Sharon
I once had a dream that disturbed me for years, and then I forgot about it. Until now.
The dream concerned my youngest child, my Gadi, who was five at the time. In the dream, I took him to the kindergarten down the block from our home, as I did every morning. We played our usual counting and color-spotting games as we walked, swinging our joined hands. When we reached the kindergarten, I pressed the entrance buzzer, and then, as happens in dreams, I suddenly found myself elsewhere. I was in a shopping mall halfway across Jerusalem, the Malha Mall, on one of the higher levels, leaning on the atrium balustrade with a takeout coffee, looking down at the ornamental pool on the mall’s bottom level.
Something was moving in the water. Fish? I focused my gaze, but to no avail. Frustration opened the door to an even more dreadful awareness: my darling Gadi was no longer alive. Something horrible had happened, but I’d forgotten about it, or never registered it, or deliberately ignored it. I’d been taking Gadi to kindergarten every morning like clockwork, for weeks or months, even though … there was no more Gadi.
I’d been working, running errands, sipping overpriced café hafuch, all while behaving as though I hadn’t suffered this outrageous, intolerable loss.
Even as the sickening realization dawned, I fled it. Like in that novel about the mom who runs away so the possible news of her soldier son’s death can’t find her. Only in this dream, the death had indubitably happened. I ran down the circular staircase of the atrium, intent on not letting coffee slosh out of the cup’s plastic lid. It seemed really important that I get down to the mall’s bottom level, and that the lid stay shut.
Abby
There she is again, with her beige newsboy hat, or is it an engineer’s hat? – puffy on top, with a wide brim in front. That seems to be her out-on-errands head-gear, as opposed to the soft blue beret she wore on the plane. An older-religious-lady look, indicative of melanoma concerns and impatience with fuss. Was she trendy when she was younger, ready to wrap her head in whatever manner the dati fashion-arbiters of the time favored? Will I ever get a chance to chase the head-covering fads myself?
I’ve glimpsed her from a distance in Talpiot about half a dozen times this past year, ever since we sat next to each other on a JFK-Ben-Gurion flight. I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve seen her around. During our long night of talk on the plane, it turned out that we both live in south Jerusalem. And where do south-Jerusalemites do their food shopping? In Talpiot discount supermarkets, of course. Has she spotted me as well? I hope not. I’ve kept my head down, turned into different aisles at Osher Ad and Rami Levy, done whatever I could to avoid being recognized.
Sharon
I awoke from that devastating realization with a start, followed by infinite relief on finding myself back in a world where Gadi slept peacefully with his next-oldest brother in the adjacent room. But for months afterward I brooded about the dream, pondered various interpretations of it.
My first theory was that it was a delayed reaction to the years-long succession of bus bombings and shooting attacks – the so-called second intifada – from which we’d recently emerged. Those years of effort at normal life amid constant apprehension about meeting friends for coffee, or letting children take the public buses to school.
Another interpretation had to do with my failure to produce another baby – a younger sibling for Gadi. Maybe the dream was telling me that I wouldn’t be walking five-year-olds to gan forever; that my time had run out. Bookending, as it were, the tick-tock anxiety I’d suffered years before as an older single in the religious world, wondering if I was ever going to be privileged to start a family at all.
Both theories were plausible enough, but something didn’t click.
I focused on the feeling, the ruling emotion of the dream. It wasn’t exactly fear. It wasn’t the dismal consciousness of advancing age. When had I felt it before, that all-consuming sense of loss that must be suppressed at all costs if one was to go on?
Abby
It feels furtive and shameful to avoid her, but she hurt me.
I know the insult wasn’t intentional, but that didn’t make it any less painful.
Funny how easily one can offend by not speaking. That little silence after I told her my age was like a splash of icy water to my face. Oh, she tried to smooth things over with an artificial resumption of banter – she wasn’t trying to be cruel – but our cosy exchange of confidences was effectively at an end. We both soon discovered the need to get at least a little shut-eye before the plane landed.
On some level, I understood her. Some things are acceptable after the fact, but not from the outset. If I’d been in her shoes, would I have offered to set me up with her son?
The worst part was that I’d genuinely liked her before that abrupt silence. Maybe I was swayed a little, early on, by the mention of a post-hesder son studying engineering at the Technion. Okay, maybe I was swayed a lot. I let myself hope that the boy was toward the end of his studies, not completely out of bounds for twenty-nine-year-old me. And there were a couple of times when a certain bemused, earnest expression played on her face, and I could have sworn she was trying to picture the impression I’d make on her son, how he and I might complement each other or – who knows – what a grandchild produced by the two of us might look like.
