Kitabı oku: «The Family Tabor»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Good Samaritan

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Empire of Knowledge

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Valley of the Shadow

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Sacred Geography

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Acknowledgements

Recommend The Family Tabor for your next book club!

About the Author

Also by Cherise Wolas

About the Publisher

GOOD SAMARITAN

ONE

TOMORROW EVENING, HARRY TABOR will be anointed Man of the Decade.

If this were the 1300s, he would be running for his life to escape savage pogroms in France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, or Bohemia.

If this were the 1800s, in Imperial Russia, he would be running for his life to escape savage pogroms in Odessa, in Warsaw, in Kishinev, in Kiev, in Bialystok, or in Lviv.

If this were the early 1940s, in Nazi-occupied Europe, he would be running for his life, the garish yellow Star of David on his chest, Jew centered in mock Hebraic, a target to be captured and deported to a savage camp to join the millions of dead going up in smoke.

It is only by a godsend that it is none of those times and none of those places, although those events, in those places, at those times, certainly clarified how one was considered by others.

Instead, it is late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in Palm Springs, California, and on this scorching mid-August Friday night, Harry Tabor is reveling in the truth of what’s coming. Man of the Decade is the desert city’s exceptional honor, lofting high the special few who devotedly enrich the lives of others in astounding and uncommon ways. As Harry has been doing for thirty years, manifesting futures of promise and hope for the persecuted, the lost, and the luckless.

In March, when he received the lavish hand-delivered announcement inviting him to ascend into the very select group—only twelve such ascensions since the award’s institution—he was hesitant about accepting, and had thought: Why me?

But now, as he embraces Roma, the love of his life and his wife of forty-four years, he thinks: Why not me? He commands immense respect and admiration as the highly successful head of his humanitarian enterprises, a man who effects miracles, trusting in the honey of bees, not the sting, to make those miracles happen. He shepherds all those he resettles here, thousands now, and looks after them lovingly, with care and pride.

And indeed, this moment, sheet thrown off, bodies damp, souls replenished by their Friday night union, Harry realizes there will never be a better time for this felicitous event, this proffering of esteem, this celebration of him, to which, apparently, eight hundred have confirmed their attendance. How wonderful that it has come now, when he has just begun dipping toes into the spotlight, and while he has not yet lost his hair or his teeth or his height or his hearing or his eyesight, and any notion of him shuffling off this mortal coil is far, far in the future. So far in the future, it bears absolutely no current consideration. In fact, he will not, this night, consider such an eventuality at all.

He runs a hand softly down his wife’s back and says, “You’re as lovely now as you were at twenty-four when we wed.”

Harry says these words often to Roma, and always on Friday nights, for he still sees her as the bride she once was. And every Friday night, Roma says, “And you have matured into an emperor, my love. Enjoy your solitary hour.”

Which is what she says now, smiling up at him before cloaking herself with the sheet and duvet. She is instantly asleep in the ceiling fan breeze, the blades’ whirring a noise she seems never to notice.

Harry rises then for a quick shower. Under the spray, inside his head, Leonard Cohen is singing, Hineni, hineni. All afternoon he listened to that song in his office, its dark exultation curiously increasing his own elation. Here I am, here I am, he thinks as he dries off and dons the caftan Roma insisted they buy him long ago in Morocco.

When he draws the drapes, he catches his reflection. He does look like an emperor, and he feels like one, too, a happy emperor, a pleased potentate, a benevolent monarch.

Slipping out of their bedroom, he follows the path Roma leaves for him through the house, overheads reduced to small lighted circles, electric breadcrumbs by which she guarantees he will find his way back to her. And he always does, always wants to, always will.

In the living room, a substantial pour of brandy in a cut-crystal glass; then he is through the sliding glass doors, stepping into the late-summer night with its textured, enveloping heat, the hot air scented with life.

On his expansive back patio that smacks right up against the vast desert beyond, he stretches out on a lounge chair, and becomes one with the settled darkness that embraces his large house, that outlines the rows of towering cacti—larger than when they first moved in—silvered by moonlight, thick as terrestrial soldiers, sulfurous as ghosts. This place, this desert, his desert, how it stirs his insides, the grandness of everything and of every living thing mixing seductively with the fragrance of the brandy he sips.

A bat shoots by, then another one, and their soaring night search for insects to gobble up no longer gives him the slightest start. He listens to the murmurs, the rustles, the peeps, the faint calls that could mean love or despair out there, the scrabbling of creatures seeking whatever it is they need. The moon is cut in half tonight, the stars preserved rather than gleaming. He remembers when his children were young, pointing out specific stars whose names he didn’t know, has never known, saying to each of them, “That star right there belongs to you, Phoebe, and that one to you, Camille, and that one to you, Simon.” And they believed him; for years they believed those stars were theirs, their names attached to them in some astral registry. Perhaps he’ll offer up stars to the little ones, his young granddaughters, this weekend.

