Tinderbox (18 page)

He stretches out on the bed, reconstructing that night. Did he take the amulet with
him after Rachida fell asleep and he crept into the music room to look again at the
magazine? He had wanted to see the picture of the man lifted high, the one that reminded
him of Debbie in
The Searchers
. Had the amulet dropped inside the file box?

Adam goes downstairs to look in the music room. He locks the door, pulls down the
shade, and drags the file box from the closet, sweeping his hand between the folders.
He removes the envelope from the box and empties the pictures onto the floor. A weird
feeling overtakes him, as though the men in the pictures are hiding the amulet from
him.

He calls Rachida’s cell.

“Do you know where Eva’s amulet is?”

“The hamsa?”

“The thing you said was a hand.”

“I can’t talk now. I’m with a patient and we’re crazy backed up.”

From the other side of the door, Adam can hear Omar knocking. “Daddy, I’m home. Can
I come in? I want to practice the piano.”

The photos are strewn across the floor. “One minute. I’m just finishing up something.
Go have a snack and I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

“I already had a snack. Eva gave it to me.”

“Well, go watch TV or something. I just need a few minutes.”

“The TV is in here.”

“Omar, I said I need a few minutes.”

Adam can hear his son sighing and then heading to his room. He gathers up the pictures
and puts them back in the brown envelope. He puts the envelope back in the file box
and the file box back inside the closet, then opens the shades and the door.

31

“What should I tell her?” he asks Rachida after she too has looked everywhere for
the amulet and cannot find it.

“You’ll have to tell her the truth.”

“She’ll be devastated.”

“I could ask my father to make her another hamsa, but I don’t think it would be the
same.”

“Maybe she’d take it better if we had one to give her when we tell her hers is lost.”

“Maybe.” Rachida flops onto the bed. “There is an outbreak of croup. A lot of the
children also have asthma, so we have to give them nebulizers. The nurses were so
behind showing parents how to hook up the tubing that I had to do the blood tests
and shots myself.”

“Do you remember the inscription?”

“The inscription?”

“On the amulet, do you recall the inscription?”

Rachida presses her fingers over her eyelids. For a moment, Adam thinks he remembers
the hamsa lying on the bedcovers next to Rachida’s face. Had it been left there? Wouldn’t
Eva have found it in the morning when she made the bed?

“I have set the Lord always before me.”

32

Eva sits motionless in the patient chair, her feet planted on the floor so her knees
stick straight up.

“You look like you have something on your mind.”

Eva stares suspiciously at Myra. “How do you know?”

“The expression on your face suggests you’re thinking about something.”

“I think about the silver hand my mother give me. She give it to me after my father
shoot her in the leg. I never know if she give it to me because it stop working for
her or because she think I need it more than she need it.”

Dreis’s question comes back to Myra. “You didn’t say how your mother died.”

“She die in a fire.”

“A fire?”

“A fire in our house. My father set the house on fire.”

Eva touches the chain that hangs around her neck. “My sister and I were in the courtyard.
The house was one floor, so the fire catch the roof fast. The flames shoot up into
the air.”

“Your father set the house on fire on purpose?”

“He want to kill all of us. My mother, my sister, and me. But he kill only my mother.
She burn to death.”

Eva crinkles her nose. It is the same crinkle of disgust Myra has seen Eva make when
she talks about the smell of cooking meat. She touches the spot under her shirt where
something hangs from the chain.

“The only good thing is, he burn the dirty pictures. I never see them again after
that.”

33

Myra calls the clinic at St. Luke’s Hospital. She speaks with the intake social worker,
who promises a Spanish-speaking psychiatry resident, a man named Dr. Gonzalez, will
see Eva.

Myra finds Eva in the kitchen. She’s at the sink scrubbing potatoes.

“There’s something I want to talk with you about.”

Eva keeps her eyes on the stream of water.

“We need to find someone who will have more time for you than I do. Someone you can
talk to about some of the things you’ve been telling me.”

Eva nods as though she has known this would happen.

“I’ve made an appointment for you for Thursday at noon with a doctor, a man named
Dr. Gonzalez, at a clinic nearby. They will only charge what they think you can afford.
If it’s still too much, I’ll help you with it.”

