Do You Love Me?

The first time I saw my granddaughters, I was standing across the street, didn’t dare go any closer. The windows in the suburban neighborhoods of Groningen hang large and low—I was embarrassed by how effortlessly I’d got what I’d come for, frightened by how easily they could be gobbled up by my gaze. But I, too, was exposed. The slightest turn of their heads and they would have seen me.

The girls took no interest in the goings on outside. They were entirely absorbed in themselves, in their small concerns. Girls with the kind of light, thin hair that spills between your fingers like flour. They were alone in the living room, too close within my reach. Had I been asked, I would have been at a loss to explain my presence. I left.

I waited for darkness to fall and lights to flicker on inside houses. This time I ventured closer, hesitating for a few moments before I crossed the street. I was astonished by the ease with which the family moved about. That was not how I remembered my daughter—I was stunned by the power of her presence. I whispered her name, “Leah, Leah,” just to make sense of what I was seeing. I stood there, not for long, just a few minutes. Leah’s daughters, Lotte and Sanne, were sitting at the dimly lit dining-room table and yet seemed to be in constant motion. Her husband, Johan, stood in the kitchen with his back to me, toiling over dinner, while Leah passed between the rooms, crucified by the window frame, disappearing from one room and reappearing in another, bending reality as if she could walk through walls. Though the living-room fireplace wasn’t lit, it wrapped the house in warmth. Gave it a homeyness, that’s what it was. And there were books everywhere, even in the kitchen. The household looked wholesome, everything about it meant to evoke the innocence of raw materials. And because I was watching my daughter and her family without their knowledge, I was vulnerable to witnessing what wasn’t mine to witness; I was running the spectator’s risk.

A woman in an Anne Enright novel I once read was from Dublin and had eleven siblings. When she grew up and got married, she had two daughters. Her young daughters have never walked down a street on their own. They have never shared a bed. The woman didn’t reveal much more about her daughters, but I understood that what she meant to say by this is that she loved them and, at the same time, didn’t know how to love them. And there’s the rub, the problem with love. She tried.

They went on vacation, the woman, her husband, and the girls, a family road trip; a silly argument broke out and the woman looked briefly in the car mirror and saw one of her daughters in the back, staring into space. She noticed that her daughter’s mouth had sunk inwards, and saw, with terrible prescience, the particular thing that would go wrong with her face, either quickly or slowly, the thing that could grab her prettiness away before she was grown. In those very words. And the woman thought, I have to keep her happy.

When I read this, I already had a young girl of my own. Leah. As a toddler, she was spirited and loud. Whispering in her tiny ears—and in her father’s big ones—I called her Foghorn. Meir and I marvelled at our foghorn. I had other names for her, too, dozens of them. I missed her every moment I spent in the studio, and scooped her into my arms every time we were reunited. My love for my baby daughter came easily. Her father was also in love with her; we talked about her every night after she fell asleep, thanked each other for the gift that was our girl. All that I had been denied I gave to her, and then some. And she loved me, too.

Everything about this baby—the drool dribbling down her chin and pooling at her neck, her urine-soaked diapers, the sticky discharge from her eyes and nose when she was sick—everything about Leah was good. Sometimes, looking at her or sniffing her, I’d start salivating, feel a sudden urge to sink my teeth into her. I’m going to eat you, I’d tell her, I’m going to gobble you up! Then Leah would laugh, and I’d tickle her to elicit more of those roaring giggles.

When she was four, I wanted another baby. I told Meir, Just imagine: two Leahs. As if that could also mean, Say no. Which he did. I was angry at him for months, until the whole thing fell by the wayside. Meir crossed into his fifties, we moved to a bigger apartment, arrived at the sweet spot of our careers, slept soundly, kept up with our four-year-old, five-year-old, six-year-old Leah, lacked for nothing. And Leah grew up.

You see it a lot in movies. A family in a car, the father at the wheel, the mother striking in a captivatingly careless way, the two children jazzed up in the back, everyone talking at once. This is the before life, and something bad is about to happen. A roadside assault. A horrible secret from the past. Your daughter’s sinking mouth.

I would have liked to hear about more families like ours, mine and Meir’s and Leah’s, about mistakes that are so easily made and yet somehow beyond forgiveness. The day-to-day mishaps. The crimes of will.

