The Best Place on Earth (23 page)

A young soldier walks by us without checking the mail. He’s wearing a khaki uniform and his gun dangles behind him. There are two lines sewn on his sleeves. Orli follows him with her gaze, and once he’s gone she says, “Corporal, engineering corps.”

Orli knows all the different ranks and units in the army. She says the air force is the best, then the navy and the ones with coloured caps, like paratroopers, who also have red boots to match their caps, and then the artillery corps and armoured corps. Orli’s entire family is in the air force, even her mother was a secretary in the
air force during her army service, which is where her parents met. Orli’s father is a major and has a profile of ninety-seven, which is the highest medical rating and determines your suitability for fighting. My dad only scored sixty-four. He had a weak heart and thick eyeglasses. He served in the signal corps.

My dad once took Orli and me to the movies at Shalom Cinema and later to a café on Hertzel Street, where we sat at a table on the sidewalk and shared hummus and fries and falafel. When he ordered for us he said, “The lovely young ladies would like some Coke, please.” He asked our opinions of the movie and talked to us like we were grown-ups, and he was really interested in what we had to say. Afterwards Orli said I was lucky that my dad was around. I only met Orli’s dad once. He was wearing a grey uniform, all decorated with glinting pins on his chest and some round buttons on his shoulders. He picked Orli up and spun her around and didn’t even say hello to me.

Orli is braiding her hair in neat little braids. I find a pen in my pocket and start drawing hearts on my jeans. The marble starts to feel cold on my bum.

“Aren’t you cold?” I ask.

“No.”

“How come you didn’t bring a hoodie?”

“I’m not cold.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say.

“You think I want to suffer?”

“I think you like to show off, like you’re tough or something.”

Orli rolls her eyes at me but says nothing, just keeps braiding her hair.

A teenage boy with acne on his forehead and a skateboard walks by and looks at us. He lingers by the mailboxes and keeps glancing
at us. Orli and I smile at each other. I think he’s going to talk to us, but then he just skips up the stairs to his apartment.

“You want to know a secret?” Orli says.

I nod.

“Amir asked Dalit to be his girlfriend.”

I press the pen into my jeans until the tip pokes through the fabric. “When?”

“Friday at the party.”

I press harder. I can feel the pen jabbing my skin.

“When are you going to come to parties again?” Orli says.

I shrug.

“You should come next week. Danny is having one at his house. There’s going to be a DJ.”

“I’m not allowed to go to parties,” I say. “You’re supposed to wait a year according to the Torah.”

“A whole year?”

I shrug.

“We miss you,” Orli says. “I miss you.”

I stare at the floor between my legs. Suddenly I have tears in my eyes. They burst out all at once. I pull the hood over my head so Orli won’t see them.

“Are you upset?” she says.

“No.”

“You can tell me if you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset!” I yell.

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“Why don’t you just shut up and leave me alone?”

Orli stands up. “Fine. I’m tired of defending you anyway.”

“Defending me?” I snort.

“Yeah, everyone says you’ve been weird since your father died. Even Meirav is not acting like this and her father was a hero.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” I stand up and push Orli out of the way and run outside. By the time I get to the pay phone I am soaked again, my face wet. I take the token off my shoelace and call my mother to ask her to come get me, but the phone rings and rings. I sit on the dirty floor of the phone booth. I can’t see through the condensation on the glass or hear anything through the rain pounding on the booth. I feel like I’m in an aquarium. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be dead. Shut in and all alone. At first my heart beats fast, but then I lean my head against the cool wall and watch the glare of the traffic lights through the steamed-up glass; it’s beautiful, how it paints everything green, then orange, then red, then green again. I start to feel quiet and a little sleepy. I almost don’t want the rain to end. I stay in the booth even after the rain slows down to a drizzle and finally stops. I wipe a window with my sleeve and look out. The street looks different now—new, as if the rain injected fluid into its veins. The sky is the colour of peaches and blood oranges.

Up high, two warplanes fly north and disappear behind trees.

