What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

I don’t know why she said it, having never before asked for a poem or seen me write one. But the request ignited an impulse that had lain dormant within me for years. As an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, a newly minted English major who had never considered writing as a pursuit, never desired writing as a pursuit, never needed it, I was introduced to James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break by one of my teachers, Coleman Barks, a romantic Santa Claus renowned for his translations of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic. By the time I devoured Wright’s work, the thought I too must write consumed me. I hunted poems in back-alleys, half-packed bongs, and in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I sought meetings with wizened professors, elderly townies, and stumbling-drunk homeless men, hazing myself with experiences befitting a burgeoning writer, shoving the funnel down my throat and pouring in everything that would slide down, excited to find what would come back up to find life on the page.

During my senior year, I found Edward, an eighty-four-year-old vagabond who approached leading his green, antique bicycle as if it were a lover. Whenever he sat down to chat, as he so often did on summer afternoons in downtown Athens, Georgia, it was impossible not to stare at his intensely wrinkled hands, splotched and flecked by the years, or the strange blue and red formations that mapped his bald head. He liked me, I could tell, and intentionally played the part of storyteller, detecting ears eager to digest his stories. Once, after interrupting me while I was writing at Blue Sky, a hip coffee shop in the center of town, he sat down and, in a blended European accent, asked, “Did I ever tell you about my apartment in Paris? My bedroom was on the second floor, and the women, David. The women. So much sex. So much love. We’d make the floor shake, keeping my landlord up at night. Paris, David. Paris.”

So this is being a writer, I thought, listening closely as the world opened to me, revealing its beauty without begging or even asking. I wrote voraciously. But the writer in me was killed by my warped perfectionism, realizing – as I read the literary masters – that my scribbling would never reach their heights. What’s the fucking point? I scrawled one afternoon, recognizing my writing was nothing when compared with that of William Faulkner. The pain of failure overwhelmed those first pangs of need, and so I put the pen down.

But after writing Jamie’s poem, a half-decent number full of awkward metaphors and enjambments, I was stricken with a sharp sense of loss. Then, one night, sitting down for a quick game of Kitty Cannon, I opened up Microsoft Word instead. Without thinking, I began to type some verse and noticed my body expand, a metal frame made malleable by the heat of creativity. And I thought, How did I let this go so easily? as I typed through the night and then through the next year – publishing several pieces in small literary magazines across the country. Colorado Review. Burnside Review. Stickman Review. Pieces about my grandfather and trips to the doctor with Noa and pissing in the bushes as a child. But nothing about the terrorist attack. Not a word.⁶

On Mother’s Day the next year – May 8, 2005, a Sunday – we hired a babysitter for the first time and walked to Lauriol Plaza, a famed Mexican restaurant nearby. Over a brunch of huevos rancheros and salmon à la parrilla, while talking about this sudden freedom from diaper-changing and drool-wiping, Jamie brought up the subject of my writing.

“You’ve been writing a lot.”

“I think it’s great.”

“Yeah, I wish I had more time for it.”

“Do you think you’ll ever write about it?” she asked cautiously, fiddling with her fork.

I shrugged – a shrug that concealed an answer I had already realized: I needed to write about it, felt compelled to write about it. I’d moved beyond therapy, having reclaimed small pieces of myself during the process, and was now reclaiming the artist within, an artist beginning to feel an out-of-body compulsion to construct this story, our story, on the page. I wanted to wrestle with it in the hopes of choking out something transformative: choking out a blessing. Not as therapy, but as art, as a redemptive expression. I had to try. This was all I had left – a sense that only through storytelling, I could reclaim myself.

But I couldn’t tell Jamie. Not yet, not as she sat opposite me sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice. I shrugged, embarrassed by the cliché – the writer with a book that needed to be written – wondering if wholeness might reside in the pages I’d not yet composed. And then Jamie said, “I think you should write about it. Maybe it would help.”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged again.

“You haven’t thought about it?”

I had thought about it at length – had thought about how, between changing diapers, doing the dishes, and grading papers, between full-time employment and full-time parenthood, I didn’t have the space within which to even consider beginning such a tortuous process. I already felt overwhelmed by daily life, barely able to breathe, much less breathe life into a past which had taken the breath of our friends, and which had nearly taken Jamie’s last breath.

