Roz stood facing him. She felt oddly stung, not by Jacob but by time itself, that her younger son was growing so quickly. “You’ll tower over all of us soon enough,” she said, her voice warbling. She swept the curls of golden-brown hair off his forehead. She turned and caught his reflection in the mirror and in that moment he looked exactly like his father, though a softer, gentler, and far kinder version of him, a version she’d kept hoping would reappear one day, if she could somehow do everything right. Here, standing before her, was Julian and not Julian, a spitting image of the man she married when that man was a boy and also a complete unlikeness, so different from his father in every way that she wondered where he’d come from—far too sensitive, far too perceptive and thoughtful for his age. And he loved her with an all-encompassing love that never once failed to eclipse a bad day or another fight with Julian, because she always had Jacob just down the hall, ready to hold her and she him, to comfort him against the bullies at school and the bully at home. She knew how deep his grievances against Julian ran, thanks to that small black notebook of his, which she’d come across by accident while changing his sheets and pillowcases one morning and had been unable to resist peeking into. She’d flipped through the pages without reading any of what he’d written, then replaced the notebook and left the room, though she hadn’t stopped thinking about her discovery all day.
Still, her curiosity to see what he’d written, if any of it pertained to her, became intolerable, a thirst she had to slake. Just a tiny peek, that’s all she was going to take, so she stole back into his room the next day, slid out the notebook, this record he kept of the wrongs committed against him, and peeked, finding it full of rotten, hard-to-swallow fragments and sentences filled with sour complaints and dusted with a bitter, powdery perception. She wanted to go to Jacob, to talk about it with him, but if she did, she knew he’d never forgive her and that she’d forfeit his trust. And she’d never be able to live with that.
Roz sat with it for a couple of days, vacillating between confiding in one of her friends, another mother with a son Jacob’s age, who, she thought, might explain to her why he was keeping such a horrible, detailed record, and forgetting she’d ever read it, much less stumbled upon it in the first place. She felt a driving sense of duty to understand Jacob better and what exactly this notebook was. What made him come home every day from school, disappear into his room, and jot down things, in her opinion, that were nothing more than everyday eventualities best ignored, as much a part of life’s rich pageant as the joy of winning the lottery or the misery of going bankrupt? Life was one long glorious miscalculation, she might have told him, a series of teachable moments that often resulted in a desire to do it all differently, though ending up in the same place, clutching the same soggy bag of drowned kittens—ultimately, life was random, nonsensical, and chiefly unfair. Roz knew what a total waste of energy it was to hold on to the unpleasant, to plaster the rooms of one’s life with the ugly, contemptible faces of those who wished and did us harm, and worst of all, to tally every slight, both major and minor, we suffered along the way.
“ ‘My Manifest of Meanness.’ That’s what he called it,” Roz said into the silence that fell after the last verse of the song, turning and speaking directly to Dietrich. “Did Jacob ever tell you about it, the catalog of every mean thing anyone ever did or said to him? Most of the entries—is that what you call them, dear?—he devoted to his dad, naturally, because his dad was a very mean man. But can you believe? Page after page of hurt and injustice going back years, some of it spectacular reading, I must say.”
“You…read my journal,” Jacob said, his voice a squeak from the backseat. She immediately regretted having said anything, for she now understood the severity of what she’d done. “And now you’re discussing it before a live studio audience? Great. Just fucking great. Like I want to revisit it—”
“But don’t you see, Jacob, that you are letting the world know anyway,” interjected Dietrich, whom she couldn’t have adored more than at that moment.
