Chapter 35
I don’t know exactly what to wear to synagogue, but I feel like it should be a dress.
I own a few, which I never wear. I waffle for a bit and then choose a long, flowy blue one with small white flowers on it.
It’s very feminine. I found it at a thrift shop in Sedona and saved it all these years with the thought that I might someday find cause to wear it.
I leave my hair down and put on dangly gold earrings.
I put on a little beeswax lip gloss, the extent of my makeup collection.
My hair still shines when I brush it out; not a single strand falls out on the brush.
I have looked up the time of the Friday evening service. I’m a little proud of myself for figuring out that this is where someone would go to commemorate the anniversary of a loved one’s death. The internet has been very helpful with information on Jewish mourning practices.
I hope my worn cowgirl boots and usual sweater-coat aren’t too informal, but I don’t have anything else that works with the dress at all.
I instantly feel completely out of place as I walk through the glass doors into a low-ceilinged reception area where people mill around, chatting.
I am early. I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them both on the strap of my bag.
I don’t see Joel. I wonder if I was wrong, if he won’t be here.
I could’ve just texted him, but I didn’t want to.
In our last exchange, yesterday, he asked about Ella—she’s completely fine physically, but she vividly remembers every detail of what happened until the moment her head hit the column—and I asked him how he was doing, too. He was already out of the hospital.
I heal suspiciously fast, he wrote. And then: I mean when I’m not healing someone else right after getting stabbed. And then: Not to brag.
My relief felt like sliding into a warm bath.
All of today has been about playing games with and reading books to Ella.
I got to apologize, finally, for hitting her.
She tried to tell me it was okay and I told her it wasn’t.
My impatience buzzed along the border of the day, but my wild gratitude held it off.
It helps that Dee has been around. Mom has also been around, but just crying in her room.
Apparently Madame Samantha, always unhelpful, agreed that Al was her soulmate.
People are making their way through another set of doors, picking up thick red books from a cart. I head that way, pick one up, too.
“Are you new here?” someone is saying next to me. I look over, then down. A very short, very wrinkled woman in a sparkly blouse, with a bit of lace pinned to her sparse purplyred dyed hair, is beaming up at me. “I don’t think we’ve met. Good Shabbos!”
“Oh,” I say. “Um. I’m just visiting.”
“Oh? For a special reason?”
“Yes, actually.” I step aside so others can pass into the larger room beyond the doors.
It is the sanctuary, with rows of maroon-cushioned benches and a raised platform at the front that features an elaborate, tall cabinet with a Middle Eastern bazaar–style lamp hanging above it.
“I am honoring a— ” A what? “A friend’s passing,” I finish uncomfortably.
“I am so sorry for your loss, dear,” she says, her round eyes going rounder and filling with moist compassion. “My name is Fran.” She reaches to grasp my hand in a firm, paper-skinned grip.
“Fran!” I exclaim, remembering her from Joel’s description of her kindness after Adam’s death, and she looks surprised. “Sorry,” I say. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Oh? Am I famous?” She laughs like a coughing fit. “I haven’t been a teacher for a long time, but I used to feel pretty famous when I walked around town and my former students recognized me.”
“A teacher!” I say, showing her I’m impressed. Homeschooling has given me plenty of fresh respect for the profession.
She grins, savoring the appreciation. “Come on in with me. Do you have anyone to sit with?”
“No, I’d love to sit with you.”
“Tell me who knows me,” she says as we walk into the sanctuary. A man with a short beard who may be the rabbi is up at the front, talking animatedly with a few congregants.
“Joel Tav,” I say, looking quickly around. He still isn’t here.
“Joelly!” Her entire face lifts with delight. “My favorite! So he talks about me?”
“And your quiches. Very fondly.”
She chortles. “Such a sweetheart. You could not find more of a mensch. And still single—it’s crazy. What a prize.” She surveys me more exactingly, something obviously occurring to her. We find seats and settle in. She sobers. “Then you must be here for his brother. For Adam.”
I nod, admitting that I am.