So maybe there was an ulterior motive, but the connection was real enough. She seemed to see me as a younger version of herself, however Millennialized. We traded baal-teshuva stories, childhood divorce stories. She nodded as I described the stifling amicability, the infuriating no-biggie-ness, of my parents’ breakup when I was nine. I gathered her own divorce experience back in the Seventies had lacked that surface smoothness.
I can’t remember what sparked that seemingly endless flow of talk. I usually try to project polite aloofness on transatlantic flights, and appreciate the same from others. But something set us off, and it snowballed. We covered a lot of ground as we huddled and whispered in our little night-flight cocoon, faces flickering light and dark, mirroring the soundless motion on our movie screens.
Sharon
Eventually, I traced the dream-feeling back to a Los Angeles-New York flight I’d made in 1973.
It was my second transcontinental flight, shortly before my eighth birthday. My first flight, in the opposite direction, had taken place the previous autumn. On that occasion, I’d flown with my mother to the new life in California she’d been talking about for months; the new life she’d had to postpone so as not to disrupt my school year. I’d understood that that act of self-denial called for gratitude on my part, and I’d supposed I was grateful.
On that earlier flight I’d felt equal to the awaiting newness, which presented itself to me as a brightly-lit, blank white screen. The reality had been more cluttered, noisier and greyer. California seemed to involve a lot of time in my mom’s new car, stuck in traffic. From the back seat I could see her knuckles bulging tight over the steering wheel, hear the tense clicking of her throat.
My second flight was back to New York to spend the summer with my father, who’d come out to L.A. for a few days during winter vacation but whom I hadn’t otherwise seen over the past year. My mother didn’t fly with me this time, though technically I wasn’t alone on the plane: she’d hired a college student headed back east for the summer to be my escort. Pam. A skinny girl with slick-straight blondish hair parted down the middle, rocker tee over admirably well-worn jeans. Pam was good-natured; I flew with her several times over the years and got to like her; but that first time I wanted nothing to do with her. Eventually she gave up trying to entertain me and dozed off with a book, at which point I could pretend I was truly alone, surrounded only by random strangers. That’s when the despair hit.
“Your old room’s waiting for you, just as you left it,” my father had told me in our last phone conversation, a couple of nights earlier. I remembered this as I rudely scrutinized the sleeping stranger beside me, this faintly-snoring half-hippie with the Marcia Brady hair and the residual zit on her chin and the paperback teepee’d on her lap. And a long-buried image came to me of myself, cowering in the closet of my old room, hands over my ears against the din of my parents shrieking at each other. And I nearly doubled over with the sickening grief of it, the lost home, the catastrophe from which there seemed no way to move on.
Once I identified the source of that feeling, I was able to put the Gadi dream out of my mind. I stopped being bothered by its nonsensical details. I stopped wondering, for instance, why it had transported me to the Malha Mall, a glitzy monument to America-envy that I’d always avoided like the plague. I stopped trying to figure out why my childhood sense of devastation and loss had attached itself all those decades later to Gadi, rather than to my older boys, who’d been more exposed to danger in the years before the dream.
Those questions ceased to engage me. Until now. Until this post-October-7 reality.
For the dream has resurfaced. Not at night, when I barely sleep through a blur of news updates and WhatsApp messages. I probably never even enter a REM state. No, it haunts me now by day. I guess you could call it a waking nightmare.
My boys have all been called up for reserve duty, leaving their wives and young families behind. I’m fiercely proud and worried to death about them all. But Gadi’s the most at risk.
Abby
The plane-lady has a name, I know. She told me and I even remember it. But I don’t call her that in my mind. I just think of her as “the plane-lady.” Maybe there’s something else I wish I could call her. Yes, even now.
My own mom isn’t the warmest person, to put it mildly. I always knew she didn’t really want to be a mother. She joked so often that one kid was enough, and I could almost hear the silent addendum: or maybe too many. We weren’t close before I came to Israel, and we’ve drifted even farther apart since. She doesn’t understand my “Jew” thing, much less my “Israel” thing. For her it’s all one primitive, vestigial impulse and a ticket to poverty, or what she thinks of as poverty.
