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  for my parents who deserve so much more than a book here’s a book

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I never would have finished this book had it not been for the generosity of the Guthrie family and the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship. I am similarly indebted to the Meta and George F. Rosenberg Foundation for the Meta Rosenberg Scholarship in Creative Writing.

  Many thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. To Ethan Canin and Sam Chang for reminding me that I’m a writer capable of producing a full-length novel: I wouldn’t have gotten by without Ethan’s patient compassion or Sam’s ruthless optimism. To Connie Brothers for helping me sort out my life when I was barely old enough to know what life is. To Tony Tulathimutte for offering me eighteen single-spaced pages of immensely helpful criticism and Okezie Nwoka for spending hours on the phone with me hammering out point-of-view issues. To Ashley Clarke, Deborah Kennedy, and Sinead Lykins for brilliant insights and hearty encouragement. To July Orringer and T. Geronimo Johnson for guiding this novel through workshops. And to Yuka Igarashi for helping my writing flourish.

  This book would not exist without Ross Harris’s muscular efforts as a literary agent. And it wouldn’t make much sense without Sarah Bowlin’s editorial skills. It wouldn’t be on the shelves without Caroline Zancan or Jessica Wiener championing it. And it wouldn’t be quite as queer without Kerry Cullen.

  A special thanks to the great city of Cleveland for my visit, and the numerous Clevelanders who welcomed me with open arms. To Sidney Mallory for letting me sleep on his couch and jumping on trampolines with me. To Tyler Lacor for wandering the woods with me and to his family for letting me overstay my welcome. To Steven Aviram for damn good pizza. To Lance Johnson IV and the Planned Parenthood crew for telling me everything I’d ever need to know about Cleveland. To Smitty’s Seaway Barbershop for being an all-around great establishment.

  I am lucky to have gone to India with the 2014 Critical Languages Scholarship in Hindi crew, and I was lucky to have gotten to know Caleb Christian, Benjamin Simington, and Annika Gage, all of whom helped me with this novel in ways they probably don’t realize. I am similarly lucky to have gotten to know the talented Mimi Neathery, and to have graduated from the Compass program.

  Shout-outs to my oldest friends who buoyed me with their goodness. To Julia Clark, Zarina Kamzina, Hannah Button-Harrison, and Alex Wennerberg for their help in making this novel happen. To Clare Costello, Jimmy Rothschild, Graham Schneider, Rachel Linder, Corley Miller, and the inimitable Vivian McNaughton for reading countless drafts and excerpts over a five-year period.

  I am grateful for my family, both the Frumkins in New York and Florida and the McHenrys in Illinois. This book is as much for my grandma Doris McHenry as it is for my parents, Michael Frumkin and Melissa McHenry. There isn’t a simple way to make clear how much I love you all.

  And finally, there’s Sharlene King, my life and love. This book is for her, too.

  “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”

  —HANNAH ARENDT

  “Shit happens.”

  —ANONYMOUS

  PART I

  PROLOGUE

  May 8, 1999

  Of those who’ve shut their eyes to the world with few or no regrets, it can be said both that their number is small, and that Leland Abdiel Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. was not among them.

  At four in the morning on the fifty-fourth birthday he would’ve shared with his best friend, Reggie Marshall, Leland Sr. arrived in Tampa looking for a hotel. It didn’t take him long to find one, the bright lobby of which wore several dark stories like a tall hat. From the road it had reminded him of a picture book of his youngest son’s in which all the buildings had faces and spoke to one another; he liked that book, so he pulled in, parked, and removed his briefcase from the trunk. The kid at the front desk looked barely eighteen. She was rubbing the sleep from her eyes. He nodded at her with his best pitying face, set his briefcase on the counter, and asked if he could be shown a room.

  “Yes you can,” she said, sounding obviously dissatisfied with her station in a way he himself had once been. She clicked around aimlessly on her computer and the machine made a sound like small waves crashing. “I have four rooms available right now, all on the fourth floor.”

  “Does that floor have roof access?”

  She looked both bored and confused by the question. “Yes, sir. Access to the roof is granted to any guest with a key.” She turned her attention to a little machine by the computer. Leland Sr. made sure he wore an expression he hoped reflected what a bighearted mensch he was. She produced a key and handed it to him. “And now you’ve got a key. Your room number is 402. Did you need anything else, sir?”

  He took the key from her gently and shook his head. “No thank you.” Then he held it up next to his face and waggled it a little. “And thank you!”

  Room 402 was well appointed: a single queen bed, a desk, a lowboy on top of which was perched a nice-looking TV. He turned on the TV and stopped on the station where a soothing female voice recited facts about the hotel as they appeared on the screen. Then he opened his briefcase. Emptied completely of the money, it felt lighter in every sense—its only contents now were his study Torah and the last twenty bag he’d ever buy. He keyed out a bump, inhaled deeply, and exhaled. It could’ve been better, that was true, but he was the beggar and not the chooser in this situation. He poured about half the bag onto the mahogany desktop and cut it up with his credit card. His blood, sludgy from the long drive, had begun to flow and his mind was restored to full operating capacity. Even room 402’s many shades of beige looked brighter. Outside he could see the electric pinks and reds of a sunrise. Now was probably the time, he thought to himself, if ever there was one. He railed the rest, grabbed his Torah, and, his blood pumping, climbed the stairs to the eighth floor.

