Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  “Yeah, I get that, Maw-Maw, but that’s not the point, is it?” he said, that precociousness of his roaring out of him.

  “Well, then, what is the point?” Roz asked, growing ever more concerned that her grandsons, Bronson in particular, understood far too well what was happening all around them.

  “If we disappear, it means they win,” he announced. “And I am not about to disappear.”

  “You can’t lose unless you believe you’ve lost,” she said sagely, trying not to think about what might be coming, the world that Bronson was about to inherit.

  “Everything not saved will be lost,” he said cryptically. When Roz repeated what he’d said to Moses later that night, he just laughed and said that Bronson was quoting the warning message from his Wii, the one that flashed across the screen whenever it crashed.

  “You can’t take him too seriously, Ma,” Moses said.

  While Bronson continued to bemoan the state of the world, Moses’s comeback continued. He landed a starring role in the latest J. J. Abrams film, a remake of Splash in which all the roles were reversed—Moses reprising Daryl Hannah’s role playing the mermaid, merman, technically—and Ronnie, one of the executive producers on The JacobSONS, was so impressed with the way Moses had handled himself on the night of the Seder that he offered him his own late-night talk show, eponymously called Moses!

  “The country is in love with you,” Ronnie decreed at their initial meeting. “Well, most of the country. Anyone who tuned in that night to watch you save your father. That, my friend, was spectacular. It continues to be one of the most viewed and talked-about episodes in the network’s history.”

  When Moses told Roz about the offer that night over dinner on her deck—it was just the two of them because Edith was at the movies with Elias, whom she’d been seeing a lot more of lately, and Pandora was at home with the kids—Roz set her fork down and stared at her elder son.

  “We both know how it could have gone,” she proffered, taking long, slow breaths. The water twinkled with the reflection of the stars above, the houses up and down the beach glowing. “No, let me rephrase that: We both know how you wished it could have gone. You’ve never been scrutinized for it, but don’t think for a second I didn’t see you, because I did. You hesitated, Moses, and you can’t possibly think I’m the only one who noticed. Dietrich saw you as well. He told me so later that night.” She hated to lie to him, but she needed him to know that there was just no way Moses could do the show, not with so much at stake. “All it takes is one crackpot or one guest who has it in for you, one question followed by one misplaced answer, and the whole thing comes crashing down on top of you—on top of us. You’re a very good actor, but no one’s that good.” Moses sighed and in that sigh Roz heard his acknowledgment and resignation. “Let’s keep this between us,” she said, determined to maintain peace among her children. “You will have other opportunities, Moses.” Shutting her eyes, she reached for the nosepiece on the portable oxygen tank and inserted it—inverted it, she thought, smiling to herself, remembering when Jacob had told her about Dietrich’s malapropism—her breath instantly returning.

  “Are you okay, Ma?” Moses asked.

  “Just…I’m just a little worn out,” she said, hearing movement inside the house, then Edith was calling out for her.

  “Out here,” Moses cried.

  “Ma, there you are.” Edith kissed Roz on the cheek. “You had me worried there for a sec. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Where’s Eliass?” asked Moses, who’d taken to adding another s to Elias’s name, something, Roz thought, Julian would have approved of, though she herself did not.

  “He has an early meeting with a client tomorrow,” Edith said, shooting her brother the middle finger, while Roz looked on, thinking about her dead husband and the real reason she’d called off the divorce that first time. It was true that Julian had been nastier than usual in the days leading up to that road trip to California, which had culminated with the two of them standing on the bluff at Point Dume, where Roz, emboldened by the sight of the silvery, endless sea, had finally told him that she was done and wanted a divorce. She’d felt lighter than light itself after she said it, as if she’d given herself over to the sun and had become one with it. The drive back to Texas was unusually pleasant with a cowed Julian on his best behavior. She would have assumed anything but this from him when he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he was to pack his bags and leave the moment they got home. And that’s exactly what he did. He stacked his bags by the door, then went to say good-bye to the kids, while Roz waited in the bedroom, terrified that she’d change her mind.

  Julian stepped into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. He kneeled down on the carpet and wrapped his arms around her, muttering that he was sorry—and that one word, sorry, froze Roz in place, for she’d never heard it come out of his mouth before. “I’m sorry I was mean to you,” he said, and the word bloomed like a flower and it was as if Julian had filled the entire room with fresh-cut red roses. She raked a delicate path through his thick head of hair, sighing a sigh that held in it the acceptance of a woman resigned to her fate. And that was that—she let Julian back, because it was the first time and sadly, she now thought, the only time he ever took responsibility for himself, that he ever said that he was sorry. She must have told her children that he’d apologized, yet this explanation must have gotten lost among all the others—that she still loved him, that she wanted them to grow up with a father, that keeping her family intact was more important to her than being right. “And happiness?” Jacob had asked. “What about that?” Everything was implied in that one word—happiness—though Roz had only been thinking about her own, because if she were happy she’d be able to share her happiness with all of them, her children, and that happiness would certainly protect them, wouldn’t it?