I didn’t stay overnight in Groningen. When I planned the trip, all I wanted was to see my daughter with my own eyes, and, once I had, I would immediately make my way back to Amsterdam and wait for my return flight to Israel. Perhaps I was wary of the drawn-out hours of darkness in Groningen, or couldn’t find another way to convince myself of my good faith.

At the Groningen railway station I boarded a 9:18 p.m. train to Amersfoort, where I switched trains and headed to Amsterdam. I used to navigate Europe’s highways completely unafraid. On our trips to France, Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, Meir and I took turns behind the wheel. We both loved the sudden bends that revealed a mountain range or a glimmering lake-carved valley, and the gas stations where pockmarked teen-age boys worked the coffee machines and hot-dog rollers, entire lives that went on long after our departure and upon which we left no mark. But now I didn’t trust myself. I could easily have got lost in thought and taken the wrong exit or flipped into a ditch. I decided I would be better off taking the train. I was also hoping to get some sleep during the ride, but every time I closed my eyes I was back in front of the picture window in Groningen.

I thought about Meir, and what he might have said had he known. I had always feared his reproach, a fear that hadn’t waned even six years after his death. That ghost still stared me down. And suddenly a strange memory came back to me, something I hadn’t thought about in years and wouldn’t have been able to summon even if prompted to recount the beautiful moments; there it was, bobbing to the surface. We had gone to Paris together, our first trip as a couple. It was winter, and every time we walked down the steps to the Métro he would say, “Walk ahead a little, keep going, I like to look at you.”

I remember how it made me laugh that first time. How charming I found it. “What?”

“I look at you and think, Who is this girl?” he said. “She’s gorgeous. Who does she belong to? If I tried talking to her, would she even give me the time of day?”

I burst into laughter, it was so silly.

“Walk,” he urged me, “walk. So I can look at you. Please.”

One summer we spent a week at a holiday village in Germany—Meir, Leah, and I. A vast R.V. site stretched north from the village, dozens and dozens of R.V.s parked among the trees in prim order governed by the ancient European know-how of creating privacy where none exists, uniform yet distinct and entirely still—hard to believe how quiet. In the evening we ambled about this R.V. land, the three of us, glimpsing personal lives laid bare: the colorful mats, the awnings, the clotheslines strung with sheets, towels, and the occasional bathing suit—never underwear, no bras. In R.V. land, no one forced nudity of any sort upon his neighbor, and it felt as though we could fit in, we would know how to be European; we got the rules, especially Leah, who had a natural understanding of the world and blended in effortlessly. Most of the campers were older couples, sun-toasted orange. Some were aging hippies but others were ordinary folk, retired professionals perched on folding chairs beside the doors to their travel vans, silently gazing out at the darkening day, or poring over a book, or talking with the hushed composure of couples who told each other their big stories years ago and have no more gaps to fill in. No one played music or moved too fast, not even the young families who arrived with their children and were now in the middle of their dinner and bedtime routines, and the arduous journey into sleep. Only once, at the edge of the campground, did the sound of crying pierce the air, and a girl flashed by the entrance to an R.V., a flicker of pink spandex and long hair, like the dizzying daytime flutter of girls filling the nearby beach, and suddenly a single shout, piercing, hypnotic—Leah, komm her, Leah!—before the girl was swallowed back into the R.V. She continued to cry, now with louder wails clearly intended for our ears. I held my hand out to Leah at the very moment Meir extended his toward her, and the three of us scampered away, hand in hand, impervious in our unity.

In the holiday resort, I occasionally thought I heard Hebrew, but when pausing to listen I would invariably find that I was mistaken. It was another language, I couldn’t tell what, dazed as I was by the distance from home, by the vacation itself. And on the nearby beach the girls in their neon-bright bathing suits and wind-tousled hair all looked the same age to me; I couldn’t tell the four-year-olds from the eight-year-olds—the colors and the language had a blurring effect, as did the pervasive quiet, around the pool, in the beachside restaurants, at the souvenir stands hawking mass-produced mementos piled high alongside the crocheted trinkets, jewelry made of shells and wood, beach towels, and cheap plastic toys.