“Your plays, dear,” she said. “I’m sorry I read it, but I’m even sorrier for the way you felt. I wish you could have just come to me,” although in saying it, she wondered how she might have reacted if he had. “And before you ask—no, I never told your father about any of it. It would have only hurt him,” she said, taking a tiny breath before continuing. “As you kids know, I spent my entire life doing my best to shield you from him and him from you. And it’s killed me. So much hatred among you and there I was, trapped in the middle of it. So yes, something was bound to give, but don’t think for a second this is how I wanted to spend Passover with my five grandsons or that I’m the least bit proud of any of this.” There he was, she thought angrily, lying in the pool, like a drowned gift horse, and instead of listening to Dietrich, you just had to look into its mouth. And here we are. I gave you the perfect setup and you blew it. You blew it! She took shallow sucks of air; for the first time since they had strapped Julian into the far backseat and headed for Point Dume, she wondered if Edith might not be right. They could still turn around and go back to Mo and Pandora’s. There was still time to undo this and make things over—and if not over, at least more palatable. She could let her kids scatter as they had the moment they reached adulthood, leaving her behind. She’d resented them for it, if she were being honest, because they continued to be the best and worst parts of her, the best and worst parts of Julian.
Dietrich eventually left the road and angled the minivan into a deserted rest area off the main thoroughfare with an extraordinary view of the Pacific Ocean. The navigation system announced, “You have arrived at your destination,” and kept announcing it until Edith barked at Dietrich to shut it off.
The moment Dietrich came to a stop, Edith leaped out, grumbling curse words under her breath and clutching herself as she walked. She hurried for the bathrooms, a thatched, faux-wood-sided hut replete with a chimney, which resembled a quaint English cottage, a vast improvement on the old structure. The boys leaped out as well, clearing the van and running in circles, regressing momentarily to adolescence, drunk and loopy from the morning’s events. Dietrich shut off the engine, then climbed out, walking around to the passenger side to help Roz out.
“You’re a good boy. Jacob had better appreciate you. If he doesn’t, you let me know, and I’ll disinherit him,” she joked.
“Vould you like me to grab ze vheelchair, Mrs. Yacobson?” Dietrich asked. What was that? Did I just hear him correctly? she wondered. Had his German accent become more noticeable and far more pronounced outside? She supposed he might be delirious with fatigue, his eyes confusing the rolling hills of Malibu for his native Bavaria and sending misguided signals to the speech center in his brain. But no, he was smiling, a big, toothy smile that showed off all of his small, stained teeth. It was only a joke, but my heavens, the accent was enough to scare the breath out of her, recalling her parents and how stringently they’d adhered to removing any trace of German in their voices, forbidding German in the house, especially in front of Roz, whom they were only protecting, they’d said later when she asked. And she damn well asked later, after she’d called off the wedding to Doug Butterfield because she’d met this man, Julian Bernard Jacobson, a PhD candidate in respiratory physiology—“The definition’s not that hard to remember, people: the study and function of the lungs,” Julian used to holler at anyone who was curious. And he finished her sentences and he didn’t hide or sugarcoat things, and he’d asked her if she was Jewish, had a hunch she might be—he was the reason she was there in Little Neck, confronting her parents about their past and pleading with them to leave nothing out.
“Are we Jewish?” she’d asked them.
“What does it matter?” Trudy responded.
“It matters,” she said, “because I’ve fallen in love with a Jewish man.”
“Mein Gott,” said Trudy, the only time she’d ever spoken German and invoked God in front of Roz.
“We’re born Jew
ish, but if anything, we’re agnostics,” Ernie said.
“We are? But you raised me a Catholic?” Roz asked. “I drank the blood and ate the body of Christ every single Sunday.”
“It was a different time,” Ernie said.
“We’re born-again atheists,” Trudy had said, correcting her husband. “Tell your Jewish boyfriend that the next time he asks.”