“A friend of Adam’s,” she says sadly.
I nod again. It’s liberating somehow, to confess this connection, finally, casually, to someone. I take off my coat.
And then the service is starting. A short man with a warm baritone sings something exuberant, then something that drifts into a wistful minor key.
The rabbi introduces prayers. Fran points to where we are on the page, but the words are in Hebrew—in characters that look like tiny indecipherable drawings to me.
When we reach a prayer that has an English transliteration below, I try to sing along.
The melody is lilting, repetitive, melancholy, but with a thread of joy in it that I can’t resist. By the second repetition, I’ve gotten it down, and I allow myself to sing a little louder.
“Oh my goodness, you have the most beautiful voice,” Fran stage-whispers, and the couple in front of us turns around and nods, smiling at me encouragingly.
I smile back, happy now that I decided to come here.
Which is when I feel him there, to my left, across the aisle.
He must’ve just come in as I studied the words in the book. He’s looking at me.
For a moment, I remember, viscerally, the first time I saw him, in Izzy’s hospital room.
The first time our eyes met. Like then, he glances quickly away.
Like then, he looks formal but friendly, his clothing neat, his posture upright and easy.
I think the brown suede yarmulke looks good on him.
Everything always looks good on him, though.
I suction a quick breath, keep singing. I don’t want this one to end—I might not be able to sing any of the others.
But the cantor is lulling it to a close.
He’s starting on something else, chanting rapidly.
I glance over at Joel and he’s looking at me again. I think I can see him taking in the blue dress, the earrings. Or maybe I’m just hoping he notices.
I sing along with a few other melodies, grateful for the ones without any words at all, just yai dai dai’s.
An hour glides by. The rabbi speaks briefly about the part of the Torah that’s being read this week, the cantor sings, and then the rabbi introduces the mourning prayer and asks the congregation if we’d like to share the names of those we are remembering today.
Many people offer names as he sweeps his hand slowly over us.
He reaches Fran right before me, and she says two names.
I say, “Adam Tav,” very quietly. The rabbi nods to me, and his nod is a brass stamp pressed into warm wax, sealing my gesture, sanctifying it.
My heart lurches. I am sweating under my arms. After his gaze passes to the next person, I whisper under my breath, “Grub, Alabaster.” I wish a second later that I’d said Grub’s given name, even though no one heard me anyway.
Joel says Adam’s name and another name in Hebrew, which I realize after a second might also be Adam’s name.
And then he says, “James Ash.” I stare at him, startled, my ribs clutching, but he doesn’t look at me.
He’s looking straight ahead, as though directly into the glow of the light above the cabinet with the Torah scrolls inside.
We are supposed to rise and recite the mourner’s kaddish now, so I stand with Fran, who only comes up to just above my shoulder, and clumsily murmur the transliteration.
The words are a rumble that rises and falls in gentle, haphazard waves as people speak together, slip apart, rejoin.
I feel the weight of this ritual, even though I don’t understand what we’re saying.
Maybe we’re saying that we won’t forget.
And then it’s over, and we’re sitting down, and the cantor is singing a closing song, and then we’re filing back into another room where there are cookies waiting on platters.
It’s time for me to go. But Fran has latched on to my arm, and she’s asking me what I do for a living, and then she’s waving Joel over, and now there’s no escape.
As he approaches, so handsome in a navy button-down shirt and gray pants, I feel suddenly bashful, suddenly very awkward and young. As though I haven’t learned yet how to be myself. I think of the feeling I had when he healed Ella. The feeling of divinity.
“Good Shabbos, Fran.” He bends down to kiss her cheek. He straightens. “I see you’ve met Tempest.” I try to breathe only a sip of air, so I won’t inhale too much of his sun-onwood scent.
“Tempest!” cries Fran, “with the niece?”
I am taken aback. Joel looks uncomfortable. “You remember everything,” he says.
“Oh, how wonderful that you’ve gotten so close,” she says, smiling a little wickedly between us. “Joel talked about you and the little girl . . . Ellie?”
