When he started walking and the dog followed again, he asked, “Are you going to insist on coming with me?”
The chihuahua’s tail wagged faster, and Adam felt his eyes closing on him again.
“All right. Let’s nap.”
Adam sat cross-legged on the grass, wearing the kibbutz work clothes, scanning their phone directory for a Dagmar, while Golda slept in a warm coil beside him. He’d just returned from his first shift in the dishroom and felt better, at least physically. Yesterday, after saying goodbye to Claudette, he had spent the rest of the day running between the bed and the toilet, only leaving his room to pick up toiletries around dinnertime. After managing to swallow a couple of boiled potatoes in the dining hall, he returned to his room and lay facedown on the bed, intending to rise in a few minutes to shower, but it was four o’clock in the morning when he awoke, having no idea where he was or what he’d done, and then it all came back. With the windows full of darkness, he showered, shaved, and showed up for his shift an hour early. When eight hours of wiping ketchup and hummus off plates were over, his boss, Yossi, a stubby guy with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, thanked him for doing a great job. He also informed him that he’d never met anyone named Dagmar, but that he should check the archives when its manager, Barry, got back from reserve duty next week. After circling Barry’s name, he handed him the kibbutz directory.
A stapled packet no thicker than a term paper, the kibbutz directory couldn’t have been more different from the five-inch-thick Manhattan phone book, but Adam was still brought back to those afternoons he spent in a phone booth on the corner of Essex and Delancey, scanning the names for his father. When he was twelve years old, his grandfather finally told him that, honestly, he couldn’t be sure who his dad was, that his mom had named him Soccorso because her boyfriend at the time was Tony Soccorso, and she had hoped that using his name would keep him in the picture; but Tony insisted the dad was Jerry Cohen, a boy who did come around a lot. Adam didn’t want to hurt Zayde, didn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t enough, so he used the pay phone to call the eight Tony and Anthony Soccorsos in the white pages and the ninety-four Gerry, Jerry, Gerald, and Jerald Cohens. Four separate afternoons he spent in that glass booth scratched with slurs and sprayed with tags, his pockets bulging with quarters. Had one of those voices he’d heard been his dad’s? None of them even admitted to knowing a Sharon Rosenberg.
“Pervert.”
Adam raised his head. The girl towered over him, wearing the same navy work shirt and beige work pants as him, and plenty of eyeliner, though not as much as that night. The late afternoon sunlight inflamed her absurdly red hair.
He brought his hands together. “I’m so so so sorry about that. I swear it wasn’t what it looked like. You know, you really should shut your blinds when you’re getting dressed.”
“And you really should not be having your eyes in people’s windows.” Her flinty Russian accent made it hard to tell if she was angry or simply giving an idiot some advice.
“Listen, I was walking around the back of the building for totally other reasons and . . . well, there you were. But I swear on my life I wasn’t getting my rocks off. Honest to God. Did you report me?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
Adam blew through his lips. “Okay. That’s good. Thank you.”
“I do not report people.”
She shot him a pitying look before leaving to join the other Russians playing cards around the picnic table.
Adam went back to the directory. He was nearing the end without any luck. If only he had a last name. Many of the listings were simply the “Horesh Family” or “Kaplan Family.” He reached the last page. No Dagmar. A red petal fell on the list of names. The tree was shedding its flowers, dappling the lawn. Adam lay back on the grass and gazed into its branches. Golden sunbursts came through the leaves and flowers. One more day, and he could talk to Eyal’s mother. He had seen her name in the directory.
He closed his eyes. The exotic smell of the freshly mowed lawn put him on edge, but the sound of the Russians bantering around the picnic table was homey. Adam had been lullabied to sleep on many a summer night by people chitchatting in a foreign tongue, ever since that first sweltering July night he moved in with his grandfather, almost twenty years ago. Several old people, seeking relief from their lonely, muggy apartments, had dragged kitchen chairs onto the sidewalk, and for hours they sat beneath his second-floor window, kibitzing in German and Yiddish. He lay listening to them for a long time after Zayde explained what had happened to his mom.
When his mother first failed to pick him up that afternoon, nobody had been surprised. Certainly not Mrs. Wadhwa, the Indian woman who babysat several kids in their apartment building in Gowanus. It was normal for Adam to still be sitting in front of the TV long after the other children had been picked up, while Mrs. Wadhwa collected the toys off her floor, mumbling, “I should charge your mother more, I really should.” Things only started to seem different when he was still on the couch as Mr. Wadhwa came through the door in his bus driver’s uniform. After saying hello to Adam, Mr. Wadhwa pulled his wife into the kitchen, where Adam could hear them whispering between muffled phone calls.
Hours passed. Night fell. A knock came at the door, and Adam went running at the sight of his tall grandfather standing with his straw fedora in his hands. “Zayde!” He threw his arms around his legs. His grandfather, cradling his head against his waist, said, “You’re coming home with me.” Didn’t it seem strange to the old man that he took his hand and followed him down four flights of stairs and across the foyer’s black-and-white checkered floor and out the building and down the street without ever asking, “Where’s my mom?”
They took a cab to Manhattan, not the train—another sign this was not a regular day. Adam had never traversed the bridge in a car and was hypnotized by the ever-changing rhombuses made by the Brooklyn Bridge’s crisscrossing silvery cables. The city lay in wait for him, an enormous Lite-Brite, the two new towers soaring into the sky. When they got to the apartment on Essex, Zayde ordered pepperoni pizza, which they ate at the small wooden table pushed against the kitchen wall. Actually, only Adam ate; Zayde sawed off a bite with his knife and fork, but never brought it to his mouth. When Adam had eaten as many slices as he could, Zayde said, “Adam . . .” Adam fell quiet, braced for the bad news about his mother, whatever it was this time. But then Zayde stacked the unused napkins. “Let’s clean up first.”
They did the dishes right away instead of leaving them on the table, as Adam was used to. Zayde washed, Adam dried: they were a team. While Adam brushed his teeth, Zayde sat on the toilet. “Always brush for a count of a hundred,” he said. “Your teeth will sparkle.” Adam hoped Zayde would never get to whatever it was he had to tell him. Why couldn’t they just do this? Just carry on? Adam was led to his mother’s old bedroom. His very own room. No sleeping on the couch. Zayde tucked him in so tight he couldn’t move. Then the old man sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand.
Other grandfathers might have lied, made up a more comforting story, planning to tell the truth some day, but Zayde simply told him his mom had fallen on the subway tracks and the train just couldn’t stop in time. “It didn’t hurt her. It happened so fast, Adam, your mom couldn’t have felt any pain.”
Fallen? The wondering would come years later. Drunkenly? Jumped? Sober?
The Russians around the table burst into laughter. Adam opened his eyes. Beyond the tree and its raining red petals was a cloudless sky. The Russian girl’s face appeared before the perfect blue.
“You’re awake.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“What’s your name?”
Adam sat up. “Why? Have you changed your mind about reporting me?”
She