CHAPTER 20
Mordechai didn’t drive with quite his usual panache in America, Ariel had noted. He assumed it was because he didn’t know the streets as well as he did in Tel Aviv. They still pulled up a couple of blocks down the street from the synagogue in what seemed to be a very short amount of time. The street was totally blocked by emergency vehicles with blinking lights. They saw an ambulance pull away as they got out of their car.
“With me,” Mordechai murmured. Ariel restrained his urge to sprint ahead and paced alongside the older man as he walked down the far side of the street, sticking to the shadows as much as possible. It wasn’t long before they edged up behind a small crowd gathered near a well-dressed man talking to a couple of policemen.
“Could I have your name, sir?” one of the policemen asked, pulling out a notebook.
“Joshua Steinberg,” the man replied. “I’m the rabbi here.”
“Good,” the policeman replied. “I’m Sergeant Ramirez. We would have been trying to contact you shortly. We need some information please.”
“I’ll do my best,” the rabbi said with a catch in his throat.
“Can you tell us what parts of the building were supposed to be occupied tonight?”
“It…it should have just been room 104 in the northwest corner of the building, and room 105 right next to it on the west side. We do a couple of English As Second Language classes every week for new immigrants. We…” The rabbi choked for a moment. He took a deep breath. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” the sergeant said. “Take your time. Do you know how many people were in the building tonight?”
“Not exactly. Once we can get to the office, we can get on the computer and tell you how many were enrolled in each class, but that may not help a lot. Attendance is usually a bit irregular, but most weeks there are between ten and fifteen people in each room.”
“Does that include the teachers?”
“Maybe. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Someone threw a serious bomb in the northwest room. The furnishings were destroyed.”
“Oh…” the rabbi said faintly. “Is…did anyone…die?”
“Everyone in the other room survived, although they’re all injured, some of them badly. But room…104, did you call it—the northwest room—we didn’t find any survivors. They’re clearing away the bodies now.”
“Oh…” Steinberg repeated. “The Caans…Moses and Miriam…that was their room…”
Ariel made a noise, and Mordechai quickly pulled him away from the crowd.
“Your parents?” Mordechai murmured in his ear as he led him back down the street.
“Yes,” Ariel whispered. “Mom taught an ESL class the last few years, and Dad tutored with her. They said it was fun, it let them meet new people, and it helped them give back to the community. But it was always on Tuesday nights. It was always on Tuesdays. Why Wednesday this week? Why tonight?” A note of anguish filled his voice. Mordechai wrapped an arm around his shoulder, and hurried him to their car, using the remote to unlock the doors and get him in.
Ariel felt the car rock a little when Mordechai settled into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Tears started trickling down his cheeks.
He didn’t know how long they sat there in the dark. Eventually he felt the sensation as the tear tracks dried and were not replaced. He scrubbed his face with his hands.
“I’m sorry,” Mordechai said. “I made a mistake. I didn’t think they would react this fast to our stopping them last night. And I didn’t think they would escalate to this level so soon. So this is at least partly my fault.”
Anger began to burn in Ariel, first seemingly in his gut, but then in a cold fire in his mind. “No,” he whispered. “Not your fault. Not my fault. Not my parents’ fault. Theirs. Theirs.”
After a moment, Mordechai said, “So what do you want to do?”
Ariel let that thought roll through his mind, through the cold flames of his rage. “As they have done, so let it be done,” he finally responded.
“Fitting,” Mordechai responded. “But if that’s what you want, we’ll have to move fast to beat the local police to them.”
“Fast works,” Ariel said, a snarl in his tone. “I’m up for fast.”
Mordechai said nothing more, simply started the car and pulled away from the curb, turning a corner almost immediately to leave the emergency vehicles behind them.
* * *
After traveling several blocks, a thought wormed its way through the waves of anger and obtruded into Ariel’s focus. His eyes widened, and he said, “Turn right here.”
Mordechai made the turn, then said, “You have someplace you want to go?”
“Yes. Home. I have some small things I want to get, and tonight is the best time before anyone else knows about…them.”
“Ah. Well, put the address in the GPS, then.”
Ariel did so, then sat back. He said nothing more during the drive. In fact, he was trying not to think at all, and he did a pretty good job of it until they turned into the neighborhood.
“Nice houses,” Mordechai murmured. “Expensive?”
