On Friday evening, a van picked up her and Miriam and took them to services at Congregation Ner Tamid. June had known Miriam for almost fifty years, and while they had not really been friends, time had knit them together. Now they were both widows, they were both old Jews, they were both longtime residents of the same declining neighborhood, with wide, low-slung houses far too large for them and yards that stretched a hundred feet in every direction. When they made their way to the van on Friday nights, they passed through sunken living rooms and marble entryways and chandeliers weighted with crystal drops that coruscated light and memories as if they were the same thing.
It was Miriam who had asked June to donate to the campaign to build a synagogue in their neighborhood decades ago, and Miriam who had persuaded her to make a much larger donation when the synagogue decided to move to the suburbs years later. June had given the first time because it was easy, and because she and Miriam saw each other at school gatherings, and because her father would have been pleased to know she did it. She gave the second time because, at a certain point, after she had mostly retired from the El Capitan, after Marshall was busy with his own family, after she had started to recognize the first symptoms of whatever was wrong with her now, she had taken to stopping by Ner Tamid from time to time.
Initially, she simply walked in the garden or by the wall that proclaimed itself to be the Moe B. Dalitz Religious School, and the staff got to know her and called out her name when she went by. Finally, she started to come to services on Friday nights.
It was a reform synagogue, and the call-and-response in English surprised her at first, but the prayers were the same as she had always known them. The Hebrew came back to her effortlessly, easier almost than English sometimes, and the standing before the ark, the mournful sound of the Sh’ma—not a mournful prayer at all—and the little children who padded up to stand around the bimah when the rabbi called them up each week; these all moved her. When she was a child, the rabbi did not invite the children this way. She had tried to be quiet in synagogue.
But the congregation built its new synagogue and moved miles away from where June lived. The old building was a Baptist church now. The rabbi’s assistant sent a van for her and Miriam each Friday night, and it stopped at the Sunrise Villas, and then, with the seats usually full, made its way to the new Ner Tamid on Valle Verde Drive. June had been determined not to like the pristine building, in spite of having helped fund it, but it was impossible not to appreciate the warm cream of the Israeli marble, the flicker of green palo verde leaves through the glass on either side of the bimah, the drape of the heavy velvet cloths that surrounded the arc. Too, the seats were comfortable, the sound system excellent, and the same rabbi and the same cantor led the services each Friday night.
Of course, June was not the same as she had been.
Miriam had always been as petite and small as June, and she was too frail to help her friend make her unsteady, unpredictable way into the temple. Usually the bus driver helped June down, and then one of the members of the men’s club took her arm, and danced with her, back and forth and tipping giddily away from wherever she intended to go, until she was seated with a heavy and unreadable siddur in her lap. She suspected that the usher handed her the prayer book in the hope that it would provide ballast. June hoped the same, though she had learned not to count on it.
Tonight she made it all the way to the Mi Shebeirach—the prayer for healing—without attracting any attention to herself. She longed to sing, though she could rarely get any sound to emerge for these prayers she had known her whole life. This evening was no different. June concentrated on thinking about something else: her breakfast that morning or the outfit Marshall had worn to an Easter egg hunt when he was four. Sometimes this allowed her to sing. She would hear her own voice, slight but on pitch, as if it were someone else’s. Now the sanctuary’s lights were dimmed. Small twinkling bulbs had been strung through the potted trees, and the rabbi read out the names of those in need of healing, while the cantor prepared to lead the Mi Shebeirach, and some people behind her stood and said the names of people who had not been on the rabbi’s list.
“Michael Jackson!” June yelled.
The rabbi nodded her way.
“Salvador Dali!”
The rabbi nodded again and then turned slightly to look at the cantor. The woman at the piano began to play the first haunting notes.
“Mu’ammar Gaddhafi!”
June could not stop. She was standing now, and this bizarre list of names was flying out of her mouth, louder and louder. Miriam tugged on her elbow, and the usher from the men’s club hurried toward her, and she wished he would hurry a little faster, the old bum, and at this thought, she erupted into laughter. At least June didn’t call out any more names, but her hilarity was so absolute and so infectious that at first the rabbi gave a gentle smile, and then he nodded encouragingly to the usher—the man really was slow—and then suddenly, June heard the cantor give a snort, and someone to her left laughed, and then there was a titter and another laugh, and a whole row broke down, and then some member of the choir. Finally, the cantor was laughing and could not stop, and the rabbi, who had great control, gave in and started to laugh as well.
When it was over, when the usher had her firmly by the arm and near the door, when Miriam looked away whether because she could not bear to see June like this or because she might start to laugh again—there was no way to know—the rabbi said, “Well, there’s nothing more healing than laughter,” and the congregants clapped, and June did that damn shimmy thing with her shoulders—good grief, there was no humiliation too great—and the service went on. June sat next to the usher on a padded bench in the hallway, which is where she ended up from time to time and did not mind so much. She could hear everything.
June thought about asking Jessy to come with her to services next Friday night, so that she could hear the cantor sing the prayers all the way through. Then, too, maybe it would make her laugh if June pulled such a stunt again. It would be good to see Jessy laugh.
33
The phone rang six times, but Jimbo did not answer it.
Ms. Navarro sat back on the couch without saying what had alerted her; what she had been listening for. But she was thinking about something. Engracia could see that her attention had shifted. What was it?
She still held Honorata’s hand in her own. She squeezed it lightly, but Ms. Navarro did not respond. She had not responded to Jimbo’s questions either, or to what he had said about Malaya. About how he could have already seen her. About how he had come to tell Ms. Navarro that he was going to see Malaya. He hadn’t wanted to go behind her back.
“If you’d just opened the letter. You would have known she found me.”
“This isn’t my fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
They sat silently again, the red glow of the police cruiser on the wall outside, the sound of the phone, ringing, ringing, still in their ears.