After Max left early the next morning, Lizzie decided to go for a run. She was meeting Rose in the early afternoon but the day seemed too open. She wished she had arranged to meet her earlier. She followed a path alongside the canals, and tried to imagine what it must have looked like a hundred years ago, when the waterways first opened as a resort, with bona fide gondoliers brought in from Italy. But she kept thinking about the first time Joseph had brought her to Max’s little house by the water. She couldn’t have been older than eleven. It was their second or third trip out to L.A. after Joseph had moved. Lynn was still alive. Max took Lizzie and Sarah for a ride in a canoe while Joseph stayed behind. The canal’s water was dark and unimpressive—she remembered plucking out a slimy green soda bottle, its label too worn to identify. The canal smelled of nothing good. She turned to Max: “Why would you defend a murderer?” she asked.
He looked at her. Everyone knew about the Cohen killings. There had been a storm of press coverage, thanks to the family’s Hollywood pedigree. (Just the year before, the father, the sole survivor, had won an Oscar for best director.) The son, who had killed his mother and brother, had gotten life imprisonment, not the death penalty, thanks to Max. And she wanted to know: How could he fight for him? It seemed unquestionably wrong.
“Everyone deserves an advocate,” Max said. “If I don’t do it, who will?” They drifted close to the mossy edge of the canal, and Max let go of the oar, which clattered against the flooring of the boat’s aluminum hull, and pushed off with his hand. “Besides, things are often more complicated than they seem.”
“He killed his mother and his brother,” Lizzie said, unsatisfied. “What’s complicated about that?” Still, she could remember how much she liked being in that canoe, rowed by Max, the distinct feeling of being quieted by the boat’s rocking.
She ended her run at the boardwalk and crouched down, panting. A shirtless guy, his torso a coil of muscles, was palming away on the bongos. A woman lifting a headless mannequin clad in a G-string came out of a shop. Displays were being set up at rickety stalls with Tshirts and nose rings and candles and Guatemalan woven shirts, a table manned by Lyndon LaRouche supporters. A middle-aged man in bright Lycra wove unsteadily by on his bike and there was something about the shape of his shoulders, the determined thrust of his neck and head that gave Lizzie a chill of recognition. For a moment she thought: That’s my father. It brought her comfort, how her body was charged to try to find him. I’m sorry for your loss, people said to her, and in these not infrequent moments she felt as if her father were not dead but truly lost, able to be found if she searched for him hard enough.
She turned away from the boardwalk, away from the homeless with their rattling carts and the shiny Rollerbladers, all the cacophony of Venice, and looked out over the broad expanse of beach, a dirty pale carpet of sand. The morning was stubbornly overcast, the sky anemic, the ocean a shade darker. Lizzie headed toward the water, watching the waves careen and heave onshore. The wet sand grew firmer beneath her feet. The wind kicked up, ocean spray mingling with her sweat. She sat down, pulled off her sneakers and socks, and gazed out over the grayish-greenish water. Her eyes burned. The day after tomorrow was the twenty-second, exactly three months since he had died. Last month on the twenty-second, she had gone to Barney Greengrass for an early breakfast and ordered the most expensive sturgeon on the menu. “Dad would have loved that,” Sarah said, and it pleased Lizzie to hear Sarah say it. The twenty-second wouldn’t always feel so fraught, Lizzie suspected, and the prospect of that dissipation served up its own fresh sadness.
Lizzie found herself saying, “Hey. I miss you, so much. I promise I do.” She felt self-conscious, but it was a relief to say it out loud.
She sat for quite a while. When she rose and started for Max’s, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before: a synagogue next to the lingerie shop—a whitewashed stucco building with sky-blue accenting its windows. the shul on the beach, a sign read.
She was gazing at it, surprised she had missed it before, when a short, round-faced man in khakis and a baseball cap approached. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Are you Jewish?”
Once or twice a year, a pair of dark-suited young men, looking as if they were twelve, would approach her in Midtown. They would climb out of a van with the words mitzvah-mobile festooned across its side or hurry down the sidewalk and ask her the same question, thrusting Hanukkah candles her way, the ceremonial fronds for the holiday of Sukkot. Lizzie would pick up her pace, ignoring them altogether.
But now she looked down at her sneakers. “My father just died,” she said.
“I am so sorry. May his memory be a blessing,” the man said. He didn’t avert his eyes as some people did when her father’s death came up. “I’m the rabbi here. Morning services are about to start. Would you like to say kaddish?”
Lizzie had last attended services with Ben and his family on Yom Kippur a couple of years earlier, an unpleasant hour at his parents’ synagogue in the Garment District with the rabbi using his sermon to rail against Palestinians. “I don’t know how,” she said.
“I’ll explain,” he said. “You’ll try.”
Inside, the sanctuary smelled dank. It was spare, the white walls unadorned, the back lined with books, a low wooden banister separating the room. The rabbi, the baseball cap off and a crocheted yarmulke affixed in its place, gave her a booklet with transliterations along with a lace head covering and bobby pin, and pointed her to the left side of the room. Lizzie sat down behind two older women, the only people on this side of the room, stunned that she was here. She draped her sweatshirt first over her bare legs, then over her shoulders and short sleeves, uncomfortable either way. On the other side of the low partition were about a dozen men, most old and in suits, a few bushy-haired and Tshirted.
The service began. Most of it was in Hebrew, and although she didn’t understand it, she found the sounds comforting. What would her father think of her being here? He had never been much of a synagogue-goer himself. But on Yom Kippur he would fast, and he used to insist that they watch Laurel and Hardy movies together on that day. He probably wouldn’t be impressed with this synagogue. “What, you couldn’t say kaddish somewhere in Brentwood?” she could hear him saying. But he would not be displeased.