This is Harry’s finale on these sacred Friday nights, after he and Roma prepare a lovely dinner at home, drink a bottle of delicious wine, share news about his newest clients, her thorniest patients, their stellar children, their adorable grandchildren, and afterward, in every season, float together in the big pool until the moon appears, then make love. This solitary hour of reflection is when he considers the infinite, and the world at large, and this world of his that he thinks he created out of whole cloth.

Tonight, it’s not the infinite he wants to contemplate, but the specific. And specifically, his response to one of the many questions posed by the young Palm Times reporter for the profile piece that will be published in Sunday’s edition—highlighting, he was told, his installation as Man of the Decade.

When asked, “Do you think great things are ahead of you or behind you?” Harry had replied, “The past no longer exists, there is only the future, whatever it may hold,” and something about his answer to that consideration of mystical simplicity has continued to give him pause. He studies it anew now, from multiple angles, and recognizes that the equation that has fueled him all his life is slightly different, less coy and more apt:

“The past no longer exists, but great things are always ahead in my future.”

That’s what he should have said. That would have been entirely accurate.

Which leads him to reconsider another of his responses during that long interview conducted in his office. His answer hadn’t been at all inaccurate, but he might have fleshed it out, elaborated, said something more than, “Religious faith has nothing to do with my organization’s mission. I am a historical Jew.”

In the dense heat, Harry unpacks that brief explanatory offering he made to the reporter, with its pithy pearl of a phrase, a definitional near-truth, a mostly accurate shorthand to describe himself, that he thinks his brain magically deduced on its own—it didn’t, but no matter.

Yes, he should have explained to the reporter that while he aligns himself with the cultural and ethical lineage of his, the Chosen People, he draws the line at, absolutely doesn’t subscribe to, their belief in the power of prayer. He could have said, “Look, prayer failed all of my ancestors, everyone from whom I’m descended,” and evocatively illustrated what he meant with a few quick stories:

That his great-grandparents Abraham and Minishka Tabornikov were tiny people, stoic and reverent in their religiousness, with an enormous belief that God was with them, despite the awful men on horseback who rode into their shtetl waving scimitars and swords, eagerly firebombing the place once again, leaving behind a new stack of dead Jews mangled, burned, cut down, sliced straight through. Every Shabbat and on all the big and little holidays, they prayed in the ramshackle shul that was their second home, rebuilt with tzedakah and reconsecrated as many times as it was left smashed and smoldering. They had three healthy sons, not strapping, but smart—the youngest, a Talmudic scholar—all marrying devoted girls who bore lovely grandchildren. Their condensed happiness was like a fragile flower cracking through bone-dry dirt, beauty found if they shut their eyes to the rough world and forced their hearts open. Paltry, pitiful gifts, taken as proof that Adonai was watching out for them, watching over them, hearing their worshipful words.

That his grandparents Aleph and Sonia Tabornikov were a little more progressive than the prior generation. They married, and with their young sons, left the shtetl for the big city, though the big city was barely a town. But with that fifty-mile migration, they reduced, to Shabbat and the top three tiers of holidays, their attendance at their newer, finer shul, whose roof did not leak, looking sideways at those who held fast to the full complement. And when their sons were old enough to understand where they came from, and that because of who they were, they were not wanted—another round of pogroms making that abundantly clear—the family sold their only inheritances, a silver Kiddush cup and menorah, packed up their meager belongings, and hightailed it out of the old country, arriving at Ellis Island, where these Tabornikovs were reborn Americans, renaming themselves Tabor. Worship did not wholly consume the totality of his grandparents’ lives in their new country, but to Harry, it has seemed only by a matter of meaningless degrees. For although these new Tabors were free as they had never been before, prayer barely eased their lot in life.

That his parents, Mordechai and Lenore Tabor, were, like all the rest, dead, but after meeting at CCNY and marrying, they chose as their home a comfortable house in the Bronx within walking distance of a conservative synagogue they immediately joined. They did not attend on Shabbat or on the minor holidays, but were present at the ostensibly fun ones, like Purim and Sukkot and Hanukkah, and were always in their middle-of-the-house seats on the most holy of days, those deemed critical, young Harry seated firmly between them. And when the synagogue threw out the fusty old prayer books and adopted looser, more free-form services, with a musician to strum his guitar and a newfangled cantor who sang to the plucked notes, they went with the times. They maintained their minimized calendar of observance and their strong belief that prayer was an answer to so many things that remained, unfortunately, unanswered.

