Page 126 of War

I glance at him again. “Why do you want to know?” I ask.

“I want to know everything about you, wife,” he says, just as he did earlier.

I take a deep breath. “I draw hamsas for my father.” I can’t even say how many weapons I’ve decorated with the image of an evil eye fitted into the palm of a hand.

“Why hamsas?” War asks.

Unconsciously, I reach for my bracelet, fingering the small metal charm as I focus back up at the sky.

“Hamsas are known among Jews as the ‘Hand of Miriam,’” I explain. “Any time my father would see a piece of jewelry with a hamsa on it, he’d buy it for me—because it was my namesake.” The hamsa I wear is the last bit of jewelry I have from him. Everything else I’ve lost over the last decade. I’m petrified of the day I’ll lose this, too.

“And in honor of my mother,” I continue, “I’d sometimes carve a sword—or sometimes a sword piercing a heart—into my bows. The sword is in honor of what I learned from her books on weaponry, and the heart … well, that one’s for self-explanatory reasons.” My own heart aches now, revisiting all the reasons why I so fondly cherished my family and why I so desperately missed them.

The horseman is quiet. He doesn’t do very well, I’ve come to find, with difficult emotions like grief and sadness.

“It’s strange being a human,” War finally says. “For the longest time, I watched what it was like to be a human, but I never felt it. I didn’t understand the true bliss of touching a woman or tasting food or feeling the sun on my skin. I knew of it, but I didn’tunderstandit until I became a man.

“There are things Istilldon’t understand,” he says, almost to himself.

War might not know it, but he’s captivating when he talks like this, as though he has one foot in this world and one foot in another.

“What sorts of things?” I ask.

“Loss,” he says. He’s quiet for a moment. “It’s one of the most common aspects of war, and yet I’ve never experienced it.”

“You better hope you never do,” I say, thinking of my family all over again.

Loss is a wound that never heals. Never never never. It scabs over, and for a time you can almost forget it’s there, but then something—a smell, a sound, a memory—will split that wound right open, and you’ll be reminded again that you’re not whole. That you’ll never fullybewhole again.

“Tell me more about them,” War says. “Your family.”

My throat works. I don’t know if I have it in me to keep talking about them. But then my lips part and the words come pouring out.

“My father was the wisest man I knew,” I say. “But to be fair, I only knew him as a child, and when you’re a kid, adults in general seem very wise.” I search the sky, trying to remember more. “My dad was funny—really, really funny.” I smile as I say it. “He could make you laugh, usually at your own expense. It was okay, though, because he made fun of himself all the time too. He was good at celebrating everyone’s rough edges.

“And he was so …real.” There were many times when he’d talk to me as though I were an equal. “With some people, you can never get beneath the surface, you know?” I say, even though the horseman probably doesn’t know. “With my father, you always could.”

I try to hold onto his memory.

“I’ve forgotten his voice,” I admit. “That’s the most terrifying part of it all. I can’t remember the way he sounded. I can remember things he’s said, but not that.”

It’s quiet for several seconds. The horseman doesn’t say anything, he just strokes my hair.

“My mother was quiet but strong. I learned that after my father died when she suddenly had to singlehandedly take care of me and my sister. Her love was a fierce thing.”

I fall to silence.

“What happened to them?” War says.

I’ve already told him about how my father died. As for my mother and sister …

“There was an accident.”

The water rushes in—

I touch my throat. “That’s where I got this scar.” I can’t bring myself to share the rest of the story.

War’s hand stops stroking my hair. After a moment, his fingers move down the column of my throat. They pause when they get to the scar. His thumb smooths over the raised skin between my collarbones.