“You want a girl to cook meat for Omar. You think a growing boy needs meat and it
bother you to have to do it yourself.”

“This has nothing to do with your work. You are doing a fine job.”

“I can cook meat. I will do it from now on.”

A feeling of despair descends over Myra: it is too late with Eva, they are already
in too deep. Don’t be ridiculous, she chastises herself. You just have to handle this
with clinical tact. “This has nothing to do with your cooking. This has to do with
what you’ve been telling me about yourself, with your needing more time to talk and
someone who can listen to you without interruption.”

“You can listen to me. I will come down earlier.”

“It’s not good for your therapist to be the person you work for.”

“After my mother die, my aunt take me to a doctor. He come out to the waiting room
and listen to my heart. He pinch my cheek, then give my aunt some pills to give me.”

“This doctor will talk with you before he decides what would help. The appointment
is for noon. I’ll go with you the first time.”

Eva turns up the water; it splashes against the sides of the sink. Myra imagines Eva
as a young girl, putting the pills under her tongue and then, when her aunt turns
her head, spitting them into her palm.

34

On Thursday, Myra comes upstairs after her last morning patient. Eva is not in the
kitchen. On the third floor, Adam has the door to the music room closed. The beds
are made in Omar’s room, in Adam and Rachida’s room on the fourth floor, and in Eva’s
room, but Eva is nowhere to be seen. At five minutes to twelve, Myra cancels the appointment.

“I forget,” Eva says when Myra sees her before dinner.

“Are you sure you forgot?”

“Yes. I am more careful next time.”

But the next week, the same thing happens. Again, when Myra comes upstairs to get
Eva, she is gone. She searches the house, calling Eva’s name before canceling the
appointment. This time, instead of waiting fruitlessly for Eva to reappear, she changes
her clothes for her reservoir walk.

When Myra returns to her office, a lunch tray is on her desk. Eva is in the patient
chair.

Myra sits behind her desk. Eva looks at her shyly, then giggles. “I am sorry. I forget
again.”

“Clearly, you did not forget.”

“I cannot talk to a strange man.”

“Would you feel better if the psychiatrist were a woman?”

Eva shrugs her shoulders. Myra wonders where Eva hid today. In the synagogue on West
End Avenue? In the back of a closet, sucking her thumb, listening as Myra called her
name?

35

“Her mother burned to death?”

They are in Dreis’s living room, where the housekeeper has made a fire. Outside, the
air is the murky white that harkens a freeze. The room is exceedingly warm, but Dreis
keeps her legs covered with a blanket. It occurs to Myra that it has been a long time
since she has seen her former analyst standing. Even in full health, Dreis was tiny,
hardly five feet. Myra wonders how tall she stands now or if she can, in fact, stand
at all.

Myra nods.

“People die of smoke inhalation, of injuries from falling beams. Does she mean her
mother was pulverized?”

Myra feels suddenly very foolish. Inept. Eva has said that her father set the fire
and that she watched the house burn to the ground. Did she manage to get herself out
or did her father change his mind and rescue her and her sister?

“I know that the picture doesn’t quite fit together.”

Now Dreis nods.

“She needs to tell her story. I know she shouldn’t be telling it to me, but I don’t
think she’s going to tell it to anyone else. If I refuse to let her talk to me, she’ll
never tell anyone.”

In her mind’s eye, Myra can see the newspaper photograph from the summer when Adam
and Rachida and Omar traveled out West: a moose, antlers aloft, standing in the middle
of the Salmon River, banks aflame.

36

Were it up to Adam, Eva would never be allowed into the music room, but his mother
has gently insisted that Eva, whom he has instructed not to touch the papers on his
desk or the boxes in the closet, be permitted once a week to vacuum the rug and dust
the piano. Usually, Eva vacuums on Thursday afternoons while he is picking up Omar,
Rachida’s plans for doing pickup never having materialized, but this Thursday, the
first Thursday in December, when he arrives home with Omar, he can hear the vacuum
still running.

Adam forces himself to climb the stairs. Two weeks have passed, during which he’s
avoided telling Eva that he can’t find her amulet.

Eva is bent over the vacuum, carefully guiding it between the piano legs.

