Sacred (20 page)

“That was the day I bar mitzvahed,” Will said. “It was a good day.”

“How old were you?”

“Almost thirteen,” he said.

“You look older.” I peered more carefully at the picture.

“People have always thought Will was older than he is,” came a man’s voice.

Startled, I jumped back from the mantel and turned.

There he was—the man from the picture, only with a gray streak in his beard and slightly heavier.

“You must be Scarlett.” He greeted me warmly, walking
into the room and extending his hand to shake mine. “Will has told me so much about you.”

“Rabbi Cohen,” I said, wondering what Will might have told him. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

“The pleasure is all on this end, my dear,” he said.

His grasp was firm and friendly. “Well, son, she is at least as pretty as you said.” He smiled. “And yes, her hair is indeed exactly the color of freshly harvested wheat.”

“Yeah, Dad, thanks for that,” Will said, blushing.

Rabbi Cohen chuckled. “What are fathers for?” he asked rhetorically. “Scarlett, please call me Martin.”

I nodded, trying to contain my pleasure at hearing Will’s comments about me through his father’s words. Freshly harvested wheat?

Martin was looking at the picture on the mantel. “Meryl was a beautiful woman too,” he mused. “This was our last picture together.”

We stood quietly looking at the picture, each with our own thoughts. Finally, Martin shook his head, as if to clear a memory. Then, “You kids have fun,” he said. “I’ll be in the study doing a little light reading if you need me.”

It seemed apparent to me, as he made his way to an adjacent room dominated by a large desk, also overflowing with books, that Will’s father meant us to know that he would be nearby.

Will seemed to read my thoughts as he led me to the kitchen. “Dad likes to say that it’s not that he doesn’t trust me, it’s just that he remembers being a teenager very, very clearly.”

I laughed a little, wondering if Rabbi Cohen would be a little more trusting if he knew what a perfect gentleman Will had been so far—
too
perfect, as far as I was concerned.

The kitchen was painted a warm butterscotch. The shelves were pine, unpainted, and all the cabinet doors had been removed. Books dominated this room too, but they were largely cookbooks, everything from
Eat Right 4 Your Type
to
The Chocolate Lovers’ Almanac
.

“Who’s the cook?” I asked, amazed by the sheer number of cookbooks.

“We both are. Every other night, we take turns, and I have to admit, we’ve gotten pretty competitive. You’ve come on a good night. Dad’s trying a new recipe, something Italian.” He gestured to the stove top, where a large red enamel pot bubbled over a low flame. “He’s baking fresh bread too,” Will said. “You’re staying for dinner, right?”

“As long as it’s before eight,” I answered. “That’s when my ride gets here.”

“Dinner will be served at six-thirty,” called Martin from the other room. The man had ears like a bat.

“Come on,” Will said, taking my hand. “I’ll show you my room.”

Back through the front room and down the hall were a series of doors, all open: a bathroom, what must have been Martin’s room, and, at the end, Will’s room.

It was neater here than in the front of the house. Will had a ton of books too, but all except two were shelved in the heavy mahogany bookshelf that lined the far wall. He had a double bed covered neatly with a gray flannel blanket. The
lamp next to his bed was made of green glass that reminded me of the glass fragments I sometimes found washed up on the beach from old bottles. On the nightstand was a slim MacBook and Will’s copy of
The Importance of Being Earnest
, dog-eared already, along with another volume entitled
The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism
.

A large wood-framed window looked out on an untamed square of yard behind the house. Near the window was an upholstered armchair, brown-and-green plaid, with a tall floor lamp beside it. I imagined Will sitting here in the evenings, the lamp glowing softly above him as he turned the pages of a book.

There were no posters anywhere, though three oil paintings hung on the wall near the closet. I stepped closer and examined them, more out of nervousness than anything else.

All three were simple and beautiful, and though I didn’t know much about art, it seemed to me that all had been painted by the same hand. The first featured a fish, drawn from above, swimming in a stream or a river. It was very close up, and each scale was clearly articulated. The next was a landscape, a field of grass at sunrise or sunset, the sky painted in hues of purple and pink, the field awash in yellow. I remembered Martin’s comment about my hair and smiled.

The third picture was the loveliest, to me. It was of a tree, though it felt somehow like a portrait, as if the tree were more than a tree. A person, perhaps, or maybe even something more.

“Did you paint these?” I asked.

Will cleared his throat. “My mother,” he said.

I turned to see him. He was gazing at the pictures too, with a faraway look in his eyes. “They were birthday presents,” he offered. “The tree was for my bar mitzvah. She died just a few days later.”

I stepped closer to him. “How did she die?” My voice was a whisper.

He blinked twice, as if bringing himself back to the present. “There was an accident,” he said simply. “In the car. We were together—the three of us. Mom was driving. I was in the backseat. For some reason Mom stepped hard on the gas and pulled into an intersection. The guy in the other car must have been going over sixty when he hit us. We were all hurt, of course, but Mom didn’t make it. Massive internal hemorrhaging, the doctors said.”

I shuddered. It seemed as if I could almost see them—his mother, knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel; his father next to her, yelling for her to stop, too late; a younger Will in the backseat, behind his father, his head buried in a book, unaware of what was even happening until it was all over.

“It’s a good thing you were sitting behind your dad instead of behind your mom,” I murmured.

Will grew stiff next to me. “How could you know that?” he asked.

Confused, I looked up at him. His eyes were intense, his jaw tight. “Didn’t you say you were?”

Will shook his head.

“Oh. I don’t know, I guess I just figured you’d have to have been—you know, since you were okay.”

Slowly, the intensity of Will’s gaze faded, and his face
seemed to relax by degrees. “That makes sense,” he said at last. “Yeah, it was lucky I was behind my dad.”

