it’s me,” Adam said. “I hope you get this in the next few hours. Danny said you weren’t feeling well, but I’m on my way home. I’ll see you soon.” Adam bought a sandwich in the food court and then slumped into a chair for the night, his legs resting on his suitcase and his daypack on his lap, a prop for his elbow so he could rest his head on one of his hands. He dozed fitfully, starting at every sound out of fear that he would sleep through his departure time. He needn’t have worried. He was fully awake by five the next morning, and when the gate opened, Adam was first in line to check in.
When he landed in Kiev, Adam had to wait nearly two hours for his connecting flight to JFK. It was four-thirty a.m. in New York. Adam checked his messages. Nothing. After an internal struggle, he decided couldn’t call for at least another hour and a half. The wait was excruciating. He drank a decaf coffee as slowly as he could and then decided to try killing time in a bookstore. Most of the titles on the shelves were written in Cyrillic and were useless even as a distraction, but he did see a guidebook written in English. As far as Adam could make out from the maps he found in the book, the places his family had lived for centuries—almost all within a hundred miles of Kiev—didn’t even exist anymore. Whole villages had succumbed to butchery, had been erased.
He paced as he watched planes take off, feeling more and more on edge. “There was no way that coffee was decaf,” he thought. The frequent announcements in Ukrainian or Russian, he wasn’t sure which, weren’t helping his nerves, either. The music of the language was close enough to Yiddish to call out for his attention, but the words meant nothing he could understand. He tried to read his biography of Duke Ellington, but he couldn’t focus. He wondered if the Ukrainians around him would recognize the Hebrew lettering on the bookmark he had picked up at his hotel; he put the book back in his bag. He checked his watch and decided it was late enough to call Danny, at least. If his grandfather had gotten home from the hospital already, Adam didn’t want to wake him this early.
The phone rang only twice before Danny picked up. “Adam, where are you?”
“I’m in Kiev. I’ll be boarding for New York in a few minutes. How is he?”
Danny didn’t answer.
“He’s steeling himself,” Adam thought. But he still couldn’t bring himself to articulate what that meant.
“He’s gone, Adam.” Danny said then. “Hank died last night. I’m sorry. I tried calling but you must have been out of range or in the air. I didn’t want to leave a message.”
“He died?” It didn’t feel possible.
“It was peaceful.” For a second, Adam thought Danny might sob, but he pulled himself together. “He was peaceful at the end. The room was all full of lights and beeping machines. That was horrible. I was with him, though.” Now Adam did hear a sob. “I was with him until the very end. It was a heart attack. They couldn’t get him stable.” Danny paused. “I’m so sorry, Adam. I can’t believe Hank’s gone.”
Dead. Gone. Adam couldn’t even process what that meant. His grandfather had been his one enduring constant. Everything else could collapse; everything else did collapse, but not him. He was like the Western Wall. “I should have been there,” he said.
There was a long pause before Danny answered. “What do you want to do about the funeral, Adam? I could start calling people. We could do it on Monday. I’ll handle everything.”
“No. No. Don’t call anyone.” Adam was surprised by the vehemence of his tone, and he lowered his voice. “We should do it ourselves, okay, Danny? He wasn’t close to anyone else the way he was with us. We don’t need to get other people involved. It will be more meaningful this way.”
“What?” For a second, Adam thought he had lost the connection, but finally, Danny said, “Look, we’re both in shock. We can talk after you land. Just call me from New York and we can work out all the details then, okay?”
“OK.” Adam said. “They’ve already started boarding my flight. I’ll call you from my apartment.” He hung up the phone, felt in his pocket for his boarding pass, and walked over to the gate.
Chapter 2
Adam didn’t sleep from Kiev to Queens, though he did his best to ignore the passengers’ chatter and the constant rattling of the flight attendants’ carts. He folded himself into his middle seat and did his best to disappear, emerging from his mental cocoon only to accept some pretzels or some water when they were offered. He wondered if his grandfather had been aware of his absence and if he died angry, or afraid, or disappointed. Or maybe Danny’s presence had been enough, Adam thought. But he took no comfort from that possibility. Picturing Danny in the cardiac unit, sitting by the bedside, holding Adam’s grandfather’s hand and leaning in to listen to his last words only left Adam feeling more bereft.
When they landed, Adam moved through the airport automatically. He must have waited to retrieve his suitcase and then to catch a cab back to Larchmont, but he had no memory of that. He got out at a restaurant a few blocks from his apartment to order a burrito and he finished it on the walk home, dragging his suitcase with one hand and eating with the other. It was just after seven in the evening when he opened his apartment door and dumped his bags on the floor. He showered, pulled on some boxers, took a deep breath, and called Danny.
“Adam, are you back?” Danny asked.
“Yeah. I’m back.” Adam closed his eyes. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve been better. I made some arrangements, but I needed to talk to you before I could schedule the service and burial.
Adam shook his head. It was all going to spiral out of control if he didn’t stop it. It would be just like when his grandmother died, just like what had happened when his parents died, probably, though Adam had been too young to remember much about that. He had just a hazy picture in his mind of an apartment full of strangers looking sad and standing in a herd around his grandparents, a collection of legs in suit pants and stockings packed so close together that he couldn’t break through.
“Tomorrow?” Adam asked. His throat was tight, so his voice was inaudible at first and he had to repeat the question. “Can we do it tomorrow, Danny? First thing? Just us?”
“You weren’t serious about that, Adam? There’s no way. It’s a huge job. There’s no way we could do it ourselves.” Danny was part owner of the cemetery and his family had worked in the funeral business for generations. “We should take a day and let people know and arrange a service.” He paused for a second; before Adam could reply, Danny added, his voice gentle, “You sound awful, Adam. You must be exhausted. Just leave it to me. I’ll take care of it.”
Adam shook his head. “No. Please, Danny. No strangers. I’m so beat, I can’t argue with you now.”
Silence. An aleph. A glottal stop. Then, “It’s not respectful . . . Adam, come on . . . no rabbi, no people . . . What kind of a ceremony could we have? There are people who’d want to come.”
“We don’t need any of that, Danny. It’s better with just us, okay? You loved him. I loved him. This is the last thing we can do for him, this private thing, this most personal, private thing.” Adam caught himself biting the knuckle where his index finger met the back of his palm. He hadn’t done that in years. He hated begging. “Don’t take this from me, Danny, please . . .”
“I don’t feel good about this, Adam.”
Adam
