My grandfather asked if I had questions.
In my head, I said, “A million.” In my head, I yelled at him.
Out loud, I didn’t dare. I didn’t ask: “Why now? Does this mean you’re sorry? That you have regrets? Are the Land of Israel and all your opinions not as important as you thought they once were?” But this day was already hard enough.
Instead, I said, “Not now.” And “Thank you.” I asked them if they had anything else they could send me. An old picture of her. Some of her letters. More of her jewelry. They said they loved me, and “We’ll put something together. We’ll put it in the mail as soon as we can.”
One awkward pause later, I gave Lo the phone. Whenever she spoke to her parents, she spoke in Hebrew. Today sounded a lot like other conversations. First soft. Then loud. Then louder. Thirty seconds later, she hung up a little too hard.
“You’re mad,” I said.
“It’s complicated.” She walked to the window so I couldn’t see her face. “We must accept our lives the way they are.” This was yoga talk for “Stay out of it.” She walked out of the room. Today was not the day to talk about why my grandparents didn’t get on a plane and visit me.
This is what I knew:
They moved to Tel Aviv when my mom was sixteen. For Lo, it was an adventure. She was eleven. For my Zionist grandparents, it was a dream come true’the fulfillment of a lifetime of yearning and saving. For my mom, it was a nightmare.
According to Lo, Mom missed her friends. She didn’t feel like she belonged. Nothing was right. She hated the heat, the food, the traffic, and she never could figure out paddleball, the game that everyone seemed to be playing. When she left the army after serving the minimum, my grandparents begged her to give Israel one more chance, but in the end they packed her up and sent her off to Douglas College in New Jersey.
That’s where she met my dad.
He was a journalism professor, a semifamous photographer, a newspaper man. She became his star student. Then they fell in love.
The event that Lo never talked about happened the summer before my mom’s senior year. She went back to visit. She brought my dad, and it did not go well.
To my grandfather, my future father was way too old. Worse than that, he was not Jewish. And that meant he was not the kind of man he wanted my mom to marry. When she wouldn’t back down, he called her terrible names. He reminded her of relatives that had died in the Holocaust, that Jews had a responsibility to pass down their traditions, and that he would never never never approve or condone or acknowledge their marriage or children. No matter how Jewish or not Jewish you were, there was nothing worse than that. For a while, she wrote about “his betrayal” whenever anything good happened.
Which was a lot. Because the rest was as close to a fairy tale as real life got.
My mom chose my dad. They went home, got married, and my dad left the college to work on his fine-art photography. My mom worked freelance. They settled in eastern Pennsylvania’ halfway between New York and Philadelphia. In one very angry journal entry, my mother noted the irony: “Jewish girl abandons Israel to settle near towns called Bethlehem and Nazareth.” She wrote, “How funny is that?”
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. My mother might have never forgiven my grandfather, but I was pretty sure she wanted him to forgive her. The way Lo looked at the hamsa, I bet she felt exactly that way now.
There should be a law. If you cared about someone, just say it. Tell the truth and don’t play chicken. Life is too short to be so ugly. When Lo said my grandfather was proud, she meant he was religious.
I suspected she meant he didn’t accept who we were either.
As the phone rang for what felt like the fiftieth time, Lo returned with the local newspaper, folded back. There was a picture of me, shaking my fist at yesterday’s reporter. The headline was bolded: “Soul Survivor Won’t Talk.” Lo acted like page three was no big deal. “The good news is, you actually look quite pretty.”
My hair did look pretty good. And the camera angle made me look like I’d lost weight. “You know, when I make a fist, my hand looks normal.” Lo half-smiled. I wasn’t fooling anyone.
If that reporter really did admire my mother’s work, she would have known that Karen Friedman would never have taken such a stupid assignment. She’d never use her death to ruin my life. She would know that my parents would never have wasted their time writing this crap, asking the questions that have no answers. I couldn’t understand why anyone cared to read this one more time.
