Rachel glanced at her father and then fixed her gaze on the mountains ahead. “She doesn’t know anything about me.”
“I highly doubt that, my dear.” He patted her knee. “She probably knows you better than you know yourself.”
“Don’t call me that.” She moved her knee away. Sometimes this sensation of hot anger roiled inside her, even when she was having a fine time. She couldn’t say where it came from, only that there was some sort of disconnect between what she wanted and what was happening in front of her. The mountains, the river, those were all fine, but it was this—this man next to her, her father, who could take her on a hike and memorize her sandwich order and call her pet names and yet had to be back home, back to his other home, by sundown.
“She’s an intuitive woman, your mother,” he continued. “She feels so much.”
He looked so pathetic in those brand-new sporty clothes. The anger was alive; she could feel it wanting to erupt out of her.
“Where does your wife think you are right now?” Rachel asked, her face hot. She had never asked this before; that was part of the unspoken deal.
He swallowed again, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “What?”
“It’s a Saturday. I can’t remember the last time I saw you on a Saturday.”
He bunched the wax paper from his sandwich into a ball. He took a deep breath.
“Golf,” he said quickly and quietly. “But, Rachel, sweetie, there’s no need to—”
“Don’t call me ‘sweetie.’?”
He took another deep breath. “Sorry. Rachel. I don’t think this is good for you, talking about this.”
“How would you have any idea about what is good for me?”
He stood. “I think we should start heading back.”
“You’re just not going to talk to me about this?”
Now the anger was coming in its other form: that familiar wave of fragility that caused her voice to crack and tears to form despite her most intense efforts to make them stop.
“How come you’re so ashamed of me?” she asked.
He shook his head and looked at Rachel with such sadness. It wasn’t empathy; it wasn’t like he could feel how she felt or was even trying to. It was pity. Like he was very, very sorry for her.
He put his hand out. “It’s time to go.”
She swatted his hand away and spent a few more moments facing the mountain landscape, though she wasn’t looking at much of anything. She focused only on making the tears stop, on pulling herself out of the moment, so that she could get back down the mountain and get home and never have to think about this again.
When she was ready, she pushed herself up off the rock and began to walk in the direction of the trail. She watched her feet, putting one step in front of the other as she went down the rocky path. Her father followed behind her silently. He drove her back to the city, news radio playing through the car’s speakers and neither of them talking over it.
—
When Rachel got back to the dance, she saw Fiona standing with some of the other counselors from her section. Fiona didn’t notice that Rachel had returned. Yonatan was now playing an Israeli pop song, and the kids were surprisingly into it, letting loose, holding hands, jostling one another around the makeshift dance floor. Rachel went over to him.
“Who is this?” she asked.
Yonatan looked surprised to see her and then collected himself and said some Hebrew band name she’d never remember. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
“Are you having fun?” she asked.
“Yeah!” He bopped his head in time to the music. “Are you?”
She shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said.
She grazed her fingertips over his shoulder, realizing only once the contact had been made that her brain had, somewhere below her consciousness, made the command: “Pick up hand. Touch shoulder with fingers.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked.
“Huh?”
Rachel took out the Poland Spring water bottle she’d been keeping in her bag. “It’s vodka.”
He laughed. He grabbed the water bottle from her and took a tiny sip. His face puckered at the taste of it as if he had just sucked on a lemon.
She took a sip herself and felt that familiar burning in her lungs. This was her MO, carrying vodka around in Poland Spring bottles: to high school dances, to college football games. When she got to Michigan, she had realized that the other girls mixed vodka with juice or with Crystal Light packets, and without her trying, the undiluted alcohol had become her trademark.
“Hold your nose,” she said, and he briefly looked around the dance to make sure no one was watching, then took one more sip, doing as he was told.
He opened his mouth wide and let out a loud breath through it, like a lion exhaling.
“That is brutal,” he said.
“Brutal!” she laughed. “Your American slang is improving.”
He smiled at her. It was a slow smile of recognition, as if he was beginning to realize that he knew her or could grow to know her.
Then Yonatan turned away and put on an American song that everyone could sing along to. “I remember when…I remember, I remember when I lost my mind.” Even the counselors at the dance were becoming more relaxed, more fun. Both Chad and Jack were dancing innocently with the shyer girls. Jack held one of Sheera’s hands and spun her under his arm. It was the first time Rachel had seen such unabashed happiness come from the girl. Fiona was dancing in a clump with the girls from her section. She still had not noticed that Rachel was back, and Rachel was glad for it. Fiona was as close a friend to Rachel as any, but not close enough to eradicate the loneliness Rachel felt in this moment. When Yonatan turned back around and faced Rachel, she took his hand and began to dance with him. She swayed her hips left and right. “Who do you, who do you, who do you think you are?” They were only attached by their hands, but those two hands were a bridge, a now-permissible connection between them. She had given him, with her hand, permission to look at her the way he was now—his eyes suddenly open to the possibility that maybe they could, maybe they would.
He could dance, Yonatan. He had an innate sense of rhythm and a suggestive way about him as he moved, a confidence in his loose limbs. He was a musical person, and so it made sense that the music was a vessel for his sensuality that had, until now, been calmly, quietly hidden away. He took his free hand and put it in Rachel’s hair—not long enough for anyone else to notice, but long enough to graze her scalp, to comb his fingers just once through the waves.
It gave her chills. Without thinking, she gestured for Yonatan to follow her and, leaving the iPod to play by itself, led him to the athletic shed, which sat just at the edge of the woods, about fifty yards away from the basketball courts.