Laughing, Jacob left his own pebble and walked on.
He wandered around for a while, swirling around the section containing Bina’s plot, like a ship caught in a slow-turning whirlpool. The relative newness of Esther’s Garden was reflected in its more modern headstones, black granite set flush with the grass. From a distance it evoked a tilled field. He found himself stooping to read markers, to place a pebble on those that had been neglected. The sun was ferocious, and he hadn’t brought a hat or water. It was half past two; he could beat traffic back to the Westside, but only if he left right now; he still had to shower and get over to his dad’s. He really should come back later, when he had more time to devote to her.
He couldn’t stall forever. He reached the correct row. Hers was the ninth plot in.
He didn’t care to think how long it had been since his last visit. His father went several times a year: on the anniversary of her death, of course, and also before major holidays. Nigel drove him, helped him make his way to the grave.
A son’s job. Sam had never asked.
Jacob wasn’t about to volunteer.
Her gravestone was unadorned, strange for a woman who could only express herself through her art, the uneasy coexistence of piety and radical independence, asymmetry and order.
Look at her work and you saw a creator whose contradictions made her beautiful.
Look at her and you saw a cipher.
Jacob’s friends’ mothers drove carpool to soccer games and whipped up elaborate Friday night dinners with fatty beef, potatoes, and a half stick of margarine. At her best, Bina Lev was scatterbrained, introverted, perfectly capable of sending her son to school wearing mismatched shoes or toting an empty lunchbox.
She was not often at her best.
And he was a logical child, brutally so. He understood cause and effect. He could look at the photo albums and parse the gaps. Her first hospitalization had come when he was a toddler.
Bouts of depression were hard, but at least he could slog along in peace. Mania was the real terrorist, holding all of them hostage. She argued with voices. She broke things. She stayed in the garage for days without eating or sleeping. Eventually she would reemerge, having created dozens and dozens of new pieces; she would drop into bed, never attempting to explain herself, not to Sam and certainly not to Jacob.
In retrospect he understood that she was trying to shield him from the ongoing avalanche of her mind. At the time, however, he’d felt as if he were staring up an insurmountable slope, silence denying him any context for her deterioration.
It was not swift. It was not merciful.
His sole consolation that he hadn’t been around to witness the worst of it.
At the start of his senior year of high school, the head rabbi spoke to Jacob’s class about the value of taking time off before college to study in yeshiva. Some boys were dismissive, others skeptical but open to persuasion, and some, like Jacob, already had their bags packed.
He couldn’t get far away fast enough.
Every six weeks or so, he’d call home from Jerusalem on a scratchy pay phone and hear the desperation mounting in Sam’s voice.
I’m worried about her.
But Jacob was eighteen, high on freedom, and bursting with righteous indignation. He was eight thousand miles away.
What do you want me to do about it?
College provided a whole new set of excuses not to come home. His newly minted girlfriend invited him to have Thanksgiving dinner. Her family had a place on Cape Cod and she wanted him to experience a real Christmas. Then she ditched him for a hockey player and he spent the money meant for his spring break flight to go to Miami with his roommates, also smarting from being dumped.
She’s asking for you.
She had never asked for him before.
Let her ask a little more.
He stayed in Cambridge that summer, working as a research assistant to an English professor whom he hoped to enlist as a thesis adviser down the line. He wangled a stipend and a dorm room that came with a campus extension that never rang until it did.
Officially judaism shunned suicides, condemning the soul to an eternity of wandering and forbidding the survivors to observe the laws of mourning. But there was a workaround, the rabbi explained.
We assume that the deceased was not of sound mind — a prisoner of their illness, if you will — and therefore not responsible for his or her actions.
If anyone fit that description, it was Bina. But the suggestion that they needed a loophole to grieve enraged Jacob, and he would later point to it as the shining example of why he’d had it with religion.
Don’t throw everything away because of one fool Sam said.
It wasn’t one fool, though. All four of Jacob’s grandparents had died before he was born, and his first hands-on experience with the mourning process convinced him that he would never go through it again. The rigidity, legalism, the miming of emotion. Tearing one’s clothes. Sitting on the floor. Not bathing. Not shaving. Praying, and praying, and praying again.
To me it’s a comfort Sam said.
It’s inhuman Jacob said.
For seven days the two of them sat in the dusty living room while strangers paraded through, offering hollow support.
She’s in a better place.
She would want you to be happy.
May the Lord comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Just him and Sam, nodding and smiling and thanking these assholes for their wisdom.
When he got back to school, his voicemail was full up with condolence calls that he deleted mechanically. He didn’t know then that he was establishing a template for years to come: the periodic shedding of attachments, his deciduous heart.
The voicemail said, “Tuesday, July 11.”
The day of: his father, presumably, calling to tell him something he didn’t need to hear again. He started to thumb DELETE but the voice that filled his ear wasn’t Sam’s.
It was Bina’s.
Jacob she said I’m sorry.
He couldn’t say which was worse: that he’d been too busy to answer her call, or that it was the first and only time he could remember her apologizing.
He squeezed down his thumb.
“Sir? We’re closing soon.”
Jacob stood up, brushed the grass from his pants, looked down at the stone one final time.
A large black bug skittered to the center of the granite and stopped.
Jacob frowned, crouched to shoo it away.
The bug dodged, ran a slant, paused at the stone’s upper right corner.
The light was different, and he was viewing the insect’s top side rather than its belly, and he was no entomologist.
But to him it looked like the same one he’d seen at the murder house.
Had it gotten into his car?
Ridden home with him?
You have roaches.
Jacob had known more than a few vermin in his time. This was far bigger than any cockroach he’d seen. A drunk woman might not be in a position to make comparisons, though.
“Sir? Did you hear me?”
Jacob reached slowly for the bug, expecting it to dart off.
It waited.
He laid his hand on the stone and let the insect crawl onto his fingers.
Lifted it up to examine it.