The Family Tabor Page 30

  “Edict?”

  “Jews who aren’t already in Jerusalem say it at Yom Kippur and Passover,” Simon says, surprised by this information he finds in his mind.

  “Listen, go be with your family. I’ll come to the house as soon as we’ve learned something. I’ll lock up here when I’m done.”

  “What my father was looking at yesterday doesn’t add up to much.”

  The detective nods. “That’s true,” he says.

  SAN JACINTO IS RIGHT in front of Simon, so close he could run his car into this part of the base.

  He should have gone right back to Agapanthus, but instead, he left the sleek part of Palm Springs far behind and below, and drove up and up and up a long thin road, watching the mountain growing larger and larger as he approached. Then he pulled over.

  The neighborhood is dingy, small houses in need of repair and repainting, porches with sun-faded chairs unoccupied in the afternoon heat, but all the front yards shimmer and shine with fields of white sparkling stones. He cranks up the air-conditioning and leans into the vents. The last meal he ate was lunch yesterday and he’s starving. And he’s still wearing his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He looks at the clock. Seventeen hours he’s been in them. He needs a shower and clean clothes and food and the sleep he will never have again. What he needs more than those creature comforts is to understand whatever knowledge can be gleaned from those bits on his father’s computer at CST.

  A pack of teenagers skateboards past, a thundering wave that flushes out a flock of tiny birds. Why aren’t their wheels sticking in the softening tar? He can see the heat rising off the pavement in waves, and if he stepped out, his own shoes would sink, leave behind marks that he was here. The skateboarders whiz around a corner and the street quiets down, the birds finding their roosts again, a slight flapping of delicate wings, and then somnolence returns.

  The first time he and Harry hiked a portion of San Jacinto, they took the aerial tram, exited at Mountain Station, and climbed to the high point of the range. It was a mild climb, only twenty-four hundred feet, and his father told him the heart of the mountain was a batholith, made of slow-cooled viscous magma that began below the earth’s crust, pushed up over millions of years, that the size was directly related to the intensity of the rock folding and crumpling, and it didn’t have a definite floor, the idea of which confused Simon entirely. His father said the light-colored rock was Mesozoic granite, and along the eastern edges, the second most abundant rock was metamorphic, and that this was a sky island, far more humid than down in the valley, averaging fifteen inches of rain each year while the desert got only six, and there were flora and fauna up there that couldn’t survive below in the triple-digit heat. He was eight and the luckiest boy because his father knew everything there was to know. They did that climb many times, and when they climbed it to celebrate Simon’s twenty-first birthday, he asked his father how he knew so much about the mountain, whether he had wanted to be a geologist when he was young. Harry slung an arm around him and said, “You’re so smart, I thought you’d have caught on long ago. When you were a kid, I bought a book about it, and each time we do this hike, I read a new chapter in advance. I’m about five chapters from the end.”

  Simon stares at the mountain, remembering that birthday hike, and his father’s explanation. He’s always seen it as endearing—his father educating himself geologically on a hike-by-hike basis, advancing in the book slowly so he could teach Simon new things each time they hiked up there. But now Simon wonders if he should view it in a different light. It’s odd that his father would have kept his reading of that book a secret. And odd that he kept something so minor a secret for a very long time. He’s never imagined his father as a keeper of secrets, or as any kind of cheat, but that’s where his contemplation is taking him.

  He knows his father as a straight shooter, frank, honest, a man who faces everything head-on, who would not have vanished as he has. How does Simon string together the steep hiking trail, Leonard Cohen, the meaning of Hineni, and biblical walking tours? He deals daily in the complicated and the convoluted, but there are always some facts at his disposal, while here there are none.

  He stares at the front yards of shimmering white rocks, at the drowsy houses, at a row of short cacti. It’s always amazed him how they seem to pull their arms in close to ward off the sun, to keep hydrated as best they can. When his phone rings and Detective Aaron David asks where he is, Simon’s heart freezes.

  “Twenty minutes from the house.”

  “Can you pull over?”

