They immediately start talking about that, so I go play some soccer with the brothers. They tell me how they’ve been discussing Passover and the Exodus all week long as part of their studies. They are homeschooled. “We even made matzo over a campfire,” the smallest one, Lucas, tells me.
“Well, you know more than me,” I say.
They laugh, like I’m joking.
After a while, Kelsey calls us inside. The house reminds me of a flea market, a little of this, a little of that. A dining table on one side, a chalkboard on the other. Chore charts on the wall, alongside pictures of Jesus, Gandhi, and Ganesha. The entire house is fragrant with roasting meat.
“It smells wonderful,” Yael says.
Kelsey smiles. “I made roast leg of lamb stuffed with apples and walnuts.” She turns to me. “We tried to get a brisket, but it’s impossible here.”
“Holy cow and all,” Paul says.
“This is an Israeli recipe,” Kelsey continues. “At least that’s what the website said.”
Yael is quiet for a minute. “It’s what my mother would’ve made.”
Yael’s mother, Naomi, who escaped the horrors Saba had lived through only to be struck by a delivery truck on the way back from walking Yael to school. Universal law of equilibrium. Escape one horror, get hit by another.
>“Come now,” she said.
At the hospital, Yael had stood in the corner while three doctors—the traditional kind, with stethoscopes and guarded expressions—surrounded me in a grim little circle and explained to me that Bram had contracted a rare strain of strep that had sent his body into septic shock. His kidneys had already failed and now his liver was going, too. They were doing everything they could, putting him on dialysis and pumping him full of the most powerful antibiotics, but so far, nothing had been effective. I should brace myself for the worst.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Neither did they, really. All they could say was, “It’s one of those one-in-a-million cases.” Such comforting odds, except when you were the one.
It was like finding out the world was made of gossamer and could be so easily ripped apart. To be so solely at the mercy of fate. Even with all Bram’s talk of accidents, it seemed inconceivable.
I looked to Yael, mighty Yael, to intervene, to swoop in, to take care of Bram like she always had. But she just shrank into that corner, not saying a word.
“Do something, goddammit!” I screamed at her. “You have to do something.”
But she didn’t. Couldn’t. And two days later, Bram was gone.
“Willem.”
I turn around and there’s Yael. I always think she’s so frightening, but she’s actually tiny, barely reaching my shoulder.
“You’re crying,” she says.
I reach out and touch my face and I find it wet with tears. I’m mortified to be doing this. In front of her. I turn away. I want to run. Out of this clinic. Out of India. Forget the shoot. Forget the flight delay. Buy a new ticket. It doesn’t have to be back to Amsterdam. Anywhere that’s not here.
I feel her hands on me, turning me back around. “Willem?” she asks. “Tell me why you’re lost.”
It’s shocking to hear her words, my words. That she remembered.
But how can I answer her? How can I answer when I’ve been nothing but lost these last three years? So much more than I ever anticipated. I keep thinking of another one of the stories Bram used to tell, a horror story really, about when Yael was a girl. She was ten and Saba had taken her camping in the desert. Just the two of them. As the sun started to set, Saba said he’d be right back, and then left her alone with one of those disaster preparation checklists that he was always having her make. Yael, terrified, but capable because of those very disaster preparation checklists, made a fire, made dinner, made camp, fended. When Saba showed up the next day, she screamed at him, How could you leave me alone? And Saba had said, I wasn’t leaving you alone. I was watching the whole time. I was preparing you.
Why didn’t she prepare me? Why didn’t she teach me about the universal law of equilibrium before I had to find it out for myself? Maybe then I wouldn’t miss everything so much.
“I miss . . .” I start to say, but I can’t get the words out.
“You miss Bram,” she says.
And yes, of course I do. I miss my father. I miss my grandfather. I miss my home. And I miss my mother. But the thing is, for almost three years, I managed not to miss any of them. And then I spent that one day with that one girl. One day. One day of watching the rise and fall of her sleep under the rolling clouds in that park and feeling so peaceful that I fell asleep myself. One day of being under her protection—I can still feel the grasp of her hand as we flew through the streets after she threw the book at the skinheads, her grip so strong that it felt like we were one person, not two. One day of being the beneficiary of her strange generosity—the barge ride, the watch, that honesty, her willingness to show fear, her willingness to show courage. It was like she gave me her whole self, and somehow as a result, I gave her more of myself than I even realized there was to give. But then she was gone. And only after I’d been filled up by her, by that day, did I understand how empty I really was.
Yael watches me a moment longer. “Who else do you miss?” she asks, like she already knows the answer.