  The door to the roof opened with a smooth click. He’d hoped for more fanfare or at least more resistance. When he thought about this moment on his drive to Tampa he’d imagined something special would happen to mark the occasion. He’d fantasized about getting into a fight with a bellboy, knocking over a food cart and then beating it down the hall while someone screamed “Call security!” But that was foolish. He didn’t live in an action movie. G-d didn’t live in an action movie. Moses could never have imagined a copy of his words would wind up on the roof of a Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa so many thousands of years after he’d written them, and that they had was just testament to their long-enduring power. Leland Sr. wished he could’ve been chosen, called by G-d to write something like the Torah: long-lasting and capable of inspiring millions of people to greatness. But he hadn’t been chosen—that sort of thing wasn’t in his wheelhouse. This, what he was doing now, was the second-best thing he could’ve done in service of G-d. This had been in his wheelhouse from birth.

  As he walked around the Hyatt’s roof, knocking
on the giant exhaust vent like a building inspector, tracing with his toe a set of fingerprints some workman had left in the concrete, he made a little movie in his head with scenes of all the people who’d loved him. There was his mother, Sarah Bloom-Mittwoch, the wild, pessary-using Berlinerin Ashkenazi who had gotten knocked up by his father in 1944, a full eight years after they’d escaped Germany, the European continent, and being gassed. He could see her in a Cleveland hospital on VE Day, pushing him out furiously while a nurse held her hand and promised her he’d already crested, that the pain would be over soon if she could just try to push a little harder. And there he was sleeping in the nursery with all the other newborns, Leland Sr. Sr. regarding him through the glass, crying, and biting down hard on his Turkish cigar as news of the Allied victory in Europe came over the speaker in the waiting room.

  There was his first wife, Melinda, standing on the Kent State Commons in the white frock she’d since lost or thrown away, her arms extended, the features of her soft face quivering and bursting and bleeding into one another as his vision began to scintillate with LSD. There was Leland Jr. when he was three days old and still helpless, sleeping in Melinda’s arms, both of them frozen forever in a rocking chair in the golden morning light that came in through the living room window. There was Natasha Marshall, Reggie’s widow, dressed in her favorite peacoat with the collar that hugged her chin, sitting at her desk with all the books piled up on it. And there was Diedre, his gas-pumping Bathsheba in high-waisted shorts, wiggling her freshly painted emerald toenails—there she was on the sofa in their bungalow, the infant Lee suckling at her milk-engorged breast, his small fingers folding and unfolding in the air.

  He thought how there was no way to know how long loving someone could last, or whether it was even a good investment to begin with. That’s what kept people watching all those television soap operas. That’s what kept people praying in shul. They wanted to know how the other people and things they loved would turn out—whether they’d be destroyed by them or loved back. He turned to regard the rising sun. Below, the streets were already beginning to fill with morning traffic.

  True to the rabbi’s prediction, the sunrise deepened to a violently dark purple. The clouds shifted apart. He thought he would faint. He thought he would drop dead. Every shameful, jealous, hateful thing he’d ever said or done in his life swam to the surface of his memory. His eyes watered with humiliation.

  “This is too much,” he whispered. “I’m unworthy.”

  From between the purple clouds emerged a Hand, palm upturned in compassion. “That’s not true,” the Hand said. “You are worthy.”

  “And Reggie?”

  “Absolutely worthy.”

  He nodded, unsure if he should speak. The Hand remained hovering patiently over the city. Leland Sr. thought how incredible it was that this Hand had wrought the entire world.

  Although he desperately didn’t want to, he began to cry. “I thought the plan for me was unspeakable,” he managed to say.

  “So did Abraham when he bound Isaac,” the Hand replied. “So did Job as he endured those plagues from the underworld.”

  Leland Sr. wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve. His face felt numb; from what, he couldn’t tell. “What do I do now?” he asked, though he knew what the answer would be.

  “Come to Me,” the Hand said, making a beckoning gesture.

  “And if I fall?”

  “You won’t.”

  About twenty feet stood between him and the roof’s edge. Between him and the Hand—impossible to tell. He breathed in and exhaled slowly. Then he clutched the Torah to his chest, ran, and jumped.

  MELINDA BLOOM-MITTWOCH, NÉE PROVOUCHEZ

  (1947–)

  1952–1967

  Ohio

  The last time her body hadn’t been thought of as more than a poke-able and prod-able inconvenience—her face subjected to the disapproval of pink-lapeled Avon saleswomen, her feet too big to fit in the right pair of stilettos, her fat resistant to herb diets and massage belts and reducing creams—Melinda Provouchez had been a child of six. She would run up and down the little hill in front of her house, ten times, thirty times, out of breath and eager to conquer her territory. The hill sloped into a drainage ditch she pretended was a moat surrounding a castle. At night she watched the moon shine a long, white tongue down the length of Lake Erie and she thought about the big fish she knew lived down there with the lamplight growing out of its head. How could she harpoon it? She went to sleep dreaming of squirrels driving through the nighttime streets in cars they’d built out of acorns, sticks, and leaves. She drew pictures of her house and family and they vibrated with color. She showed them to her teacher at school, who wrote to her parents: Melinda has a very promising intellect and imagination.

