They came to the edge of the bluff, the sea pounding at the rocks below, and Roz counted to three—and then they released him, tossing him unceremoniously over the side. They did not watch him fall, nor did they hear a splash. After it was over, her kids wandered away, toward the bathrooms to clean themselves up, saying nothing. Only Roz remained. She took one quick look over the edge, just to make sure, for she was worried that with Julian’s luck he’d awakened and was clinging to a vine or a tree root and at any moment would be yelling at her to pull him up. But Julian was gone, and there was nothing but the sea and the rocks and the fish, which she hoped were already feasting on him. You had to be good for something, she thought, joining her brood in the bathroom, where she rinsed herself off, then they all headed back to the minivan, where Roz instructed Jacob to grab his father’s fishing gear—his prized rod and reel, his tackle box—from out of the back, then toss it all over the side of the cliff, which he did, returning to the minivan with an eerie, gleeful smile on his face, the same smile she remembered him wearing when she and Julian announced all those years ago, and in the very same spot, that they were divorcing.
—
It all went according to plan, well, to the amended plan, the one upon which they all agreed on the drive back to Von Trapp Lane. Mo put on an Oscar-worthy performance for the police officer they called, distraught as he recounted his predawn fishing trip with his dad, in which the two waded out into the surf and fished for a couple of placid hours before they were ambushed by a group of bat-wielding, neo-Nazi skinheads who rushed into the surf and surrounded Julian, taunting and terrorizing him. His dad, he said, had begged him to flee to the safety of the shore. He’d accidentally dropped his phone in the process, which was why he hadn’t been able to call for help immediately. He’d stood there, watching helplessly as Julian was hit in the head with a bat. He’d be hearing that sound forever, Mo said, the echoing crunch of his dad’s skull caving in. Then his dad disappeared under the waves, good as dead, he imagined, and the group then turned in unison and headed for him. He’d raced to the car, climbed in, and sped away.
Roz pointed out the graffiti on the door of the house, leading the officer to draw his own connection between last night’s crime and that morning’s, which claimed the life of her children’s dear, beloved father and her own dear, beloved husband. Edith, wretched with shame, took to her bed and remained there, taking personal leave from Emory, and Jacob and Dietrich changed their tickets, not once but twice, Jacob more than ready to go but Dietrich reassuring him that he’d regret it if they did. For two weeks, Roz, the dowager, came to grips with her widowhood and began to plan a new future, one that did not in any way resemble the one she’d been facing when Julian was still alive and they were heading off on a cruise, during which, she was fairly certain, he’d been planning to kill her. And so it happened that on the fifteenth day after Julian’s death, Roz awoke and decided it was time, well, to decide.
She could stay indefinitely, or she could leave and go home. She could get on a plane and fly to Paris or sit in the sun in the backyard for hours on end. Her days were her own again and for the first time in forty-four years, she had absolutely no idea how she was going to fill them up. This did not frighten her. What frightened her was how little she missed Julian, yet how much his death meant to her. She sat in the backyard, fiddling with Julian’s ring, as her children came and went, leaving her with Dietrich, who sat in the lounge chair beside her. “Go and get my handbag, dear,” she whispered to him at one point. Once he returned, she pulled out the spare checkbook that Julian made her carry around on the utterly slim-to-none chance that he ever misplaced his or got it stolen. That day, however, she wrote her first check in years and presented it to Dietrich. “That ought to be enough for you and Jacob to buy an apartment. I’ll let you know when Julian’s will clears probate and it’s safe to deposit,” she said. It was more than enough for two apartments in Berlin, and he thanked her profusely, then went to show Jacob, who was lingering at the wall of glass, having taken up his father’s role as protector of the dying queen. She would do these things for her children, because she loved them and because it felt good to give them what was going to be rightfully theirs someday soon anyway. And then Jacob was beside her and she told him, “Please be happy. Please make a life with him,” meaning with Dietrich, only Dietrich, for she had come to love him like a third son, and so what if they never had children.
“We will make a beautiful life together, Mrs. Jacobson—Roz,” he said, hovering over Jacob. “I do not…for the first time, I am lost words.”
