THE EIGHTH DAY (OR THE SEVENTH DAY OF PASSOVER)

DON’T LEAVE

EMILY, 2003

Emily kind of knew that she was dreaming, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that she not wake up.

Harpo was standing in front of her, and Emily couldn’t decide what to do. She knew that she wanted to close the space between them, but how? How could she do it without scaring him away? What if she spooked him and he remembered that he was dead? This was a fragile moment. He couldn’t disappear again. She wouldn’t let that happen.

Abruptly, Harpo fixed the problem. He closed the four steps between them all in a rush, grabbed Emily under the arms and hugged her tightly, lifting her bodily off the ground. He felt incredibly solid. She could feel his back under his coat, the muscles moving as he lifted her up higher. Then he put her down again. Emily didn’t let go. She just hugged him tighter. The fabric of his coat was soft, so much softer than it looked in the movies.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Emily said into the raincoat. She hugged him tighter still and felt an answering pressure, Harpo’s hands on her back. She’d wanted him to hug her so badly. She realized now, that’s all she’d really wanted. “Please don’t go.”

Now Emily was awake. She was lying in bed, watching lights play on her ceiling, and these were the things that she knew. She was alone. Harpo Marx wasn’t here, and he wouldn’t fix anything. So she tiptoed out of her room, and that’s when she saw Doran walking down the stairs, dragging a suitcase. He saw her, stopped, and put a hand on her cheek.

“Do you have to leave?” asked Emily.

“I’ll be back,” said Doran. “I’ll come soon, and for a much longer stay. I’ll bring more things. See how long I can impose myself. If I can’t make myself into family too.”

Emily watched Doran walk out the door, and fought to get control of her breathing, of her feelings, of all these things that she knew now that she couldn’t unknow. She’d inflicted some of the knowledge on other people too. That was the worst part. Some people preferred to go through life not knowing, and who was to say they weren’t the smarter ones.

Sonja sidled up beside her. “You’re sad to see Doran go?”

“Do you forgive me?” whispered Emily.

“Of course I love you,” said Sonja.

Emily nodded, mute. Classic deflection. Loved and forgiven were two different things.

“Everyone seems to miss Doran terribly,” said Sonja. “It’s funny, because I’m the one who should miss him the most, and I feel oddly free.”

“He said he’s coming back,” said Blima.

“Oh yes,” said Sonja. “I should have mentioned. He said he’ll be back in a few weeks.”

“Will he really come?” asked Emily.

Sonja just shrugged.

“Of course he’ll come,” said Blima. “He’s family. He was our mother’s special friend.”

“Emily,” said Sonja, “do you know who else was our mother’s special friend?”

“No,” said Emily.

“Harpo,” said Sonja. “Now I’m remembering things too. I don’t like to be excluded. Harpo Marx was our mother’s special friend. I remember that now.”

“Oh yeah,” said Emily. “Bubbie Blima told me.”

“She cried when he died, you know,” said Sonja.

“I didn’t know that,” said Blima.

“You were too busy crying to notice. You couldn’t see anything through your own tears.”

Emily heard footsteps on the staircase, Doran trundling back up for a last look, maybe. She rounded on Blima. “I thought you were mad at Harpo.”

“Only for one day,” said Blima. “You can get mad at a person and still be his friend after that. You can still love him terribly.”

Emily heard the front door click shut. She looked at Blima, who was looking out toward the door, watching the empty space with an expression that Emily couldn’t decipher. Suddenly, Emily felt electric. What did Blima know? Had she looked at that package since she’d hidden it so many years ago? She wouldn’t have understood then, but she would now. But she’d hidden the thing decades ago, seventy years at least, maybe more. Maybe she didn’t remember where she’d put it. Maybe she didn’t remember doing it at all.

Blima sat heavily. “Our mother had two ventricles,” she said. “One had love for a man, either Doran’s father or ours. The other ventricle had love for you, Sonja.”

“That’s not true,” said Sonja. “It was for both her girls.”

“She loved you more. Me, she used to boss around. Microwave the soup. Turn on the element. Make coffee. Check the stove.”

“I have a letter I want to show you,” said Sonja. “Mackie and I were looking for whatever meshugas you needed and she found this letter instead. Mackie found it in her mother’s old things.” She pulled a letter out of her purse, carefully unfolded it and scanned the contents. “Let me get to the good part,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Blima.

“‘Well, I’ve just learned that my farts can be heard over the phone,’” read Sonja.

“Grandma Ayala wrote letters about farts?” asked Emily.

“‘I’m writing to apologize to you,’” Sonja went on. “‘I’m not calling you because I don’t want to embarrass myself further. Also, I’m not sure what else can be heard over the telephone lines. Technology is a dangerous thing.’”

Blima reached for the letter. “I didn’t know she wrote about that. Let me see it.”

Sonja stood. “‘What about thoughts?’” she read. “‘Sometimes you pick up the telephone and you hear someone else talking. My Blima tells me that it’s the wires that are crossing somewhere, but what if it’s someone thinking? It could happen that sometimes our thoughts happen at the frequency of a telephone.’”

Sonja walked away, holding the letter up, away from her sister.

“It’s true, Emily,” said Blima. “Our mother didn’t know that other people could hear these things. Her hearing was going, and she didn’t know that just because she couldn’t hear it anymore didn’t mean that everyone else couldn’t hear it.”

“Our mother was a hoot,” said Sonja.