Since this war started, she’s been surprisingly silent, even for her. Even my dad called, asking about my safety in his half-oblivious, befuddled way. He even vaguely hinted that his spare room could be made available, “for a while.” I’m sure the new wife would adore that.
Funny how I still think of her as new.
I’m finding my mother’s current blatant indifference, even after a lifetime of her poorly-concealed indifference, harder to take than my father’s equivocation. Is she muttering “Told her so”? “Serves her right”? I grew up among assimilated Jews, but everyone else seemed to hang onto a few random customs – a Hanukkah menorah, an abbreviated Pesach seder – and some even visited Israel. My mom had no use for any of it.
I wonder how she’s dealing with the Jew-hatred running rampant over there now. Sometimes I think she hasn’t called me because she’s utterly confounded by the whole mess. Maybe her head is spinning with cognitive dissonance and she just doesn’t know what to say. Other times I suspect she’s doubling down on her Jewish disengagement, rejoicing in the bland surname she concocted for herself after the divorce – a mashup of her married and maiden names that somehow came out sounding ethnically neutral. Is she strolling past pro-Hamas riots as though they don’t concern her? Pointedly ignoring news items about antisemitic incidents? I hope not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Sharon
He’s not a natural daredevil. Just happens to be good at everything he tries his hand at. Too good. He could have ended up somewhere else entirely – on the digitized, virtual end of things. But that’s not his way.
I try to picture him as a teenager, peach fuzz and oversized feet, gulping down a glass of milk in the middle of my kitchen. But reality intrudes. The images we’ve been bombarded with since October 7th infect even our most benign mental pictures.
A few days ago, I saw that young woman who sat next to me on my return flight from New York last year. The physical therapist … Abby. I was in my car and she was trudging uphill on Rivka Street with groceries. Probably from Osher Ad, where I was headed myself. She’d told me she lives in Baka, so it stands to reason. I pictured the shared rental in a crumbling Baka shikkun, the rickety furniture, the young and not-so-young women from the religious singles’ swamp sitting around a Shabbat table together, singing their hearts out with longing.
I’ve thought of her more than once over the past year; regretted not taking her number and inviting her for a Shabbat by us. It was wrong, how that interaction ended. What was I afraid of? But I’m paying now for my qualms.
She works with amputees, Rachmana litzlan. I remembered this about her as I was weighing zucchini on one of Osher Ad’s self-service scales. What was it she said about treating phantom limb pain? Some trick with mirrors? Something else with electrodes? And then the awful image came into my head of those boys with limbs blown off being thrown into the back of a truck on October 7th. Injured by a grenade, carted off bleeding to Gaza like sacks of potatoes. Is she working with boys in a similar state, right now – soldiers? And what if, G-d forbid, the meeting between her and Gadi that I decided I didn’t want to happen, took place anyhow, in some rehab center?
That’s not my accounting to make, of course. But moving on from those images is easier said than done.
Abby
Some of my friends have been laid off or had their hours cut; others are gig-economy types with no gigs coming in. They keep busy by volunteering – picking vegetables to replace the foreign workers who’ve fled; packing supplies here in town for soldiers and evacuated families.
The running joke is that they might have to start picking and packing food for themselves.
For better or worse, I’m not in that position. When you help fix people for a living, war tends to increase the workload.
I’m for sure not seeing the worst of it – ZAKA has that sad distinction – but what does come my way is bad enough. I’ve been putting in extra shifts. That keeps my mind off things, but also takes its toll.
In my off hours I do a lot of walking. Sometimes I’m just too wired to rest when I get home, no matter what my workday was like. I go right back out again and stay out until I’m literally staggering with exhaustion. Same on Shabbatot. For some reason I can’t bear to do the old things that used to make me happy on Shabbat – shul, meals with friends, singing. My apartment-mate, an American who’d delayed grad school to “further her spiritual growth” in Jerusalem, left for the States on the first flight she could get after October 7th, so there’s no one to notice my new, irregular, habits.
I walk the length of Park HaMesila a lot. Back and forth I go on the footpath that runs parallel to the old railroad tracks, from the First Station to Malha and back again. Something about the semi-solitude of walking among, but not with, other walkers soothes the soul, I find.
Until it doesn’t.
Sharon
We always do move on. We Jews. It’s one of the things that sets us apart from our enemies. We despair, we grieve, we rage; and then we move on.