“Ella.” I am still looking at him. He talked about us.
I think he’s slightly flushed. He pushes the curls back from his forehead. It seems improbable that I have already touched them, too. That I have already touched him, decadently, in all the ways I wanted to.
I clench against a shiver.
No, not all the ways. I haven’t, for example, ever held his hand.
“I hope it’s okay that I’m here— ” I start, and he says at the same time, “It’s nice of you to be here.”
I’m relieved, surprised, that he has interpreted me as nice, instead of assuming a sinister ulterior motive. Or maybe he’s just keeping up a front for Fran.
Now some other older women are coming over, and I get introduced around and have to explain what a doula is.
One of the women used to be a surgeon; she is clearly unimpressed.
The rabbi comes over and pulls Joel away, and Fran says, “Have you heard him play the cello? My God! What a sound! Like heaven!”
The other women agree rapturously. “When he played the Kol Nidre—it was like being at Carnegie Hall.”
“You know, we get some very good acts here in town, at McCarter.”
“I’m not saying we don’t. I’m saying it was like Carnegie Hall because of the beauty of the playing.”
“He’s very modest,” says Fran to me. “You wouldn’t necessarily know about all the things. But he is a remarkable man. I hope you realize that.” She raises her eyebrows at me, teasing and warning at the same time. I am aware that I am being surveilled.
“I realize that,” I say. And maybe there’s something accidental in my tone, because Fran clutches my arm again.
“Sweetheart, the way he talked about the two of you, you and the little girl. He sounded happy for the first time since his brother died. I wouldn’t worry.”
“I’m worried,” I admit in a rush. “Fran, I’m definitely worried.”
“You aren’t Jewish, are you.” She gives me a strong look.
I shake my head.
“And would you convert? I have to ask!”
I smile. Does she have to ask? “Oh, I . . . I hadn’t really thought about it. . . .”
Aside from sex fantasies, before we were enemies, I hardly dared to imagine myself reaching out to touch Joel’s hand with my fingertips, let alone in what religion we might raise our future children. The gulf between my mind and Fran’s is Grand Canyonesque.
“Well, maybe it’s time to do some thinking.” Her eyes dig deeper into mine, conveying a serious meaning.
“Hmm. Okay.” I try to return the serious stare with equal force. It’s hard.
Joel is turning back to us, leaving the rabbi’s side.
“Yes?” Fran probes.
“Yes!” I agree hastily.
Yes. I have agreed to convert to Judaism during my first visit to a synagogue for a man who has very clearly and explicitly tried to kill me. I am doing great.
“I have to go,” I tell Fran. “It was lovely to meet you.”
“Already? You didn’t even eat a cookie!”
“I’m gluten-free,” I say, forgetting that I’m not anymore. I am still being awkward, apparently. I flee.
I make it out the glass double doors into the edge of the night before Joel catches up to me. He stops me with a hand to my shoulder. I turn and am predictably affected by his nearness. It’s excessive, this thing. “Why did you come?” His hand stays on me.
“Because of Adam.”
He studies me. “You dressed up,” he says, something halting in it.
I nod, hugging my coat tighter in the prying wind. It’s starting to seem too thin. “I was trying to be respectful.” Also true. In addition to the rest of the truth.
I feel him become aware that he is still touching me. His hand drops away, and my maudlin shoulder is instantly lonely.
I say, “And you saved Ella.”
“It was my fault, what happened to her.” He owns it without hesitation.
“It was my fault, too.” The strange thing is, I haven’t really blamed him.
He’s looking at me steadily; I can’t tell if the curse is holding him there or if it’s his own will. His eyes seem clear, though, in the dark. We are standing close together, and his fingers lift unconsciously toward me again.
And then I am simply honest, even though I’ve been trying not to be since I met him, and certainly since I learned the truth about him. I keep slipping up, it keeps slipping in anyway. And right now, I can’t even remember how to stop it.
“I came here because I care,” I confess under only the mildest duress. “I want you to know that.” My voice quavers, threads embarrassingly to tufts. “I really care.”