‘Dad,’ says Ruby. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘But it’s your name.’
‘Yeah, it’s like’ – Ruby scrunches her nose – ‘my God-given name, but it’s not my name.’
‘Oops,’ says Daniel, smiling. ‘I called you Rubina yesterday.’
‘Oh, that’s okay,’ says Ruby. ‘I mean, you’re a stranger.’
The word hangs in the room for seconds before her face drops.
‘Oh, gosh,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – you’re not a stranger.’
She looks pleadingly at Raj. Daniel is touched by the gesture: the teenager running back to a parent’s legs to cling, to hide.
‘That’s okay, sweetheart.’ Raj ruffles her hair. ‘Everyone understands.’
They pile into Daniel’s car, all five of them, everyone offering the front seat to Gertie and acquiescing when she demurs to sit beside Ruby in the back. They drive to the maritime museum and the historic district and take a brief hike through Mohonk Preserve. Daniel races Ruby across a field, mud flying up to streak their jackets. The air in his lungs is gloriously cold, and he gasps with pleasure. When it begins to snow, he expects Ruby to complain, but she claps. ‘It’s like Narnia!’ she exclaims, and everyone laughs as they walk back to the car.
She surprises him in other ways, too. At dinner, for instance, when Gertie recounts her ailments – a topic favored by Gertie herself and dreaded by Daniel and Mira, who share a panicked look as she begins.
‘I had a corn on my foot that didn’t heal for a year,’ she says. ‘That’s part of the story. Then, because of the infection, I got something called lymphadenitis. The lymph nodes in my legs were inflamed, I had pockets of pus the size of golf balls. The hair on my legs stopped growing – utterly. And before long it spread to my groin.’
‘Ma,’ hisses Daniel. ‘We’re eating.’
‘Forgive me,’ Gertie says. ‘But I wasn’t responding to the antibiotics. So the doctor took a look and said that if I came in for surgery they’d drain all of my nodes, and that might be enough to fix the problem. There were two of them working on me, an older doctor and a younger, and the younger says, “Mrs. Gold, you wouldn’t believe the gunk we found.” Afterward they hooked me up to a drainage tube and I had to stay in the hospital until all the blood and the fluids oozed out.’
‘Ma,’ Daniel says. Raj has put his fork down and Daniel’s mortified; he’d like to slap duct tape across his mother’s mouth, but Ruby is leaning forward with interest.
‘So what was it?’ she asks. ‘What was causing all that stuff?’
‘Well,’ says Gertie. ‘Given we’re eating I’m not sure I should say. But seeing as you’re interested –’
‘We are not,’ says Daniel firmly, ‘not now,’ and the peculiar thing is that Ruby looks just as disappointed as Gertie. When Mira asks Raj about their tour schedule, Ruby leans toward her grandmother. ‘Tell me at home,’ she whispers, and Gertie flushes with a pleasure so rare that Daniel nearly reaches for Ruby to thank her.
That night, while brushing his teeth, Daniel thinks of Eddie. Eddie’s question about Simon – whether the fortune teller predicted his death – is troubling him.
Daniel doesn’t know when the fortune teller claimed Simon would die. Simon only said it was young – this in the attic of 72 Clinton Street on that drunken, befuddled night seven days after their father’s death. But young could have been thirty-five. Young could have been fifty. The detail was so vague that Daniel discarded it. It seemed more likely that Simon’s death was the consequence of his own actions. Not because he was gay – whatever mild discomfort Daniel has with Simon’s sexuality is far from moralizing homophobia – but because Simon was careless, selfish. He thought only of his own pleasure. One could not go on that way forever.
But Daniel’s resentment of Simon masks something deeper, darker: he is just as angry with himself. For his failure to know Simon – truly know him – while Simon was alive. For his failure to understand Simon, even in death. Simon was his only brother, and Daniel had not protected him. Yes, they spoke after Simon’s arrival in San Francisco, and Daniel had tried to convince him to return to New York. But when Simon hung up, Daniel became so incensed that he threw the phone on the ground, where it cracked against the linoleum, and thought that perhaps Gertie’s life would be easier without Simon, anyway. Of course, that thought was as temporary as it was cruel, but could Daniel not have tried harder? Could he not have gotten the next Greyhound to San Francisco instead of stewing in his own resentment and waiting to be proven right?
They look at who’s vulnerable, Eddie said of the fortune teller. They can see straight through to the point.
It’s true, Daniel thinks, that Simon was vulnerable. He was seven years old, but that wasn’t the only reason. Just as there was something different about Klara, there was something different about him. Impossible to say whether he knew at that age he was gay, but he was elusive regardless, difficult to parse. He was not as verbal as his siblings. He had few friends in school. He loved to run, but he ran alone. Maybe the prophecy did plant inside him like a germ. Maybe it incited him to be rash – to live dangerously.
Daniel spits in the sink and reconsiders Eddie’s theory: that what innate vulnerability Klara had may have been triggered, or compounded, by her visit to the fortune teller. There are certainly situations in which the marriage of psychology and physiology are undeniable, if not fully understood – the fact that pain originates not in the muscles or nerves but in the brain, for instance. Or that patients whose outlooks are positive are more likely to beat disease. When he was a student, Daniel served as a research assistant for a study that explored the placebo effect. The study’s authors hypothesized that the effect was caused by patient expectations – and indeed, patients who were told the tablet of starch they’d consumed was a stimulant soon showed an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and reaction time. A second patient group, told the placebo was a sleeping pill, fell asleep within an average of twenty minutes.
Of course, the placebo effect was not new to Daniel, but it was another thing when witnessed firsthand. He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo – not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.