On our first night there, after her shower, Leah bounced about the room, thudding against the walls like a moth trapped in a lampshade, wearing me down. The preparations, the flight, the long drive—I wanted to sleep. I looped her in my arms to calm her down and kissed her neck and sang to her, and she cried quietly for a few minutes before falling asleep. But after that trying night the three of us settled into a laid-back holiday routine. We spent the week playing. Lego, puzzles, card-matching games. I didn’t find the games themselves enjoyable—maybe only dressing the dolls and brushing their hair, serving them dinner in tiny plastic dishes and tucking them in for the night in their boxes—but Leah was positively delighted, and even as she grew up Meir and she kept at it, playing checkers and chess and backgammon, competing with passion and perseverance. In those years I didn’t play with them anymore, their pleasure alone was no longer enough to reel me in, but on long drives, the three of us in the car with mile upon mile of open road ahead of us, I sometimes agreed to join them and at times even suggested a game myself. When it came to word and trivia games, I almost always won; I was quicker than they were, but their imaginations shone brighter, and they understood each other with a mere glance.

One evening that week, in our small spotless room at the resort, we were about to gather up the card game and head out to dinner, but Leah begged us: just one more round, the last one. We flipped the cards face down and shuffled.

“Who’s going first?”

“Me!” Leah cried. “Me!”

We’d played with that deck hundreds of times, such that many of the cards were bent and stained; I could pick out three pairs by the scratches on the back, and Leah could pick out many more. We considered this within the rules.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Leah matched four pairs in a row before striking out. I matched two. Meir struck out on his first try.

“Your turn,” I told her.

She looked at me for a moment, then at the cards.

“Well?” Meir said, to urge her along. “I’m hungry.”

Leah had already started turning over a card when she said she had changed her mind and was choosing a different one.

“But you already saw what’s on that one,” I said. “It’s not fair.”

“I didn’t,” Leah replied.

“Liki,” I protested, “come on now . . .”

“She says she didn’t see it,” Meir said.

“But—” I began, but Meir shushed me and I decided to let it go. “O.K., fine.”

Leah flipped a new card, then another, and placed the pair on her stack. I rolled my eyes. When I played, I played to win. She reached for another card.

“Leah’le,” Meir said quietly, “you know what’s more important than winning.”

Horrified, I shot him a look. He met my gaze and said, “She knows that telling the truth is more important than winning.”

Leah picked up two more cards—another pair. But her lower lip quivered and her head sank forward as she whispered, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

How could I bear it? I couldn’t. “Sweetheart,” I said leaning toward her, “don’t cry . . .”

“I saw the card,” she sobbed. “I said I didn’t but I did . . .”

I was distraught. I wanted to recant, go back, rewind.

“It’s O.K.,” Meir said. “We all make mistakes. Continue, Leah’le.”

But she threw herself onto the cards. We couldn’t continue. We went to dinner.

When I return from Holland, Art picks me up from the airport. I didn’t ask him to, but it seemed like a given to him. We have been together for a few months now, and before I embarked on my journey he asked for the details of my return flight. “I’ll be there to greet you, Yoella,” he said. “You’re not alone.”

Meir and I didn’t wait for each other at airports. We didn’t make each other coffee when we prepared ourselves a cup. We were happy to if the other asked, of course; what I mean is that we didn’t offer. Once, when I got stuck on the side of the highway with an empty gas tank, I didn’t call him. Later, he had it out with me. He would have come right away; waiting on the shoulder for roadside assistance for more than two hours was insanity, it was so dangerous, what was I thinking. And, honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking. I could never anticipate what he deemed the right thing to do.

But when Leah and I flew back from our brief travels in Europe he always showed up. We would walk into the arrivals area and sweep our gazes around the hall, worried that perhaps he had forgotten, but he always came, and Leah would rush toward him, wedging herself into his arms; and when I reached them he always extended his arm and pulled me into the hug, looping the three of us.

In the morning, whenever we could, we would head out together for the bus stop at the intersection. Leah would sit there waiting for her bus to school, while Meir and I continued north on the footpath that led up to the campus where we both worked. I feared that walk, thirty minutes of dread waiting for Leah to reach her destination and text me; and if she happened to forget I would be paralyzed with anxiety.

Only once did Meir lose his patience. “She’s a teen-ager,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. “She gets to school, sees a friend at the gate, and forgets everything else, including texting you, so let her be.”

He was right. Worry is a straitjacket, and so is love. I promised to do a better job of holding myself together. But even when she was out of view I was watching closely, I don’t know exactly what. I was cautious, but it was a conjuring caution, akin to superstition; I knew that if I covered all my bases Leah would come back. I would hear her footsteps on the stairs. She would appear at the door. And how surprised I was each time anew, not by the fact of her return but by her palpability; she was more real than anything I could remember.