Ariel shrugged. “Most of these houses are what’s called Craftbuilt or Craftsman style. They were all built over a hundred years ago. Our home is one of the newest, and it was built in 1920. They’re not mansions, but there is something of a status to having one of these, and if they’re in good shape they command top dollar, even in the crazy California real estate market. I know Dad turned down an offer of two million dollars for our home a few years ago.” Ariel waited as Mordechai guided the car around a couple of corners, then said, “Pull up under that big chestnut tree there. This shouldn’t take long.”
“You sure you can do this without causing a problem?”
“I know where the spare back-door key is hidden, and I know the alarm code. This is my best chance.”
“Okay.”
Mordechai was shutting down the engine as Ariel got out of the car. He closed the door quietly, then walked down to the house he had grown up in. He skirted around the edge of the yard to avoid the electric eye that would turn on the front-yard floodlights and slipped into the back yard, stopping at the back-corner rainspout long enough to reach inside and remove the magnetic key holder. A moment later he was inserting the key in the back door.
Once inside, he closed the door quietly and stepped over to the alarm keypad. This was the part he was nervous about. If his father had changed the alarm code…he punched it in quickly. A moment later, the alarm turned off, and he released his breath.
Ariel heard the tic-tic-tic of little nails on the kitchen’s tile floor, and looked down to see his mom’s Shih Tzu approaching. She sniffed his foot, then looked up at him with a curled lip. She knew who he was, regardless of what he was calling himself, and she didn’t react much better than she had the last time she had seen him.
“Hey, Tiffy,” he said around the lump in his throat. “Mom’s…not coming home, baby. I’m sorry.” He bent over and tousled her ears and her little hair bow. She put up with it for a moment, then walked away. Ariel made himself stand and move on.
His father had left the foyer light on, which gave Ariel plenty of light to see by as he soft-footed it up the stairs to open the door to what had been his bedroom.
Once inside, as he had expected, nothing had been changed. He’d been certain that his mother still hadn’t been able to bring herself to move anything or put anything away yet, even though she thought he was dead. He moved to the dresser and found the kippah he had worn at his bar mitzvah. Folding it and putting it in his shirt pocket, he looked around the room. Mementos, memorabilia, what was left of his books, but nothing really drew him except for his Boy Scout sash with the twenty-five badges and emblems on it, including the Eagle Scout emblem. For nostalgia’s sake, he almost took it down from where it hung on the wall, but in the end he only pulled out his phone and took a picture of it.
A moment later he stepped off the last tread at the bottom of the stairs and moved around the corner into his father’s study. There, on the front left corner as seen by whoever was sitting in the desk chair, was his father’s copy of Tanakh; not the fancy leather-bound edition that he carried to shul on Friday nights, but the worn hardback edition with page edges dirtied by hands turning them during years and years of study and meditating, and with decades’ worth of handwritten notes printed neatly in margins and flyleaves. He ignored every other volume on the nearby shelves. This—more than anything else, this was his father’s soul.
Ariel’s final stop involved a return to the kitchen, where he set the book down on the corner of the breakfast table and approached the china cabinet. He pulled the center drawer open, and there on top of the fancy napkins, just as he knew it would be, was the dark blue velvet drawstring bag that housed his mother’s most prized possession. He undid the drawstring and slid the solid silver menorah out onto his hands.
It was old, and very old school by today’s standards, of course. Old-fashioned, nine candle holders, slim, slightly tarnished. But it had been part of Ariel’s life for as long as he could remember, sitting on the table every Chanukah. It had been made in Lithuania in the late 1800s, two generations before the Holocaust, and had belonged to his mother’s grandmother. In his hands, Ariel held the tangible evidence of his mother’s faith. He gently slid it back in the bag, drew the drawstrings shut, and equally gently placed it on top of the book.
Glancing into the kitchen, Ariel could see that Tiffy’s water and kibble dispensers were full, so she was set for three or four days. He looked over at where she stood watching him. For all that she’d never been his pet, he regretted that she could no longer accept him.
“Sorry, Tiff, I have to go. Uncle Bernie and Aunt Rachel will probably be here tomorrow. You’ll be okay until then, and they’ll take good care of you.”
He swallowed around the lump that was back in his throat, reached down to touch her little black nose with his fingertip, and after a moment was surprised to feel the rasp of her tongue caress it.
It only took moments to gather up the book and bag, set the alarm, exit through the door and make sure it locked, and restore the magnetic key holder to its hiding place. It was only moments more to retrace his steps to the car, again successfully avoiding the light-sensor perimeter.
Ariel slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. He looked over at Mordechai.
“Let’s go.”