approvingly as Maggie displayed her documentation of the tablet. “We’ll have to celebrate!” she said. “The legal drinking age in Israel is eighteen, isn’t it?”
Maggie smiled broadly. “It is.”
“I have a bottle of champagne back at the hotel,” Claudia said. “Let’s work until dinner and then we’ll have a toast.”
Adam took out his phone; Claudia stepped beside Maggie and put her arm around her shoulder to pose for a picture. The three of them were still grinning when Adam’s phone rang. He jumped at the sound. The phone was only for emergencies; everyone he knew in Israel was at the dig. Adam’s first thought was that it could be his grandfather, but he almost always waited for Adam to call, especially when Adam was away. With a stab of guilt, Adam realized he had let almost two weeks pass since they last spoke.
Adam shielded the screen from the sun’s glare as best he could with his hand. The call was from Danny. Adam had a bad feeling. Almost two decades before, for reasons that had always escaped Adam, Danny had ceased to be just a kid from the neighborhood in his grandfather’s eyes. Adam had never been consulted, but somehow Danny became virtually a part of their household, loud, needy, and omnipresent. “Maybe he just wants something,” Adam thought. But he knew Danny’s call would mean trouble.
“Excuse me,” Adam said to Claudia and Maggie as he tapped the screen, “I should take this.” He spoke into the phone as he climbed out of the trench where they had been working. “Hi Danny,” he said. “What’s going on?” Despite the poor connection, Adam could hear the strain in Danny’s voice. “Hold on a minute, Danny, I’m in a dead zone. I’m going to try for a better spot.”
He walked toward the tent. It was probably the best he could do out here.
“It’s Hank, Adam,” Danny said. “There was a slight pause. “I think you should come home.”
Adam felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders stiffen. He had been holding his breath, he realized, and he let it out. “What happened? Can you put him on?” His grandfather had seemed fine when they last spoke. He hadn’t complained about anything on the phone. Of course, he wouldn’t have, Adam thought.
“No, Adam; he’s in the hospital. He’s not awake. They said to call you. Can you come?”
He had planned on flying back two days later. “Yeah. Yes. Of course I can come. I’ll find a flight and I’ll call you back.” Everything around Adam seemed to be moving in slow motion. At his feet, a tiny beetle was scurrying into a hole, underground, home. Back in the trench, Maggie and Claudia were kneeling beside each other, their heads close together. Inside the tent, Adam could see the afternoon lecturer, gesturing at his presentation screen.
Adam checked the time. It was almost two-thirty. He called El Al to see if he could fly out that evening. It was a Friday night and he wasn’t sure what running up against the Sabbath would do to the schedule of flights out of Israel. He was on hold for a while before he got to an operator, but when he explained his situation, the woman on the line was sympathetic. She put Adam on hold again while she checked the flights.
Adam looked back at the dig site from where he stood, and he remembered standing there a few summers before, watching Claudia’s husband Theodore. That was less than a year before he died. Theodore had been painting a gorgeous landscape of the ancient city of Tel Arad, restored, fully alive, superimposed over the modern, unimpressive skyline of the neighboring Israeli town. Adam had understood without being told that the sky in the painting, a luminous blue, was the exact shade of Claudia’s eyes. Theodore had loved Claudia with a passion and single-mindedness that she reserved for herself, Adam knew. Adam understood that, too
The woman came back on the line. There was nothing leaving that night, she told him. El Al’s flights the next day were booked as well. She said it was possible he might find a flight tonight if he went standby, perhaps on another airline. But the best he could do would be to get to the airport and figure things out from there. Adam walked back to the dig. Maggie and Claudia looked up from the tablet when he approached.
“Sorry I had to take that,” Adam said. “That was . . .” was there even a word for what Danny was? He wondered if there was any language that had a word for someone you grew up with and could never shake loose?
Maggie sounded concerned. “Are you okay, Professor?”
“Just a family thing,” Adam said with a curt wave. He didn’t want to explain. They didn’t need to know. “I have to fly back tonight. I should probably pack up my stuff now; there’s a bus to Tel Aviv at four.” He glanced over at Claudia. “I’m sorry I can’t stick around, but you and Maggie can celebrate without me.” Claudia acknowledged his comment with a nod, but she was still lost in the tablet. Adam wondered what part of it had captured her attention, but there was no time to ask. It would have to wait until they were all back in New York.
Adam retrieved his daypack and handed Maggie the remaining water bottles he had brought. “I’ll see you both in a few days.” He looked over at the tablet. “Send me your pictures when you get a chance, okay, Claudia? Please say goodbye to the others for me.”
Adam rode his rented bike the six miles back to his room in Arad. It would take him only a few minutes to pack; he had been living out of his suitcase since June. He took a quick shower, changed into the only clean clothes he had left, and arrived at the bus stop with a few minutes to spare after checking out of the hotel and returning his bike.
Arad was near the beginning of the line, so the bus was nearly empty when Adam boarded, but the ride would last almost two hours as the bus traveled its route, first due west, then almost due north. It would pick up passengers all along the route: black-hatted haredim rushing to be home before the Sabbath, soldiers on leave, grandmothers.
The more Adam thought about Danny’s phone call the more concerned he felt. The bus seemed so slow that it was all Adam could do not to get out and push. He was in no mood to speak to strangers trying to be sociable or looking to practice their English. He set the music on his phone to shuffle and he stared blindly out the window as he slipped the headphones into his ears.
Adam skipped over several songs that didn’t suit him, until he came to “Meditations for Moses.” It was Charles Mingus solo at the piano, and Adam felt each jab of Mingus’s fingers on the keys as if he had been struck. The next song was Bill Evans’s mournful, disquieting “My Man’s Gone Now,” and it sucked Adam in whole. For the rest of the trip, Adam’s consciousness drifted unfocused and disconnected. He had only the faintest awareness of the bustle all around him as people boarded at each stop.
Adam’s mind drifted back over his last few conversations with his grandfather. There wasn’t much to them, Adam thought. His grandfather was usually reticent on the phone, especially on international calls. Adam wondered if his grandfather knew he was sick. He was in his eighties, but he never talked about his health. “It is what it is,” he would say. “Tell me how you’re doing.”
The final stop was in Tel Aviv. It was only about an hour until sunset, but Adam managed to catch a cab to the airport. By a quarter to seven, he was speaking to a ticket agent, but as he had feared, there were no seats available that night with any airline. It took him until nine to straighten out his itinerary. The best he could get was an outrageously expensive seat to New York via Kiev, leaving at eight-fifteen the next morning. He resolved to hunker down in the airport instead of finding a hotel room.
Adam tried to call Danny several times during the evening to let him know when to expect him, but without success. He tried his grandfather, praying he would be at home, the crisis over, but he only got