The plane started its descent,
and Naomi looked out the window at the dramatic patchwork of land and water. Vancouver was as blue as Jerusalem was golden. The only other time she’d visited her younger sister, ten years ago with Ami, she had been stunned by that view. They had been happy then, married for five years, their first time away from three-year-old Ben, whom they had left with Ami’s brother and family. Ami had given her the window seat, and as he had leaned over her to look out, Naomi had squeezed his hand on her thigh. Now, as she watched the neat rows of boxes on the ground, the toy cars zipping on the highways, the buildings like Monopoly pieces she could crush with gigantic feet, the beauty of the city—like a mass-produced postcard—was lost on her. She pressed her forehead against the cool window, feeling alone, missing him.

Only four weeks ago, they had been sitting in their living room, as they did every evening, watching a romantic comedy she had picked up on the way home from work. Street lights filtered through the arched living room windows, and the evening fell over Jerusalem like warm syrup drizzled over baklava. Naomi had made tea, brought out a plate of cookies. She lay across the couch, rubbing her feet together while Ami sat in the reclining chair, his legs in a diamond shape.

Not long into the movie, the character of the husband came back from a business trip and said to his wife, “I’m afraid you’re going to leave me. I slept with someone else.” Naomi peeked over at Ami like she did sometimes when they watched movies together, searching for the comfort in his shared reaction, and saw that her husband was wearing the wrong expression, one suitable for a horror film, perhaps. Her heart plunged into her stomach like a dead bird.

“Babe?” Her voice gave, got tangled with her breath.

When he finally turned to look at her, his eyes gleamed like two murky puddles.

“Oh dear,” he said, and started crying.

Her sister sounded surprised
when Naomi called to say she was thinking of visiting her on Hornby Island. Without Ami. Without the kids. “Is everything okay?” Tamar said.

“Yes,” Naomi said, putting on a cheerful voice. “I just need a vacation. I miss you.”

She didn’t want to tell Tamar over the phone. She could hardly bring herself to tell her friends. She had lied to the kids too, telling them their father was on a business trip, when in fact he was
sleeping on the rickety futon in his brother’s living room, a few blocks away.

They hadn’t spoken since she kicked him out; Naomi refused his calls, ignored his emails. Every day, as she drove by his brother’s house on her way to work, she found herself—against her better judgment—searching for his lean frame, his confident stride, his short curls. At the same time she dreaded seeing him, afraid to awaken the part of her that wanted to stop the car and run to him sobbing, seeking comfort from her best friend.

In the evenings, as she came home from work—the jiggle of her keys in the lock echoing in the empty house—she was greeted by musty, stagnant air. The boys were out for hours at a time, busy with their soccer games, boy scouts, summer camp. She found herself saving her daily anecdotes and observations for Ami, and then watching them go stale like leftover food in the fridge.

One evening the toilet wouldn’t stop flushing, and Naomi stood over it, staring at the innards of the tank, perplexed. She grabbed the phone and held it for a while before putting it down. In the car, she didn’t know how to check the oil or water. She had always thought of herself as a modern woman. She worked
and
kept house; she was the one in charge of the finances. Her mother hadn’t even had her own bank account.

As a teenager, Naomi had been angry at her mother for turning a blind eye to her father’s affairs. But perhaps her mother’s quiet resignation was better than the fights Naomi and Tamar had witnessed as children. Back then, there had been tears and yelling, slammed doors, and once a cloud of smoke Naomi had seen from afar, as she walked home from school. “Someone’s house is on fire,” her friends had yelled, and they all ran, until they were close enough and Naomi realized it was coming from her own house.
Her friends stood in a row, giggling and shoving each other as they watched her mother throwing her dad’s clothes into the firepit in their front yard.

Some days, burning Ami’s clothes didn’t seem like such a bad idea. She was a nobody, Ami had sworn over and over again. It was so long ago. He hardly remembered her face. “What, you want a name?” He flapped his arms. “Rona, I think.”

“You think?” she screamed. “
You think?
”

Naomi pushed her cart
out through the automatic glass doors to the pristine arrivals area, searching for her sister’s full head of blonde curls. It had been a while since she last saw Tamar. Her sister didn’t visit often. “This country drives me nuts,” she had said the last time she came to Jerusalem, over three years ago. “No, let me rephrase.” Tamar had cleared her throat. “I love the country, I hate the people.” Naomi wanted to tell Tamar that she was, and always would be, an Israeli. They had grown up running in the narrow streets of Sha’arei Tsedek, spent afternoons riding their bikes in the Mahane Yehuda Market, pinching cashews and peanuts from the Armenian vendor on the corner of Yafo Street.

