But then look whom we had as role models, he thought, hating himself for thinking badly of his mom, though there it was. She, too, had done her part in fomenting distrust among them all, so much so that for years the three had been divided, each to his or her own cell and to his or her own life. It wasn’t until much later, after they’d all moved out, went to college, and had a chance to live on their own, that they’d even begun to be able to see one another without rancor. He didn’t want that for his children.
The trips bumbled into the bathroom, pushing and shoving one another in good fun, whooping and hollering, until Moses went in and shushed them, telling them to be quiet, that their mom had gone back to bed. “If you wake her up, I’m going to have to take away all of your electronics,” he threatened. “Just remember that, okay, guys? Don’t make me the bad guy, not today. We have a long, long day ahead of us. Let’s all try to get along.”
He left them, these good-looking boys of his, to brush their hair and teeth, then set out again across the catwalk, treading more lightly the closer he came to the bedroom so as not to wake his wife. Before he entered, Moses removed his shoes and tiptoed through the dark, the heavy curtains drawn against the sun. He stood perfectly still to allow his eyes time to adjust, trying to make out the outline of his beloved—his beshert, his destiny—beneath the quilted comforter. They’d been together for fourteen years, many of them good, some of them not so good, yet Moses would not have traded in even one of the bad years, for to live without her, well, there was just no living without Pandora Orenstein-Jacobson, whose last name he’d taken as well, because that’s who he was, because that’s who she needed him to be. The idea that he hadn’t slept in the same bed with her in over a month distressed him, for no one knew about this part of the separation but them—they’d kept it a secret from everyone, especially from his mom, the news of which would have killed her, as it was killing him.
Before everyone had arrived, he’d slept in the guest room across the hall, sneaking back into the bedroom before the boys woke up. Now that the house was filled to the rafters, however, Moses had to be more creative and discreet and had been sleeping at Gibbs’s house on Calabasas Lake, which was even larger and grander than Moses’s. But of course it is, he thought, as his eyes finally adjusted to the relative dark and Pandora’s phone vibrated from somewhere deep in the folds of the bed: She often fell asleep with it in her hand. Her attachment to her phone irritated him beyond measure, yet he was trying to let it go, just as she was trying to let certain irritating idiosyncrasies of his go as well. They were trying.
Slipping under the covers, Moses found himself caring nothing about finding the phone or the video on it, nothing about anything except being right there, beside Pandora again. He curled up inside the cocoon of their marital bed, everything melting away, a shedding so profound that for a moment he could almost believe they were younger and still madly, deeply in love and they hadn’t yet had children and were still living in their first apartment in Thousand Oaks and he was getting commercials right and left and the studio kept extending his role as psychiatry resident Floyd Foxx on the hit L.A.-based sitcom Our Time’s Up, and his mom was breathing regularly and his dad was trying to find a cure for lung cancer and Jacob was in Brooklyn working on another play and Edith was in grad school falling in love with Elias and trying to get over her affair, exaggerated or not, with Sheik. He could almost believe it until he accidentally pressed himself against Pandora, who said, “Knock it off, Mo,” breaking the spell that he had cast and vanishing everything with it. Then she rolled over, away from him, and as she did, her phone, which she’d been sleeping on, lit up with new notifications. As he reached for it and turned on his side, his back to her, he listened for the sound of her breathing, the lap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as if she were trying to remove peanut butter, then other sounds, which he’d come both to love and to loathe—the click-clack of her jaw, the burble of her stomach, the occasional, sighing fart—all signs she was once again asleep.
Moses slid out of bed and hurried with the phone into the twins’ room, where Dexter was struggling half in, half out of his shirt. “Where’s your brother?” he asked the boy, the lower half of his face hidden.
“Downstairs,” he muttered as Moses went to help him. “I was trying to put on a different shirt, Daddy.”
“I can see that, yeah,” Moses said. He slipped one of his son’s small arms through one sleeve. “Hey, Dexter, will you do Daddy a favor and say Mommy’s passphrase into her phone?”
“Why do you have Mommy’s phone? Is yours broken?” the boy asked pleasantly, without any hint of suspicion.
What a great age to be, Moses thought, missing his five-year-old self. “Yes,” he said, “mine’s broken,” and oh, how he hated to lie, but it was just easier and more expedient and this explanation seemed enough to satisfy Dexter. He knew her passphrase, had heard her say it many times, but he couldn’t match her modulation.
