And then he saw his father lying on the basement floor, dressed as if for work, his gray suit surrounded by a burgundy stain. Had Poppa spilled something? Cranberry juice or Hawaiian Punch? Would Mama be mad at Poppa for making a mess? There was a gun, his father's gun, which he had to carry for work. But the gun was in Poppa's right hand, and his father was left-handed, like him. Why was the gun in his right hand? Someone else must have killed him and tried to make it look like his father did it to himself.
The boy took the gun away and put it in his toy chest, which had suddenly materialized, and now the basement was the rec room he remembered, with the cast-off sofa and pine paneling and the old black-and-white RCA in the corner, because his father just bought a big color television for the den. Would they have to give the color television back, now that his father was dead?
Zeke willed himself awake, an essential trick to master for those prone to nightmares. He had thought the dream was the by-product of his old life and assumed it would end when he finally got out. But here it was again, more or less the same. Some details varied, but the fiery house remained constant. It always started off as a surreal approximation of the shingled Forest Park home his family had owned before his father's death, then reclaimed itself at the end, taking on its true contours in case Zeke ever made the mistake of thinking his father's suicide could be confined within the boundaries of a bad dream.
And the young Zeke always had some petty thought upon finding his father's body. Would they get to keep the color television? The new Cadillac? Strange, the one question the dreamworld Zeke never asked was the one Zeke had asked in real life: Did this mean they weren't going to the Orioles game? Zeke didn't beat himself up too much over that. He was only five when his father died-in the basement of what was left of his business, as a matter of fact, not at home. And he was discovered by an employee, not his son, so the event had seemed unreal to the little boy. After all the rabbi's vague talk about journeys and God's fate and being summoned by the Angel of Death, Zeke came to believe that his father had gone to a place from which he might return. So he had asked what a five-year-old boy would have asked in those years, the glory years of McNally and Palmer and Brooks: "Does this mean we're not going to the Orioles game?"
The rabbi took their tickets. Or so Zeke always assumed. At any rate, Zeke didn't go to the game that night.
He stared at the ceiling, taking in the sounds around him. Life on the outside was at once louder and quieter than he remembered, the sounds more varied and less predictable. Natalie didn't exactly snore, but she whistled a bit as she slept, curled into his side like a kitten. The children, who shared the other double bed, were mouth-breathers and snufflers. The twins slept in a tangled jumble, while Isaac hugged a narrow strip along the side. Once or twice so far, Zeke had awakened in the night and found Isaac's brown-black eyes boring into him in the dark, full of hate. The boy slept so far on the side of the bed that it was amazing to Zeke he didn't end up falling every night, but he had an unnatural rigidity. Again, just like his father. The Rubins were very rigid men.
Spoiled, too. At every stop Isaac asked if he could have a rollaway bed, but Zeke had said a motel double was big enough for three kids. The truth was that he just didn't want to draw attention to the fact that they were traveling with three kids. Bad enough that they sometimes drove with the luggage on the roof, although that sometimes worked as an optical illusion. Now you see it, now you don't.
"What makes you think motels even have rollaways?" he had asked Isaac once.
"The Waldorf-Astoria did," he said. "We had a suite, and I slept on the rollaway in the living room part, and the twins shared the other double bed."
"The Waldorf, huh?" Even when Zeke's father was alive and the business was thriving, Zeke had never taken material things for granted, never assumed the world was his oyster, never even understood that puzzling expression. If the world was your oyster, what were you? A grain of sand being pounded into a pearl? "You stay at the Waldorf a lot, Lord Fauntleroy?"
"Just once. Daddy had business in New York, and we went up for the weekend. He took me to the museum with the dinosaurs and the big planetarium. He said he finally understood black holes after going there. Do you know what a black hole is?"
"Of course." If he said no, Isaac would launch into a long, tedious explanation. The kid was in love with the sound of his own voice. It was an unexpected bonus of locking him into the trunk, not having to listen to him yak. You, he wanted to say. You're a goddamn black hole, a mother-fuckin'maw, demanding attention.
Too bad the boy didn't take after his mother, a woman with the rare ability to keep still. Natalie's beauty was remarkable, but it was her composure, her need not to fill silences, that Zeke prized above all. Most women were so busy, never at rest. They puttered, they frittered, they fussed. The spark between Zeke and Natalie hadn't been so much love at first sight as it was the thrill of recognition, two aliens trapped on an unfriendly planet, the only members of their species. Natalie, like Zeke, knew she deserved whatever she could wring out of this world.
Granted, he found himself wishing that she had been a little more communicative when she showed up in Terre Haute. Surprise! I've left Mark, I didn't want to wait anymore, not even a month or two. Oh, and I have three kids. Guess I forgot to mention that in all the letters. Zeke had never even suspected the kids existed, although it struck him in hindsight that Lana had dropped a spiteful hint or two over the years. He wasn't an idiot, he knew Natalie had to have sex with Mark, but she had told him she couldn't have kids. Truthfully, he hadn't minded the idea of Mark's being denied the children that an Orthodox man would consider his due. He had even hoped it might make Mark question his faith, or God's love. He yearned for that prig to question something, anything, but that was the Rubin secret to survivaclass="underline" Never look too closely at the source of all that good luck.
Even as Zeke processed the inconvenient fact of the children's presence-in Terre Haute in particular, on the planet in general-he understood why it never would have occurred to Natalie to leave them behind when she bolted. What was hers was hers; Natalie was almost crazed on this point. It had killed her, having to leave so many of her possessions back in Mark Rubin's house. But the children were hers, and hers alone, according to Natalie's bizarre logic. Motherhood had gotten under Natalie's skin in a way Zeke never could have predicted. She still put him first, above all others, but she didn't see why she couldn't do that while tending to the children she had conceived with another man. If only Zeke's own mother had been committed to such a paradoxical idea. But Zeke's mom had always put her happiness above his.
He had tried to convince Natalie to go home, to wait just a month or two more, although her disappearance and reappearance would make Mark inconveniently suspicious. Failing that, he urged her to put the children on a bus before they had seen too much and knew too much, although he didn't phrase it quite that way. "Don't you see he's going to do a full-court press to find you? A wife runs away, a man might come to accept it. But when she takes his kids, it's like throwing down a gauntlet. He has to hunt for you now."