And that on Harry’s own Bar Mitzvah, as he ascended the bema, reached the Torah scroll unrolled on the lectern, accepted from the well-bearded rabbi the scepter to guide him along the reversed sentences of minuscule black-inked Hebrew words, he, like all those earlier Tabors and Tabornikovs, had prayed. His prayer hadn’t been for global peace, or to make Mordy and Lenore proud, or to be gifted with checks and Israeli Bonds in relatively substantial sums for 1961, but that Eve Flynn, the long-legged redhead in his homeroom, who every single Sunday attended church and sang in its youth choir under a massive crucified Christ, would finally notice him on the very day Jewish tradition declared him a man. Harry had looked out at the congregation and prayed that when everyone was at the after-party in the Tabors’ tidy, well-gardened backyard, Eve, dazzled by his new manhood, might, in an enthusiastic clasping of sweaty hands, be led around the side of the house, where, under the silky fronds of the weeping willow tree, Harry would bestow upon her his first-ever kiss. He had seen his pale gingery angel among his dark-haired erstwhile tribe and sang his Torah portion as if it were a love song for her. At the party, he was knock-kneed with love for Eve, who wore a short froth of a party dress in a peach that clashed with her red hair, but exposed her slim thighs, her rounded knees, her thin calves, all that opaline skin. Despite his fervent call to God, as fervent as once intoned by his ancestors, the prayed-for kiss was not to be. Big, blond Bobby O’Ryan, a churchgoer like Eve, had led her away, and in painful defeat, Harry could only imagine Eve Flynn being kissed under that weeping willow tree by a boy who, because he was no Jew, would never be a man at thirteen.

And he would have concluded by saying, “I consider myself a thoroughly modern man, standing at a vast distance from the millennia of bloodshed and obliteration and prayer, and that whatever links me to my ancestors is tenuous at best, a matter only of DNA, and not of outlook, or of temperament, or of faith. Big prayers did nothing for my ancestors, and a tiny prayer did not turn Eve Flynn’s head and heart in my direction. After that, I gave up prayer entirely.”

All these years, Harry has been certain that he prayed just the once and never again. Indeed, he would swear that’s true.

What is true is that he left Eve Flynn behind, and met other girls who welcomed his kisses, and he graduated from college, and from a decent business school, and landed, surprisingly, at a hoity-toity, top-tier, gentile-owned stock brokerage firm in Manhattan, where he was the token Jew for a few years, but moved up the ladder with alacrity anyway, fell madly in love with the dazzling Jewess who deigned to become his wife, and created a life far beyond his ancestors’ ken.

What is also true is that thirty-plus years ago, in what still strikes him as a miraculous decision, he moved his family to this desert and made it his mission to do good in the world.

Looking up at the moon and the stars, Harry thinks he ought to be done for the night. It’s late, but not too late, and anyway the brandy is finished, and he wants to be fresh for tomorrow.

He locks the glass door, rinses the crystal, returns it to its living room tray, and snaps off the lights one by one as he winds his way through the house, back to his bed, where his wife, and the warmth of her skin, awaits him.

It is pitch-black in the bedroom, and silent once he cuts the fan’s spinning entirely, and then Roma sighs her heartbroken sigh when she’s dreaming about her grandmother Tatiana and her mother, Inessa. He waits until his strong and happy wife’s nocturnal sadness fades away, then carefully climbs into bed, fluffs his pillows, and closes his eyes.

Soon there is an internal rush of lapping oceanic waves pulling him under, into the ruffled layers of sleep, where he will travel to places he does not know, see people he never knew, and others he once loved, traveling, he thinks, on his own, believing, as he always has, that he alone inhabits his head. Mistaken in his assumption that the past no longer exists. Mistaken, too, in his certainty that the world can be understood, that he understands the world, or, at least, that he understands his own. As his breath grows even and deep, a sensed, rather than articulated, sentiment washes over him: I have been a very lucky man.

And that is true, absolutely true. But luck is a rescindable gift.

TWO

THE HOURS PASS, AND he sleeps deeply, and then all the blood-soaked history of the Judaic people, and all the history of those to whom he is related, whose lives were cut short or resulted in his existence, and all his beliefs about the past and the future, and about faith and prayer, are fading back into the pleats of Harry Tabor’s sleeping mind. It is dawn and he is waking, opening his shining brown eyes, running a large hand through his thick hair, still boisterously dark, threads of distinguished white only recently emerging, in this his seventieth year.