Back home, I try to remember what my life was like before I saw my daughter through the window of her Groningen home. The hour before sleep sets in is a pothole I struggle to skirt. I pick up a book I started reading before my trip to Holland and wait for Art to put his hand on my arm to let me know that it’s O.K. That I’m O.K. That I should give it time.

Winter is over. I slowly regain my concentration. I have no plan. In a recurring dream, I go back to Groningen, knock on the door, and wait. It is dark outside, and my daughter’s lit house is unfathomable and unbearably tempting, as if I were a homeless person. I pound on the door, again and again, each blow louder than the last.

With Art’s gentle prodding, we go out to plays, movies, restaurants. Every few weeks we have Art’s daughter and her family over for dinner at my house. I’m grateful for Sharona’s two small boys, spirited redheads who can’t possibly remind me of us.

On other days, after dinner, we carry our wineglasses to the living room and watch the news. Art almost always stays over, and before lights-out he gathers the dishes we have scattered around the house, folds the TV blanket, and plumps the couch pillows. Darkness requires order. Then we convene in the shared destiny of the night. In the bathroom we maneuver around each other, readying ourselves. Brushing teeth, washing faces. Art gets into bed before me, turns on both our reading lamps, folds down the edge of the blanket for me, and with his hands resting loosely on his heart waits for me to join him. But we never read the same books—together in the ocean of the bed, we each cling to our own raft, floating to wherever it will take us.

Meir liked the nighttime, and when I retired to the bedroom he would sit at his desk writing his essays and grading student papers; but sometimes he would nip into our room first to say good night, talk for a bit, screw. It was only during my difficult periods that we traded places—months when I stayed awake while he cleared the way and went to bed, letting me have the nights to myself.

They sat together in the kitchen, talking and laughing.

“How much do you love your dad?” Meir asked, and Leah said, “A million kajillion.”

“That’s all?”

“Plus two.”

“Now we’re talking!”

And Leah snorted and said, “Ha-ha, Dad. Hilarious.”

They fell silent when I entered, as if I couldn’t possibly understand.

But she, Leah, had asked me countless times over the years, “Do you love me, Mom?” and I would reply, “More than anything in the world,” and she would ask, “You’re sure?” and I would reply, “Plus seven,” and she would say, “Round it up to ten and we’ll shake on it,” and never, not once, not in any way, shape, or form, did I return the question.

Nearly a year goes by from the day Leah leaves until the boy calls, the man—I don’t know how old this person with a deep and booming voice is, a voice rising from a well—and asks to speak to Leah’s mother.

“Speaking,” I say, heart racing. I have not seen my daughter in eleven months and have not heard from her in weeks.

The fellow informs me that Leah is in the mountains, in Nepal, that everything is fine, she’s fine. He met up with her two weeks ago and she asked him to call us upon his return to Israel to let us know she was O.K.

“In Nepal,” I repeat his words. Forty-four days I have not heard from her. “In the mountains?”

“Yes,” he says. And he says something else, about a phone that stopped working. Cell-reception issues. I don’t understand exactly what, and yet I rush to say, “Yes, of course.”

“She’ll be staying there a while longer,” the fellow says. “At least a few more weeks. Maybe more.”

I once knew a man with that kind of voice. I was working at an ad agency at the time, he was an account manager, and, no matter what he said or wanted to say, his voice rippled and rattled through my body, the bass reverberating in all surrounding matter.

So many things I want to say and ask. I sit down on the couch with the phone shaking in my hand. She turned nineteen two weeks ago, I called her countless times that day, the next day, too. I didn’t stop trying.

At night, in bed, I tell Meir. A Yaniv called today, or Yariv, I couldn’t recall his name, said Leah says hi. She’s in the mountains. In Nepal. There’s no reception there. Or she doesn’t have a phone. Never mind. It makes no difference.

Meir gives me a puzzled look. When did this happen? This morning? How could I not have told him until now? And before he can get another word out I say, “She slept with him, that much is obvious. She’s fine, sleeping around with men. Nothing to worry about.”

Meir’s look goes from surprise to shock. We’ve been out of our minds with worry, waiting on pins and needles, and finally we’ve been put at ease—what’s wrong with me?

I cry and he hugs me. “Don’t cry.” He has always dreaded my tears, resented me for them. Now they’re a relief for us.