“The guests would laugh,” said Blima. “She’d leave the dining room, then there would be a second, two, then everyone in the room would burst into laughter. Everyone loved our mother. You couldn’t not. You could hear her giggling down the hallway and we’d all just laugh louder. Those were good times.”

“‘I’m going to use this to my advantage,’” said Sonja, reading again. “‘What if sometimes our thoughts travel at the very same frequency as a microwave? Would our appliances talk too? So I’m encouraging Blima to use the kitchen appliances as much as possible. Make more coffee—in case the coffee machine can talk. Roast the beans yourself—in case it’s the stove that can hear my thoughts. Heat the soup. Run the dishwasher. I imagine that while she’s in the kitchen, she’s hearing a chorus of I love you from all the machines, because I’m not good at saying it anymore. I used to get help, but now Harpo is gone.’”

“Harpo?” said Emily. “What did she say about Harpo?”

“Our mother really wrote this?” asked Blima.

“‘Harpo cut up all the lodge love letters,’” read Sonja, “‘and then he taped I love you all over the underside of the table.’”

“That was him?” asked Emily.

“‘So I could take my daughter under the table. Harpo made me a script. Then I started writing it myself and taping it up there. But Blima is an adult now, and married, so she won’t follow me anymore. So we’ll just drink more coffee instead, just in case the coffee maker can help me say I love you.”

“Harpo did that?” said Emily, her voice catching, barely a whisper.

“‘When Blima was a little girl, she used to draw me beautiful pictures,’” Sonja read. “‘I put them all in my underwear drawer so I could look at them every morning because it’s been a long time since I forgot to put on panties. After all these years, I still look at those pictures every day.’”

“This is real?” whispered Blima. “That was Elijah the prophet that I drew for her. I knew how much she loved him.”

“The farts,” said Sonja, looking up. “I’m the one who told her. She used to do it in elevators too. One day, we were at the mall, going down to where you park all the cars, and I had to tell her, ‘Mom, I can hear that. Everyone else can too.’ And she said she had no idea. She just giggled. She was just naturally funny.”

“I want to read more letters,” said Blima.

“Yes,” said Sonja. “Me too. No, let’s look at the photo albums.” Then they stood and walked out of the room arm in arm, and left Emily alone.

As Emily was tiptoeing back to her room, she realized there was a room that she hadn’t explored yet: the attic. She grabbed her computer and crept up the stairs.

Emily sat down on the cot and started her computer. She’d been working so diligently on these symptoms for the past few days. So maybe she could be honest now, tell Russell her real worries.

“Dear Russell,” she wrote, and stared down at her computer. She didn’t believe that her research showed anything. The numbers were great, but they didn’t prove what everyone said they proved, or anything at all. She’d shown that there were tenuous connections between people, but she couldn’t show influence. She should be focusing on genealogy, or including it at least. Because family influenced you. Even after they were gone, they lodged inside you and forced you to change and change and change. But that wasn’t math. Jonah was right. There was no way to show it empirically.

When Blima walked up to the attic, Emily heard her coming, heard her footsteps from miles away. And she knew it was her grandmother coming to sit with her. She was relieved.

“I think he’ll be back,” said Blima, as she sat down beside Emily. “He’ll come next year at the very least. I think this might be our tradition now.”

“How about we set a place for him no matter what?”

Blima cupped Emily’s cheek. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll extend the table. We’ll set places for Elijah and Harpo too, and we should have been doing this for years. Why didn’t I ever think to do that before? We should always set the table for everyone, living and dead.”

“For Great-grandma Ayala.”

“And for my father,” said Blima. “Your old Papa Sam. He died when you were still so young. You would have loved him. He was like Harpo. Everyone in Kingston cried the day he died. I thought that Treasure Island would sink, and all of Ontario would be under water. Someone told me once that this could never happen, but I thought at the time ‘today’s the day.’”

“I want to hear the real love story of Auntie Sonja and my great-uncle,” said Emily. “I’m ready now.”

Blima settled onto the bed, and rusty springs cried out discordantly. “Our mother made Sonja marry your great-uncle. The marriage was arranged.”

“No,” said Emily.

“Sonja was boy crazy. That part of the story was true. She did go on a date with a different man every night. So our mother gave her a choice. Marriage, or boarding school.”

“I can’t think of anything worse.”

“Arranged marriage doesn’t mean that they didn’t love each other. And it doesn’t mean that Sonja didn’t get a choice. For all her faults, our mother was good with people. She knew how to match. She got right with me too.”

“What?” And Emily felt like she’d run over a speed bump, hit the bottom of a roller coaster, that the world was shifting and rearranging all around her.

“Of course I love your Papa. We’ve loved each other since I was eight years old and he was nine. And Ayala didn’t arrange the marriage exactly, I mean, it wasn’t an actual shidduch. But she did hint at it an awful lot. She always said, ‘You should marry that boy.’ I regret that I never told her that she was right. It was my fault anyway. I saw Doran and Sonja on the dock and told. Two weeks later, my sister was married. I should have known it was for a reason. I should have trusted my mother more. I loved her. I hope she knew that.”

“I can’t believe all this.”

“Wait,” said Blima, reaching into her pocket. “I have something for you. A special treat since you’re too old for the afikomen.” She handed her a letter. “It was given to me by Harpo Marx.”

Emily unfolded it. It said L and that was it. “What is this?”

“It’s a love letter,” said Blima, as if that explained everything.