  “I’m already stopped. What’s going on?”

  “We’re into your father’s laptop. Yesterday—”

  Simon exhales.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I thought you were going to tell me he’s dead.”

  “No, sorry. I should have led with that. Here’s what we—”

  “Wait, what was his password?”

  “I’ll spell it. M-A-N-Y-O-V-O-T-H.”

  “Manyovoth?”

  “Yes. Make you think of anything?”

  “I don’t even know what language it is.”

  “We don’t either. But he was looking up articles about—” And the detective explains to Simon what the police have learned.

  When the detective finishes, Simon says, “None of that makes sense to me.”

  “We’re heading over to talk with your mother.”

  “Did he purchase a ticket, get on a flight?”

  “We’re waiting for return calls from DHS, and bank and credit card companies, but in my opinion, I think he did.”

  The connection breaks off and Simon stares at a blood-red seam winding through the rock of the mountain.

  Yesterday at home, his father researched a man named Max Stern, Carruthers Investments, and the laws for asking for forgiveness on Yom Kippur Eve.

  He should be feeling hopeful. If Harry has taken a flight to Israel, then he’s not dead. Or unconscious somewhere still on the grounds of the resort. Or lost out in the desert. But what purpose, reason, or need would his father have to fly to Israel? It’s all unknowable, unknown, as if his father’s incomprehensible actions lead to a door behind which can be found all the mysteries of life, only Simon doesn’t have the key.

  He becomes aware of his breathing, his stomach rumbling with hunger, the weight of his tuxedo trousers on his skin, the heat against the SUV’s windows, the cold air blowing at his neck, and that he’s thinking: secrets, cheating, and the Yom Kippur laws he’s never heard of, about asking forgiveness. That holiday is a time of repentance, but he didn’t know that repenting in one’s own head was insufficient.

  Then he’s speeding back down the long thin road, watching the immediacy of San Jacinto diminish, even as it expands.

  ZHANG’S MUSTANG IS PARKED behind a fat cactus on Agapanthus, before the drive up to the house. The detectives, waiting in the cool of the car, open their doors and step out. Detective Zhang is holding Harry’s laptop, Detective David a sheaf of papers.

  “Your father is on a plane, nonstop to Tel Aviv,” Detective David says. “These are printouts of his laptop searches.”

  Simon takes the stack. Among these papers, there must be facts he can analyze, no matter how complicated or convoluted. He needs to read quickly, to be able to provide his mother and sisters with answers, or a cogent theory about Harry’s bewildering actions, or at least possible interpretations for his behavior.

  “Are the Jerusalem addresses you said he looked at in here? In case I need to fly there and retrieve him, hear directly from the source the meaning of all this?”

  How would Elena react to his going? A day ago, her automatic response would have been, “Of course, go, you’ve got to find Harry.” But now? He knows how she thinks—she’ll link his father’s absconding to Israel with his own nascent interest in Judaism. And he sees again that look on her face when he said, “I think I want to be a Jew.” Words that seemed to be a kind of killing stone.

  “Everything
’s in there, including the addresses and instructions for a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” the detective says.

  Simon nods. A bus is what his father would take; he likes moving around a foreign city like a local.

  “I need ten minutes before we head up.”

  He shuffles through the pages and stops at the printout of “Laws of Asking Forgiveness on Yom Kippur Eve.”

  1. It is absolutely imperative that one receive forgiveness for sins committed against other people. Even if one is full of remorse, Yom Kippur will not bring atonement for such sins unless one has appeased the hurt party and obtained his forgiveness. This includes all forms of interpersonal offences, hurtful remarks, slander, damages, overdue debts, dishonesty in business, not respecting parents and teachers—

  The list is lengthy and eight additional laws follow, but Simon stops there.

  Why was Harry researching this? Did one of his families reach out to him and say, “I need to repent and I don’t know how to do it?” and Harry went looking for guidelines that could be followed? Or was Harry expecting someone to ask him for forgiveness? Or does Harry himself need to atone for his sins against another? Simon can’t imagine that at all. His father is a man of casual but direct rectitude in all of his actions, choosing his words with care, so as to elucidate, or illuminate, or suggest, or prod, but never to hurt.