From that day on, they call regularly, every month or two. It’s always men who’ve crossed Leah’s path, who trekked the mountains with her, the forests, the remote villages, places whose names are shot so quickly they land far outside my reach. Emissaries through whom she sends word not to worry, everything’s fine, she’s fine. She asks that when they arrive at a main city, at an area with cell reception, in Israel, at home, they call us, and they do. Not to worry. In these men’s voices I hear complacent caution, that the world is theirs, that Leah is theirs, but now I’m ready for them. I never ask them, Tell me. Tell me about Leah. I thank them. I say, thank you, thank you for calling. And still I call her time after time, relentless. My calls go straight to voice mail.

Our daughter’s room remains hers, as if she were expected to return; our lives are the sum of these situations, what there is and what there isn’t. We are the parents of a missing person, but the kind no one around us can understand, not even us; and in this darkness we fumble.

When Meir first tells me about the muscle pain plaguing him, I already know. I have been awakened more than once by the sound of suppressed groans. I accompany him to our G.P., after which he’s rushed to a series of scans. Results, consultations. Luck is not on our side. Without our knowing, the disease and Meir have been cohabiting for too long to split up.

Every time one of Leah’s emissaries calls—always me, my phone—it takes me hours to get my thoughts straight, which can explain why I find it hard to say, exactly, when it dawns on me that it might all be a charade, that none of these men ever scaled up or down receptionless mountains with her, slept beside my daughter in forests, hiked with her to remote villages; that while they were on the phone with me she was somewhere nearby, perhaps even right beside them, listening in, gesturing to them to hurry up, and the next time one of them calls I say, If you happen to run into her again, if you go back up the mountain, if you cross her path—you might just cross paths—tell her that her father is very sick.

She appears at the door less than a week later.

The three of us are together again, even if Meir is already not himself, either in appearance or in speech. He has drifted away from his essence, but is possibly more present than ever—it’s hard to pin down the thing that happens to someone in his final days, whether he dwindles away or purifies.

Our nomad daughter is home. She is not sun-scorched. Nor are her calves muscular, or her hair an overgrown fern. She’s not too thin—if anything, has put on weight—and her clothes, despite the multitude of colors and layers, are clean and kempt. I flash back to the summer between eleventh and twelfth grades, when she waited tables at the café in the local shopping mall. As if overnight, she learned to tuck her shirt into her skirt, chew bubble gum undetected, avoid leaning against the tables. She learned the proper way to pull her hair into a ponytail and not to be too cozy with the customers.

“Mom.”

She stands at the door. I reach out and touch her hair.

Affectionately, affectionately I used to ask her, When was the last time you washed your hair? It’s due for a washing. Affectionately, I used to slide my hand over the heavy waterfall of her hair and say, We’ll end up finding bird’s nests in there, maybe a kitten, an antique Chinese coin.

“Liki?”

I burst into tears and embrace her, and she wraps her arms around me and says, “No, don’t cry,” and already it is hard to believe that she has been away for two years, that I have been in such agony.

I lead her into Meir’s room. Our room. I worry that he’ll become too excited, worry for his heart, but his face lights up with recognition and understanding, as if he had been expecting her, and in his new, drug-slurred voice he says, “Leah’le.”

Gingerly, she leans over him, and his skeletal hands slowly climb up her back. She whispers something in his ear and they both laugh.

Meir dies in the hospital five days later. Each day we sit by him, holding his hands from either side of the bed. On his final day, the intuition of the doctors prompts them to tell us, Stay. Don’t go. Wait.

It’s hard to find words for the moment it occurs; it is as otherworldly as it is prosaic. The plainness of the deceased’s feet.

Five weeks after Meir’s death I drove Leah to the airport. I knew exactly what I was going to say, already had the words lined up in my head. Forty minutes in the car with no escape hatch. Our rides to the airport used to be the kickoff to an adventure waiting to unfold, and it felt the same now. Leah got in the car, placed her coat on her lap and her hands over the coat. I turned on the radio. After a few moments, she reached out to turn it down, then lowered her hand to her side. I waited a while before cranking it back up and only much later, when we stopped at the airport terminal, did I put my hand on hers. It wasn’t too late. I pulled into the drop-off zone and we got out of the car. I knew that I was going to talk, that I couldn’t not talk. I heaved her giant duffelbag out of the trunk. A car came up behind ours, waiting for us to clear the lane, and I rushed back into the driver’s seat. “Come here,” I called out to her from behind the wheel, and she bent over the open passenger window and poked her head in. I leaned across the seat, cupped her face with both my hands, and kissed her on the mouth the way we used to. A curt honk sounding behind us quickly broke us apart. I could see her in the side mirror, standing there, watching as I drove away.

