After heading into the garage, Moses found his dad tinkering with the dirt bike. “The frame’s bent,” he observed, “and so is one of the rims.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll have to buy him a new one,” Moses said, as his dad reached into his pocket and pulled up a couple of crisp hundred-dollar bills.
“Here,” he said, extending the money to Moses. “Go on. Take it.” From time immemorial, this had always been his dad’s way. First the lightning anger and fork-tongued insults, then the cooldown and the payoff. Moses took the money because he’d never not taken it, thus resetting the buttons and beginning the cycle anew. “Buy him a new one,” his dad said, wandering back into the house, probably to brag to his wife about this latest mitzvah of his.
Moses climbed into his car and began reversing out of the driveway just as Edith pulled up to the house in her ridiculous cargo van. She climbed out, then hurried over to his car, opened the right-side door, and hurled herself into the passenger seat. “That was an absolute nightmare. But luckily the damage isn’t as bad as I thought. I’ll just say someone backed into me,” she said.
“How did you get to Claremont?” he asked, confused, for none of them had driven her there.
“I took an Uber,” she replied, though Moses didn’t quite believe her. Probably some guy she met on a hookup app and talked into driving her, he thought, feeling smug and sorry for her as ever. “And where are you sneaking off to?” she asked, leaning into him. She smelled gamy, and her face was both puffy and drawn. Her breath stank of mint mouthwash.
“I have to run up to the kids’ school and pick them up, Thistle,” he said. It’d been the boys’ idea to sign up for these Saturday self-defense classes, choosing Krav Maga over Muay Thai, for they liked the poses and the lightning-quick reflexes of their hands and feet—the roundhouse kick especially titillated them. Moses was all too happy to pay for the expensive lessons, for how could he possibly deny or object to his boys’ wishes to protect themselves? Pandora was just as supportive, though it was the last time in recent memory, Moses thought, that they’d been able to come to an agreement on anything. “If you’re coming, strap yourself in. If not, I’ll be right back,” he added, though it seemed to him that she hadn’t heard a word he’d just said because she was looking at the house.
“Do you think he has any concept of what he did to us? I mean, an actual, concrete idea of what a prick he was?” She whipped her head back around. “Did I…Did I ever tell you—nah, I don’t think I ever did because why would I have?—how he convinced me that Mom was a witch? I was terrified of her. Like, she scared the bejesus out of me, Mo. But that’s what he wanted, and I fell for it. I spent the entirety of my childhood afraid of the wrong parent. Priceless, huh? Well, it just goes to show what a great judge of character I am. My mother’s daughter after all, I guess.”
“Edith, why don’t you stay here and take care of yourself,” he said, having neither the desire nor the time to discuss the moral ramifications of her having driven while intoxicated. He wasn’t about to mention how dangerous it was, even more so if she’d gotten pulled over by the wrong cop—driving while under the influence and driving while Jewish, a double whammy that might have ended disastrously for his sad sister. He didn’t want to scare her, so he didn’t mention the rumor that Pandora had passed down to him last week about the mysterious disappearance of several Jewish women who’d said good-bye to their husbands and kids, headed to the grocery store, and were never seen or heard from again, their cars abandoned in parking lots or by the sides of the road. He nearly told her about the pool, wanting to suggest she go for a little swim to sober herself up, then thought better of it, for who knew if she just might not drown in the process.
“Do you think he ever went down on Ma?” she asked. “I ask because Elias never once went down on me. What kind of a person marries a guy who won’t go down on her? Me, your sister, that’s who,” and she opened up her door, yet didn’t make a move to go. “You know something? I’m going to tell you a little secret before you go—I always wanted to date a guy named Moses so I could sing ‘Go down on me, Moses, way down,’ ” and she broke out into one of her uncontrollable hyena laughs, her eyes springing with tears.