He is quick out of bed, the travertine marble cool under his feet, and in the bathroom, he gives his solid teeth a thorough cleaning, grinning at himself when he finishes rinsing. He picks up the razor, runs a hand over his cheeks, thinking happily of this afternoon, when his children and grandchildren will descend upon the family’s substantial and striking mid-century modernist homestead, with its five bedrooms and endless other rooms, all open to the expanse of sky and desert and weather and one or the other of their two pools. He and Roma and their progeny all gathered together for this weekend of Man of the Decade pomp and circumstance.

Maybe there will be time for a hike with his son. Wouldn’t Simon be surprised if he said, “I’m finally ready to do Cactus to Clouds”? Really, this would be the perfect weekend to hike that tough trail he has always avoided.

He sets down the razor. He’ll take the single-edge blade to his face tonight, be glisteningly smooth for the gala event celebrating him.

In his large closet, he dresses in his tennis whites, then tiptoes, socks and Tretorns in hand, out of the master bedroom with its view, when the drapes are pulled back, of the meditation pool, leaving Roma asleep, her face aglow in a shard of sunlight, dreaming, he hopes, about something pleasurable, not about Tatiana and Inessa, or the youngster she has begun treating who has ceased eating entirely.

In the sunny kitchen, the waft of espresso makes him smile again, that timer on the machine such a modern wonder. He throws back a first cup, rich and unadulterated, looking out over the large aquamarine rectangle in the main courtyard where Roma swims her daily laps before healing the children of the Coachella Valley.

Socks on, laces tied, he gulps down two more espressos, leaves the thimble-sized cup in the sink, and pulls from the freezer three bottles of water, slick as stalactites.

Out into the open-air carport, into his old convertible Mercedes coupe painted in a patina of gold, he revs the engine just a little, to feel the vroom in his being, and leaves his majestic home, which sits on a solid acre, driving past the flowering cacti and soaring palms, and the beds of mimosas, ocotillos, acacias, lemongrass, and the lilies of the Nile, after which the Tabors’ street is named, turning left onto his street, onto Agapanthus Lane. He presses the gas, feels the stalwart car gather its power, gliding so easily over the smooth macadam, a hop and a skip to the courts.

He could belong to any of the private tennis clubs in the area, and his tennis pal, Levitt, would prefer playing at his own, but Harry is a man of the people, and he prefers the public courts. After all, he comes from solid stock that knew how to make do with what they had, which was nothing. And he knows how to make do, too, only he has so much more than any impoverished Tabornikov could have imagined possessing back in the Pale of Settlement, when the world was so very, very, very old. Harry Tabor may no longer be chronologically young, but he feels as if he is, lives as if he is, as if this world is a great and wonderful place, and he himself is adding to that wondrousness, waking up every day strong as a bull, his thoughts sharp and important, his very being brand-new. A man self-made, through and through. That’s how he remembers his own life, up to this point.

And there is Levitt’s showy Maserati cooling down when Harry pulls into his regular spot at Ruth Hardy Park. Younger than Harry by a baker’s dozen, but not quite as agile a player, Levitt is a friend Harry considers “newish” since they met only a decade ago. In the desert, ten years is nothing against the antediluvian nature of the topography.

Creaky parking brake engaged, Henry swings himself easily through the car’s open door, is up on his feet, retrieving his tennis bag from the backseat.

“You ready to lose again, Levitt? I’m telling you, you’d better be tough, give me your prime-A game, because today is my lucky day.”

THREE

ROMA TABOR’S DREAMS ABOUT her baba Tatiana and her mother, Inessa, aren’t about what she has suffered and lost by their absence, or the bottomless sorrow that never dissolves; instead she dreams of their sufferings, their losses, their sorrows that they packed away after they found a way to escape.

For many years now, when she wakes, she thinks first about luck—about the terrible steps Tatiana had to take to find a shred of it in a world that decreed she should have none, and then about its constancy in her own life. From the time she was young, those strong women defied their experiences to teach her to trust in its tangible reality. She learned the lesson, but honors their before and after by remembering that believing one deserves luck doesn’t mean it won’t disappear in a flash.

This morning, there is Harry’s usual empty space next to her in the king-sized bed, and the sun’s heat on her face, and she thinks about luck, then puts it away, and waits to see what name is in her head. Today it is Noelani McCadden, a big name for a little girl who is only eight.