But they must. Because the phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
“Can you run interference?” I asked Lo. “Or take the phone off the hook?” For at least a few minutes, I wanted to be alone. No noise. No interruptions. No conversations. I tossed the newspaper onto the floor.
Lo walked downstairs to the guest room, picked up the phone on the very next ring. “Yes. No thank you. Please respect our privacy.” She had long since memorized her lines: “At this time we choose not to make a statement.”
FIVE
After Lo left the guest room, I got out of bed and grabbed some of my mother’s journals. These were the only stories I felt like reading. They were the stories that kept her alive.
I’d bookmarked all the highlights: the day they got married. The night they found out Mom was pregnant. When I was six months old, she took me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I laughed at all the Magrittes, especially the one with the man with an apple for a face. She wrote that this was a sure sign that I was the most intelligent baby in the universe. When I was seven months old, I said my first word: “Shoe.”
There was only one volume I hadn’t read. That was the last one, the one she took with her to Israel, the one the search and recovery squad found in her purse under a pile of crushed rock. I called it The Book of Death.
Lo kept it hidden. She said it was mine—that I could have it whenever I wanted it. All I had to do was say the word.
I wasn’t ready yet. There was something sacred about a person’s last words.
After a while, Lo returned with Sharon. Sharon had a lopsided gait—she’d broken her leg in college, and when it healed, she was left with a pretty intense leg-length discrepancy.
They looked uncomfortable, like their shoes were too tight, like maybe there was something more to discuss. I asked, “What is it now? Did something happen? Why was the phone ringing off the hook?” I imagined the worst possible scenarios—another bombing in a synagogue. More death. More pain. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility—or even all that rare. In ten years, the Middle East political situation hadn’t changed that much.
Suicide bombers—unless they killed a whole lot of people or ruined a landmark—or left one lone survivor—didn’t cause a stir like they used to.
Or maybe it was just my picture in the paper.
“What’s the problem?” Today was going to be bad enough. “You look like someone died.”
Sharon picked up the newspaper off the floor. She handed it to Lo. “You need to show her.”
I wasn’t in a reading mood. I hated playing games. “Can you just tell me?” I asked. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”
Lo shrugged. Sharon read, “Scholar-pastor to offer lecture about the rise in religious fundamentalism in government.”
I didn’t see what the big deal was. “Must be a slow news day.” I rolled over and stared at my stacks of sewing books, my piles of patterns, and of course, Dress-Form Annie. The bright red lipstick made her look a little manic—like she was laughing at me. “Can we talk about something else?” I buried my face in my pillow. “Scratch my back.”
“Sure.” She found the itchy spot right away. Lo clearly didn’t want to talk about Dave Armstrong any more than I did.
Before he became an internationally known pastor with an online congregation and a weekly televised address, Dave had been a professor of political science. He was visiting Israel to witness some of the same events my mom was covering
. But the morning of the bombing, he couldn’t get into the synagogue. Maybe he wasn’t influential enough. Maybe he needed a ticket. Maybe he was just lucky.
Maybe I was.
When the blast erupted, he was two blocks away, killing time in the marketplace. He said it felt like an earthquake. While most people ran away, he was drawn to the explosion—compelled to go see what had happened. Later, after he found me, he claimed this was a direct message from God.
Lo has never believed him. She thought he was an opportunist who one day in his life did the right thing. She thought his entire ministry—and she used that word lightly—was about money. And fame. And the worldly benefits that went with speaking the gospel to desperate people in desperate situations.
Hypothetically, I had no problem with him using this day for donations. That day, there were a lot of people searching for survivors, but he was the one who heard my voice, who lifted the final rocks, who uncovered my hands and found me. He was the man who sat by my side every single day until I could move my fingers. He read me stories. He sang to me. I knew it sounded cliché, but for months—almost a year—he made me laugh when all I wanted to do was cry.