I longed for stretches of time that looked like a coastline upon which I could pour out the Israeli desert sands that were rubbing coarsely under my skin. I was afraid to admit this to Jamie, apprehensive about her possible response. After all, she’d already given too much time to this narrative. She’d lived it. And I feared making her live it again. But I needed to tell her.

“I’ve been thinking about graduate school, about an MFA in creative writing,” I said.

“Yeah. I just feel like I need time if I’m going to actually write about everything. It’s not about the degree or anything like that. I’ve just been thinking about ways I could get the time I need to write, and it’s the thing I keep coming back to.”

“So you have thought about writing about what happened, then.”

“And graduate school?”

“I don’t think we can afford something like that, David.”

“I know. I know we can’t. I’ve just been thinking.”

“Well, I’m glad you told me – I didn’t know you were thinking about this.”

“Have you looked at schools?”

“Well, a little. I don’t think we can do anything like that, with Noa and everything. But – you should at least look into it.”

“Look into it how?”

“I don’t know. Just find out information,” she said, giving permission, herself intrigued by the permission she was giving.

Several months later, I sent in applications to several writing programs along with requests for teaching assistantships, knowing that, financially, it wasn’t feasible under the rosiest of circumstances. A twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year assistantship was worlds away from sustainable for our family. And Jamie was pregnant again. Applying to graduate school was plain foolery, I thought.

The following spring, a professor from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington called to inform me that I had been accepted into their program and was being offered an assistantship. By then, memory of my applications had been erased by the birth of our second daughter, Tamar, an event so disorienting it warped time, making it appear as though everything that preceded it existed on a separate plane.

Jamie strolled into our living room one evening late into her pregnancy and announced plainly, “I think my water just broke.” The casual beginning seemed appropriate, since Noa’s delivery had lasted for twenty-four hours. We assumed we had plenty of time. There was no reason to hurry. So I waited while she got her things together and arranged care for Noa. Then Jamie dropped a bag, leaned against a wall, and said, “We need to leave right now.” I jumped off the couch. Her contractions were coming every thirty seconds, overwhelming her, overwhelming me as I tried to get her to the car.

“Shit. How are you already contracting like this?”

“I – don’t – know,” she said, teeth clenched. I finally eased her into the car and took off, running red lights and skirting the wrong way down one-way streets, Jamie grabbing the handle above the passenger-side window, flexing her body toward the door, attempting to push herself through the glass and onto the asphalt, seeking relief. As we neared the birth center, I was forced to stop at a major intersection, where I cracked the windows for fresh air, trying to relieve her convulsions by doing something, anything. The baby was close.

Jamie groaned, “Hurry.” Then, closing her eyes, focused completely internally, she let out a primordial scream. I looked past her and into the eyes of a teenage boy in the car waiting next to ours, his face stricken. There was no doubt in my mind: She’s going to have this right now. The light turned green and I skidded the car into the birth center’s parking lot. It was dark, and the doors were locked.

“Press the button.”

I pressed the buzzer. Nothing. Pressed it again. Then a voice came over: “Can I help you?”

“I’m having a baby!” Jamie yelled, the word baby trailing up, forming a sarcastic question where no question existed. The door buzzed open as a nurse greeted us from the top of a steep flight of stairs. “Just have her come on up and we’ll – ” she said as Jamie bent over and wailed. “Oh my, she’s having it right now. Do you think you can get her up here?”

“Then do it now.” She disappeared. I grabbed Jamie’s arm and guided her up the stairs to a room with a bed. Jamie got on it and immediately started pushing as the nurse reported that the midwife wasn’t going to make it, that there was no time, that we were going to have to do it on our own. I wasn’t pre pared. Noa’s delivery had been an exercise in procrastination. But Tamar was suckling on Jamie’s belly before I’d processed what was transpiring. We were a family of four, just like that. And just like that my thoughts of confronting the terrorist attack within the cozy confines of graduate school dissipated entirely from my mind.

Jamie and I began adjusting to life as a family of four, our house transformed into a wrestling ring with three others always on the mat with me, all of us stomping and ricocheting off the ropes, a flurry of activity that was blinding and exhilarating. It was in the midst of this brawl that the UNCW professor called, inviting us to live along the coast, speaking warmly, calmly, saying, “The Department of Creative Writing really wants you,” saying, “The writers here are really excited about your work,” saying, “You’ll love the ocean, how time stretches flat and long and open along the coast from Wrightsville Beach to Fort Fisher,” saying, “You can roam here, be free, like the terns and sandpipers.”

