Washing the Dead (35 page)

“Where are you?” the rebbetzin asked.

“Barbara, where are you?” I laughed, not needing to explain my reference to the question God asked Adam after he bit from the apple.

“Another one of Rabbi Lichtenberg’s lemon drops for you.” She squeezed my hand.

“He paid a hefty price for hiding his sin from God, that Adam.”

“God knows we’re not perfect. He only expects us to take responsibility for our actions, which you’ve done, unlike Adam.”

“That’s generous of you to say.”

“You’re not the only one at fault here, Barbara.” The wrinkles on her forehead looked deeper to me.

Suddenly I had a feeling that she was hatching a plan that involved me and that I was going to start feeling better soon. In a way, I already did. I knew from long conversations with my students’ parents what it felt like to hold someone’s trouble in your palm and offer them a second of relief from the burden.

I left the mansion, floating between San Diego and my home
ten miles up the road. My cell phone rang.

“Hello, stranger,” Sheri said. “Did you forget something today?”

The sound of her voice yanked me back into my life, but what had I forgotten? “Today?”

“My birthday lunch.” She sounded hurt.

“Oh, crap.”

“Barbara, are you upset with me?”

“God, no. Why?”

“You’ve been so distant lately. Like you’re off somewhere else.”

She didn’t have to say more. I knew exactly what she meant. I knew how it felt to watch someone disappear into a mist.

“Sheri, I am so sorry. I’ve been worried about Lili. I haven’t been myself.” This was partially true.

“What can I do to help?” Her voice had warmed up.

“Just forgive me.”

“I’m sorry things have been so rough.”

“Listen, I’m just getting home, and Lili’s here. Talk later?”

“Whenever you want.”

We hung up, and I walked through the door to find Lili waiting for me at the kitchen table, primed to ignore me.

“Hi, Lil,” I said.

“Hi,” she grunted.

I was too exhausted to cook or deal with her sullenness. “You in the mood for Thai?”

She narrowed her eyes. “
Taylor
took me to Kopp’s.” Her lips curled into the beginning of a smirk.

“Glad you ate,” I said, refusing to react. I didn’t recognize this girl with the added layer of flesh and the new baseline mood of irritability.

“I flunked my geometry test, in case you’re interested.”

Her words made me shiver; I remembered throwing the same wounded accusation at my mother when she stopped tracking my schoolwork.

“Of course I’m interested,” I snapped. “Haven’t I been sitting
with you every night trying to help you?”

“You suck at math.”

Three deep breaths, Barbara. Math wasn’t my strength, true, but working with Lili frustrated the hell out of me. I could tolerate the busiest four-year-old, but I couldn’t help her for more than a half hour without wanting to tear my eyelashes out. Her stream of patter looped around her worries that she wasn’t going to finish her assignment, that she was going to fail the test, that her ankle wouldn’t heal, that she was going to miss the new episode of
Glee.
She couldn’t sit more than five seconds without jumping up to fill her water glass or go to the bathroom.

“Your dad will help you tonight.”

“Great, pawn me off on Dad,” she snarled.

That was it. I was calling her doctor tomorrow and pursuing the Adderall prescription her academic support team had been suggesting.

“I’m going upstairs to shower, Lili. We can discuss this after we’ve both calmed down,” I said. Her obnoxious behavior signaled that she needed me more than ever, but I had nothing to give her right now.

When I emerged from the shower, Sam was waiting for me. “What happened down there?”

“Your daughter was being a pill.”

“That’s my girl you’re calling a pill.” He held me for a second, my wet hair leaving an imprint on his shirt.

“Why does she have to be so mean?” I asked.

“She’s hurting.”

“Who isn’t?”

He unbuttoned his oxford shirt and retrieved a sweatshirt from the drawer. “Are you still thinking about clearing things up with your mom?”

I wrapped my hair in a towel. “Jenny the warden won’t let me see her.”

“What’s that all about?”

“My mother’s visit here, or shall I say, her visit with
me
, agitated
her.” My lip quivered.

Sam pulled his sweatshirt over his head to avoid telling me what we both knew, that Jenny had a point.

“Let me talk to Lili, and we’ll finish this up later.” I kissed his shoulder, went to Lili’s room, and knocked on her door.

“Come in.” She sounded contrite.

She lay on her bed in an oversized T-shirt she’d sweet-talked Sam into buying her when he took her to see the Jonas Brothers for her twelfth birthday. A history book was open across her legs.

“Do you have a history test?”

She shut the book. “Yes. What’s the difference if I get a C or a C-?” She handed me her last test, which was littered with red checkmarks. “See? It’s not just math.” Tears started streaming down her face. “I’m dumb.” She looked so small in the big shirt, her nose running, her eyes red.

“Move over.” I crawled into the slot between the bed and the wall. “You, my girl, are anything
but
dumb.” I wrapped a strand of her wiry hair around my finger.

“I’m just smart in different ways,” she said, mimicking me. She let me hold her for a few minutes before she squirmed away. “I’m
perceptive.
”

“You see things, Lili,” I said. “You know that.”

“Maybe things I shouldn’t,” she said.

I sat up. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Better get back to it.” She opened her book.

I maneuvered myself out of her bed. “Do you want me to help you study?”

“No, I got it, Mom.” She tried to sound brave.

“Let’s try the Adderall, Lil.”

“Do you think it will help?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, instead of what I was thinking. Can’t get much worse.

That night, I dreamed about Simone Cox. She was wearing a red bikini that revealed her outie, as small as a buttonhole in the
collar of an oxford shirt. Her hair shielded the face of a little boy who was whispering in her ear. I woke up panting as if the smell of smoke had seeped into my sleep. Who was that little boy? Mrs. Kessler’s Yossi? Sari’s Benny? Simone’s Ollie? He was not Josh Fader or Brett Cooper or any of my students. They never would have been so bold as to intrude upon my subconscious.