In the intake session on Monday, the mother, Jeanine, said, “One day my daughter was fine, the next day not. She’s an only child, and until a month ago, a couch potato. She didn’t like playing games during recess, wasn’t interested in taking gymnastics or ballet with her friends, or riding the bike we gave her for her birthday while her father and I took our regular after-dinner stroll. We tried to get her to go to camp this summer, where she would swim and learn how to trot on a horse, but she flat-out refused.

“Now, before dawn, she runs through our neighborhood, to the fire road, and keeps going. She’s eight. It’s not normal at that age to be running seven miles a day. And no matter what we do, we can’t stop her. If we try to stop her, she starts screaming, so we let her go, then follow at a distance in the car. Usually it’s Steve who does that, makes sure she’s safe.”

Roma pictured the little girl waking, dressing quickly, sneaking through the quiet house to the front door, carefully turning the locks, slipping out into air that had cooled overnight. So young, but needing to run, perhaps without any idea of why, running in the early-morning dark until light infused the sky.

“In the beginning,” Jeanine continued, “she’d come in all red and sweaty, and I’d be making her breakfast and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table. And she would, but she’d keep her mouth tight and turn away from the eggs and bacon or oatmeal I’d serve her. I went out and bought sugary cereals and donuts, but nothing. And last week, when I said, ‘Honey, you must drink enough water. You’re running so much and we live in the desert, it’s a hundred and ten and a body needs hydration,’ she smacked the water glass I’d filled out of my hand. Then every time I offered her water or fruit juice or even the soft drink she used to beg me to buy and I never would, she’d smack the glass out of my hand. Glass everywhere on the kitchen floor. So I went out and bought plastic and I keep trying to get her to drink, but she won’t. All day long I’m spying on my child, to see if she’s drunk something or eaten something without me noticing. Hoping and hoping. I’m checking if glasses are wet. I’m counting the pieces of bread left in the loaf, crackers in the plastic sleeves, cookies in the boxes, slices of American cheese in the fridge, fruit in the crisper; I even counted the Fritos in the bag, but she’s not touching a thing.”

Roma met with the girl every afternoon this week, two hours each time. It is the immersive approach she prefers with a case that has developed this swiftly, to see if she can get to the essence quickly.

The questions in Noelani’s case are: What has speeded this child up? Why is she running so far and so fast? Is there something monstrous she is trying to outrace, and if so, is that monstrous thing within or without? And how is a child so young overriding her natural hunger, imposing on herself an iron-willed discipline at which most adults fail?

Roma has seen elements of this many times over decades in practice, and the causes rarely reveal themselves easily. Noelani is not the youngest patient Roma has had with these symptoms, but what worked with her other patients will have no bearing here. Roma must start at the beginning, treat Noelani as she treats every patient, as the sui generis beings that they are.

When Roma asked if Noelani had any other new and uncharacteristic behaviors, Jeanine began to cry. “She lies about everything. I ask her, ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ or ‘Did you make your bed?’ or ‘Did you feed your goldfish?’ and she says yes to everything, but it never turns out to be true. She lies about things that are verifiable as untrue with one glance, which Steve and I can’t understand.”

Naturally, the parents are scared and shaken. The cherished daughter they knew, whom they tucked into bed and kissed each night and roused in the morning with hugs, has disappeared entirely, as if she never were.

Everything Jeanine spoke about, Roma has seen in her meetings with Noelani, but she has also seen more. In addition to the girl’s obsessions with running and denying herself food and liquid, she has also seen in her anxiety, anger, and impulse control.

In yesterday’s session, their fifth, Roma was tough, clarifying that if Noelani does not immediately start eating and drinking, she will be hospitalized, sustaining fluids forced into her through a tube in her stomach. Roma pulled out a medical book with pictures of children in hospital beds with tubes jutting into their bellies. She pulled out from a box on her desk the medical equipment that would be used to invade Noelani’s body in that way. The impact Roma had intended to create was deliberate, and there it was—the young face soon covered in sprung tears, snot dripping from the little nose. But Noelani had not given in immediately. Thirty minutes discussing the only outcome had been required before Roma was able to wring out a promise, Noelani writing her name in blocky letters on the bottom of the food plan she agreed to maintain through the weekend. Together they had chosen what she would eat: a banana and yogurt for breakfast; a tuna fish sandwich and apple for lunch; salad, chicken, and rice for dinner; and each day she would drink five glasses of water.