  When she was seven, her grandpa had poked her thigh during Christmas dinner and asked if maybe she shouldn’t have that second helping of pecan pie. He’d never touched her before—they waved instead of hugging, she curtsied instead of kissing him on the cheek. He was sitting next to her and stuck his finger in her thigh’s pale flesh, bare because she wore a stiff taffeta dress with layers of tulle underneath that made the hem ride up high past her knee. She looked up in panic but saw that everyone was laughing, her cousins, uncles, aunts, father, and mother. Only her grandma wore her grave, semipermanent mask of judgment: “Should you be treating her that way, Walter?” To which her mother responded: “Well, there’s some truth to it.”

  So as she grew and came to understand who she was, where she was, and the other people around her, Melinda bore in mind the fact that there was some truth to it. Some truth she should be ashamed about. Her father was a well-respected man in the Lakewood community and in other parts of Cleveland, a supervisor at a factory where vinyl siding was manufactured for use in construction. He had a square neck exactly the width of his head and wanted sons, was irritated with Melinda until her little brother, Tommy, arrived a few days before her eighth birthday. Melinda’s mother was less impatient, less boy-obsessed, but also less inclined to assert her opinions. If she agreed, then something “could be right,” or “rang a bell.” If she disagreed, she “didn’t know.” She was full figured, wore belted skirts and scooped-neck dresses like Elizabeth Taylor. Melinda’s father seemed proud of how her mother looked, made a point of taking her out to the Italian restaurant in town on Thursdays—his one-day weekend—to show her off. Melinda had to spend this time holding a swaddled, frequently croupy Tommy and watching Gunsmoke on the couch while some knock-kneed babysitter talked to her varsity-letter boyfriend on the phone, interrupting her conversation only to complain to Melinda that the volume was turned up too loud. For whatever it was worth, Melinda also thought her mother had gorgeous proportions.

  But when Melinda was thirteen, her mother’s waist began to fill out. Her chin sagged and her breasts slackened. She ate two waffles with peanut butter and syrup every morning. Melinda didn’t know why this was happening, and she also knew it was nothing to speak about. Their sunny house by the lake seemed darker, its rooms capable of being folded up and stored away like the hastily painted Nativity backdrops in the basement of their church. Her father began to stay out drinking with union members on Thursdays. Instead of fried chicken and Jell-O, her mother made Melinda and Tommy “healthy” dinners: green beans and ashen-colored meat loaves with a quarter-inch crust of ketchup baked on top. Dust motes appeared in every room, orbiting the yellowing spheres of her mother’s milk glass lamps. Only Tommy, stumbling happily around in his fire-truck rompers, seemed to have no idea that something was going on. Melinda shook him off whenever he came to her with his plastic baggies of cowboys and Indians, telling him it wasn’t a good time to play.

  Something was happening to Melinda, too. Her father had inherited a book of German fairy tales, which she often paged through. She couldn’t understand any of the words, but the pictures were horrific: a boy with severed thumbs, women in fancy ball gowns cutting off their toes to fit into a slip
per. The worst was of a girl screaming while locusts swarmed from her mouth. Melinda kept the book under her bed and studied the words above the girl’s picture: Das junge Frauenzimmer. She was too scared to ask her father what it meant. Her body had begun to creak and gasp and ache involuntarily—when she went to sleep, insects walked the lining of her stomach. The twitchy vibrato of a tight muscle was a locust batting its wings. The pain in her chest, the itchiness at her nipples: locust babies hatching from their eggs.

  By Melinda’s sophomore year of high school, her mother weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and rarely left the house. She cooked only pastas in heavy cream sauce and three-cheese casseroles. She let Melinda and Tommy drink Coke and orange juice instead of water in the middle of the night. At dinner—which even Tommy understood to be a difficult but necessary time—Melinda’s father told her mother that she should be careful of her health. He eventually let it slip that people were talking about her. Melinda’s mother did something she’d only done once before in Melinda’s memory, on the day she’d said “Well, there’s some truth to it”: she folded her hands in front of her and stated an opinion.

  “So what if they are?”

  “So what if they are?” Melinda’s father repeated, then looked at Tommy, who kept his head down and shoveled in his spaghetti. “So what if they are?” her father said again, and looked from Melinda’s mother to Melinda.

  Melinda, grown from a chubby child into a well-proportioned girl, chest buzzing with tension, looked at her father to confirm what she knew she would do anyway, which was agree with him. “Well, you should be ashamed,” Melinda said. “If people are gossiping about you because of how you look.”

  Melinda’s father pointed his fork at her and nodded vigorously. “Exactly!” he said. “Exactly!”