When he was already very sick, Meir suffered terribly from the cold. But with the windows closed from morning to night the room was stifling, so in the early evening I would cover him with three blankets, open the windows, and lie beside him in the dark. We would talk for a bit. He was tired and weak and so was I. And still, one night he said, “I thought that after you gave birth I would have to have you committed.”

I listened breathlessly. The months of pregnancy with Leah were a horror ripening from within—the thing that was growing inside me, forming from my flesh, was also entirely sealed off and subjugating.

“I saw how you were holding on,” Meir continued. “I knew you were holding on by your fingertips. I remember thinking, She’ll have the baby and then fall to pieces. She’ll never be able to take care of anyone, ever. I thought that after the birth I’d have to raise the baby on my own and also take care of you.”

It hurt that he would say this. The words he chose.

“You were off your rocker,” he said. “But then Leah was born and a miracle happened. She was born—and you came back. Just like that, you were your old self again. You loved her so much and took care of her, everything seemed so simple. I couldn’t believe it.”

My neighbor Ora knocked on the door. She’d been away for two weeks, on a guided tour to Europe, suddenly I didn’t remember just where. France, Holland, maybe Belgium. She looked fabulous, radiant in her new haircut. She said, “Make me coffee, you won’t believe the story I have for you.”

I didn’t like it when she fizzed like that. Talked too loud. But I wanted to hear. We had become closer since Meir’s death. It wasn’t a friendship—I kept away from those. By then I had already cut off most of my ties, didn’t want to tell anyone about Leah, that she was avoiding me, that in recent years I called her only when I could endure the coldness of her voice. It embarrassed me.

It was a marvellous trip, Ora said. A good group, everyone always on time, except for one, a widower, not that old. Raphael. Rafi. So annoying. And on the bus he always insisted on sitting by the window, said he had motion sickness. And the thing that happened happened in Groningen—a nice city, she said, quaint, all of Holland is. After a visit to the maritime museum, they’d dispersed for thirty minutes of free time to explore the town before reconvening back at the bus, everyone but Rafi, again. Waiting for Rafi. Story of our lives. And she, Ora, took her seat on the bus and looked out the window. Two cute girls were sitting by a fountain, and she thought, What adorable girls, where’s their mother? And then she saw the mother on a bench nearby, keeping an eye on them.

“I looked at her,” Ora said, “squinted. I couldn’t believe it.”

My grip on my coffee mug tightened. Over the past months I’d spoken with Leah only once. She was in Thailand, she said, working on a small organic farm. Mostly cooking, sometimes cleaning. I didn’t ask questions, I let her speak, didn’t want to poke holes in her story. Now I tried to draw the mug to my lips, but my hands trembled.

“I thought I was going nuts,” Ora continued. “I looked at her. Leah? Yoella’s Leah? What is she doing here? Can’t be. Is that Leah? She looks just like her, her doppelgänger! I got up, told the driver, ‘Wait for me, I’ll be back in a sec.’ I got off the bus and started walking toward them, I don’t know why, what I was thinking. I was thinking, Maybe I’ll take a photo of her for Yoella. Yoella has got to see this, she’s got to!”

Ora paused for a moment, ran out of breath, dizzy with excitement.

“They were a hundred feet away from me,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Is that Leah? But Leah is in India, in Thailand, I don’t remember where, she’s in all kinds of places, but here? I didn’t know if I should wave at her, maybe call out her name? She’ll think I’m crazy. I waved. She didn’t wave back. I wanted to shout, Leah! Leah! But I was too embarrassed. It wasn’t her, it can’t be. But a dead ringer! And then Rafi came running out of nowhere, and the bus driver called me back, and the woman, Leah, she approached the girls and took their hands and the three of them started walking away. I’m so sorry I didn’t take her picture. You wouldn’t believe it, Yoella.”

I smiled. I managed to. I said, “That’s some story.”

I can’t recount the next few days. What I can say is that I now knew where to look for my daughter, and I found her easily. She was living in Groningen. Married to Johan Dappersma. They had two daughters, Lotte and Sanne. It would be a few months before I found a photo of Lotte online. I would find a photo of Johan, too. And one of the two girls.