“Just the weekend,” Roma had said, “that’s all you need to promise me now.” And the crying girl, her thin forearms laced with trails of mucus, had carried the handwritten food plan flat on her palms, as if it were an offering on fire, holding it out to her mother in the waiting room, who leaned forward in her chair, her cheeks as tearstained as her daughter’s, until the two were face-to-face. Noelani has her mother’s pretty features, although it will take a few more years for those features to fully emerge, arrange themselves on her face. But where the mother was nicely proportioned, the daughter was gaunt, nearly emaciated, and Roma was certain that Noelani has been running for far longer than only the month the parents believe it has been.

Noelani had tried smiling, a brave barely there smile, and waited for her mother to open the outer door to the parking lot, and then she was taking careful steps to their car. Jeanine had turned to Roma and said, “What now?”

“Make sure she follows the plan. She’ll cry, but remind her she promised. And though she won’t grasp this completely, explain she made this promise to herself, not to me or to you.”

Jeanine nodded and Roma said, “Leave me a few messages over the weekend, to let me know how it’s going. Remember, Jeanine, she chose those meals for herself, so give her only those meals, exactly. Of course, you and your husband, one or the other or both, will have to stand guard to make sure she eats.”

Jeanine nodded again, glancing out at Noelani, still crying copious tears, her careful steps replaced by a frenzied pacing around and around the car.

“What about the running?”

“We have to figure out what the running means to her before we can alter the behavior.”

“And the lying?”

“Health first,” Roma said.

It had taken Jeanine McCadden so much effort to extricate her car from its tight spot, backing in, backing out, turning the steering wheel every which way, that the car seemed to be heaving, as if mimicking the tears of its unhappy cargo inside, and Roma watched until Jeanine finally broke the car free, gave her a sad little wave, and joined the quick flow of late Friday afternoon traffic.

This morning, Roma debates the odds of mother and father having the courage to keep to the plan, of Jeanine leaving the updates she requested on her office or personal voicemail. Impossible to determine, but their actions or inactions will provide her with additional information: a child’s issues are rarely isolated, there is nearly always some sort of tangential cause and effect, and whatever Roma is dealing with here, with Noelani, she likely will have to address the parents’ problems as well.

She rolls onto her side, stares through the gap in the drapes, at the sun spreading across the marble floor, over her body beneath the light duvet. It is Saturday, her work week finished, the morning hours hers alone. By noon, everyone will be here. Phoebe and Simon and his family arriving separately from Los Angeles, Camille from Seattle. Her family all together to celebrate the accomplishments of husband and father. She wishes she had seen Harry this morning, to kiss him, to tell him how proud she is about this honor being conferred upon him tonight. How proud that he righted his ways back then, unwound his wrongs, moved again into the light. They have never discussed that time, but this morning, she would have liked to tell him what an inspiration he is, how she marvels at his devotion to his indispensable work, the magnanimity with which he gives himself fully to everyone who needs him and to those who love him.

Noelani returns to her mind, and then Phoebe pops in. As a psychologist, Roma is used to these jumps in her thoughts, aware there is always a logic to the unconscious leaps she makes, and she considers the connection between her eight-year-old patient and her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, her eldest.

On the phone yesterday, Roma asked whether Phoebe will be bringing the new boyfriend with whom she has been taking long weekend trips since February. No one has met Aaron Green yet, not even Simon, who checks in on Phoebe’s cat when this man whisks her away to the Outer Banks, to Santa Fe and Aspen and Nashville, to La Jolla and Catalina and Big Sur; last weekend’s trip was to the wine country up north.

From Phoebe’s descriptions, Aaron Green sounds like a paragon, but yesterday, her daughter had not been able to answer Roma’s question head-on, hemming and hawing, saying only that “Aaron’s hoping to be able to move some things around to free up his schedule.” And Roma was quickly concerned that Phoebe has again fallen in love with the wrong man, and that the qualities this Aaron Green supposedly possesses might be colored by Phoebe’s desperate desire to have a family.

Roma sighs. Oh, yes, she sees the connection now between Noelani and Phoebe. The lying the little girl is engaging in, the subterfuge Phoebe once used as a shield. Is that subterfuge, at odds with Phoebe’s otherwise straightforward nature, returning? Over a man named Aaron Green?

Fifteen years since the last time, since Simon’s high school graduation party, when Phoebe brought home a boy she insisted on calling her paramour. How irritated she had been with Phoebe’s use of that archaic word, her refusal to employ simple language to explain the facts, her preference for befuddling. All Roma had wanted to know was whether her driven daughter was having a romance that involved physical intimacies. How she had hoped for that until meeting the paramour, the boy Roma nicknamed “the prophet,” because he was actually named Elijah and seemed to have knocked Phoebe off her feet, her daughter taking Roma aside all that weekend and raising questions about the way she was living her life. She had decided to be a lawyer when she was in high school, would begin her third year of law school that fall, wanted the big firm experience after passing the bar, but, Phoebe had cried to Roma, weren’t her accomplishments meaningless, her desire for her routines, her nice apartment, her pretty things wrong and shameful, her need to have everything mapped out insane?