  He skims through articles about Carruthers Investments, the Manhattan investment firm where he knows his father worked before having a change of heart that culminated in a migration, as in the old days, from East to West, or that’s how Simon has always thought of it. Carruthers, where his father’s life had once been about money, and where he made his money, money he used to create CST. “My true calling in life,” his father has said often with pleasure and pride.

  He reads the few articles about a man named Max Stern, the only person at Carruthers to be jailed for insider trading, and he calculates the dates—it was after his parents and sisters had moved here to the desert.

  Then another article about Max Stern becoming a rabbi and moving to Jerusalem, nearly twenty years ago.

  Is this who Harry is on his way to see?

  It must be. But why after so long? What precipitated this irrational trip? What was so calamitous, so grave and essential, that his father needed to immediately see a man from an ancient time in both of their lives? Harry’s actions have stunned his family, which likely means that Max Stern, whoever he may be, whoever he is to Harry, will be stunned, too, when Harry shows up.

  Simon shivers in the heat, feeling a cold wind from nowhere suddenly blowing through the leaves of a tree he didn’t realize was there.

  FIFTY-ONE

  ROMA WANTS TO GO to Odessa.

  If it still exists, she wants to find the farm where her baba and her mother once lived, to see the trees in the orchard whose fruit they picked and wrung for eleven years and then never ate again. She wants her whole family to take that trip. She hopes Harry will be with them on that trip.

  And then Phoebe is whispering into her ear. “Mom, are you awake? It’s not Dad, but your cell’s ringing.”

  “I’m awake.” Roma takes the phone from her daughter, looks at the screen, stands up, and clears her throat. Walking through the courtyard to her study, she answers, “Hello, Jeanine.”

  “Hi, Dr. Tabor.”

  In the background, Roma hears the laughter of a young girl and a man, which has to be Noelani and her father. Is that laughter a positive sign? How she wants it to be for the McCaddens, and perhaps, vicariously, for the Tabor family, too.

  “How is everything today?” she asks.

  Jeanine sounds happy when she says, “She’s eating. Not a lot, but not just what’s on the list. And she’s drinking water, but insists it be warm. And she’s stopped screaming at us. And she didn’t run at all this morning. She curled up on her daddy’s lap and said it hurts to drink anything cold because it feels funny when she swallows, and when she eats even only a little bit, sometimes her stomach hurts a lot.”

  Roma sits down on her pale blue sofa. Has she overlooked something important, something easy to overlook when a young female patient presents as Noelani presented?

  “Jeanine, I’m going to give you the name and number of a pediatric gastroenterologist. You’ll make an appointment first thing in the morning. I’ll call and ask her to fit you in and tell her what I’m thinking. That Noelani needs to be fully examined for primary achalasia and esophageal achalasia. In a nutshell, they’ll test how well her esophagus and stomach are working. If there are peristaltic compromises in these structures, it might explain her food and liquid issues. This would be an organic problem, rather than psychological, and usually fixable. It doesn’t explain her obsessive running, but could explain some of the other behaviors we discussed. Do you have a pen and paper handy?”

  Roma leaves a comprehensive message with the doctor’s service.

  Hoping she has overlooked something.

  Hoping that Noelani will have the chance to return to being a regular eight-year-old girl who eats and drinks without fear and pain, whose anxiety, anger, impulse control, and lying will turn out to be connected to the achalasia, and resolved by surgery.

  It is more than possible. She’s seen such behaviors disappear entirely when the achalasia is successfully treated.

  And the running could have been Noelani compensating, expelling the energy of confusion. If Noelani doesn’t run tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, it could be good news—in her experience, a child running to outdistance a monster within the house never stops until the threat is eliminated.

  Regardless, Roma must place all her assumptions back on the table, including what the running might signify, and reassess Noelani from scratch.