I was afraid to revisit my dream, so I lay still and listened until the birds started to chirp outside my window. Sam, Lili, and I spoke little over breakfast. After I slogged through a morning of teaching, I put on my sneakers and went for a long walk.

I made a beeline for our kitchen computer as soon as I got home. I hit the return key and studied my screensaver, a photo of Sam, Lili, and me in Cheesehead hats, smiling after a Packers victory. Sam always looked slightly triumphant, as befitted a person blessed with an allegiance to a baseline level of happiness.

I opened my browser, and the Google welcome page swallowed up the image of my grinning family. I searched “Daniel Cox and coffeehouse and San Diego,” and up popped a business address for Java Books in Encinitas. It made me happy to know that he was living his dream. I clicked on the website, which featured a photo of Daniel lounging on a big white chair, holding an oversized coffee mug. He was still beautiful, though middle-age had dulled his features. My hand shook as I dialed the West Coast.

“Java Books.” Daniel sounded exactly the same.

“This is Barbara Blumfield. I used to be Barbara Pupnick.” My hand shook harder. Maybe I’d made the wrong choice.

He paused, and I heard the grinding roar of an espresso machine and bustling sounds of a busy coffeehouse. I wondered if he was going to hang up on me.

“How’s Ollie?” I asked.

“Ollie’s a public defender up in Spokane. Got sick of the sunshine.” His voice was tight.

I had a flash of the bright little boy I’d bathed and chased down the flat San Diego beaches. I put my hand to the place on my cheek he liked to kiss, half expecting to find grains of sand from
his lips.

“Did you call to check in on Ollie after all these years?” Daniel asked.

I took a nervous swig of bottled water. “I called to apologize.”

The espresso machine quieted. “Are you in some kind of twelve-step program?”

I laughed weakly. “No.”

I could hear someone ask him if they had any raspberry scones left.

“In the back, in the pink box,” he said. “Sorry, Barbara. Let me go outside so I won’t be interrupted.”

I listened to the din of the shop yield to the sound of the ocean and waited for him to speak.

“It was an accident,” he said, sounding like he had when he and Simone were just about to make up after an argument.

“You’re generous, but I should have stayed to see if Simone was okay.”

He took a breath as if he was about to speak, but I cut him off. “Please don’t make this easier for me.”

“I just don’t see the use in reliving that nightmare.”

“How long did it take for her to get well?”

“Months. She … um … her hip and knee are still a little messed up.”

I imagined Simone running through the sand in one of her bikinis, her muscular legs devouring the ground beneath her. Daniel told me about her recovery, about the two surgeries and the long rehabilitation, and I gathered my courage to ask, “Did you ever have more children?”

I could hear waves in the background.

“Yes, a girl.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, wonderful. Congratulations!”

“She was born in 1977, but thanks.”

I laughed out of relief that Simone had been spared the heartache of failing to conceive. I wondered if she ever got the reading she wanted from Marci.

“Barbara, we’ve forgiven you.” He sounded like he wanted to get to the point of this phone call and move on.

“How?” I asked, thinking of the damage I’d caused.

“You were fragile.”

Fragile. It was the word the Shabbos goy and the rebbetzin had used to describe my mother. “That’s no excuse for hurting people.”

I could tell that he was walking toward the water by the intensifying sound of the waves. “Do you know what our biggest seller is right now?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “It’s a kid’s book called
Zen Shorts.
”

“I know that book. I’m a preschool teacher.” I felt my old excitement when I learned that he was a Gatsby fan.

“Okay, Barbara, then go and reread—”

“ ‘A Heavy Load,’ ” I blurted. It was the story about two traveling monks who encounter a rude young woman in silk robes, sitting in her sedan chair, waiting grumpily for someone to ferry her across a mud puddle. The older monk obliges, and she treats him shabbily. Hours later, the younger monk complains about the woman’s rudeness.

“Yes, that’s the one. Remember the ending, when the older monk says something like, ‘I set the woman down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?’ ”

It was the type of exchange that I was once young and foolish enough to mistake for Daniel’s romantic interest in me. “I get it.”

“I know you do,” he said warmly.

“So you got your wish,” I said. “A coffee shop where people can talk about their favorite books.”

“Yeah, I did.” I pictured his shy smile.

We mumbled a clumsy farewell, and then he spoke my name just as I was about to hang up.

“Yes?”

“Maybe I hadn’t fully set down the woman in the robes until you called.”

“Then I’m glad I did.”

With the warm phone in my lap, I thought of my recurring nightmare of the naked woman floating in the mikveh and the man paddling around in his dirty work boots. Now I could see her face. It was mine.

I didn’t sleep the night I called Daniel. Our conversation had released an energy so uncomfortably wild that I couldn’t settle back into myself. I went down to the kitchen, heated some milk in a saucepan, and emptied it into my favorite mug, a Mother’s Day gift Lili made when she was twelve. She’d laminated a collage of the two of us to the cup. I’d always focused on the cleverness of Lili’s artwork and her conscientious gathering of mementos: the words “Benji’s Deli” cut out of an old menu, a piece of thread from a disastrous sewing class we’d taken together, a dried blueberry we’d picked in Door County. But now that I examined the photos, I noticed that she’d selected images where my lips were smiling but my eyes were not.

It took me a week to digest my conversation with Daniel, but by the time November arrived, I was ready to visit the rebbetzin to discuss it. She kissed me hello, and I followed her into the kitchen where my mother and I had worked as a team, stacking dirty plates from the Shabbos table, arranging bakery platters, grinding coffee for the rebbetzin’s teas. I started to giggle.