Tinderbox Page 10

  Larry examines his thirty-two-year-old son, the face that seems still only half-formed. The almost twenty-five years since Myra kicked him out have passed in a heartbeat.

  “Sometimes I’d get Caro to climb out the window,” Adam continues, “and then I’d chase her, pretending I was the ax murderer.” Adam raises his hand as though there were an ax in it and bolts toward Omar, who screams with terrified delight as he runs from his father. Adam chases Omar around the edge of the terrace.

  “He-elp!” Omar yells. “Help!”

  Larry lifts the last of the fish steaks onto the platter. In his mind’s eye, he can still see Myra lowering her hands from her face while he nursed his injured ankle. Even in the dim light of the bungalow, there had been no question about it. Her eyes were dry.

  “Save me from this dangerous man!” Omar cries, now on his second lap around the terrace.

  “Got ya, got ya,” Adam yells, swinging his arms. Omar veers toward Larry. He darts between Larry and the picnic table, his father close behind.

  Adam stumbles. “Shit!” he cries, crashing into Larry.

  The platter falls to the ground, breaking into two jagged halves as the fish tumbles onto the flagstones.

  Larry looks at the broken platter. There are shards of porcelain on the steaks. “Idiot. Look what you’ve done.”

  Adam leans over to pick up the fish. “I stubbed my toe,” he mumbles. He holds a piece of fish in each hand, looking helplessly for somewhere to put them.

  Betty arrives with a new platter. Caro follows with a broom, her eyes moving from person to person. “Here,” Betty says, taking the fish from Adam and then picking up the other pieces from the ground. “Nothing a quick rinsey under the water and two more minutes on the grill won’t cure. Just don’t cut your feet.”

  Omar buries his face in Eva’s side. She puts an arm around him.

  Larry touches Adam’s shoulder. He feels like a bully. A monster. “Sorry, son. I didn’t mean that. Are you okay?”

  “It was stupid of me to be running like that.”

  The worst part is that Larry knows that Adam thinks he is right. That he is an idiot. “Is your toe okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  Adam sits on the picnic bench. He clutches his foot. Omar sits next to him. He leans over to examine the toe. Caro sweeps the plate shards into the dustbin.

  Larry turns the grill back on. He takes a gulp of his wine. “Okay, another adventure at Max’s Folly.” His voice sounds artificial, the cheerfulness disingenuous even to his own ears.

  Betty musses Omar’s hair as she passes behind him with the fish, but he does not respond. He is watching Eva, who has raised her palms so they form a cup under her chin. She spits into them. Three times in quick succession.

  “Why’d you do that, Eva?” Omar asks. “Spit in your hands?”

  “Because of the story of the wicked man who burn down the house and use his ax on the people.”

  “That’s just a story, right, Daddy?” Omar turns to look at his father. “It’s not real.”

  “Oh, it happened all right.”

  Caro glares at Adam. “It was a long time ago, Omar. A freak event.”

  Eva spits in her hands again. “Four.” She spits again. “Five.”

  “Why do you keep doing that?” Omar asks.

  “My grandmother teach me. It is how you keep away the evil.”

  Omar counts the bodies. “There are five of us out here. You spit five times because there are five of us.”

  “One time for each finger,” Eva says.

  “But you have ten fingers. Don’t you have to spit ten times?”

  “Five. There are five fingers on a hamsa. You spit five times.”

  “What’s a hamsa?” Omar asks.

  Eva wipes her palms on the sides of her pants. She lifts the chain that hangs around her neck so the hand-shaped silver amulet that had been inside her shirt rests momentarily between her thumb and forefinger. She raises it to her lips, then tucks it back beneath her shirt.

  11

  Of them all, only Adam believes in the significance of coincidence. As a child, he would study lists of notable dates. With great solemnity, he would announce the connections: Did his parents know that Charlie Chaplin died on the birthday of Houdini? That the Great Fire in San Francisco occurred on the same day as an eruption of Mount St. Helens? His father would attempt to debunk the significance with his layman’s statistical proofs: in a room of twenty-three people, there is a greater chance of two or more persons having the same birthday than not. But none of it had mattered to Adam. Once he believed something, not even God, had he believed in a deity, would have been able to sway him.