“Okay, but I want you to know I’m doing this under the dress,” Dexter said. Under duress, which made Moses smile. He held the phone up to the boy’s mouth and told him to say, “I love Moses,” then waited for Dexter, who he gambled still sounded enough like his mom to fool the voice recognition software. “I love Moses,” he said at last, yet the phone did not accept the string of words and remained tantalizingly locked.
Moses had only gone into her phone once before, many years ago, when she was in labor with the triplets. He’d forgotten his phone in the car, and Pandora, out of her mind with pain, had thrust the phone into his hand and had told him her numeric passcode—how technology had changed—ordering him to call her dad. When he mentioned it later, she completely denied having given out her passcode, laughing at the very idea. But that was a different world, when she still loved and trusted him and kept him close to her heart by using a simple chain of numbers, their anniversary, to lock and unlock the secrets she kept. He gazed down at the phone, at the screenshot of Pandora and him holding hands, remembering the day of that photo shoot a few months ago. To his mind, it was the last good time they’d had together before Pandora cooled to him, the house becoming a place of battle rather than of respite. He stared hard at the phone, trying to imagine a n
ew set of words, the right ones in the right combination, that would give him the access he needed, for something told him he’d find things on her phone that she’d rather not have him see—changing her passphrase was proof.
More than ever, Moses wanted to unlock the phone and threw out random phrases to Dexter to say—“I love my boys,” “I love Nieves,” “I love my life,” “I love Calabasas”—but none of them worked.
“Can we go downstairs? I’m hungry,” Dexter said, drifting toward the door.
“Sure thing,” he said. “And thanks for helping me out, champ.”
“I’ll always help you out, Daddy,” he said. “You can count on me.”
My boy, Moses thought with such longing and love in his heart that for a moment he was utterly ashamed of himself for turning him into an accomplice. Luckily for him, his sons liked him better than they liked Pandora, who screamed at them from morning till night. She’s a screamer, both in and out of bed, he once told Gibbs. His mom had learned long ago not to intervene or say anything when Pandora was in one of her stormy, our-sons-are-dirty-filthy-creatures moods, but his dad, whom he’d reminded time and again that it was best to let her blow herself out, was a different story. “Something’s not right in the head with her,” his dad liked to say, in front of her, which of course just made matters worse. Moses suspected that part of his dad’s butting in had to do with how much pleasure he took in winding Pandora up even further, then sitting back to watch her spectacular implosion.
Moses thought of returning the phone, then decided to shove it in his pocket, for Pandora would be out for another couple of hours, which would buy him some time. Usually, she never slept in, up at the crack of dawn to see the boys off to school or sometimes to meet her dad for breakfast—that is, when he was in town and not gallivanting off to the Caribbean with his floozy du jour. It amazed him that she seemed to love her dad as much as she despised her mom. For years she’d had nothing at all to do with her, even though she lived just a few miles away. He envied Pandora’s relationship with her dad even as he fought against scolding her for holding a grudge against the woman who had brought her into the world. It’s not that he didn’t understand the strain between mother and daughter or couldn’t sympathize with her decision to cut the woman, good or bad, out of her grandkids’ lives. But even horrible parents, Moses knew, could make remarkable grandparents, often trying to make up for their failure and neglect of their own kids by heaping loads of attention on the next generation. This made him think about how his dad may have intentionally broken his son’s fingers, and he realized that not even this, the simplest of charitable, grandfatherly characterizations, could be applied to Julian. Moses sighed, following Dexter down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the boys were gathered on stools around the island, his dad at the stove wearing an apron, already spooning the pancake batter onto the griddle. “I want to flip them,” Baxter said, standing beside his paw-paw, who handed him the spatula.
“Where’re Mom and Aunt Thistle?” Moses asked, training one nervous eye on his dad, the other on Baxter.
“They’re in there,” his dad said, indicating the guest room.
“Keep an eye on your paw-paw,” Moses said, leaning down and whispering into Bronson’s ear. “I’ll be right back.”
He hurried out of the kitchen and through the den, passing the wall of glass, where he briefly caught his reflection and beyond that, the shadowed, sunless backyard, the dark green grass, the slate-colored flagstones, and the pool, everything seemingly in place, though not quite right, as if in the night they’d had an earthquake, which had shifted the world around and tilted it ever so slightly. Moses pressed on, though, for he had no time to dawdle, not then anyway, not with so much riding on what he might or might not find within the locked confines of Pandora’s phone, which buzzed frantically in his pocket and played the theme to The Twilight Zone—Pandora’s alarm. He silenced it, then headed for her office down the long, narrow, unlit hallway at the far back of the horseshoe-shaped house.