By the end of that first summer with my father, when I boarded the plane back to L.A., I’d already moved on. I was eager to fly again; greeted an astonished Pam with a full-body hug. And in all the years that followed of being shunted between coasts, I never stopped finding comfort in those cocooned, timeless interludes.
Maybe it was the hours suspended in mid-air that drew me toward religious observance. It certainly wasn’t my upbringing. Pam would doze off and I’d close my own eyes and imagine myself clutched to the breast of a great bird. From there it was a short leap to the sense of a Someone above it all, holding me secure against the cross-country squabbles of my parents, the indignity of being fully at home nowhere, an inconvenience, a check on the self-fulfillment projects of others.
Eventually I did make it home, not across land but across water, on eagle’s wings, the great bird of a Boeing. A home no less loved, and perhaps more so, for being perpetually under threat. Despair, grieve, rage, move on. Rinse and repeat.
I know we’ll move on again, fling ourselves back to G-d in a full-body hug as we always do. We’ll move on because we must. But somehow it’s harder to picture, this time; too many other images keep getting in the way.
Oh, Gadi.
Abby
At my boss’s insistence I took a day off, my first other than Shabbat since the war broke out. I slept later than I could remember ever having slept, waking in panic from a dream I couldn’t quite remember. The dream-anxiety persisted as I washed and dressed. I davened in the robotic manner that was the best I could seem to manage. While putting my siddur away I remembered that I had a wedding to go to later that week, and,. nothing to wear to it. I’d have no other time to shop except that day.
I exited my apartment and headed out on the Park HaMesila footpath, in the direction of Malha. The plan was to clear my head by walking, and to find an outfit at the mall. But something was off. The anticipated calm didn’t descend. The anxiety remained.
“Where’ve you been?” someone gasped alongside me. Without breaking my stride, I turned to see my friend Liora. She was out of breath; had she been running to catch up with me?
“Busy … you know.” I was ashamed to say “working,” knowing how underemployed Liora currently was.
“Even on Shabbat? I don’t think I’ve seen you in shul for, like, a month.”
I slowed my pace, and sighed.
Sharon
When I officially joined the ranks of the retirees, right before Rosh Hashanah, friends warned that I’d need to set boundaries if I didn’t want to become a full-time grandma. The fact is that I never had a chance to see what my normal babysitting schedule was going to be like. After the massacre down south and the call-up of my sons, the question of boundaries became moot. I’ve been doing supermarket shopping, housecleaning, and school pickups in four different cities; watching sick toddlers so my daughters-in-law can go to work; frying schnitzel and shaking up suspensions of Moxypen.
When I make it back to my own home, I bake trays of cookies that Asher delivers to the boys at their posts – the ones he can get to, that is.
The ones where Gadi isn’t.
The war has generated so many volunteering frameworks, and I’ve had no time for any of them. I have a beautician friend who’s giving free haircuts to evacuees, and an art-therapist friend who’s going around to work with displaced kids in the hotels. Others are doing more generic stuff – filling boxes of personal hygiene supplies for soldiers, packing food baskets. On some level I envy these people the impersonal nature of their volunteer work. What I do – grandmothering on steroids – doesn’t feel like volunteering. What it does feel is personal.
This war is very personal.
Two of my older boys finally got a little time off with their families this week, and I found myself unexpectedly free. I straightened up my own house for a change, then went to donate blood at the Payis Arena, the new stadium near Malha where Magen David Adom moved its Jerusalem blood-collection operations after the war started. As I lay squeezing and unsqueezing a ball, head turned aside so as not to see the blood gradually pooling in its bag, it occurred to me that I was finally contributing something impersonal.
That accomplished, I did what I’d known I would do from the moment I booked my MDA appointment: I walked from the Arena over to the Malha Mall.
I had no particular shopping to do. True, Asher and I had a few simchas coming up, but with advancing age we’d progressed from purchasing physical gifts to writing checks. Nor was I hungry, or in need of caffeine. Still I plodded past the Arena, down Ayalon Street with its parking-lot vistas, then around the older stadium, Teddy, and through more parking to the footbridge over Begin Expressway, then past some more parking and into the mall.
Longish wait at the entrance; there may be slightly fewer shoppers these days, but those who do show up undergo more thorough security vetting. Once inside, I pause to get my bearings in the alternate universe. A couple of storefronts are shuttered and it’s a little less crowded than I remember, but the mall offers a reasonable facsimile of its prewar bling. A triumph of resilience, or a travesty? The clothing-store mannequins stand pert and defiant, like so many economic soldiers.