Roma had said, “Phoebe, we’re proud of all you’ve accomplished by this tender age of twenty-three, but if you’re not, or if you want something different, you can always explore un-mapping yourself.” By which Roma meant, Investigate other avenues that might interest you, try being spontaneous, cull your belongings and give all that bounty to charity.

Instead, some months later, Phoebe had nearly quit everything and run off with the prophet. In the end, at the last minute, she had pulled back and raced to the safety of home, had opened up to Roma completely, had told her mother that the love she had for Elijah had to be cut out of her heart or she would end up becoming someone she was not.

Roma sighs again. In a few hours either Phoebe will be here with Aaron Green, introducing him to her family, or she’ll be here on her own. And if she is here on her own, Roma will carve out time to sit alone with Phoebe, to apply her professional expertise to her own child gently, always gently, in order to expose the truth.

It is true a mother feels something more, or different, or extraspecial for her firstborn, but as a psychologist, she knows the importance of keeping things fair among siblings, and she’s lucky—that touchstone word again—because her children, uniquely different, are easy to equally love.

Camille, her social anthropologist middle child, is perfectly defined by her profession, which employs flat research language and mathematical statistics to disguise its romantic and obsessive nature, and the romantically obsessive nature of those bitten by the need to explore. She was thirteen when she decided she wanted to live with tribes she could study, and she accomplished that goal, spending two years living far away, on islands in an archipelago of coral atolls off the east coast of New Guinea.

Camille will be coming alone this weekend, as always, infrequently talking about someone named Valentine. Maybe this visit Roma will ask Camille directly who Valentine is to her, what is the nature of this unexplained relationship, why she never identifies Valentine by gender. In Roma’s experience with troubled children, those who are also gay and have not yet declared themselves often have a difficult time voicing the particulars of the person who has captured their attention. “They are so cool. They are really nice,” is what they say to her. A conundrum her daughter has solved by always referring to Valentine as Valentine or Val. If she has ever referred to Valentine as he or she, Roma somehow missed it, which strikes her as entirely unlikely.

If it’s a lesbian love relationship, it would confirm the supposition Roma’s held in her heart. With her patients, Roma doesn’t trade in suppositions, she asks them questions outright, knowing she will have to dig for the truth, but with Camille, a keeper of her own counsel since childhood, who even then averted her mother’s deliberately casual prying with a wise smile, Roma’s always had to be wary of even asking the questions, of horning in on the mental space her daughter refuses to share, of violating her fierce and innate sense of privacy. Thousands of patients and their parents have entrusted her with their secrets and fears, but not this daughter of hers.

Where Phoebe explored clothing and makeup, Camille only explored when coerced by Phoebe. Even today, her external appearance does not command much of her attention; she’s lucky in her natural beauty, somehow not tamped down by the baggy, old clothes she wears, by her refusal, most of the time, to use lipstick or mascara, a blush to brighten her cheeks.

Where Phoebe had boyfriends, Camille had friends who were boys. Roma has no idea who Camille dated in college, in graduate school, in her PhD program, or if she dated at all. Girls, boys, those who prefer the personal pronoun of them and their, or s/he and he/r, the intersex, the third gender, the transgendered—truly Roma does not care, nor would Harry, if Camille is gay, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, or asexual. What she cares about is how Camille gates her inner life with Roma outside.

When her daughter’s little-girl desire for a penis of her own did not abate, as such desire usually does, she’d wondered for the first time about Camille’s sexual orientation. And then Camille convinced another little girl to remove every stitch of clothing. When Roma found them in Camille’s bedroom, Camille’s left hand was on the girl’s flat chest, her right hand between the girl’s thin legs. Roma had seen the Band-Aids on both girls’ knees, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, because it might only have been the kind of exploratory game children play. Despite her expertise, she’s never been sure.

How old was Camille then? She was eight. Ah, the same age as Noelani.

Her youngest, Simon, worships Harry, is a lawyer like Phoebe, and somehow has become the family outlier. So young when he began college, so adaptable with intellectual heft and high emotional intelligence and the looks of a playboy—Byronic curls, soulful eyes, girls fell under his spell—Roma figured he would play the field for a long while, settle down in his forties. Instead, he is the first of her children to create his own separate family, happily married to Elena Abascal, father of her granddaughters, Lucy and Isabel. Nothing jumps out at Roma when she considers Simon in the context of Noelani, nothing ties them together, except that Simon has been on a running jag lately, putting in the miles, he says, every morning before work, either running the hills in his neighborhood, or in a foreign park across from his hotel when he’s litigating abroad. She’s never asked how many miles he runs, but given how often he’s out of town, and the way he works late into the nights, it seems unlikely he’s running seven miles at a shot.