I wanted to offer him something then, a slice of my pain, so that we would be even. “Ronny went really fast,” I said. “The doctors said he never felt a thing.”

Will’s hands came up to my shoulders and he pulled me against his chest. The rough wool of his green sweater rubbed against my cheek. He rested his chin atop my head, and we stood like that for a long time.

Finally, with a sigh, Will pressed his lips into my hair. Then he stepped back a little, and I unwound my arms from his waist. We looked into each other’s eyes, and we might have kissed then, but I think neither of us wanted our first kiss to be colored by our grief. So we parted.

This time, the whole front of my body felt that desperate yearning for the press of Will against me—my breasts tingled, and some place deep in my belly turned with a sensation I hadn’t felt before, a kind of urgent desire I’d never experienced firsthand. I tucked my loose hair behind my ears to have something to do with my hands, then turned to my backpack to search for my script.

“I like it when you wear your hair like that,” Will said. “Loose and untamed.”

“Thanks,” I managed to say, though I wanted to say much more. I found the book and turned back to Will. “Do you want to run some lines?”

He hesitated, as if he also wanted to say something else, but instead he nodded.

I curled up in the plaid armchair and Will sat across from
me on his bed. He switched on the bedside lamp and retrieved his script, flipping it open. “Let’s start at the first meeting,” he suggested, and I was happy to escape into character—flirtatious, bubbly Cecily Cardew, who had never known real grief and never would, who would simply fall in love, over and over again, remaining eternally young, forever innocent, blissfully pure.

By five-thirty, sounds of clanging pots began emanating from the kitchen. By six, the mouthwatering smell of baking bread wafted down the hallway. And even though I had thought nothing could make me ever want to leave Will’s small room, by six-thirty, I couldn’t wait to dig into whatever Martin had prepared.

He’d set the table with a faded but clean red tablecloth, white china dishes, and silver shined to a beautiful luster. The red pot from the stove sat in the middle of the table on top of a potholder. Steam rose from it in tempting waves. Martin stood at the counter, slicing his fresh bread.

Next to each plate was a crystal goblet; on the sideboard was an uncorked bottle of red wine.

“Ah, the actors arrive,” said Martin, cheery and red-cheeked from the kitchen’s heat. “Son, you’re going to be hard-pressed to beat this one, I’m warning you now.”

He came around the counter, the basket of steaming bread in his hands.

“Will,” he said, “pour the wine, will you?”

I tried to keep my mouth from falling open. The rabbi was serving me wine?

Will chuckled quietly as he poured the red wine into the goblet in front of me, stopping when the cup was just a third full.

“Everything in moderation,” he and his father chimed, almost in unison.

“More moderation for some than for others,” chortled Martin, tipping up the bottom of the wine bottle as Will filled the cup at the head of the table.

I noticed that Will’s cup was also less than half full; he sat to my left, between me and his father.

His father said something in Hebrew, before nodding to Will to serve the food.

And then we ate. The pot was full of vegetables and a heady tomato sauce, fragrant and delicious. We filled our plates with the mixture, shaved fresh Parmesan over the top, and then spooned mouthfuls onto bites of the fresh, hot bread.

After every few bites, I raised my glass to my lips for just the smallest sip of wine. An entirely different drinking experience than the night of Andy’s party, tonight was about appreciating flavors, not getting drunk. The wine wasn’t my favorite taste of the night—the fresh bread was—but as I listened to Martin talk about the art of viticulture, I started tasting the elements he was mentioning—something woody, a touch of blueberry.

The kitchen was warm and cozy. The food was nourishing and delicious. I listened as Will and his father bantered back and forth about the fate of some college football game they’d watched together earlier that day, but rather than listening
to the words, I just heard their tones and inflections—they laughed often, sometimes raised their voices almost to a shout when making a point, they waved their hands around wildly, wine sloshing and threatening to splash on the tablecloth.

The room—the whole house—felt beautifully alive.

I imagined how my kitchen at home must look at that same moment. Meticulously clean, without the papers and books and clutter that dominated every surface of the Cohens’ kitchen, but also cold … abandoned. If the kitchen was the heart of the family, ours had ceased beating along with Ronny’s. I wished that I could bottle some of the joy I felt all around me and take it home with me, where I’d fling it around our house like pixie dust.

The table had grown quiet. I’d been too still, I realized. Now both Will and Martin were looking at me with concern, leaning forward a little across the table.

Then Martin asked, “Are you all done with that, Scarlett?”

I nodded, and he took my plate. “Thank you so much, Martin. It was wonderful.”

“You have to come back on one of my nights,” Will insisted. “Then you’ll see and taste something wonderful.”

“Did I raise you to be a braggart?” Martin asked.

“Absolutely,” Will answered. “Like father, like son.”

Before he cleared the rest of the plates, Martin returned to his seat. He closed his eyes briefly, and half spoke, half sang in Hebrew, “
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Haolam, Hazan et haolam kulo, b’tuvo, b’chein b’chesed uvrachamim.
”

“What does that mean?” I asked, after he’d opened his eyes.

“It’s called the
Birkat Hamazon
. It’s a giving of thanks—for the food, the land, Jerusalem, and the goodness of God. We’re not Orthodox, so around here we do the abbreviated version. Roughly translated, I said, ‘Blessed is the Lord our God, King of the universe, who sustains the entire world with goodness, kindness, and mercy.’ ”

I’d been on this planet for over sixteen years. The only blessing I’d ever heard at my house was “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.” But I didn’t want Martin to know how godless we were; he might not like me anymore.

Instead I said, “Well, thanks for everything, Martin. It was really, really good.”

“As was the company, my dear.” Martin bowed to me, then headed back toward his office. “I’ve got a date with a radio show,” he called to us over his shoulder. “And you two have a date with the dishes.”

TWELVE