“They’re not Jewish then?”
“No. They’re Christians. Missionaries, even.”
“You’re kidding?”
She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “I have discovered that no one likes a Jewish holiday quite like a Christian fundamentalist.” She laughs, and I can’t remember the last time I heard her do that. “There might be a Catholic nun there, too.”
“A nun? This is starting to sound like one of Uncle Daniel’s jokes. A nun and a missionary walk into a Seder.”
“You need three. A nun, a missionary, and an imam walk into a Seder,” Yael says.
Imam. I think of the Muslim girls in Paris, and I’m reminded, again, of Lulu. “She was Jewish, too,” I say. “My American girl.”
Yael’s eyebrows go up. “Really?”
I nod.
Yael raises her hands into the air. “Well, maybe she’s having her own Seder tonight.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but as soon as she says it, I get a strange feeling that it’s true. And for a second, even with those two oceans and everything else between us, Lulu doesn’t feel quite so far away.
Thirty-one
The Donnellys, the family hosting tonight’s Seder, live in a large sprawling white stucco house with a makeshift soccer pitch out front. When we arrive, several blond people spill out the front door, including three boys who Yael has told me she can’t tell apart. I can see why. Aside from their height, they are identical, all tousled hair and gangly limbs and knobby Adam’s apples. “One’s Declan, one’s Matthew, and the little one, I think, is Lucas,” Yael says, not so helpfully.
The tallest one bounces a soccer ball in his hand. “Time for a quick game?” he asks.
“Don’t get too muddy, Dec,” the blonde woman says. She smiles. “Hi, Willem. I’m Kelsey. This is Sister Karenna,” she says, gesturing to a weathered old smiling woman in a full Catholic habit.
“Welcome, welcome,” the nun says.
“And I’m Paul,” a mustached man in a Hawaiian shirt says, bundling me into a hug. “And you look just like your mama.”
Yael and I stare at each other. No one ever says that.
“It’s in the eyes,” Paul says. He turns to Yael. “You hear about the cholera outbreak in the Dharavi slum?”
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.