Bottom line: I couldn’t hate him. Even though his mission seemed a little too vague and even over-the-top, I thought he was basically a good guy. He had the right to make his speeches, to offer prayers to the world, to try and bring peace and health and happiness to the world. He was the man holding me in the picture that won the Pulitzer. Technically, it was his story, too.
I just wished he could leave me out of it.
I pointed to the small of my back. “A little higher.” When Lo found that spot, too, I finally let my arms and head and shoulders relax. She was the best back scratcher in the world.
Too bad Sharon would only drop the subject for so long. “I think we need to talk about this. Janine needs to consider the implications.” Her voice turned whiny/screechy. “She’s sixteen. You have to stop protecting her.”
That was enough for me. I got out of bed and booted up my computer. Dave must have made some really obnoxious statement for Sharon to react so strongly.
It was all there on CNN.com. Thanks to an anonymous donation, Dave Armstrong was going to visit small colleges to give a series of lectures about politics and religion.
“I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“Watch,” Sharon said. Maybe she was more uptight than I’d realized.
I clicked on a seven-minute clip of Dave speaking—the shortest of the three. It was filmed early this morning. Dave Armstrong’s thick white hair was slicked back; his voice was deep and clear and careful.
The clip already had 2,832 views.
“Many times, I have spoken about the extraordinary events that occurred ten years ago this day. I have talked to you about the serendipitous moment when I became part of an army of men and women determined to find survivors. I have also shared my secular past and personal awakening and call to serve our Lord. Every year on this day, I have recounted my joy and gratitude that I was the one who first heard Janine Collins’s tiny voice and touched her broken, bleeding hands.” I had to admit, Dave was a charismatic speaker. But he also had only one note. He tended to use words with vague implications and not much else. But he knew when to raise his hands toward his face. He knew when to bow his head. He knew how to connect with the audience. “When I touched her hands, I felt euphoria. Warmth. Peace. I knew God was with me. I was not alone, and I never would be again. In that moment, the Lord made it clear I had to do something more with my life. I needed to tell the world miracles were possible. I’m looking forward to talking about the world today and why the time is right for a greater thrust toward faith.”
I muted the video when he started praying and quoting Scripture. “I still don’t understand why you’re so upset.” Dave Armstrong, like a lot of people, believed that my story had biblical, spiritual implications far beyond bad or good luck. “So what? He pretty much said the exact same thing last year. And the year before that.”
Sharon shook her head. “It’s not the what that bothers me. It’s the where.”
I looked again. The background did look familiar.
“He’s here?”
“In Bethlehem. At Moravian College.”
That was odd, but it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me. Moravian College had a theology department. He was a professor. And, all things considered, he was a high-profile one. This time of year, in and around the Lehigh Valley, you could hardly walk a block without stumbling across a pastel Easter display or some announcement for a service or a religious discussion. On top of the mountain, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, was a huge “Star of Bethlehem.” You could see it every night of the year. Dan and I tried to make out there once, but the cops wouldn’t let us get near it.
Dave being here made sense. Sort of.
Lo asked me to turn off the computer. “Sharon’s afraid he’s going to try and ambush you.” She paused when Sharon cleared her throat—a clear sign they had agreed to some sort of compromise. “We think you need to be extra cautious.”
Sharon picked up the new brown dress, crumpled on top of the sewing machine, and smoothed it out. In the light, there were wrinkles. Flaws. I saw a pucker in the collar, a thread hanging from the hem. The phone rang again. She told Lo, “If I were you, I’d talk to Robert.”
“No.” Lo never asked her boss for help. Too much testosterone. She didn’t like to owe him favors. She said, “What could he do? Armstrong has a right to speak here. He has an invitation. We may not like him, but he’s never threatened Janine.”