  Back in the city, Adam is struck with the first coincidence to get under his skin in a very long time. The quiver of uncanniness he felt so often as a child envelops him one afternoon as he is reading about the rubber boom in Iquitos. In 1909 in Iquitos, the rubber trade was approaching its precipitous end, the 70,000 rubber seeds Sir Henry Wickham smuggled out of Brazil having taken hold in neatly organized rubber plantations halfway across the world. In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney left their respective families in Chicago to sail to Europe together, the prequel to the disaster to befall them.

  Adam gets up from his desk. He stretches his arms overhead. He can hear the front door opening, Omar and Eva laughing together. Why does Omar rarely laugh when he is with Rachida or him?

  Surely, Adam thinks, one of the rubber traders must have traveled from Manaus to New York, booking passage to Europe on the same boat on which Frank and Mamah fled together, all of them with children and spouses left behind.

  12

  For the first few weeks after Adam, Omar, and Eva return from Willow, Myra maintains her routine: her morning sessions followed by a brisk walk around the Central Park reservoir, a shower, then a simple lunch, which she eats, when the weather is nice, on the deck off the kitchen. She’d initially protested when Eva began making her lunch, but Eva is so eager to do it, Myra lets her.

  In general, the girl seems happier. She chatters about Omar, who loves her, Adam says, because she plays with him like another kid. Coming up the stairs after seeing her last patient, Myra will hear the laughter that accompanies Eva and Omar’s ongoing card tournament, the centerpiece of which is a game called Spit that involves whooping yells.

  At the beginning of September, Eva tells Myra about a mother she met in the park who has offered to introduce Eva to the rabbi at the nearby West End Avenue synagogue. Eva asks Myra if she can shift her hours so she can attend the services Friday evenings and the adult Hebrew classes Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

  Eva’s first visit to the synagogue is on the Friday before Rosh Hashanah. “I never was in a synagogue before,” she tells Myra when she returns. “I think it will be something very strange, maybe like a crypt, but it looks like the cathedral we have at home. There is a man who sings. He has the most beautiful voice.”

  “The cantor.”

  “The cantor,” Eva repeats. She begins to hum, a mournful melody that Myra dimly recalls from the synagogue where her uncle had been the rabbi. Her mother had never liked going to services, had seemed relieved when Myra announced at eleven that she no longer wanted to attend. During the few weeks, now nearly a decade ago, Myra tried attending services again, she visited the same West End Avenue synagogue where Eva now goes: a grand, crumbling edifice with peeling pink paint and stained-glass windows clouded with decades of dirt. The rabbi had been interested in radical theology and a messianism that had made Myra think of men in black coats davenning at the Wailing Wall.

  “In Iquitos,” Eva continues, “there is an old Jewish man. People come to his house Friday nights and on Yom Kippur. Until my mother die, she take me every Yom Kippur to the man’s house. We drink tea and eat sweet mango cakes. The cakes are to remind us of God’s sweetness, the old man say.”

  Myra’s parents had always fasted on Yom Kippur. When she turned thirteen, they expec
ted that she would fast too. Afraid to tell them how light-headed the fasting made her, she had stashed licorice under her mattress to help her get through the long day.

  Eva smiles in a way that suggests she is remembering the sweet mango cakes. “Every year, on Yom Kippur day, my mother take me from the old man’s house to the Catholic church so we can say confession and receive communion.” She studies Myra’s face. “The Jewish people, they don’t do that here, do they?”

  13

  After a few weeks of Friday pickups, Caro and Omar fall into their own routine. Immediately after school, they walk to an ice-cream store on Columbus Avenue where Omar orders a scoop of strawberry in a cone and Caro orders whatever nonfat concoction is being offered from the machine. Ice cream in hand, they head south to the Museum of Natural History, where they visit first the dinosaurs on the fourth floor and then the African mammals off the rotunda. Afterward, they catch the bus up Central Park West, getting off at Ninety-fifth Street as Caro had during all of her high school years.