Now she heard Dietrich ask again about the wheelchair. “It won’t be necessary,” she told him, taking a step, then another, testing the ground, testing her own stamina. She took what felt like belated breaths, as if her lungs were out of sync with the rest of her body, yet found if she gulped the air as deeply as she could, she just might be able to make it without having to resort to the chair or the tank. She’d been preparing for this—okay, not for this precisely, not the removal of Julian’s body from the minivan, but for something just as momentous: the triplets’ upcoming bar mitzvahs. She wanted to walk up the steps of the pulpit and stand together with her entire family. For months now, she’d been attending physical therapy—well, when Julian would let her, for it exhausted and winded her and he didn’t want her to tire herself out. She’d fought him, and it was proving to have been worth it, as she arrived at the back of the minivan. She peered inside the back window, the overhead throwing off a diffuse spray of light just enough for her to make out her dead husband, whose head had fallen forward on his neck. Seated in this position, the back of Julian’s head was on full display, and Roz had an unobstructed view into his brain cavity; a large chunk of skull was missing.
“If only I had my melon baller,” she said as her kids reappeared, knitting themselves around her.
“Ma! Don’t be ghoulish!” Edith said, though she was pretty sure that at least Mo had laughed. Undone by the sight of her daddy in the backseat, Edith scolded her: “Daddy might be beneath your contempt, but he was still a person. He gave the three of us life, after all.”
“And you all plotted and schemed to take it away,” she said, turning to face them. “Eventually, I would like to know which one of you suggested it, though I already have my suspicions, Jacob, or am I barking up the wrong tree?”
“What makes you think it was Jacob?” Mo asked from inside his hoodie, which softened his voice into a muffled echo. “Maybe one of your other children loves you as much as Jacob? Is it out of the realm of possibility that Edith or I wanted to do something nice for you? No, I suppose it had to be Jacob, your favorite. I mean, am I wrong?”
“Fuck you, Mo,” Jacob hissed. “Take it back.”
“Yeah, right. Dream on, little dreamer,” Mo said, like a parrot of Julian with the same scoff and dismissal in his voice.
“Stop it. You just stop it right now,” Edith interjected, banging a fist on the minivan and sending the car alarm squawking, the lights flashing on and off. Here, out in the wide open, the sound traveled everywhere, expanding and intensifying, rippling in still louder and shriller arcs with each passing second.
Mo tried the driver-side door, but it was locked, as all the doors were locked. “Where’s the German?” he asked. “Find your damn German, Jacob.” And Jacob departed, searching for Dietrich, who seemed to have vanished. “Did he tell you about the guy’s grandparents? They were fucking Nazis in charge of confiscating works by Jewish artists. Degenerate art, they called it. Fucking Germans.”
“Yes, Mo, I’m well aware of that,” Roz said, although she wasn’t. A fast and furious chill descended upon her and raised the hair on her arms, though it originated not from the chilly air but from the icy breath of the past, which contained within it a slide show of her parents fleeing Vienna on a night train bound for Istanbul and carrying only what they could take with them—a few articles of clothing, a photograph or two, and her mother’s prized and priceless possession, an original self-portrait by the Austrian master Egon Schiele, the only painting that fit inside Gertrude’s suitcase.
Jacob returned with the keys and shut off the minivan’s alarm, saying, “He’s taking a nap on a picnic table.”
It was at that moment that Roz knew exactly how all of this had to go. She also knew that, judging by the sky, they didn’t have much time left, so it had to be now or never. “Jacob, you’re going to pull the van around the cottage and back it up to the picnic table,” she said. “Then, Mo, you and your brother are going to lift your father out and lay him down, while your sister—where is Thistle?”
Jacob pointed at the vending machines, and sure enough there she was, a dim aura cast on her consternated face. She was just standing there, swaying a bit in place, as if she were six years old again and wondering why her bag of chips hadn’t fallen. Roz shuffled toward her daughter, her breathing shallow but steady, shooing her boys off to their tasks. Once she got to Edith, Roz reached into her pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Go crazy, Thistle,” she said, sliding the bill into her daughter’s hand.
