not-so-proud resident of Lodmoor Rehab.”
She made no response, only pulled her crossed arms into her chest, and Adam let it go.
They passed another one of those strange doors, which he now saw had a slope of concrete behind it, and made a turn before the jasmine bushes. He trailed Claudette down the steppingstones, which she took like a bride going down the aisle, bringing her feet together on each stone. When they reached the bottom, a sandy-haired chihuahua rose from the grass around the flowering tree and trotted alongside them, surprising Adam. He associated chihuahuas with uptown wives who lunched after Bergdorf’s, not the Middle East. As they neared the room where Adam had seen the naked girl, Claudette pulled a key out of her pocket.
He said, “I thought nobody used keys around here.”
“My roommate wants the door locked at all times. Every night she goes out and locks me in the room.”
The partying roommate, putting on all that eyeliner. Where could she be going on a kibbutz? What nightlife could they possibly have? Did kibbutzim have bars? Forget it. He shouldn’t even wonder. He took a gander at the picnic table: the bottle was gone.
To ask anything other than whether the kibbutz had a bar, he pointed to Claudette’s pendant. “So who is that anyway? Guessing it’s a saint.”
She pressed the medallion against her chest, seeming at once proud and shy to talk about it. “Yes, it’s Sainte Christine de Liège. In English, she is called Christina the Astonishing.”
The chihuahua reared onto its hind legs and pawed at Adam’s calf, forcing him to scratch its tiny head. The dog closed its eyes to bask in the affection.
“Yeah? What was so astonishing about her?”
“So much.”
“Such as?”
“At Christine’s funeral—she was only twenty-two when she died—she floated out of her coffin, and God spoke to her. He gave her a choice: she could either go to Heaven or she could come back to life and save people in Purgatory by suffering on their behalf. Every time she suffered, a soul would be released. She chose to come back, and for the next fifty years, she tortured herself. Jumped into fires. Swam in frozen rivers. She starved herself, never ate any food, except the milk from her breasts. She had milk even though she was a virgin.”
Adam struggled not to smile. “That is pretty astonishing.” After a second’s thought, he added, “I guess it would be nice to believe someone was out there, atoning on my behalf. Poof! I’m sin free.”
Claudette wrapped her hand around the saint. “All you have to do to believe is believe.”
“Right.”
Adam continued to his room. He didn’t want to lie down, but he had no choice. His eyes were closing against his will. And he needed to keep close to the toilet. The cramps were only warming up, and he didn’t want to risk a repeat of what happened last time he was detoxing: while standing on line at Duane Reade, trying to ignore the cramps, before he understood what was happening, he felt a warm liquid flowing down his leg. He lowered his eyes, thinking, God no, but there it was, diarrhea oozing out of his jean leg and pooling around his Converse.
“Hey, buddy,” he said to the chihuahua trotting next to his ankles. “Where do you think you’re going?”
The chihuahua whipped its tail. Adam stopped, looked around for its owner. Claudette still stood at her door, wiping its knob with her shirttail.
“Yo, Claudette. Do you know who this little guy belongs to?”
Claudette clutched the shirttail in front of her. “It lives in the volunteers’ section. People leave food and water for it by the tree.”
“It got a name?”
“Golda, I think.”
The tiny dog gaped up at him, its big black eyes wide, giant ears on end. A dog had always been something other people had, normal people.
When he started walking and the dog followed again, he asked, “Are you going to insist on coming with me?”
The chihuahua’s tail wagged faster, and Adam felt his eyes closing on him again.
“All right. Let’s nap.”
Adam sat cross-legged on the grass, wearing the kibbutz work clothes, scanning their phone directory for a Dagmar, while Golda slept in a warm coil beside him. He’d just returned from his first shift in the dishroom and felt better, at least physically. Yesterday, after saying goodbye to Claudette, he had spent the rest of the day running between the bed and the toilet, only leaving his room to pick up toiletries around dinnertime. After managing to swallow a couple of boiled potatoes in the dining hall, he returned to his room and lay facedown on the bed, intending to rise in a few minutes to shower, but it was four o’clock in the morning when he awoke, having no idea where he was or what he’d done, and then it all came back. With the windows full of darkness, he showered, shaved, and showed up for his shift an hour early. When eight hours of wiping ketchup and hummus off plates were over, his boss, Yossi, a stubby guy with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, thanked him for doing a great job. He also informed him that he’d never met anyone named Dagmar, but that he should check the archives when its manager, Barry, got back from reserve duty next week. After circling Barry’s name, he handed him the kibbutz directory.
A stapled packet no thicker than a term paper, the kibbutz directory couldn’t have been more different from the five-inch-thick Manhattan phone book, but Adam was still brought back to those afternoons he spent in a phone booth on the corner of Essex and Delancey, scanning the names for his father. When he was twelve years old, his grandfather finally told him that, honestly, he couldn’t be sure who his dad was, that his mom had named him Soccorso because her boyfriend at the time was Tony Soccorso, and she had hoped that using his name would keep him in the picture; but Tony insisted the dad was Jerry Cohen, a boy who did come around a lot. Adam didn’t want to hurt Zayde, didn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t enough, so he used the pay phone to call the eight Tony and Anthony Soccorsos in the white pages and the ninety-four Gerry, Jerry, Gerald, and Jerald Cohens. Four separate afternoons he spent in that glass booth scratched with slurs and sprayed with tags, his pockets bulging with quarters. Had one of those voices he’d heard been his dad’s? None of them even admitted to knowing a Sharon Rosenberg.
“Pervert.”
Adam raised his head. The girl towered over him, wearing the same navy work shirt and beige work pants as him, and plenty of eyeliner, though not as much as that night. The late afternoon sunlight inflamed her absurdly red hair.
He brought his hands together. “I’m so so so sorry about that. I swear it wasn’t what it looked like. You know, you really should shut your blinds when you’re getting dressed.”
“And you really should not be having your eyes in people’s windows.” Her flinty Russian accent made it hard to tell if she was angry or simply giving an idiot some advice.
“Listen, I was walking around the back of the building for totally other reasons and . . . well, there you were. But I swear on my life I wasn’t getting my rocks off. Honest to God. Did you report me?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
