She shut her eyes and gritted her teeth above his head so as not to falter on the trip wire of tears gathering inside her and remembered what Ilan had once explained: he always hugged the boys a little less than he wanted to, because that was always a little more than they needed. Oh well, Ilan and his calculations. She kissed Adam’s forehead again, and he looked up at her with a sweet can-I-have-a-special face, which made her incredibly happy. The “special” was an old childhood tradition between her and the boys. It had been years since either of them had agreed to it, but now Adam puckered his lips, and she laughed with embarrassed delight — after all, he was almost thirteen, with the dark shadow of a moustache. But he seemed to need it so much that nothing embarrassed him, and he kissed her warmly, first on her right cheek, then on her left, and on the tip of her nose, and on her forehead, and Ora rejoiced: she would show him the way home with kisses. He smiled and lowered his gaze, indicated that he wanted another round, and kissed her on her right cheek again, then her left, then the tip of her nose and her forehead. Ora said, “Now my turn,” and Adam grunted, “Just one more time.” He tightened his hands around her face and the back of her neck stiffened. He showered sharp pecks on her right cheek and left cheek, the tip of her nose and her forehead. She struggled to pull her face away and he grasped her with sharp fingers until she shouted: “Stop it, what’s the matter with you?” He grimaced, at first with a lack of comprehension, then with deep insult, and they faced each other for a moment, standing between the kitchen table and the sink, and Adam quickly touched the corners of his mouth and the spot between his eyes, then blew on his hands, first right then left, and his eyes kept filling with murky, thick liquid, and then he walked backward away from her, monitoring her suspiciously, as if fearing she would pounce on him, and she remembered: this was exactly the look Ofer had given her when he found out that she ate meat. That same flash of recognition — the possibility of rapaciousness — which had passed between them then, which had flickered across his cerebral cortex like an ancient drawing. How could she explain this to Avram? This moment between a mother and her child. Yet she does explain it, right down to the last detail, so he’ll know, so he’ll hurt, so he’ll live, so he’ll remember. Adam’s eyes widened and almost filled his entire face, and he kept backing away from her, still watching, and before leaving the kitchen he gave her one last sober, awful look, and she thought he was wordlessly saying, You had the chance to save me, and now I’m leaving.
Finally, after pressure and threats — taking away his computer privileges was the most effective method — they overcame Adam’s resistance and took him to see a psychologist.
After three meetings the man summoned Ora and Ilan. “Adam seems like an intelligent boy with a lot of potential. A boy with strong character. Very strong.” His voice sounded weak. “The truth is, he sat here on this chair for three hours and didn’t say a word.”
Ora was amazed. “He didn’t speak? What about the gestures?”
“No gestures. He just sat here like a statue. He looked at me and barely blinked.”
Ora suddenly remembered that when Ilan was a boy, he had blackballed his whole class.
“Not an easy experience,” the man said. “Three whole sessions. I tried this, I tried that, but there’s some kind of resistance in him.” He tightened his hand into a fist. “A bunker, a sphinx.”
“So what do you suggest?” Ilan asked rancorously.
“Of course we can try another few sessions,” the man replied without looking in their eyes. “I’m certainly willing, but I have to say there’s something in the interaction—”
“Tell us what we should do,” Ilan interrupted. The vein in his temple was turning blue. “I want you tell me in simple words, what — do — we — do — now!”
Ora looked in despair at the iron layer descending over Ilan’s face.
The man blinked as he spoke. “I’m not certain there’s an immediate solution here. I’m just trying to think out loud with you. Perhaps it would be more successful with someone else? Perhaps a woman therapist?”
“Why a woman?” Ora sat back in her chair, feeling accused. “Why does it have to be a woman?”
One evening, Ora sat poring over receipts for her income-tax return — every two months she had to report her income from the physiotherapy clinic (“But patients I see at home, I don’t report on principle,” she tells Avram with a proud sense of conspiracy between two mutineers; he doesn’t even carry an identity card!) — when Adam came up to her and asked her to help him tidy his room. This was an unusual request, especially in those days, and the mess in his room was intolerable, but she had to finish her taxes. “Does it have to be now?” she asked irritably. “Why didn’t you ask me an hour ago, when I wasn’t busy? Why is it that only my time is expendable in this household?”
Adam danced and fidgeted away in his complex of tics. Ora tried to keep sorting through her receipts, but she could not concentrate. More than anything, it depressed her to think that he had walked away without arguing. Without saying a word. As though he knew he could not waste even one drop of energy now.
As she calculated her mileage and per diem expenses, she could sense that Adam was in his room crumbling into shards of despair and loneliness. She knew his disintegration was sucking her in too, and that soon it might dissolve her and Ilan as a couple, and the entire family. We’re so weak, she thought, staring at the neat little piles of paper. How can the two of us be so paralyzed, instead of really fighting for him? It’s like — the thought punctured her — it’s like we can feel that it’s … what? Our punishment? For what?
“For you we fought a lot harder,” she says to Avram.
Avram tightens his hands around the hot cup of coffee. His body is tense, his eyes enthralled by the last glimmers of light on the stream.
Ora got up and almost ran to Adam’s room with a foreboding heart. But he was just standing there in the middle of the room he shared with Ofer, surrounded by incredible heaps of clothes, toy parts, notebooks, towels, and balls, leaning slightly forward, frozen.
“What’s going on, Adam?”
“I don’t know, I’m stuck.”
“Is it your back?”
“Everything.”
In mid-motion, while trying to erect barriers between one fragmentary movement and the next, he must have been trapped into cessation. Ora hurried over and hugged him, and rubbed his neck and back. His body was rigid. For several moments she unfroze him, just as she used to do for Avram in rehab, and miraculously did for her patients, restoring the body’s memory, replaying the music of its movement. Adam finally loosened a little, and she lowered him into a chair and sat on the rug at his feet.
“Does it still hurt?”
“No, it’s okay now.”
“Come on, let’s do it together.”
She picked up objects and clothes off the floor and handed them to him so he could put them away. He obeyed, moving robotically to the closets and shelves, then back to her. She did not say a thing about his movements and gestures. She could not stop looking.
Then Ofer arrived home from a weeklong vacation at his grandparents’ in Haifa and eagerly joined in the operation. It seemed as if a bright light had been turned on in the room, and the bad thoughts retreated. Even Adam’s face lit up. Ora, who knew how much Ofer hated untidiness and dirtiness, was amazed at how he had let Adam turn their room into a dump. He’d never complained even once that whole month. Perhaps it was time to give them separate rooms. They had talked about it a year ago. But she knew what that would mean to Adam, and she had no doubt that Ofer would refuse now, too.