Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(150)

When Jacob and Julia had shared the news that Sam and Max were going to get a little brother, Jacob made the mistake of suggesting the boys name him—a sweet idea that if carried out one hundred million times would never once produce an acceptable result. Max quickly settled on Ed the Hyena, after Scar’s loyal henchman in The Lion King, assuming, presumably, that that’s what his new brother would be: his loyal henchman. Sam wanted to name him Foamy, because it was the third word his finger landed on when he was riffling through the dictionary—he’d promised to commit to the first word, whatever it was, but it was extortion, and the second was ambivalent. The problem wasn’t that the brothers disagreed, but that both were such terrific names—Ed the Hyena and Foamy. Great names that any human would be privileged to have and that would all but guarantee a cool life. They flipped a coin, and then did best out of three, then seven, and Julia, being Julia, gently folded the winning name into an origami bird that she released from an open window, but made the boys T-shirts with iron-on letters that read “Foamy’s Brother,” and, of course, a “Foamy” onesie. There was a photograph of the three of them in their Foamy-wear, asleep in the backseat of the Volvo that was christened Ed the Hyena as an easy-to-give concession to Max.

Sam patted his knees, beckoning Benjy over, and said, “I’d miss you, too, Foamy.”

“Who’s Foamy?” Benjy asked, climbing onto his brother.

“You almost were.”

Max found all of this too emotional to acknowledge or name. “If you run away, I’m coming, too.”

“No one is running away,” Sam said.

“Me, too,” Benjy said.

“We need to stay,” Sam said.

“Why?” they asked.

“Jinx!”

“Benjy, Benjy, Benjy.”

Sam could have said, Because you need to be taken care of, and I can’t do that myself. Or, Because it’s only my bar mitzvah, so only I need to run from it. Or, Because life isn’t a Wes Anderson movie. But instead he said, “Because then our house would be completely empty.”

“It should be,” Max said. “It deserves to be.”

“And Argus.”

“He’ll come with us.”

“He can’t walk to the corner. How would he run away?”

Max was becoming desperate: “So we’ll put him to sleep, and then we’ll run away.”

“You would kill Argus to stop a bar mitzvah?”

“I would kill Argus to stop life.”

“Yeah, his life.”

“Our life.”

“I have a question,” Benjy said.

“What?” his brothers asked in unison.

“Jinx!”

“Jesus, Max.”

“Fine. Sam, Sam, Sam.”

“What’s your question?”

“Max said you could run away until the war stops.”

“No one is running away.”

“What if the war never stops?”





O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!


Julia came home in time to put the boys to bed. It wasn’t nearly as painful as either she or Jacob had imagined, but only because she had imagined a night of silence and Jacob had imagined a night of screaming. They hugged, exchanged gentle smiles, and got to work.

“My dad procured a Torah.”

“And a rabbi?”

“It was a two-for-one.”

“Please, not a cantor.”

“Thank God, no.”

“And you found everything at Whole Foods?”

“I got a caterer.”

“The day before?”

“Not the best caterer. Some unsubstantiated accusations of salmonella.”

“Rumors, I’m sure. We should have about what, fifteen people? Twenty?”

“We’ll have food for one hundred.”

“All those snow globes…,” Julia said, genuinely wistfully.

They were gridded on three linen-closet shelves, fifteen across and eight deep. They would stay there, untouched, for years—so much trapped water, like all the trapped air in the saved bubble wrap, like the words trapped in thought bubbles. There must have been tiny cracks in their domes, as the water slowly evaporated—maybe a quarter-inch a year?—and by the time Benjy was ready to have, or not have, a bar mitzvah, the snow was resting on dry city streets, still pure.

“The boys have no idea, by the way. I just told them you were visiting a site last night and they didn’t ask anything else.”

“We’ll never know what they know.”

“And neither will they.”

“It was only a night,” she said, loading dishes into the washer. “But I’ve never chosen to be away from them. It was always because I had to be. I feel awful.”

Rather than try to diminish her feeling, Jacob tried to share it: “It’s hard.” But there was that other angel, its tiny feet nailed to Jacob’s shoulder: “You were at Mark’s?”

“When?”

“Is that where you went?”

There were many ways to answer that question. She chose: “Yes.”

He brought the extra plates up from the basement. She took a shower, to release her shoulders and steam Sam’s suit. He walked Argus to Rosedale, where they listened to other dogs play fetch in the dark. She ran a load of kids’ underwear and socks and dish towels. And then they were back in the kitchen, putting away the clean, still-warm dishes.