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him up and he’d become quite famous for a time. Maybe immortality was also waiting just around the corner for our Keren, or the one who loved her, he thought, grinning.
    He emerged into the cool night air and fluorescent lights. Up ahead was the Efrat junction, where one took a right to Gush Etzion and a left to the Dehaishe shantytown and Bethlehem.
    He turned right, his heart skipping a beat. Just ahead, past the large Jewish townships of Efrat and Elazar, was the most dangerous stretch of all. It was there the road grew narrow and dark, and traffic thinned. On either side of the road thick, beautiful olive trees—trees he had always loved—had become sinister terrorist camouflage. Just months before, terrorists had used them as cover, attacking a young family on their way home from a wedding. Three people had been killed. Afterward, the army had begun to bulldoze them, but do-gooder rabbis from America had organized protests with the local orchard owners, blocking the bulldozers and helping to replant them.
    He glanced back nervously at liana, who was half asleep. Then, as was his custom, he took out his cell phone and dialed Elise.
    She picked up immediately. “Jon?”
    “Yes.”
    “How was it?”
    “Oh, Elise, if you just could have seen her… She was so beyond thrilled. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think her feet touched the floor at all!”
    She laughed. “So where are you?”
    “I’m just before the turnoff to Maaleh Sara. I’ll be home in less than ten minutes. liana’s practically asleep,” he whispered, wanting to keep it that way.
    “All right. See you soon. Love you to the moon,” she added cheerfully.
    But he might not have heard her, she thought, because he didn’t answer “and back again.”

Chapter Five

    Maaleh Sara,
Judea Monday, May 6, 2002
7:03 P.M.
    A ND THIS is what Elise will remember: the phone a lifeless, plastic corpse in her hand; and her hand suddenly old, shaking, as if with Parkinson’s. She will remember too the infinite slowness of the second hand as it struggles like a fly through honey from five to six, and from six to seven… She will remember thinking: ten minutes, that’s all the ride should take, if everything was all right.
    And why shouldn’t it be, after all? She will not remember getting painfully out of bed, standing by the window, her eyes peering into the distance, her ears straining to pick up the crunch of car wheels over pebbles, the gentle suck of rubber meeting tar.
    But she will remember the moment she knew that the ten minutes had passed, the moment that the innocent, quiet driveway was transformed into something dangerous and sinister. And she’ll recall the frantic redialing of Jon’s cell phone, the heartstopping denouement of each hopeful ring, ring, ring as it fell into an impersonal silence that settled in her suddenly hollow chest.
    The act of calling her neighbor Joshua, the yishuvs security officer, with his access to special beepers, and unlisted army intelligence phone numbers and a bulletproof four-by-four, she will not recall. It was, after all, what needed to be done; it was the part in the scenario that seemed already written and acted, almost will-less, along with the knowledge that he’d take his car and drive out to where Jon had last called, and in minutes, a mere breathing interval, she’d know.
    She will not want to remember that some part of her already knew and that the knowing felt like a strange, hot wind, the kind that made one’s face shine, sunburnt, kissed by acid fear. The time it actually took Joshua to get back to her will not be remembered as it was, a mere fifteen minutes. It will feel like four seasons: spring-summer, the idea that soon there would be two cars in the driveway, Joshua’s and Jon’s, and both would be waving and smiling. And Jon would get out and walk around the side of the car to take liana out of her seat belt and help her out of the car. And she would see her baby in the pink