  Well, no, Roz thought that night, as Edith escorted her back into the house and into her bedroom, because the problem with happiness is that there’s never enough to go around. Roz changed into her nightgown, then lay down on the bed, calling for Moses, who came in to say good night. “Be nicer to your sister,” she said, kissing his face. Say you’re sorry, she thought.

  She turned the dial up on her oxygen, while she and her daughter watched the news, which, as she liked to confirm nightly, didn’t contain any new leads in the Julian Jacobson investigation, though it did mention the Great Drought: The Sequel.

  The last time it had rained in L.A. was that morning in April 2022 when Jacob and Dietrich had arrived for Passover, in fact. And now here it was more than a year later, and they hadn’t had a single drop. President Cox issued another state of emergency in California, as crops fell into ruin and farmers had to abandon their land. According to the news, unless something was done or it rained soon, food prices would continue to soar across the country, from Seattle to New York City, where many grocery stores had more demand than they did supply.

  “How was the movie?” Roz asked.

  “It was fine,” Edith replied, though something in her daughter’s voice alerted Roz to the fact that it hadn’t been fine at all.

  “What happened?” Roz asked.

  “Well, you know how some theaters show those three-minute movies about the terrible poverty ravaging the Israeli refugees and then they have a rep go around collecting donations? Well, when the rep went around, he was booed out of the theater. Elias wanted to leave, but I talked him out of it. The movie was fun, though. A stupid rom-com starring Apple Paltrow.”

  Yes, it is bad, Roz thought, and only getting worse—for the Israeli refugees and, by default, the American Jews, if she were to believe what she heard on “Jews in the News,” the nightly news segment that highlighted the day’s instances of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world. Most of the time, Roz switched the news off before this segment. She couldn’t bear to hear about another attack on a synagogue or another suicide bombing of a school bus full of Jewish children. It was all just
too much and though she wanted to remain informed, she hated to feed her fears like this. On some level she understood that while reporting these atrocities was necessary, it was also playing directly into the hands of those who wished to do the Jews harm—it focused as much attention on the neo-Nazi skinheads and the white supremacists and ISIS and whoever else had it in for the Jews as it did on the bereaved families and innocent bystanders who’d lost their own lives in the process. The ADL had made this argument, she’d read, to try to get networks to remove the segment, but there it was, still on the air, still alarming every Jewish person that he or she could be targeted next. Roz switched off the TV, as there was only so much bad news they could take. But oddly, there seemed one bright spot in the world amid all of this mishegas.

  Whenever Jacob called, he told them all how good it was in Berlin, how Jews from all over Europe, especially France, were flocking to Deutschland, where they were protected under the law. Roz wanted to believe that he was living in a new Germany, but she couldn’t quite keep the worry out of her voice, thinking that even if it were terrible here in America, she couldn’t imagine being a Jew in that country. Diet called out from somewhere in the flat that they should come visit and Jacob echoed him before asking Roz how she was doing.

  “Not great, but not terrible.” She shrugged, finding it more difficult to breathe that day for whatever reason. It didn’t take much to irritate her lungs anymore.

  “Do you want me to come?” Jacob asked. “You only have to say it and I’m there, Mom.”

  She wanted nothing more than to have all of her children nearby, but she was happy that at least one of them didn’t have to face the hatred that swirled like dust in the air. If you think you’re safer in Berlin, then that’s where you should be, she thought, still unsure that Jacob wasn’t exaggerating, but there was Dietrich, who would not lie to her, and so when he finally showed his face, she asked him about it all, for she wanted to hear it from the mouth of a bona fide German.

  “It is not ideal, no, but it is better than it is in America,” he confirmed. He told her about an article in Der Spiegel claiming that 73 percent of American Jews polled said they had experienced a direct threat in the last six months and that 61 percent of non-Jewish Americans blamed the Jews for the country’s economic and ecological woes. “This is not the case in Germany, Roz,” he said. “I am not telling you what to do, but it seems fairly clear that things there are only going to get worse. You are always welcome here,” he added, smiling. “It will be our pleasure to have you, all of you. We have the space, thanks to you.”

  The idea of moving again, however, gave Roz real pause because she worried she’d never survive the trip. She was feeling run-down. She’d outlasted her prognosis by well over a year—but one day soon she figured her luck was going to run out. And so it did, for on an afternoon a few days before Yom Kippur, while Edith was substitute teaching at the Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue and Moses was on set at Paramount Studios, Roz lay down for a nap and never woke up.

  They stood together on the bluff on that sunny, fall morning, Moses and Thistle flanking Jacob, who clutched the urn to his chest, a beautiful round canister of Delft-blue enamel, which they’d picked out together last year at Eternal Hollywood, Clarence offering them the chapel to say a few parting words before they escorted their mother’s body to the crematorium. They stood alone on the bluff, which was exactly how Jacob wanted it, just the three of them. He’d been trying to persuade them to move to Berlin, but that conversation had faded to silence when they’d climbed out of the car and walked to the edge of Point Dume.