I climb the central stairway to Level 3 and lean over the railing, under the surreal haze of the skylight. I look down.
Abby
I’ll admit, after all, that walking alone among other lone walkers isn’t the only way to soothe the soul. Chatting with people while we all perform a semi-automatized task together can be another means to that end. Sandwich, pastry, bottled drink, napkin. I was at the end of the line, taking filled lunch bags from Liora and sealing them shut with heart-shaped stickers. At one point, I got confused and thought I was affixing a TENS electrode patch to a patient.
It was uncomfortable at first, working in this little area marked off by low plastic barriers on the bottom floor of the Malha Mall. We were in the middle of the walkway, near some popular eateries that were sponsoring the volunteer operation. People turned to look at us.
“There used to be a petting zoo in this very spot,” the middle-aged volunteer across the table from me offered when she noticed me warily eyeing the passersby. “Quite the kid magnet. Rabbits, guinea pigs, and a few parrots living their lives on display in the middle of the mall.” She patted my hand across the table and smiled. “Just for perspective.”
“She’ll tune out the background activity like the rest of us,” Liora added with a friendly jostle.
Eventually, I did.
When the operation ended for the day, Liora invited me to join her at the parsha class she was headed to. Remembering that I still had an errand to run at the mall, I declined.
“But I’ll see you on Shabbat,” I told her. “Bli neder.”
Hunger pangs reminded me I’d eaten nothing that day. I grabbed a coffee and a pastry from one of the eateries, and sat down with them on the ledge of the ornamental pool under the mall atrium. Amid the buzz of humanity, I felt as calm as I had in weeks. When I tilted my head back to get the last drops of coffee from the cup, my eyes locked with those of a woman who was leaning over the railing above me, looking down.
Sharon
In my day, people got married in Talpiot wedding halls, between the auto repair shops and the purveyors of tile flooring. Nobody thought those places were déclassé; just affordable. And accessible.
Nowadays, the weddings seem to get farther and farther out in the boonies. The venues are always at the end of some narrow twisting road that it’s a miracle Waze ever heard of. You arrive in the dark and have no idea where you are. But I’ll admit there’s ambience – something that was in short supply at the boxy uninspired event halls of my day. Pastoral outdoor reception areas with funky seating arrangements. Fairy lights strung from trees. Restrooms in rustic cabins.
The chatan’s mother is a distant cousin of Asher’s. It’s all the extended family Asher and I ever had in Israel, until our older boys married and broadened the circle. These cousins are good and pleasant people – a school principal, a hospice nurse – but we’re not close with them; they’re Israeli-born and a culture gap yawns between us. We attend each other’s simchas but have rarely interacted outside them. During the reception, Asher and I stroll around the venue grounds feeling a bit like outside observers. We glance toward the entrance area repeatedly, hoping against hope that one or more of our boys will have managed to get leave and show up here.
In the meantime, we check out the latest wedding fashions. Young men in full army uniform with rifles; young men in white dress shirts and fatigue pants with rifles; young men in full formal dress with rifles. Depending, I suppose, on whether they came straight from their posts or from home, and on how much time they had to shower and change. It’s astonishing how guns have ceased to be a jarring presence at weddings and become as festive as bouquets. They project and elicit warmth. They say: I’m here for you, my country, my people. They say: love.
The chatan himself is on leave from the army for his own wedding. I haven’t seen him yet; will he be standing under the chuppah with his weapon? I have four who married weaponless, and one left to go. An image of Gadi in olive drab, under a white canopy, shimmers in my mind. A woman in white, veiled, at his side.
I’m tempted to lift the veil, but resist.
The image dissolves.
She, too, had a wedding to attend this week. Abby. I left her deliberating at the mall between a forest-green dress and a burgundy dress, assuring her that both were suitable for a coworker’s child’s wedding, and that she’d look stunning in either. I couldn’t stay for the final decision; one of my daughters-in-law paged me, signaling an end to my little vacation.
This time, before we parted, I took Abby’s number.
Though for what, exactly, I’m still not sure. A low-key Shabbos with old folks, away from the singles’ swamp? An exercise in surrogate mother-daughterhood? A shidduch? And if the latter – would that even be do-able, under present circumstances? Or even fair? Gadi’s time is hardly his own. Maybe it’s something best left for “six in the evening after the war,” as they say.
But look where I am – at a wartime wedding. And there are so many of them happening, right now.