We talked for weeks about the impossibility of such a move, looking at our finances, the numbers never adding up. Noa and Tamar bounced off the ropes, reminding us that they needed to be included in our calculations. My students at JDS bounced off the walls, reminding me that I’d be abandoning them as their FBI chief. The city hummed, reminding us of the bustling community we’d be leaving behind. Then one day, Jamie said, “Let’s just do it. The ocean sounds nice. And we’ll make the numbers work. We’ll find a way, somehow.”

In truth, we were both ready to escape the traffic and the sirens and the political chatter, which seemed to push time, a bit quicker than it should. We delighted in the words small town, beach town, southern town. By mid-July, nearly four years after the attack, we were ready to abandon Washington for Wilmington.

We woke up at 4:30 on a summer’s morning, our apartment emptied of everything save an inflatable mattress from our last night’s sleep. We had decided to rise bombastically early to avoid rush-hour traffic, to escape under the cover of perpetual movement and our children’s slumbers, giddy to reach North Carolina. But seven hours later, as we approached Wilmington on I-40, driving through the drab, flat landscape punctuated by clumps of browning pines, the decision to move south no longer seemed sound.

“I wonder what this is going to be like,” Jamie said. She looked concerned.

“Maybe we should have visited first?”

“I’m sure it will get better.”

“It has to,” I said, wondering how many Jews per square mile lived in the towns we passed – Watha, Burgaw, Rocky Point – suddenly feeling foreign and vulnerable. Finally, our exit arrived. We were funneled off the interstate and onto Third Street, toward downtown Wilmington, where we were greeted by austere colonial homes and moss-draped oaks whose branches formed a canopy over the road. We sighed at the beauty, at the tranquility, at the coffee shop we found with pastel rocking chairs planted on the sidewalk. We stopped, got out, sat down and exhaled.

“We’re here,” I said to Noa.

She looked around, taking in the storefronts. “This is our house?”

“No,” I chuckled. “This is Wilmington. The place we’re going to live.”

“Oh. Where’s our house?”

“We have to find one,” Jamie explained.

Noa’s brow crinkled quizzically until her eyes focused on the cinnamon roll I was holding. Reaching for it, she said, “I know what. Let’s go find a home.”

We found a rental in one of the town’s oldest neighborhoods, where the houses hugged each other closely and the front stoops pressed against the curb, providing a cozy, residential main-street feel that harkened back to the turn of the twentieth century. Our house was from the 1930s, painted light green and buttressed by a spacious porch. When we opened the door to get our first look, Noa was immediately enamored, skipping into the living room and yelling, “We live in a castle,” bouncing around each of the three bedrooms in turn, echoing off the hardwood floors, while Jamie, smiling, cradled Tamar on the threshold of our new life.

Still, it wasn’t until I was sitting on Wrightsville Beach, watching Noa build sand castles and Tamar waddle unsteadily with a diaper weighed down by sea water, that I understood the seismic shift. Barefoot, I walked down to the water’s edge, and what once seemed foreign, vulnerable – writing about Israel in a sleepy southern town – suddenly felt natural. I dipped a toe in the ocean, envisioning a line leading directly from it across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Tel Aviv, then overland via Highway 1 inland to Jerusalem, thinking of these two coastlines and these two states as my topographic bookends.

On my first visit to the writing department, I thought of bookends, of UNCW and Hebrew University as intellectual peaks, the valley of my narrative running between them. In contrast to Hebrew University’s limestone structures, UNCW’s campus appeared modern – bricks and angles and manicured swaths of grass occasionally interrupted by a sandy pocket, a miniature dune rejecting the landscaped sod. But it wasn’t the sand that most stood out as a sign, a signifier, that I was standing on coastal land. It was the laxity. The unfettered freedom of movement. The leisure. No gates. No security stations. No metal detectors or wand-wielding guards. No soldiers carrying M-16s or professors sporting gun holsters instead of pocket protectors.

Finding a café tucked inside the university’s library, I watched groups of students mingle and felt at ease. It seemed an appropriate place in which to begin the process of committing everything that had happened to us to the page, and once classes began, I allowed myself to inhale, deeply, as though I was a long-distance runner at the starters’ block, pressing the balls of my feet into the floor and my fingertips into a keyboard, thinking, It’s time to start digging.