“Jesus, Edith,” he said, “what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I might have gotten the teensiest bit high,” she said, laughing again. “Not drunk. Just magnificently high. With Zion. Out the window of his dorm room.”
“You got high with Zion? Sheik Cohen’s son?” he asked, her poor judgment confounding him despite her dismal track record. He knew this was not the first time she’d let herself fall prey to her own wayward impulses. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“The Magic Eight Ball says…all signs point to yes,” she gasped with laughter, launching into a monologue about how she hadn’t planned to contact Zion, but then she’d seen him and he looked so much like Sheik that she just couldn’t not get in touch with him, because she thought talking to the son might help her put to rest her past with his father. She’d emailed him under a false name and gave him false credentials—the address formula for Pomona students embarrassingly easy to deduce—explaining that she was visiting with her son who was keen on going to school there. “I told him my son was on a campus tour and asked if he wanted to meet,” she finished. “I know, I know,” she said when Moses scoffed. “Look, please don’t be mean to me right now. I’m…I’m dealing the best I can, Mo, but a few months from now she’s…” And her voice trailed away. Moses wanted to comfort her, but he was too fixated on how it was that they, he and she, had both come from the same parents.
“Anyway, we met for a coffee, then took a walk around campus. He’s such a nice young man, the kind I wish I’d met when I was his age. Tell him who you are, I kept thinking. Tell him you’re sorry for terrifying him when he was a boy, that it was a different version of you who used to stalk him and his father. It happened so long ago, but the way he spoke to me, it was almost as if he knew exactly who I was and why I’d come. I didn’t have to say anything because Zion, unlike his father, has an incredible amount of compassion. I told him that I’d seen him speak yesterday and that it had moved me. Then he said that he realized that I was the lady who had driven the van onto the quad and how fucking awesome it was.”
She was rambling, which she did when she was high or drunk, and Moses sat there in silence, trying his best to withhold judgment. He couldn’t possibly judge her as harshly as he suspected she was judging herself.
“Long story short, he invited me up to his dorm room and before I knew it we were smoking a joint and gazing out over the campus, and he kissed me or I kissed him. Please don’t hate me, Mo. I…”
“You need to get out of my car right now,” he said. “Before I start accelerating and push you out.”
“Don’t be so damn sanctimonious, unless of course you enjoy sounding like Daddy. So I kissed him. So what?”
“So what? Let me tell you about so what,” and he launched into all the reasons it might not have been such a grand idea to get high with, then kiss, then do God only knows what else with Zion Abdullah Cohen, for he didn’t believe she’d really stopped there. “Do you not remember what happened in D.C., because I sure do. You also kissed and fucked that boy’s father and see where that got you. You tried to commit suicide, and you worried all of us to death. Look, it’s not my place to criticize anyone’s love life”—thinking about the state of his own marriage—“but you have some serious sexual hang-ups that you haven’t dealt with. I’m not blaming you. I want to see you happy, and you aren’t. You aren’t, Thistle.”
“I don’t remember the last time I was happy,” she said. “Oh, wait, yes, I do. It was about three hours ago, when I was sitting on Zion’s bed. And for the record, you don’t seem very happy to me, either. But the difference between us is that I’m doing—did—something about it. I told him exactly who I was before I left and do you know what he said to me? He said that his fath
er treated him and his mother like absolute shit and that he had all sorts of women on the side. I’ve been idealizing that man for years and he was fucking everything that moved? All I ever wanted was to love Sheik Cohen. I thought I would have been perfectly happy had I been given that chance. But the moment I tried to get close to him, he shut down and turned me into a shrew. You know he told me that his marriage was over? That they were divorcing? Oldest trick in the book and I fell for it. I fell for the whole damn thing, because that’s what people with hearts do. They fall. Headfirst. And they either swim or they don’t. They either make it to the opposite shore or they drown.”