“Eva, could I talk with you?”

Eva stares at him.

“Could you turn off the vacuum?”

The vacuum stops. Adam points at the wing chair. He drags the desk chair over for
himself.

“I have bad news.” He swallows, rests his clammy palms on his thighs. “I seem to have
misplaced your amulet. I feel terrible about it. I’ve searched everywhere.”

Eva sits motionless, her lips slightly parted.

“I’m sure it will turn up because I never took it out of the house. I showed it to
Rachida. Then, when I went to get it to give it back to you, I couldn’t find it. Rachida
and I tore apart our room. We looked under the mattress. We even rolled up the rug.”

Eva does not reply. She appears to be watching Adam’s lips, as though they are strange
doggish fish.

“Rachida’s father—he’s a jeweler—is making you another one. I know it’s not the same,
and I’m not saying we won’t find yours. But in the meantime, at least you’ll have
something.”

Adam’s armpits are pouring sweat. He would not have felt worse if he were telling
a kid he’d run over her dog.

“Can I go back to vacuuming?”

37

“My mother always say never tell anyone anything,” Eva tells Myra the following day.

“Many children are told that.”

“If I tell you things, you will think I am lying.”

It is she, Myra, who feels like the liar. She told Dreis she would insist that Eva
go to a clinic, that their talks cease. And she has tried. She made a third clinic
appointment, which Eva also missed, but it was followed by a week during which Eva
retrieved Myra’s tray without sitting in the patient chair, so that Myra had thought,
Well, she understands even if she won’t go see another therapist. The following Monday,
though, Eva was back in the patient chair. Before Myra could say, You can’t sit here
with me in the office, Eva resumed. Rags. Her father had stuffed rags soaked with
kerosene in the corners. It was night, her mother asleep in the back bedroom. At the
last minute, with the house already filling with fumes, he dragged Eva and her sister
outside. He put them in the chicken coop and told them not to move. Then he crept
into the kitchen and threw a lit match.

“All I have left from my mother is the amulet she give me.” Eva touches something
hanging under her shirt.

“Now you will quit me,” she continues.

“Quit you?”

“Make me leave.”

“Why would I make you leave?”

“The people who want it.”

“Who want what?”

“When my sister tell her teacher that our mother die, my father hit her in the mouth
with a rock.”

Myra’s buzzer rings.

After Eva leaves, Myra stands to stretch her back. She bends forward, her head and
arms dangling down. A wave of dizziness, then nausea, comes over her, and for a moment
she wonders if the sandwich Eva made for her was spoiled.

She walks toward the waiting room, not thinking, as she usually does, about the patient
she will greet, the mood she might encounter, the link to what happened in his last
session, her mind still on Eva so that the sight of her patient’s face comes as a
jolt, like a boat bumping against a dock, an undertow of fear in its wake.

THREE

1

Since she was a child, Caro has dreaded Christmas. The dread begins the week after
Thanksgiving, when the city falls down the rabbit hole into what is euphemistically
called the holiday season but everyone knows is really the Christmas season. Vendors
selling trees arrive from Canada with earmuffs and lumber jackets, the bound trees
imprisoned along the sidewalks of upper Broadway. Drugstore windows are filled with
squashed boxes of lights and neon tinsel on the verge of combustion. In the cramped
supermarkets, carols blare through the loudspeaker systems.

When she was young, the dread had centered on the feeling that there are two groups:
those who eagerly await Santa Claus and the mountains of presents, and then, in some
alternate darker universe, the Jewish children who, like her, had been hoodwinked
into accepting Hanukkah as their meager alternative. (Then it had not occurred to
her that there are also Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist children greeting Christmas morning
without excitement.) Yes, her mother made latkes, and they had a holiday meal with
her father’s parents, who gave Adam and her chocolate gelt and fifty-dollar checks.
Yes, there were dreidl games with Grandpa Max, who each year produced an outlandish
dreidl—one that emitted gospel-style songs, one that lit up like a slot machine—but
it all paled against the visions of her classmates running to their living rooms Christmas
mornings to see the gifts piled under their trimmed and lit trees, their handsome
bathrobe-clad parents sipping eggnog while the children rip wrapping paper from marvelous
toy after marvelous toy.