“At a loss for words,” Jacob said gently, taking his hand and squeezing it. Then he turned to her. “Mommy,” he whispered, which was all he needed to say. It was everything and it was nothing, all of it wrapped up inside that one word.
“We didn’t need your friend Clarence, after all,” she said. He looked at her askance, and she saw his eyes darken with the revelation that she’d known about their plan to kill Julian all along, that Dietrich must have told her about it the Thursday they’d arrived. “But make sure to wish him well for me. Will you do that, Jacob? And about his ostrich, well, I’m sure he won’t hate you forever. Accidents do happen.”
“They certainly do,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “But you can thank him and wish him well in person. I thought I’d take Diet to see where Bugsy Siegel is buried. Dad used to…” But he stopped himself, unexpectedly choked up. How people do surprise us, she thought.
“When Jacob was a boy, his father liked to tell him Bugsy Siegel would kill him in his sleep,” Roz explained to Dietrich, “because that’s what Bugsy Siegel did to all bad boys.”
“You are right, Jacob. Your father was a psychopath.” Dietrich nodded. “I do not have another explanation for his behavior.”
“Julian was many things,” Roz agreed. If I can say anything about him, she thought, I can say this—he was terribly good at hiding his worst parts from the world and saving them all up for us. In some ways, he was a better actor than Mo.
“Anyway, what do you say, Mom? Want to come with us?” Jacob asked. “It’ll be fun.”
“I think I’d like to go home,” she said.
“Shouldn’t one of us drive with you?” Edith asked a little later, as Mo and Jacob shoved her suitcases into the minivan.
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s such a good idea if you go alone,” Jacob said.
“I second that, Ma,” Moses said. “What if…,” But he didn’t finish his sentence, although she knew they were all thinking the same thing, all of them including her.
But she needed them to understand that this was something she had to do on her own and told them so, told them that if she started to feel dizzy or unwell, she would pull off the highway and find the nearest hospital, that she would check in with them every hour, if it made them feel better.
“Every hour on the hour, Ma,” Edith said.
“And if you have any trouble at all, one of us will be there in a flash,” Jacob said.
Then Roz was saying good-bye to them and to Pandora, who appeared from out of the house and to whom she felt closer after sharing her plan in the garage the night of the Seder. It had been important to Roz that she know, just in case. Next came five teary hugs with her grandsons, all of whom wanted to go with her, all of them except for Bronson, who held himself back, held himself aloof, as if he weren’t buying any of it, as if he knew what had happened to his paw-paw. She thought about her dead husband and how he’d never taken the chance to know any of them, not perhaps because he didn’t want to but because he simply didn’t know how. And this more than anything else saddened Roz, who hugged and kissed them all one more time, then climbed into the minivan and pulled away, waving to her children and to Dietrich, who called out, “Auf Wiedersehen!”
She drove for about half an hour before the fuel light came on, and she took the next exit. She pumped her own gas, which she hadn’t done in forever, and when she was finished, she went arou
nd to the back of the minivan and grabbed the spare oxygen tank, the one she suspected Julian of tampering with, and dragged it behind her on the way to the Dumpster. Her breath was short and labored, and when she climbed back into the minivan, it took all of her strength to reach under the passenger seat, where she retrieved the slimmer, lighter, more portable spare tank, which she’d kept hidden for months, just in case—only a five-day supply of oxygen, but enough to get her home.
Roz headed east on I-10, bound for Texas. She was driving straight into the sun and flipped down the visor, dislodging an old Polaroid—it couldn’t be, but there it was, a picture of the five of them, she and Julian so young, so thin, and the kids and that cruddy brown Oldsmobile station wagon. The picture had been taken at Point Dume moments before the kids ran off and she and Julian had stood at the edge of the bluff and talked about separating. It hadn’t been a good day, or even a good trip, Julian irascible as ever and the kids punchy in the backseat, wanting out, and she in the passenger seat, wanting out as well, wanting out from all of it. But here, in this photo, the facts of the day, of the trip, of their life, were absent. Here, they were smiling. Here they were, smiling.
