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He stood and led Matt to his bedroom, where they made out for a while, straining against their clothes like teenagers. Matt kissed him and nibbled him and worried whether this shy and quiet man could give him what he needed. Wind gusted against the windows, and a critter skittered overhead along the attic floor. Then they undressed, and Daniel took Matt’s arm and turned him on his side. Matt gasped and tried to make a joke, but Daniel didn’t laugh; he leaned over the bed and fumbled for the pants that lay on the floor, reached into the pockets, and pulled out a condom. You dog , Matt thought, but then Daniel was gripping his hips with surprising authority. Matt closed his eyes and fell, soaring, into himself, while the world bucked and spun. His orgasm thundered through him, and he passed out. He slept for fourteen hours, and when he awoke the next afternoon, the sun was shining and his body was aglow. He could hear Daniel moving around downstairs and the trickle of water in the gutters. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked outside; the snow had almost entirely melted.
    IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when they began their ascent to Jerusalem. Shoshi had had the driver stop at a roadside pizza and falafel stand and rousted them out of the van, insisting that they try to eat, but the smell of deep-fried and spicy food made everyone indecisive and nauseated. The smell of the morgue clung to them; Matt sniffed Daniel’s hair and shuddered. Finally, Shoshi ordered a basket of pitas and some Cokes, which they took into the van. Matt looked out the window, chewing a warm pita, as the highway began to ascend. He was sitting next to Daniel now, his knee pressed against his, wondering what was going to happen next. He thought about seeing Gal, who was almost six years old now; she was a quick, intense child who they all were sure was gifted. Noam he barely knew; the baby had been only a few months old when he had last seen him. He was a cheerful, easy baby with legs that came in fat segments, like dinner rolls. He’d been born after two miscarriages following Gal’s birth, and was considered such a gift by his parents that they were, as if amazed out of every expected impulse, completely mellow around him. Matt remembered that last visit, Noam sitting placidly in his bouncy chair in the corner of the dining room as they ate supper; midmeal, Ilana looked over and joked, “Hey, someone should pay attention to that baby over there.” The name Noam, Daniel had explained to Matt, came from the word na’im , which means “pleasant,” or maybe “pleasing”—“nice,” but without the banality that word carried in English.
    He looked fiercely out the window, deliberately blocking from his mind any thoughts of the future—of those kids living in his house, of himself as the guardian of two children. He thought about playing Uno with Gal, and what a sore loser she was, how she stormed out of the room when she lost and her father had to go speak with her. And almost from the time she learned to talk, if she was in the room, you couldn’t tell other adults about the cute thing she’d said or she’d pitch a fit.
    She was scathing about American accents, and imitated with withering accuracy the way Matt said her name till he learned to make not just the ah sound in the middle, but also the l sound at the end, pronounced not with a thick American tongue lazing at the bottom of the mouth but with a sharper tongue tapping the middle of the upper palate. For all that, Matt adored her and couldn’t resist pushing the limits with her, making her giggle and howl in protest at the same time. He knew she adored him, too; she greeted him by rocketing into his arms, and he’d make loud strangling noises when she gripped him around the neck. Ilana and Joel had instilled in her a good sense of humor; they were the kind of parents for whom that was a value. Since she was tiny: Is