Tamar waited at the end of the corridor, her long arm waving like a flag. Naomi quickened her pace when she noticed a slender, bearded man standing next to her sister. His long hair was thinning on top and tied in a ponytail. He wore a sleeveless shirt with a faded print and loose Thai pants.

They hugged, and Naomi held Tamar out at arm’s length. “Look at you. How come I grow old but you never age?”

Tamar laughed, pushing Naomi’s arm off her. “Shut up. You look great.”

“I’m Carlos.” The man shook Naomi’s hand firmly, his black, small eyes penetrating hers. He was older than his attire suggested, fine lines etched into his tanned skin. Tamar cuddled up to him. Naomi busied herself with her luggage, rearranging her suitcases on the cart.

Outside, summer was at its best, the sky a flawless blue, the dry air smelling of mowed lawn. The three of them sat together in the front seat of a pickup truck, Tamar’s long legs straddling the gear stick. Naomi rested her head against the truck’s window, giving in to the fogginess of jet lag. She squinted to read the slogan on a passing car’s licence plate. “Beautiful British Columbia. The Best Place on Earth.” She scoffed quietly. According to whom? She was from Jerusalem, after all, the holiest place on earth, a place so laden with history it made tourists crazy. She grew up seeing delusional tourists loitering by the Old City’s gates, touching the ancient bricks, delivering mumbled sermons in foreign languages about Jesus and redemption. Once, she wrote a psychology paper about the Jerusalem syndrome, suggesting it was often resolved by simply removing the patient from the city. “If leaving Jerusalem is all it takes to cure a psychosis,” her professor had scribbled next to it, “then we should all leave.”

She had hardly ever left Jerusalem herself. She didn’t even like going to Tel Aviv. Maybe this was exactly what she needed to cure herself of her delusions, or at least get some perspective. She watched the mountains in the distance shimmering in the hot afternoon. She rolled her window down and inhaled; the air tasted green, fresh.

Naomi slept for much of the ferry ride,
and Tamar was grateful for the opportunity to study her sister’s face, inventory the changes. Naomi
frowned in her sleep. Tamar wondered again what had brought on this visit. When she had pressed over the phone, Naomi had said dryly, “I’m not dying. I’m just coming for a visit.”

Naomi’s hair had new white strands threaded through it, and the laugh lines that fanned from the corner of her eyes had deepened since Tamar had last seen her. It always surprised Tamar to see that her sister had aged. Whenever she thought of Naomi, she pictured her at twenty-five, even though she was three years older than Tamar. Tamar had called to wish her a happy fortieth birthday a couple of months ago.

“I can see the resemblance.” Carlos, back from the ferry café with two chai lattes, sat beside her and cocked his head as if to mimic Naomi’s.

“Really?” Tamar said. “I look like my dad. Naomi looks like my mom.”

“Still,” he insisted. “You have the same cheekbones. Something about your facial structure.”

Back in Jerusalem, a stranger would occasionally recognize Tamar by her resemblance to her father. Everybody knew her father. His family was one of the oldest Jewish families in the city, having arrived in the sixteenth century, after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Once, a woman on the number 18 bus had stared at Tamar for five stops before saying with curled lips and narrowed eyes, “You must be Shlomo Delarosa’s daughter.” The woman’s hair was bleached and her nails long and golden; she wore tacky high-heeled boots. Tamar didn’t ask her how she knew her dad, didn’t want to know. She hated that she looked like him, that their relationship was evident in her face, that sometimes she caught her mother looking at her with a mixture of affection and derision.

“You two are so much alike,” her mother had said after she
witnessed one of Tamar’s many fights with her father. Although Tamar protested, she knew her mother was right. She had inherited her father’s temper, his intensity and his charm. This temper, her contempt for authority, had made her army service insufferable: a series of trials, detentions and reassignments. Her father, who had been an officer in the army—had fought in three wars—was appalled by her behaviour. A temper wasn’t the only thing they’d had in common. She had never thought herself very good at relationships. Not until Carlos.