Edith dropped the bill to the ground, while Roz ran a hand through her tangled red curls, smoothing the tangles out as best she could. She was tired, Roz knew, and aggrieved and in shock, but now was not the time to turn her fiercely ethical mind against her family. Edith backed away from her and kneeled down, running her hands along the dirt. When she stood up again, she had a stone in her hand, a flat stone the size of a baby’s fist, and she took a couple of steps toward the vending machine, wound up her arm, and sent the stone through the glass, shattering it. “I’ve been dreaming of that for decades,” Edith said, triumphant, reaching past the shards of glass and pulling out bag after bag of chips and pretzels and those awful neon-orange cheese crackers.
Roz took her by the elbow and led her around the side of the cottage, where the boys had laid Julian out on the picnic table, just as she’d asked them to do. “While you’ve been dreaming of that, Thistle, I have been dreaming of this,” Roz said, standing over her husband. She dialed up the oxygen on the tank while Dietrich walked around the minivan and climbed in. For a moment, Roz was worried that he would take off and strand them. “Jacob, go see what he’s up to,” she directed, but before Jacob could take his first step, the air around them shifted, filling with what sounded like a string quartet.
Ah, how lovely, Roz thought, studying Julian’s left hand, on which he wore his gold wedding band. She lifted the hand up, his arm already stiffening, his fingers swelling, and knew she’d never get the ring off. Her children stood near her, just out of the circumference of their dead father, as if they feared he might awaken and pick up where he’d left off, screaming at and insulting them. They had lived in Julian’s shadow their entire lives, and it would take some time before any of them got used to living in the light. She feared that without Julian to hate, her children might turn their hatred on one another, or inward, or toward her. She wondered if in killing Julian she’d opened herself up to this, for she had not been innocent, she had done her part in fueling the anger that burned brightly in all of them. If she’d only left him when she’d had the chance—well, as Julian liked to say, If if were a skiff, we’d go boating.
“I think I might need some help,” Roz said, struggling with Julian’s ring. But then out of the shadows came Dietrich and he reached out and bent the finger back and broke it, the sound reverberating wildly in Roz’s ears. He spit on the finger, then slid the ring off and handed it to her. How she’d longed for this over the years, to be free of him. Julian had never deserved the love she’d given him, she saw that now as she undressed him, his skin as white as the porcelain toilet over which Roz had spent every one of her pregnancies—the most horrid morning sickness of anyone she knew. And Julian had made fun of her for that, saying she wasn’t woman enough to carry his children. He’d said vicious things and still she’d stayed. He said things, then showed up with flowers. He said things, then took her to a fancy dinner and later bought her a new house and a new car and everything she’d ever wanted, all of this to make up for the fact that he did not have it within him to say that he was sorry. She’d only once, ever, heard hi
m say it. And even that had been under serious duress. Yet that, too, no longer mattered, for she had her children and her grandchildren, and what was left of her health. She would not tarry in mourning Julian Jacobson. She finally saw just how irredeemable he truly was, a black hole into which he sucked all light and luck and love, manipulating them into giving it to him when he had no love to give in return. A vacancy. An absence. That’s all he’d ever been.
“Well, here we are,” she said, turning to her kids, who were standing around the picnic table gazing down at the body of their dad. In his hand, Moses held the chamois, which was dripping with water and which traveled with Julian everywhere they went, and Moses began to run it over his dad, washing him, a ritual that went back thousands of years—the cleansing of a Jewish corpse. Each of her kids took a turn, even Jacob, who washed his dad’s feet, so lovingly and so gently that Roz felt prouder of him then than she ever had.
“Would anyone like to say anything?” she asked, staring down at this husband of hers, at the blood-soaked pajamas she held in her hands. No one had any words to say. A pity, she thought, yet what could they say about him that hadn’t been said already? Then they were all hoisting him off the table, even Edith, who said quietly, “I’m sorry, Daddy.” Roz knew that her daughter would have the hardest time of it, that it would take her years to get over her grief, but that one day she would. One day she’d wake up and see that this was necessary, exactly how it had to happen, and that she was better off without him.
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