Meir was forty-six the summer I first saw him, at the supermarket. A few weeks later he showed up at the studio, after which we never parted. But there were times when I left the house in tears, got into my car, started the engine, and drove around town for thirty minutes, an hour, two, until he called and, with soft words, steered me back.

In all our years together I burdened Leah with my sadness only once. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Meir was about to leave me, and I wouldn’t sleep next to him. At night I would crawl into my daughter’s bed; she would turn to me right away, wrapping herself around me with the perfect warmth of her body that offered its softness and asked for nothing in return. In Meir’s arms I was always restless, whereas twelve-year-old Leah held me as if she knew all there was to know about human touch and how to calm me completely. That week I fell asleep beside her night after night; she was the cure for seven nights straight. We pulled through—I never found out what put an end to the affair, knew only that it was a student of his, perhaps I had seen her on campus, from afar, alone, and knew it was she. I knew as people often know. It was over, and I returned to our bed.

The following summer I got pregnant. I was forty-three years old, Meir fifty-nine, and I told him with an excitement tinged with trepidation. I didn’t know what his eyes were going to deliver until they delivered it. And so I terminated the pregnancy. I wasn’t angry; I was relieved. Actually, I was angry.

But if I left Meir, what would I do with Leah? With whom would I love her? With whom would I talk about her? To whom would I send the photos I’d taken of her? Share the funny things she said? Only Meir loved her as much as I did, was as interested in her as I was. Only in his eyes could I see the light snap on at the mention of her name. I couldn’t leave him. I knew that with Leah I would never be lonely again, and yet I still needed Meir, to see us.

After my first trip to Groningen, I went back. Went back twice. But I couldn’t bring myself to go near the window again. I stopped at the end of the street and turned around.

I knew where Johan worked. I wrote to him twice, to no avail, but I could find him and stand in front of him. I could leave him no choice. Who can hide in this day and age? No one. Especially if someone is looking for them.

My daughter’s husband taught at a theatre school by the east harbor, the Lancering Theatre Academy, a jutting building of concrete and glass that conformed perfectly to the ashy sky above it. I sat down at the café across the street. Every so often the Lancering students crossed the street and entered the café, sticking to the cheapest items on the menu. Espresso, soda, pastries. People can be so young sometimes. A boy with a nose ring and pink hair belted out a song while waiting in line at the counter, and I thought, How nonchalantly the future spreads out its nets, you don’t realize it until it’s too late. Three girls a table over got up to leave and hugged one another with willowy delight. Was that how Leah conducted herself in these parts? As if the world were hers for the taking? Hugging everyone and everything? She had been Johan’s student, and when I found her on the Internet under her new name I also found a photo of Johan that she had posted seven years earlier, with “my teacher” in Dutch written under it. And yet I still could not picture her sitting in this café, laughing carelessly, undoing her ponytail, flipping her hair and pulling it back into a ponytail like someone who knows herself inside and out. Johan was fifteen years her senior, perhaps even older. I understood what he had to offer her.

When he finally exited the building, he was alone. Lanky in a winter jacket, carrying a leather briefcase, like a country doctor in a play. I recognized him easily. I had studied his photographs, but I had not realized how tall he was. I’d paid the bill in advance so that I could get up and leave at any moment, and now was that moment. I jumped out of my seat and crossed the street. He rounded the corner onto the main avenue, and I followed him. We walked. I had done this before, years ago. For the duration of one dreadful winter, I had trailed Meir undetected; I got good at it. Johan darted down the street and came to a halt at the bus stop, where he placed his briefcase on the curb and searched his pockets. I didn’t slow my steps, I rushed along, waiting for my mind to shut down so I could move from thinking to doing, and I was already in close range when he glanced up at me and I kept going, passed him, was gone. But the notion that he didn’t recognize me as Leah’s mother was suddenly unfathomable, ludicrous. I wasn’t just another person passing by. I was the mother, his daughters were my granddaughters, we were linked by a bond that could not fail to signify something. I had sent him letters, he knew I existed, knew I was looking for him, and yet when he saw me his expression remained blank. To him I was just a woman going about her business.

That night, when darkness descended, I was back in their neighborhood, wandering the streets surrounding their house. The ice-cream shop, the pharmacy, the playground. These were the slides my granddaughters slid down. This was the bench my daughter sat on while watching them. Here were the swings that propelled them upward, the sand that poured into their shoes. From this merry-go-round Lotte once fell and bumped her head and was rushed to the hospital. Such things happen. The neighborhood was an old one, and it seemed peaceful, but nocturnal men might still prowl it, and I had to trust that my daughter knew how to keep her daughters safe.