  The salad Eva has made will be on the counter, the table set, the chickens her mother has cleaned and seasoned earlier in the day already in the oven. Omar plays cards with Eva until she leaves for evening services. A little before six, Myra climbs the stairs from her office. She and Caro have a glass of wine before calling the others for dinner.

  After some toing and froing, Myra and Rachida have agreed that meals are not to be delayed for her since she rarely arrives before eight, and even that hour is unpredictable. On the first Friday in October, however, Caro notices two extra settings on the table.

  “Who’s coming?” Caro asks her mother when she arrives upstairs.

  “Rachida. She invited another resident from the hospital. A woman named Layla who’s also from Morocco.”

  A few minutes later, there are footsteps on the brownstone stairs. The front door opens and Rachida, in blue hospital scrubs, enters with Layla, a slip of a woman in a short skirt and sling-back pumps.

  Layla’s hands flutter as she reaches out to touch first Myra’s and then Caro’s arm. Adam comes down the stairs, unaware or having forgotten, Caro surmises from his unkempt appearance, that a guest will be at the table. Layla greets him with her arms pressed tightly to her sides.

  Caro follows Adam to the kitchen while the others settle into the parlor. He opens a bottle of red wine and she pours a glass of juice for Omar, who has come downstairs, too. “Tuck your shirt in,” she whispers as she leaves to bring the juice to Omar. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  Layla is draped in one of the Barcelona chairs, talking about the four years she spent at medical school in Iowa. Omar has taken Caro’s seat on the couch, his head resting on his grandmother’s shoulder.

  When Adam extends a glass of wine toward Layla, she holds up a hand like a stop sign. “No thank you.”

  “A teetotaler?”

  Rachida shoots Adam a sharp look as she gets up and heads to the kitchen.

  “I don’t drink because I’m a Muslim,” Layla says softly.

  “Excuse us, dear,” Myra says. “We’re all so parochial here.”

  “What’s that mean?” Omar asks.

  “You know,” Caro says, “how some children love playing with action figures and you don’t? Imagine if they couldn’t understand that you don’t.”

  “That would be mean.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s meant to be mean, but it can feel like that.”

  Rachida returns with a glass of sparkling water that she gives to Layla.

  “So, the two of you work together?” Caro asks Layla.

  Layla glances at Rachida, who answers for her. “Layla is a second-year primary-care fellow. My track, the respecialization track, overlaps with the second-years.”

  Over dinner, Layla tells them that she was raised in a small village near the edge of the Sahara, not far from the Algerian border. “My father was the eldest son of the man who was the chief of the region. His grandfather was a sultan. When I was a child, my grandfather kept camels that he’d rent at the tent camps used by tourists headed out to see the Erg Chebbi dunes. He gave that business to my two uncles, and now they have the cell phone franchise for the area—which is very big because there are so few landlines.”

  “That’s where Bertolucci filmed The Sheltering Sk y, isn’t it?” Adam asks.

  “That was in Ouarzazate,” Layla says. “In the Draa Valley. Where we live is totally desert.”

  “Layla was telling us about her family,” Myra says, looking pointedly at Adam. “What is the village like where you live?”

  “We live in an ancient town called Rissani. It was the home of the first of the Alaouites, Hassan the Alaouite. There is an old palace there that belonged to the royal family. Now, though, the area is very poor. Most people live off the meager incomes they receive from the government with a little extra money when they can get it harvesting dates in some nearby oases. My family has had electricity since 1990, but many families only got it in the last few years. Now everyone spends the hot afternoons squeezed into the houses of the people in the village who have televisions.”

  “Watching,” Rachida adds, “dubbed sitcoms from the States. Layla intends to go back to southern Algeria and open a clinic. The electricity is too spotty to be counted on for refrigeration, so it makes antibiotic and vaccination use hard to manage. She’s writing a grant proposal for the World Health Organization to fund solar generators for medical refrigerators.”

  “Blindness is the main problem,” Layla says. “One out of eight children suffers from eye infections that place them at risk of losing their vision.”