  The sea spread out before Jacob and for a moment, as he unscrewed the lid on the urn, he recalled that morning when they’d disposed of their father’s body. It seems only natural and befitting, he thought, to dispose of our mother’s cremains here as well, where everything changed. It had been far too late to reverse the damage Julian Jacobson had done to any of them, especially to his poor mother, who had deserved so much better than him, that ex-husband of hers, which was how Jacob had taken to thinking about him—that lousy, no-good ex-husband of hers. He hoped the last year of her life without him had been able to make up for the forty-four with him. Edith had told him it had, when she called to let him know their mom had passed away in her sleep, sobbing as she told him about finding her in bed and how utterly at peace she’d looked. Just an easy quiet and the exhalation of her last breath, though Edith did have a moment of hysterics, scream-crying that if she’d only gotten home sooner, if she’d only not taken that stupid subbing job, if only, if only, if only…To which Jacob replied: “Enough. You did more than enough. She knows that. We all do.”

  Jacob handed the lid to Mo, who slipped it into one pocket, then from the other removed three yarmulkes from the trips’ bar mitzvahs—small, blue leather kippahs with black stitching, inscribed with the trips’ names and the date of the blessed event.

  “Mom,” Jacob began, but the rest of what he wanted to say got bunched up in his throat. “Mom,” he tried again, but there was nothing, just his dry tongue trying to form the appropriate words to say good-bye. “Mom.” One last time, before Edith wrapped an arm around him and she said, “Ma,” softly, leaning her head against her brother’s shoulder. Mo stood beside them in silent contemplation, and Jacob thought, My sweet, dumb older brother, but then he wrapped an arm around Jacob and whispered, “Mommy,” that word and only that word.

  Suddenly, Jacob was a boy again, in the backyard of their house in Dallas, crouching behind a shrub and sobbing his eyes out because he’d just come to the realization that one day his mom was going to die—six years old and kneeling in the rocky dirt, not being able to wrap his mind around such an enormous concept. If he could just stop picturing it, maybe it wouldn’t happen. But now here he was and he no longer had to picture it, for he was holding the result of his childhood in his hands. He was thirty-four years older than the boy he’d been, but he felt again his knees packed into the rough earth and the branches of the shrubbery scraping his face as his mom found him cowering behind the house, and she lifted him into her arms and asked him what was wrong and he told her that he didn’t ever want her to die. For a time after that, he tried to never let his mom out of his sight.

  “When I was six,” he began, “I had this horrible thought that Mom was going to die. I didn’t know how or when, but I also didn’t have any idea someone else in that house actually wanted her to die. I lived my entire life pretending she wouldn’t. He lived his entire life hoping she would.”

  “Jacob,” Edith interjected gently, “is this really the time?”

  “Let him speak,” Mo said.

  “Mom spent the better part of our lives fighting him off,” Jacob continued. “And it weakened everything about her. She was never able to say what she needed to say and that, for me, is the greatest tragedy of all. So, Mom, I’m saying it for you now.” He turned his face up to the sun and said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him for you. I’m sorry about what I said in the car that time because if I hadn’t, Mo wouldn’t have hit me in the face and my nose wouldn’t have bled, and we would have gotten to the airport on time and flown away. I’m sorry I didn’t visit you more, later, but I just couldn’t stand to be around him or watch how he treated you. I’m sorry you never understood how much better you were than him, but you have to know that I—that we—knew it. I hate you for not understanding that you were going to die one day and that you could have made your life as beautiful as possible—without him.”

  “Oh, Jacob.” Edith sighed. “Jacob, Jacob, Jacob,” and she grabbed hold of his hand and squeezed it tightly. “Try to see it differently. Try to see that Ma made a choice. She loved him, Jacob, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love us. You can love a monster and still know what he is.”

  But Jacob was inconsolable. He let go of his sister’s hand, recognizing the pointlessness of doing battle with time, and he resigned himself to the idea that none of it could have gone a
ny other way than the way it had. It had all been meant to play out exactly this way—with the three of them standing on this bluff on this morning to say good-bye to their mom for the last time. This gave him a momentary peace, enough to join his siblings in the Mourner’s Kaddish. They did not have a minyan, but so the fuck what—they were ten adults if they were anything, for they had lived countless lives already, reinventing themselves in different images, each as unalike their father as possible.

  They recited the prayer in unison, and Jacob knew that Edith was secretly reciting it for their father, too, whom no one had said a single word for after they’d tossed his body into the sea—an unheard kersplash and then it was gone

  Now Jacob tipped the urn, ceremoniously scattering little bits of his mother into the sea at a time. Fish food, he thought, watching the ashes go and peering over the edge, which he hadn’t done that morning two years ago. It was a long way down onto the jagged rocks and the sea below and for one brief moment he imagined his mom’s ashes reconfiguring themselves just below the surface, imagined a fin, her fin, and then she was a shark searching the depths for her prey, their father, smiling as she did, for here was Jacob’s idea of an afterlife—his mother leaping at their father to devour him over and over again.