When I first started searching for my granddaughters I stayed up whole nights. I was hoping I would find them. I was hoping I wouldn’t. I understood the violation. I went to the same Web sites again and again, clicked the same records and the same photos, searched every corner as if some old detail might suddenly present itself in a new light. I expected to find them at any given moment, and I did. Lotte Dappersma. Sanne Dappersma. They were five and six, and slowly growing up. Six and seven. Students at De Lange Brug, the long bridge. Students at the local conservatory. Lotte for guitar, Sanne for violin. Unearthing Johan’s Instagram account coincided with a case of bronchitis that kept me bedridden for days. The minutiae of their lives became mine for the taking: the pattern of the curtains in the girls’ bedrooms, the dome of light cast by Lotte’s reading lamp, Sanne’s loopy handwriting and penchant for green hearts. Sanne appeared more lighthearted than her sister, slier. A mischievous face. I thought that with her it would be easier down the road. Neither of them resembled Leah in the slightest, not in their looks, not in their expressions, not in the type of woman tucked inside them, lying in wait for the future. Small straight noses. The golden flour hair that fluttered about their heads, alive like a puppy, stirring in me the desire to sniff it and dip my hand in it. And still I did not lose my mind. Now that I was in possession of my granddaughters in photographic form, I withstood the urge. I had already tracked down several of Lotte’s classmates and a few parents—I knew what I was doing. I had also located two of her friends from the conservatory. The mother of one of the girls, Maria Koch, posted a short video from the end-of-year recital. The camera lens was fixed on Maria, a small, sallow girl. I watched the first few seconds, then paused to compose myself. A whole hour went by before I watched the rest of it. Next to Maria, on the edge of the screen, was Lotte.

A few weeks later, as if I had gone entirely unnoticed, was not even on their radar, as if my tracking them down and watching them from afar were an impossibility, Johan posted a video from Sanne’s birthday party, and there was everyone. Lotte, Sanne, Johan, Leah. Eleven seconds. I want to say that seeing my granddaughters in motion was more than I could bear. I am saying that I was crushed by the sight of Leah bunching Sanne’s hair into her hands as she leaned forward to blow out the birthday candles. And just like that, they were her daughters in every way; the resemblance, which lay below their features, in deeper strata, triggered a tremor of recognition that slammed me to the ground. Days of high fever, fitful sleep, and jumbled thoughts ensued. Had she found God, had she joined a cult, had she surrendered to a force greater than herself . . . But she remained Leah, she was Leah, and she no longer wanted to be my daughter.

After Meir’s death, after the shivah and the thirty-day mourning period, on the night before she was about to set off again, the two of us sat down at the dinner table. All those years she had wanted us to eat together as a family, wanted Meir to sit with us, too, wanted Friday-night dinners, and we tried, we’d sit down together, but we didn’t understand how to generate the mass. Maybe three is just too few for a family. Meir would have the TV on in the background. “It’s the weekend news.” But he had no interest in the news, and we’d eat quickly and get up, disbanding with lighthearted banter; in small families, one member’s silence is enough to spoil everything.

I’d made us omelettes and salad. Brewed herbal tea in a teapot. Toasted the bread she liked. Meir had been dead for five weeks now, thirty-five days had gone by since the funeral. Meir was dead. Leah understood perfectly, perhaps faster than me. It was now just the two of us.

During those weeks she’d left the house very little. Two or three times she visited my mother, and once drove into town to run errands.

I asked if she’d like more tea. Enough sugar? She smiled gently. Treated me softly. She spoke as little as possible during those days. Later I thought it was to protect me.

I said, “I’m so sorry.”

She levelled her gaze at me.

“I didn’t know how,” I said. “I didn’t know how to help you.”

She looked at me a moment longer before bringing the mug to her lips again, and I thought, She understands what I’m saying.

“Are you all packed?” I blurted out. “Or can I help you pack?”

“Thanks,” she said, “it’s all right.” She was always a gentle child, a gentle young woman. “It’s O.K., Mom.”

Early the following morning I drove her to the airport. The next time I saw her, she was already twenty-eight years old and I was looking in her window in Groningen, from across the street. ♦

 
This is drawn from “How to Love Your Daughter.”