The clock on her nightstand reads 7:20 a.m. Roma pulls open the drapes, smiles at the meditation pool, at the brightly colored desert flowers and the shrubs. Harry has his tennis this morning and then a stop at the tailor to pick up the new tuxedo he will wear tonight. He’ll be arriving back home just before the kids show up. Everyone will be hungry. She shopped yesterday, has only to put out the spread, but all that can wait. First her hour of laps in the big pool, then coffee.

In the bathroom, she stands naked, inspecting her reflected hair. Fernando did a nice job on the color this time. Last time it was much too light, bold in an odd and punkish way. Over the years she has undergone a slow but steady transformation, from boring, uncommitted brown to lighter and lighter hues, until she gave in, said to Fernando, “I might as well admit life is more fun as a blonde. Let’s do the whole head.” It wasn’t true that life was more fun as a blonde, but she was tired of fighting it, of facing daily the unfairness of her hair transmogrifying into old age long before Harry’s. She rubber-bands the honeyed chunks, brushes her teeth, then pulls on her bathing suit. She lifts her cap and goggles from their hook in her closet and shuts the door.

IN THE MAIN COURTYARD, the pool is a sapphire under the sun, shooting liquid rainbows into the house at oblique angles. How she adores submergence. She is a healer of human cracks and fissures, her days spent dealing with her patients’ struggles and agonies, the emotional and psychic often embodied in the physical. She uncovers all the states and syndromes that can spark and catch fire from infancy on, searing a being, those flames rarely sputtering out on their own. She works hard quenching the symptoms, providing parents with answers, and the toddlers, children, and teenagers with techniques to manage their frightening infernos, helping them douse the alarming heat and gain interior strength against what is burning them up. Resolutions if the sufferer and loved ones are lucky, cures if kind spirits are shining down, so that as they grow and mature their lives will be happier, sweeter, so that they will be saved from total annihilation. She gives them all of her time, but this hour belongs only to her, swimming with an uncluttered mind, feeling the expectant delight of having everyone together, remembering that however involved she will become with Noelani, she belongs by blood and love to others, and those others, by blood and love, belong to her.

How fortunate she and Harry have been that they and their children have never been afflicted with any kind of serious illness, not physical, emotional, or mental, everyone on their right paths. Closely knit all these years, enjoying being together, genuinely liking one another. Of course, there are the occasional, normal tensions and skirmishes among her children, and sometimes she wishes they didn’t force her to read their faces, would simply admit to what’s bothering them, but eventually, always, the issue is revealed, and she guides and advises them so judiciously they frequently think they have arrived at the solution on their own.

Head underwater, she holds her breath, then pushes off, stroking strongly to the other side of the long pool. One, two, three … fourteen long and solid strokes to reach the wall today before reversing course.

Half of fourteen is seven, and she’s thinking of Noelani McCadden’s toothpick legs racing her away from home, or toward something. In her session notebook, she had written: Does the actual mileage hold an unconscious significance for Noelani? Jeanine McCadden was adamant that her daughter runs exactly seven miles each morning, no more, no less, as if the girl were fitted with an internal mileage counter. Before her first meeting with Noelani, Roma had researched the number and discovered that in numerology, seven represents the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth who knows nothing is exactly as it seems and is always trying to understand the reality hidden behind the illusions. Roma had realized that definition described herself as well, born on the seventh day of June. And in astrology, seven meant—

No, she is not going to break her promise, no pondering about Noelani, about any of her patients, while swimming.

She will think about … She will think about … Okay, yes, what sort of sea creature would she be? Not a shark, not a whale. Not a seal. What’s the difference between porpoises and dolphins?

Then a mental bolt to that weekend when Phoebe brought home the prophet. She heard moans coming from Phoebe’s bedroom, and had breached her daughter’s trust, carefully turning the knob, peeking through the crack, almost hoping to find Phoebe tangled naked in bed with that long-haired young philosopher whose pacific calm was threatening upheaval in Phoebe’s life, but that’s not what had been happening in there. Elijah had been at her daughter’s feet, washing them. Between his knees, filled with water and suds, was the irreplaceable silver bowl passed down to Roma from Baba Tatiana.

Roma, she says sternly, silently, no more, just swim.