His sister was one who swam, he thought, giving her credit for finally taking some responsibility for it all. “And besides,” she went on, “Sheik got a fucking novel out of it, but what did I get? A restraining order barring me from coming within five hundred yards of them and an indelible scarlet letter on my record. I admit that I was obsessed and that I stalked him, but that’s all I did. I didn’t do the terrible things in the story. I thought you believed me at least.”
“I do, Edith,” he said, yet this news about Zion only managed to reshape how he assembled the past. “And that boy at Emory? With the sexual harassment suit?”
“Alleged,” she corrected.
“Okay. Alleged harassment,” he said. “That’s all it is, though, right? Alleged?”
“What kind of professor and person do you think I am?” she said. “I don’t fuck my students, Mo. It’s completely unethical. I’d fuck any number of them if they weren’t my students because they’re beautiful and I like sex and some of them remind me of the way I was at that age—all awkward and gawky and yearning to be loved by someone. But I don’t fuck them, Mo. I never have. And the one who’s suing me isn’t my type at all, if you want to get right down to it. He’s skinny and hairless and bony and looks like a child. I like men. The crafty little asshole trumped up the charges because he didn’t get the grade he thought he deserved. I have plenty of other students who don’t get the grades they think they deserve, but they don’t lie and distort scenarios that never happened. It’d be nice if my own brother took my word for it. If the roles were reversed, I’d defend you, Mo. But I guess that’s another way we differ.”
Yes, it is, he thought, recalling what Jacob had told him yesterday about the kiss. He wanted to tell Edith about it, but then checked his watch. “Look, Pandora’s going to tear me a new one if I’m late getting the kids,” he said. “Just go inside and make nice with everyone until I get back. We can talk more about this later.”
“Or…we can just forget the whole thing,” she said, stepping out and slamming the door. As she went, he thought he heard her singing, “I’m the good witch lollipop…”
All of the boys attended Ilan Ramon Day School, a private Jewish day school in Agoura Hills. With the 101 still closed in both directions, the trip took longer than usual, but he didn’t mind because it gave him time to collect himself and go over how he was going to attack the question of the water. His boys liked to close ranks, protecting one another when accused of misdeeds, in this particular case, of grand larceny, for California had made stealing water a serious offense, punishable with jail time and steep fines. The law was the first of its kind, though other states, like Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were about to pass similar measures. There wasn’t enough water for the state, the population of which had reached a staggering forty-one million people, according to the last census, huge numbers of them displaced Israelis, who found the climate and terrain familiar. Desalination plants were springing up all along the Pacific Coast corridor, but they weren’t desalinating fast enough, not yet anyway.
To get onto the school’s campus, Moses had to pass two security checkpoints—one at the bottom of the hill, another at the top, each time presenting a laminated badge, which the guard swiped through a card reader, raising the mechanical arm. The school itself was heavily fortified, full of a private security presence bought and paid for by the parents that he’d also come to take for granted and found as ordinary as the flags of Israel that the school refused to take down. He didn’t like seeing the ubiquitous armed guards, who were stationed at every entrance and exit, yet they were living through some incredibly rough, menacing times, and he supposed this was just the way it had to be. If water was California’s most precious commodity, then the boys were his and he was more than happy to show ID if it meant their protection and survival—jihadists and violent anti-Semites had already bombed a couple of yeshivas, one in Beverly Hills, the other in West Hollywood.
The boys were lined up and waiting for him, Bronson, whose turn it was to sit in front, hopping in beside Moses, while the rest scattered into the back and the way back. Moses figured that the one who sat farthest away was the trip with the most to hide—and so he directed his questioning at Brandon, who promptly denied having any part in Pool-water-gate. “Then which one of you did it?” he demanded, while Bronson sat beside him, humming “Dayenu,” which they’d practiced again yesterday in assembly. “I’m not angry and neither is your mom. I just need you to be honest with me.”
“It wasn’t us, Dad,” said Brendan, followed by Dexter, who was then followed by Baxter, a chorus of denials.
