Avram listens and recites: remember, remember it all. Sometimes Ilan and Ora tilt their heads toward each other as they walk. They lean on each other and dare to guess — cautiously, keenly aware of how fragile things are — what the future will bring for the boys and where their lives will lead them. They wonder if Adam and Ofer will continue to sustain their precious enigmatic couplehood.
She sits alone one evening in Ilan’s study, staring at the legal books on the shelves, unable to do a thing. Adam has had two therapy sessions in the past week with a very experienced elderly female therapist who seems pleasant and tranquil. He said nothing to her either, and he hid the “phenomena” from her, too. But she was not worried. She told Ora and Ilan that these sorts of symptoms were not unusual at Adam’s age, just before physical maturation began, and added that something in Adam’s eyes told her he was a fundamentally strong young man. Just in case, and to reassure them, she referred him to a prominent specialist for neurological tests. He cannot see them for another three weeks, and while Ilan has tried to pull strings and get an earlier appointment, Ora feels that she is losing her mind.
Adam and Ofer are in the kitchen, engaged in a deep conversation about rhinos. She sends her usual maternal sonar waves out to them every few seconds and processes the returns almost unconsciously. Only after several minutes does she vaguely realize that she hasn’t heard this sort of talk between them for a long time. Adam’s tone of voice sounds lighter this evening. He is even helping Ofer with a project for his summer “creativity day camp.” He invents a water rhinoceros with two big fins and a curly rhino and then a pearly rhino—“he’s an unendangered animal,” he dictates to Ofer, “who sits looking at himself in the water for hours. And there’s also a girly rhino.” They both roll around laughing. “But the girly one is invisible,” Adam warns. “Then I’ll just draw his footprint!” Ofer says. He cheers. “Give it to me, I’ll draw it for you.” Their chatter flows on, and Adam heartily goes through all his rituals. Ora can hear the rhythmic breaths, the lip-sucking, the faucet turned on for quick rinses. She sinks back into herself, but perks up when she hears Ofer’s thin voice asking very calmly, “Why do you do that?”
She doesn’t know what Ofer is referring to, but a subterranean wave rolls through the kitchen and all the way to her chair, wraps itself around her, and squeezes.
“What?” Adam asks suspiciously.
“Wash your hands and all that.”
“No reason. I just feel like it.”
“Are you dirty?”
“Yes. No. Stop it, you’re bugging me.”
“But what from?” Ofer asks in that same calm, lucid voice, the balanced and matter-of-fact tone she wishes she could have, especially in these moments.
“What from what?”
“What d’you get dirty from?”
“I don’t know, okay?”
“Just tell me one more thing.”
“What now?”
“When you … when you wash like that, then do you get clean?”
“Kind of. I don’t know. Now shut up!”
Silence. Ora does not dare move. She thinks of how Ofer has held it in all these weeks and not asked Adam anything. Something in his voice, in his persistence, hints that he has planned in advance what to ask, chosen the circumstances well, and perhaps carefully primed Adam’s mood for this moment.
“Adam—”
“What now?”
“Will you let me, too?”
“Let you what?”
“Do one instead.”
“One what?”
Ora can feel Ofer’s arc of boldness and audacity grating on her nerves. She does not twitch an eyelid. She wonders what risky, daring game he is playing.
“One of these.”
“Hey!” Adam makes an effort to laugh, but Ora can hear his embarrassment. “Are you crazy?”
“Just one, what do you care?”
“But why?”
“So you’ll have to do one less.”
“What?”
“Stop it, you’re getting water on my drawing!”
“What did you say?”
“That if I do one, then you’ll have one less to do.”
“You’re crazy, you know that? Totally nuts. Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Whaddayacare? Just one. A loaner.”
“Which one?”
“Whatever you say. This one, or like that, or—”
She hears a chair flung aside and quick steps. She guesses Adam’s little steps around himself on his way to the faucet, his eyes now scurrying in panic.
“Adam—”
“I’m gonna beat the crap out of you. Shut up!”
A long silence.
“Come on, Adam, just one.”
She hears steps and a thud. Panting and bodies falling to the floor. A chair turned over. Stifled grunts. She realizes that Ofer is holding back his shouts so she won’t come in to separate them and ruin his plan. She stands up.
“Give in?”
“Just let me do it once.”
“You’re such an annoying kid!” Adam screeches. “Don’t you have any friends, you midget? Pest!”
“Just once and that’s it, I swear.”
She hears the slaps, one and two, and Ofer’s deep, stifled yelp. Without realizing it, she is biting her fists.
“Now d’you understand?”
“Whaddayacare, just once each time.”
Adam lets out a high-pitched giggle of amazement.
“I’ll do it so you won’t even know,” Ofer groans.
Adam sucks his lips, blows on the backs of his hands, and spins around. Finally, he says quietly, “No. I think I have to do them all. The whole thing.”
“Then I’ll just do them next to you.”
The faucet is turned on. A quick rinse. Blows. Silence. Then the faucet again, a little longer this time, and different blowing, stronger and slower.
“Did you do it? Okay, now get lost.”
“Let me do one every time,” Ofer says with an assertiveness that amazes Ora. Then she sees him run out of the kitchen with a serious, focused look on his face.
Over the next few days, Ofer and Adam spend all their free time together. They seldom leave their room, and it’s hard to know what’s going on. When she listens behind the door, she hears them playing and blathering the way they used to when they were seven and four. They seem to be returning, together, to an earlier era, as if drawn instinctively to some moment in time when they were both little children.
One morning, after she wakes them up and lets them lie chattering in bed for a while, she walks by and hears Adam ask: “How many today?”
“Three for me, three for you.”
“But which three?” Adam’s voice sounds so submissive and soft that she hardly recognizes him.
“You do the water and the feet and the turning, and I’ll do all the rest.”
“Can I do the mouth, too?” Adam whispers.
“No, I’m doing the mouth.”
“But I have to …”
“I already have dibs on the mouth. That’s it.”
She places both hands on her temples. Ofer must have dropped an anchor inside Adam. She has no other words to describe it. He’s already there, working in the depths of Adam with that same calm determination with which he builds giant LEGO castles or dismantles old televisions.
“Aren’t I allowed any today?” Adam asks at the breakfast table, out in the open, in her presence.
Ofer thinks about it and decrees, “None. Today I’m doing them all.” Then he comes around: “You know what? You can do the one with the lip. When you fold it.”
“And everything else is you?” Adam asks. His voice is childish and obedient, and it horrifies her.
“Yes.”
“But d’you remember to do it?”