  But for this single moment, she wants only to imagine that on this day of all days, everything will work out for another family because she has righted a rare misstep.

  Misstep, she thinks, what an odd word it is. And how many must we make without knowing we’ve erred? She turns the word around in her mind, and wonders again if Harry has run away. Not to escape, she’s not thinking that now, but perhaps because he made a misstep of his own. It is, marginally, a better thought to consider.

  “Mom, where are you?” Phoebe’s imploring shout sends Roma running into the courtyard. Her daughters are standing at the pool, sundresses on, watching Simon and the mismatched detectives coming through the sliding glass doors.

  Her son and the detectives aren’t smiling, but none has the downcast eyes, the hesitant approaching gait, the voice sympathetically lowered to deliver the fateful news she’s been dreading. And yet it is impossible to gauge the kind of news they are bringing her.

  “PLEASE. TELL ME.”

  “The good news is that Dad’s not dead,” Simon says.

  Roma finds herself sitting on a chaise, her body, spring-tight and coiled since last night, violently releasing the tension, limbs shaking as if palsied. Seconds until her arms and legs still. Phoebe and Camille are instantly on either side of her.

  Simon sets a chair down in front of hers. The black around his eyes has darkened, his demeanor like the restive, inquiring dog she was thinking of earlier, but he is her Simon when he leans forward and takes hold of her hands.

  “The strange news is that he’s on his way to Israel,” he says.

  She can only stare at her son.

  It is Phoebe and Camille who say, “What?”

  The tall detective crouches down. “Dr. Tabor, your husband purchased an El Al ticket for the one p.m. nonstop flight to Tel Aviv, and this moment he’s sitting in an economy class seat on that flight. He’ll be landing at one forty-five tomorrow, local time in Israel.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I know, Mom,” Simon says.

  “Dr. Tabor, we think Jerusalem is his final destination. We have no way to confirm that, but we’re confident the assumption is correct. We understand his leaving like this, without disclosing his plans, is out
of character. We’re very sorry about what you’ve all been dealing with. Unfortunately, there’s nothing more for us to do. He’s an adult and, as you’ve all indicated, physically healthy and mentally competent, and his record is clean, there are no outstanding arrest warrants we could act on, so our work ends here. We understand this information leaves you all with many questions, but now it’s a family matter.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  AT THE FRONT DOOR, Zhang shakes Simon’s hand and Detective Aaron David claps Simon on the shoulder, holding his hand there for a while, before saying, “I’m really sorry.”

  “I am, too. But thank you for getting us this answer so quickly.”

  In the guest room, he strips down, runs water over his face and hair, pulls on shorts and a T-shirt, and finds Elena’s note that she and the girls are at the hotel with the slides. He is glad they are gone, out of the way, his children having some fun.

  In the kitchen, he guzzles a bottle of water, and finds his hunger gone. Staring through the glass doors, he watches his mother and sisters huddled together on a single chaise, their shock mirroring his, but he’s more than an hour ahead of them in considering Harry on a plane to Israel. He wonders if they understand Harry’s not been airborne for long.

  His mother looks up then, and when their eyes catch and hold, Simon realizes why he feels he’s stepping into a very delicate interrogation, where he must take it slowly, ease carefully into the little he’s learned. It’s because she’s the one here with the institutional knowledge, the only one who can possibly make connections between the links. He walks back out into the heat, thinking, She’s our best material witness.

  THERE’S A SHARPNESS TO Simon’s bearing that Roma doesn’t recognize when he sits facing her and his sisters. The planes of his face have hardened, he looks older than he did yesterday, and the image that comes to Roma is of an asp, and she thinks perhaps she doesn’t know the kind of man her son is when he’s being a lawyer. She’s never observed her sweet youngest child in action, but she sees now how he must be in the courtroom, implacable and relentless, a quick tongue flicking, the words seemingly easy, but impossible to understand, and her fleeting thought is whether he shows that implacable face to Elena, asks her questions intended to confuse, uses that particular tone with her, if that’s why her daughter-in-law was upset, is upset, with him.