Here, he knocked cautiously, a silly involuntary reflex, as if he might find her inside—when she was in her office, he knew enough not to disturb her—then entered the Fortress of Disquietude, as he called it, this room into which she disappeared for hours and which was the central nervous system of her thriving online business—Pandora’s Box: The Mommy’s Treasure Trove of Family-Friendly Fun in Los Angeles!—an email newsletter that reached eighty thousand families, Jewish and Gentile alike, in the Valley and beyond.
He hadn’t been in her office for months and here, too, everything looked exactly as it always did, though also slightly out of whack. Keeping one ear on his sons’ voices, Moses brushed his eyes over the desk, skimming it for something, anything, that would help him get into her phone. His fingers quested through her papers, then the drawers, yet nothing leaped out at him, only that what he was doing was in direct violation of the rules they had set down ages ago—no one, including Moses, was ever to be in her office without her express permission. Not only was he breaking this rule, he was also trying to break into her phone, and that’s when it struck him that if she ever found out about any of this, she really would divorce him. Her phone buzzed and pinged again, announcing another text, then another and another—Someone is desperate to get in touch with her, someone who isn’t me, he thought, leaving her office and heading back into the kitchen, where his dad was serving the first round of pancakes.
The boys slathered them with Irish butter and real maple syrup—his dad was a stickler that his pancakes had to be served with the genuine (pronounced: gen-u-ayn) article, which he’d brought with him all the way from Texas, because, as he said, “It’s clear you’d feed them that Aunt Jemima slop. I’d like them to grow up with a modicum of taste. Can you blame me for trying?”
The door behind him opened and out rolled his mom, pushed along by Edith, who was shaking her head and mouthing something he was having a hard time deciphering, though it looked like she was saying “I hate this,” but she might have been saying “I hate him,” meaning their dad. And that’s when Moses had a moment of eureka, grinning a big dopey grin that stretched from ear to ear. “Good morning, Mo,” his mom said. “Did you just have one of your father’s pancakes, or did you just win the lottery? I love seeing you smile.”
“Morning, Ma,” he said, reaching for Dexter and drawing him out of the kitchen in midbite, the fork still grasped in his little fingers. “We’ll be right back,” and he led the boy to the wall of glass and stopped, retrieving Pandora’s phone from his pocket. “Okay, I want you to try this: Try saying ‘I hate Moses.’ ”
“Dad, you’re being a big silly,” he said.
“Just try it,” he said, handing the phone to Dexter, who whispered the three words into it, handed it back to him with a sad, disappointed shrug, then raced into the kitchen to finish his pancakes with his brothers.
Moses looked down at the phone, which, finally unlocked, lit up in his palm. It did not surprise him that Pandora had changed only one word in the passphrase, for she was nothing if not predictable, even in her scorn. First things first, he thought, and searched the phone for the video, which he found without much trouble. He played it, and he saw what Edith had seen earlier—their dad, tampering with their mother’s spare oxygen tank in the back of the minivan. It did look as though Julian had had no idea he was being recorded, just as Edith said. But Moses, unlike his sister, understood instantly that his dad had done something to their mother’s spare oxygen tank. He played the video again, just to make sure, slowing it down frame by frame when he got to the end, but even then he couldn’t exactly see what his father was doing, only that he was doing something. He glanced up from the phone in the direction of the kitchen, fuming, in shock. He tasted bile in the back of his throat, thought he might be sick, and rushed into the bathroom, stuffing Pandora’s phone into his back pocket. He turned on the taps and held his face under the water, wondering why his own wife had kept the video from him, then quic
kly understanding that she had kept it from him precisely because she knew him and knew what the video would do to him. He reached for the toilet, not to vomit but to sit down, forgetting about Pandora’s phone, which made a sharp, unforgettable crack the moment he sat down on the lid.
“Ruck me funning,” he said, jumping up and removing the phone from his back pocket to find a single fissure in the glass, from top to bottom, a split that ran directly through the center of Pandora and him, who were angled toward each other and holding hands, separating them as if it knew. Moses forwarded the video to himself and Edith—he would have to explain that traceable offense to Pandora later—then left the bathroom. He snuck up the stairs and into the bedroom, knowing the right thing to do was to have the glass replaced, yet sometimes the right thing was negated by too many wrong things. Just as he was setting the phone on the floor, it buzzed and lit up again in his hand—another text. Before he knew what he was doing, he was opening it and reading.
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