“Fine,” Moses said. “If that’s the way you want to play it, then you leave me no choice. When we get home, I want all of you to go to your rooms. No Wii, no PlayStation, no tablets, no computers. And absolutely no TV.”
“But, Dad,” whined four, but not Bronson, who remained utterly removed, which made Moses wonder if he should have been questioning his favorite little oddball, this boy of his who cared nothing for family drama or politics and preferred to sit all of it out, even as his mom screamed at him and tried to drag him into it. This boy who never had an unkind word to say about anyone and who drifted through his life as if everything were already laid out before him. Moses loved Bronson best and most, for he saw him as a superior being, the apotheosis of who Moses wished he could be and a paradigm for the rest of them to follow and emulate. My own little messiah, he thought, turning to him.
“So is there anything you’d like to tell me, Bronze?” he whispered. “Anything you’d like to add? Tell me who did it, okay?”
“No, Dad, I took a solemn oath not to tell,” he said. “I made a promise.”
“You made a promise to whom? Which one of your brothers did it?” Moses asked, growing irritated. He was bending under the weight of his own life and starting to think that when it all came crashing down, he’d welcome the fall. “I’m your dad. See how that trumps everything else?”
“I’m no snitch,” he said, imitating a movie gangster.
“You disappoint me,” Moses said. “I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Bronson said. “And I’m only twelve. I never thought I’d see the day when my own dad would want me to break a promise. I’m just as disappointed in you as you are in me,” and he turned his face to the window and said nothing more.
If it weren’t for the other four, who would certainly bear witness to his fury and blab to their mom about it, he might have pulled over to give Bronson a good and thorough thrashing. Yet he’d learned patience and he’d learned reserve and he wasn’t about to let his boys see him come apart. He focused on the road while he seethed, beads of perspiration popping out on his forehead and his heart thumping wildly in his chest, the digital heart galloping so fast that he was afraid it might simply leap off the screen or short-circuit the watch again.
Once they got home, all the boys leaped out, hooting and hollering and karate-chopping one another as they ran inside, probably to tattle on him and complain to their mom and grandparents about how Daddy was being mean and unfair. Only Bronson remained, still refusing to look at him. “One day none of this is going to matter,” he said. “All of it’s going to disappear.”
“What are you talking about, Bronze?” he asked. “Did Paw-Paw say something to you?
You shouldn’t listen to him whatever it is.”
“Nothing,” the boy said, turning to face Moses at last, an expression of pure calm and resignation in his face. “C’mon, Dad. Look around you. Look at where we are,” then he opened the door, climbed out, and headed into the house as well.
It was a sobering moment, and it lingered even after Moses climbed out of the car, put down the garage door, and went inside, where he found the boys in the kitchen. “Okay, grab your snacks and then up to your rooms,” he said. “If I hear even a single beep, I’m taking away all your electronic privileges for a month. Got it?”
He heard his dad in the next room, where he was having an animated discussion with Chandler, the tech guy, about the necessity of an education. “In a few years, even a secondary degree might be worthless. Ask my sons—one got his MFA in something useless like playwriting, the other in something even more useless like acting,” and he laughed derisively and far too loudly. “The humanities are going the way of the dinosaurs. What you need is a PhD in computer engineering coupled with a law degree in intellectual property, and you’ll be golden. You’ll be the future of this country.”
“What I need is to marry a rich woman,” Chandler said, laughing.
“Like I did,” his dad said, or at least that’s what Moses thought he heard, for the boys were clanking around in the fridge.
Pandora appeared in the doorway and asked Moses if she could speak to him. “In a second,” he said, hoping to overhear his dad say another disparaging remark or ten.
“Now,” Pandora insisted. “It’s important.”
“What? What is it, O light of my loins?” he asked once they were back in the garage and sitting in the Expedition, where they often went to speak and to fight and even to fuck sometimes so that the boys couldn’t hear them.
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