We choose life. The full-body hug.
We move on.
The men are gathering for maariv in the dining hall, a large glass enclosure that makes me think of a commercial greenhouse. Which in turn makes me think of Gush Katif, which in turn makes me think of … Asher’s gone to daven and I’m alone with my thoughts in a sea of women, never a good place to be.
I distract myself by surveying the head-coverings, especially those of the younger crowd, the kallah’s friends. My impulse toward snark is tempered by the memory of fashion crazes I succumbed to back in the day. In the early years of my marriage I wore hats that looked like flying saucers. For a long time now headscarves have been in vogue, though those are subject to mini-fads of their own. Right now, it’s thick, coarse-woven bolts of fabric like area rugs, wound haphazardly around the head. I suppose I’ll get used to these slapdash, oversized turbans eventually. At this point, of course, I’m just a spectator, not a participant in the show.
My neutral status is reflected in the sober satin dress hats I always wear to weddings, this one included. These hats are never really in style and so never quite go out of style, or so I like to think. They don’t fit as snugly as my everyday newsboy hats; I’m constantly tugging at them, worrying that they’ve tilted in some weird way. At some point I always head off to the restroom to check in the mirror that nothing’s gone awry. Now seems as good a time as any. I make my way to the rustic cabin marked “Ladies.”
There’s a wall of mirrors opposite the sinks. I find an empty spot to primp at, between other women doing the same. Two middle-aged ladies to my left are evidently connections of the chatan’s mother, Asher’s cousin.
“What a tzidkaniya,” one of them says. “To work as a hospice nurse. Not for the faint-hearted.”
“Actually, she switched to rehab not long ago. After all those years, she felt she was burning out. She decided to transfer before it affected her work.”
At the word “rehab,” my face flushes with confusion, even before I realize why. I lower my gaze for a moment. When I look up, I see what I somehow knew I would: a young and lovely face, smiling wryly at me in the mirror, over my shoulder. The middle-aged ladies move off and the lithe, supple figure slips in beside me.
“I went with the forest-green.”
“You look stunning.”
Abby
Was it mutual, the avoidance? I won’t ever ask. In any case, it’s over.
I’d gone clothes-shopping with girlfriends, but never, since childhood, with anything resembling a mother.
Somehow, I was even less surprised to run into Sharon at Bracha’s son’s wedding than I was at the mall. She, too, seemed to take it as a natural occurrence. We stood together during the chuppah. The kallah, barely out of her teens, looked breathtakingly girlish. Even when I was her age, I wasn’t serene and girlish like that. Sharon gave my arm a squeeze. As though to say, I know.
As we were singing Im Eshkachech Yerushalayim, Sharon caught sight of her fatigue-clad son at the entrance to the venue grounds. I saw the mix of joy, relief, and – incredibly – rage in her face. A kind of muffled, impersonal rage at the circumstances that dictate such impromptu reunions. I knew which son it was, without being told. I moved off, rejoining the coworkers I’d come with. Sharon found me later on, during the dancing. “We’ll give you a lift home,” she said, not an offer but a fact.
I sat with her in the back of the car, her husband and son in front. We carried on, the four of us, a light and whimsical, almost too-giddy conversation, as though we were all high on some sort of wedding-fairy dust. Only as I gathered myself to exit the car, door held open by the handsome young man in fatigues, did Sharon shoot me an earnest, bemused parting look.
Sharon
Twenty-four hours, minus his travel time, that’s what we got.
He gulped a last glass of milk in the middle of my kitchen, colossal army boots taking up all available floor space. Then:
“So that girl from the wedding. Aren’t you going to give me her number?”
“Of course.” The previous night’s giddiness had evaporated, and I had to force a smile as I added, “I don’t suppose you’re saving the world every split-second.”
“That’s the spirit, Ma.”
I picked up my phone and sent Abby’s contact information to his phone. While doing this, I rattled off a few details about her that hadn’t come up before, slipping her age in as matter-of-factly as I could. His phone beeped receipt and he thumbed it, then glanced up with his dazzling smile.
“Cool,” he said.
We embraced, and he was off. I leaned against the closed door for a few moments, eyes closed, feeling grateful, through pain, for my life in this place.
That night, I dreamed I was at the Malha Mall, leaning over the atrium railing, gazing into the pool below. The water rippled, then stilled. In that calm mirror I glimpsed a face that was both familiar and unfamiliar, old and young.