  “You put us to shame,” Adam says, pouring himself a second glass of wine. “Our father’s a cardiologist, but he won’t even take private health insurance anymore.”

  “How does your family feel about your being here?” Caro asks.

  “When you call his office,” Adam continues, “they ask for credit card information before they even ask what the problem is.”

  Rachida stands to clear the plates.

  “Let me help you,” Layla says.

  14

  After dinner, Adam heads upstairs to give Omar his bath while Eva does the dishes. Layla thanks Myra for having her, apologizing for leaving so early. “I haven’t had more than ten hours’ sleep all week,” she says.

  “Of course, you must be exhausted.”

  “I’ll walk you to the cross-town bus,” Rachida says.

  “I can walk her there,” Caro says. “I’m headed that way.” Having assumed Rachida would prefer to have time with Omar before he goes to bed than to walk Layla to the bus, she is surprised by Rachida’s expression, which suggests otherwise.

  “Come back anytime,” Myra says. “We’d love to have you.”

  Outside, the autumn air is damp and chill. Layla’s heels make a clicking beat on the sidewalk. They turn south on Columbus Avenue, Caro folding her arms across her chest, Layla’s gaze fixed on the sidewalk in front of her.

  When they reach Eighty-sixth Street, Caro points across the street where the bus will stop, then extends a hand to say good night. Layla grasps Caro’s arm.

  “I didn’t want to say it in front of the child,” she says.

  “Say what?”

  Layla examines Caro’s face. “You asked how my family feels about my being here.”

  Caro nods.

  “My father and my brothers stoned me after they heard I’d been accepted to medical school in New York.” Layla pushes up her jacket sleeve to reveal a long scar on her arm. “They broke my arm and my nose and three ribs, then dumped me as far out into the desert as their truck could go.”

  Caro gasps.

  “They left me on the sand to be eaten by the vultures. My boyfriend heard about it. It took him until the next morning to find me, because I’d been half-covered by sand. He wrapped me in gunny sacks to hold my bones together and took me to a hotel where some French tourists had me flown to a hospital.”

/>   The bus pulls into the stop and Layla dashes across the street. When she reaches the curb, she turns to wave. Caro exhales, her breath held since she saw Layla’s long scar.

  15

  Myra began her analysis with Dr. Klara Dreis after her parents’ deaths, when she felt backlogged with grief from the miscarriages and achingly alone. At the time, she had not understood how unusual the analysis was. There was no chipping away at resistances, no gradual construction of unconscious thoughts. Rather, once she lay on Dreis’s couch, everything poured out: the chill in her bones that had lasted her entire childhood; the fear of making a mess—of her puke, shit, toys, clothes impinging upon her mother’s vigorously sanitized rooms, for that’s what they had felt like, not a home, certainly not Myra’s home.

  Then, behind that torrent to Dreis, came the words They didn’t love me, words sputtered with humiliating tears that backed into her nose and chafed her cheeks, followed then by something worse—the apprehension that the words were true.

  For months, her only comfort was Dreis’s reassurance that it would eventually become a relief to have it said, that her parents had not loved her, and then to look at this idea from a distance, as something of curiosity, how it had happened that two people had borne a child whom they then had not loved.

  “When?” Myra demanded, her tears still abundant. “When will this relief come?”

  “When you stop believing as you did as a child that it was because of you, who you are.”

  Not at five, not at eleven, at twenty, at thirty, had she been able to conceive of this possibility: that the sorry state of affairs had nothing to do with her, a reality which had its own quality of pain—the utter impersonality of it, the utter obliviousness to her, so that it would have made no difference if she were a saint or a psychopath. That these people whose offspring she was simply had nothing in them that allowed love: not for themselves, not for each other, not for her. The actual ease of their circumstances had never touched their belief that they were on the precipice of disaster, that living was a brutal grind that required unflagging vigilance.

  “Had you been more difficult, had you enacted your sorrow,” Dreis said, “they would have hated you for the interference. That might have been easier for you, since at least you would have had their attention.”