And suddenly Roz was getting off the interstate and turning the minivan around, back toward L.A., for this had been her destination all along, there with her family. She was relieved to finally be heading in the right direction, and though she knew this disease would kill her eventually, she couldn’t help imagining that she was already breathing better, for her chest felt lighter, and she rolled down the window and let the wind into the car to take the last of Julian’s scent away.
It had been Roz’s impulse to get back into the minivan and drive it home, yet she realized as she pulled onto Von Trapp Lane some forty-five minutes later that she hadn’t thought this part of the plan through enough, or at all. She liked her house, but it was just a house, and she liked her things, but they were just things, easily packed up and moved. She’d find a nice, quiet place on the beach, in Malibu, close enough to Mo and Pandora but not too close. She had no desire to be a burden. And when her friends asked, she’d just tell them the truth—that she’d never liked Dallas, that her doctors had prescribed a drier climate, and that she wanted to be near her family. Besides, Texas was no safer than California. It had become a hotbed of intolerance, too, and hadn’t she already lost her husband to the scourge that was virulent anti-Semitism?
Roz parked the minivan in the drive, then made her way slowly into the house, where she was met by her grandsons, who were delighted to see her again so soon, especially the twins, who asked her about Paw-Paw, as though in the last hour they’d already forgotten what Mo and Pandora had explained to them—that Paw-Paw wasn’t coming back. Roz glanced past them through the wall of glass to the shimmering pool. She’d given Mo a check before she left with instructions to keep it permanently full. And she thought about that moment when she’d struck Julian and how extraordinary it had felt, and how she wasn’t going to apologize for any of it, not for that, and not for telling the twins that Paw-Paw was looking down at them from heaven and that he’d loved them very much.
Roz decided to stay with Mo and Pandora while she settled up her life in Texas. Even after she’d set herself up in the guest room again, she kept expecting the police to arrive on Von Trapp Lane with new evidence disputing their account. But they never did. No particular effort seemed to be going to catching the assailants. Another unsolved attack for the backlogged LAPD. Sometimes she was surprised by her guilt, for never in her life would she have ever imagined that in removing Julian from the world, she’d had to, in some way, become him. Jacob reminded her that her actions had been good and just, which did a little to allay her guilt, though it never completely went away. And how could it, when she’d spent her entire life with Julian, loving and caring for him, this man who had been slowly poisoning her by tampering with her oxygen? It was hard to forgive him, yet Roz understood that forgiveness was the only way through. And the more she forgave him, the better she felt, and the better she felt, the easier it was to breathe, at least this was the way she imagined it, even if it weren’t exactly true. Without Julian, Roz breathed easier—was it really as simple as that?
As the weeks became months, the boys stopped asking about Paw-Paw altogether, all of them except for Bronson, who refused to let it go, who kept at his parents, especially Moses. Which was why on a dry, warm day a couple of days after his bar mitzvah—yes, it was a miracle that here it was October and Roz was still alive—she sat him down and told him the story from start to finish, the story of their lives together, the story of Julian’s reign of terror, and when she was done, Bronson got up and hugged her, just like that, and he whispered in her ear, “He was a bad man and bad men have to be punished,” almost as if he’d known all along. He never mentioned it again after that, yet she could tell that it continued to affect him, as it continued to affect all of her children in surprising ways. The next few months were full of small miracles—Moses landed a big part in a movie and Jacob wrote a new play, Edelweiss, Edelweiss, which was picked up by a small production company in New York City and performed across the country.
Edith, dear Edith, went back to Emory to find that in light of “new evidence,” the board had no other choice than to recommend her immediate and swift resignation, as she told her family at the trips’ bar mitzvah. She could finish out the year but then had to go. She was not about to accept this and filed an action against the college, demanding her case be reexamined. She drummed up support from colleagues and students alike in the form of affidavits and letters, filing this and that document, careful not to make a single mistake, although she was tired beyond tired and couldn’t wait for winter break, which was quickly approaching. All of her documentation had to be in before end of term, so two days before winter vacation she was leaving her office late once again. She was throwing her briefcase into the backseat of her car and was about to climb in when a car slowed down and stopped, blocking her in. The driver, who was wearing a balaclava and aiming a gun right at her, told her not to move. He said her name—Edith Jacobson Plunkett—and called her a filthy kike bitch, telling her that he knew where she lived, reciting her address, laughing. “Gonna gut you, you stupid Jew cunt,” he said, cocking the gun.