Sharon hated when Lo rolled over and played dead. “You don’t call this threatening?” The last time she’d looked this aggravated was when Lo wouldn’t spill a single detail about the town’s last murder trial. “I wish you’d stand up for yourself. Take the offensive.” She shook my dress in Lo’s face. “What have you got to lose?”
Now I saw an uneven hem. A pointy dart.
I snatched the dress out of her hands. Yesterday, I thought it flowed, but now I hated it. The details were tacky. The handwork a mess. This dress was supposed to be part of my portfolio, to show the colleges what great work I could do. It was supposed to display my potential.
It looked like crap.
I grabbed a pair of scissors and tried to catch a loose thread, but I was frustrated and not careful, and I snipped too far. When the hem tore, Lo tried to snatch it away, but she was way too slow. She said, “You don’t want to destroy it.” But I did. I wanted to destroy it. This dress was a rag. I tugged at the tear.
I hated when they fought.
I wanted them to be quiet.
I stabbed the cloth with the scissors, then gathered it into my palms by the ends and pulled as hard as I could. Yes, it was a miracle that I lived, but I would know if my hands were blessed. “It’s my dress,” I shouted. I made it. And I was going to destroy it.
I didn’t stop tearing and tugging until all that was left were some gathered strips of shiny brown cloth. A dismembered sleeve. Four blue buttons. I could never understand why I was the only one who lived or why I didn’t remember anything about my parents that wasn’t written in a book or found in a photo.
Through the skylight, the clouds looked dark. Out the window, two joggers ran by. Miriam’s car pulled into the driveway. Her engine sounded like it was about to give up and die, but she left it running and walked in the front door with a brown grocery bag. She said, “I hope I didn’t wake the neighborhood.”
I checked out her outfit. “You’re wearing the shoes.”
Miriam nodded. “They’re killing me.” She didn’t dress up often.
Her dress was simple, which drew your eye to the obscenely high platform Mary-Janes I’d talked her into buying, even though they were totally impractical. She had needed something for some interviews. The salesgirl was a sister of one of the most popular girls in our grade. “Even Melissa can’t walk in those,” she’d said. S
old.
We sat down at the kitchen table so she could give her toes a break. Miriam saw the hamsa straight away. “Did you just get that? My aunt has one. She wishes on it all the time.” Miriam reached into a brown bag and pulled out a box of cinnamon buns. “Doofus out there will bring the coffee.” She rolled her eyes. “He’ll come in as soon as his song is over.”
Five minutes later, Abe appeared, balancing five steaming paper cups on a cardboard tray. When he put the cups on the table, a little bit of foam bubbled out of each lid.
He gave me a long, overly formal hug, the kind that meant I’m sorry about yesterday and Whatever you need and I’m not totally comfortable hugging you in front of your aunt. It was a reasonable response—I was still in my pajamas. I wasn’t wearing a bra. If he didn’t let go of me soon, Lo was going to have a heart attack.
I pushed him away. “Did you see the paper?”
Abe gave me a coffee. “I bought four copies.” When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Come on, J. Have a sense of humor. I’m joking.” He sighed. “Only two.”
Before I reminded him that this was all his fault—he was the idiot who hadn’t seen them hiding—Miriam raised her cup. “To your parents, Karen and Martin.”
Lo nodded. “Their memory should be a righteous blessing.”
I didn’t know if my memories were righteous or not or, for that matter, even mine, or if they had all come from stories I’d heard a million times. What I was sure of: Time was supposed to heal all wounds, but this one was too big to fix. This was the day my parents died. It was the day that changed the rest of my life, the day that made me famous. If Dave Armstrong wanted to believe that I was a miracle, there was nothing I could do.
I needed to get dressed. It was time to go to the cemetery and pay our respects.
SIX
I settled on a navy blue dress with white collar and cuffs that I made last year for a Social Studies presentation. It had an empire waist. It wasn’t too tight. I could wear it with flats. “Your hamsa is really pretty,” Miriam said. She stood back to look at me. She thought the dress made me look “mature.”
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