Edith shut her eyes, the fear overtaking her as her bladder let go, the piss streaming down her thighs, and he laughed again, and in that laugh she heard her father, heard the sound of her death. But he did not kill her. He fired a bullet through the windshield, the sound of which exploded through the cavernous parking garage, the glass shattering and spraying her so that she was still picking tiny fragments of glass from her hair days later. She screamed as he tore away, her voice resounding in her ears, which continued to ring from the blast, her eyes squeezed shut until she was sure that he had gone. She got out her phone, called the campus police, who arrived to take her statement and escort her home, where she locked and chained the door and kept all the lights off, cowering in darkness that night. In the morning, unable to bring herself to set foot on campus, she called Roz and told her what had happened. “I hate to say this,” Roz said. “But I have to agree with what your father always said—fuck Emory. Come here, my darling.”
Edith bought a ticket to L.A., booked a rental car—no vans!—and headed to the airport just a couple of hours later.
After selling the house in Dallas through a real estate agent who specialized in remote sales, Roz bought a three-bedroom house with a skylight in every room. It sat right on the beach in Malibu, and it was there that Edith came. Roz welcomed her only daughter and put her in the room beside hers, just steps from the Pacific, not far from Julian’s last resting place. Roz took care of Edith and Edith took care of Roz, who had made a recovery of sorts, no longer needing the wheelchair as often to get around, her health taking a turn for the better—everyone attributed it to the drier climate, but Roz knew differently, attributing it to happiness, to her proximity to her children and grandchildren, to
living without Julian and those poisoned tanks. She grew stronger and took fairly long walks on the beach with Edith, who only rarely spoke about her dad these days.
“Do you ever miss him?” she asked Roz once. It was a warm, sunny day in June, the ocean gleaming and glassy, the tide high and wetting their feet as they strolled.
“Maybe like a pain one gets used to,” she mused. “When the pain finally goes away, another one takes its place.”
“Are you in pain, Ma?” Edith asked.
“Not that kind of pain.” She smiled, reaching for her daughter’s hand. “I won’t see the boys graduate from high school, or Jacob and Dietrich’s apartment, or Moses win an Academy Award, or you get married again, if you meet a man and decide that’s what you want to do.”
“You’ll see other things, I promise,” Edith reassured her.
“Oh, I’m not complaining, Thistle,” she said. “But you asked.”
“I miss him a lot,” she offered
“You need to find a boyfriend, dear,” Roz suggested. “Sex is the ultimate distraction.”
“Ma!”
“Your dad and I used to have so much sex when we were younger.” She laughed, stopping herself from elaborating, and added, “Before you kids came along and frightened him to death.”
It was something of a golden age for the Jacobson family, for even the boys prospered. Not long after that disastrous Passover special, they received calls from record companies, the producers of which wanted to harness the talent they’d seen and heard. And thus the Jacobson 5 was born—to their parents’ wary, overprotective chagrin. The boys fast-tracked a single, “This Night Is Different,” that slowly penetrated the airways of L.A., then was picked up nationally, gaining momentum and popularity, eventually climbing as high as number 32 on the Billboard charts. Then the boys were asked to sing at a gala to raise money for the new JCC in downtown L.A. During their set, which was heavily attended, several members of the audience stood up and began to shout anti-Semitic slurs, lobbing bags of fecal matter at the boys, which exploded upon impact, dousing them and forcing them to flee the stage. And that was that—Mo and Pandora put an end to the Jacobson 5, without much argument from their sons, save for Bronson, who thought it was an overreaction and sulked for days until Roz took him aside and explained that he needed to cut his parents and brothers some slack, that they were only looking out for him.
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