Mrs. Friedman, the eim bayit, wants to see the shading and light in the professionally printed version, so she asks Maya to have the final printed and to drop it in.

She’s not there, though, so Maya puts it on her desk and looks around. A little boy is peering at a laptop screen. In the lounge two mothers are chatting over coffee, little kids are playing on the floor with Magna-Tiles. She spies Chana in the garden, draping laundry over a line. It’s cozy. Homey, even.

The kid with the computer snorts. “What’s up?” Maya asks him.

He turns to her. He’s got blond hair that tufts upward in different directions, so that his kippah perches precariously atop it, and round brown eyes, and looks around eight.

“I have to make a PowerPoint for school, and it’s not working.” He flicks the screen.

She leans over, shows him how to add a blank slide.

“Wanna see something cool?”

He nods.

She clicks on the design tab and shows him how to add a background.

“Cool. Can you add a fighter jet?”

“An F-16?” Her nephew is just this age.

He nods, a shaking of the head that goes on for almost a minute and makes her laugh when his kippah falls into his lap. There’s something theatrical about this kid.

When the eim bayit calls to approve the ad, plus size adjustments for WhatsApps and emails, Maya asks if they’re in need of volunteers for the kids in the afternoons. Mrs. Freidman hesitates. “Usually, we go through a whole interview process, but we’re a bit short-staffed at the moment.”

“I could come in tomorrow, for when the kids come home from school. To help with the homework.”

Her voice is filled with relief. “Oh, that would be wonderful. Just for the meantime, you understand.”

“Of course. Just for the meantime.”

When she hangs up, Maya’s heart is lighter than it has been for a long time.

There are times when you fall through a crack and you’re not in life anymore, you’re in a story. In a story, time has a different quality. Each moment slows down so that it drags with an ache, or it speeds up so that you are breathless. And the world looks and sounds different. Ordinary things grow shadows. Faces elongate and twist and become strange, frightening. A tree is an escape or a missile, ready to trammel you. People walk and you wonder how they do it, just walk nonchalantly down the street as if they are not made of lead, as if it doesn’t take all their human strength to put one foot onto the ground. As if then moving their second leg is not a feat of engineering or coordination that bewilders and confounds.

There it is. You are in the place of story.

So when your parents say to you, where are you for Shabbos and you say, at home, smiling sweetly, they just swallow it, like you knew they would, and think, aw, our sweet shanah rishonah couple just want to spend time on their island.

They don’t think that the couple is a non-couple. They don’t imagine that every time she takes a step toward him, every time they have a long, involved conversation or a walk where she opens her heart and he holds it, he understands her and sees her… and then, the next day or the next week, he disappears again. Not even into a cave, to a different planet.

She had mentioned it to a friend, who had laughed. “Oh, husbands.”

But her friend’s laugh — the carefree chuckle at the end — had told her something. She didn’t laugh much, anymore. Certainly not when Uri was around. Unless he made a joke, of course, when she would put a tinkle into her voice and then he would walk around all happy with himself for half an hour and she could relax and breathe and pretend that everything was just fine. Just fine.

Three days before Chanukah and there’s a buzz as the women make supper.

Lunch is made by a cook, and is pretty good, but supper is made by the residents and it can be hit or miss. Chana has decided to make spaghetti and sauce, but only for herself and her two kids, and Ruchele has decided that this is selfish and she tells this to Chana, which is applauded by the other women, for she is asserting her point of view. As well, everyone loves Ruchele’s creamed pasta and then they wouldn’t have to make supper, either, because she loves to make enough for everyone. Chana, in the meantime, has told Ruchele that she will not be a people pleaser and make supper for 14, but is doing what works for her and for her children. And if she uses up all the pasta sauce, well, there are eggs and even tomatoes — make your own, imagine that, almost as good as pick your own.

When the argument — or debate, as they prefer to call it — has died down, Maya hears that the children are going to be treated to some culture. The municipality has rustled up a budget to send the kids on a trip to the Israel Museum: a display of menorahs and an art project. When Nati hears he runs up to Maya. “Will you sit next to me on the van?”

The van is parked half a block away from the museum, and there’s what, three umbrellas between them, and the rain has turned into hail, which is coming down in a storm of fury. Maya looks around and assesses the mood. They could wait inside the van until the storm passes: The driver might, theoretically, be amenable. He’ll grumble, but he’s sweet enough, an old Sephardic guy, probably just waiting for them here, not rushing off to another job. And the kids: They all have good coats — last week’s trip to the local gemach, she and the eim bayit had come back with a good haul and the kids had pounced on them. She’d been afraid that they would turn up their noses, but turns out kids in shelters don’t have the entitlement bug, and it was good stuff, anyway. A Tommy Hilfiger one was among them.

So they have coats. And how will they react to staying in the van? Nati is antsy. For him, the hail will be an adventure. The little ones? No, they’ll start to cry.

But Nati is already bouncing on his seat, leaning forward to grab Yaeli’s braids.

She offers the mothers: I’ll take Nati in and you come after, ’kay?

They nod, grateful to wait out the storm.

She takes his hand. “One, two, three, run for it.”

They run. It makes her breathless at first, but then she starts to laugh, and Nati laughs along with her, and as they line up under the shelter to show their tickets, she thinks about how she is good at this, reading people. Sensing their frustration before they’ve even acted on it.

It’s one of the gifts of being a bas zekunim: As soon as her mother entered the room, before, even, Maya could hear the rhythm of her walk, how heavy the tread, her pace, and if it was even or if her left leg — broken a few years ago and still causing her trouble — was dragging slightly. Before her mother even entered the room. Tamara, her older sister was there once, when Maya had stopped what she was doing, cocked her ears, and told her that their mother was in pain. Before she had even entered the room, Maya had the kettle on and her mother’s painkillers waiting for her on a glass saucer. Tamara had called her a prophet, or maybe a witch, but it was just her sixth sense.

She used it now, with Uri. Okay, not before he entered the room, but she could tell — not from the expression on his face, but from something more amorphous — what kind of mood he was in. And either she would paste a smile on her face and wonder if she could coax him out into the world, if she could only be soothing enough, not hovering (suffocating, he called it, when she had thought it was caring) but also giving him just enough attention and no more. Or he would beam a smile at her and the colors of the kitchen would turn a shade brighter, and everything would be okay, because Uri’s world was okay, more than okay, really, bright and beautiful and that little niggle that things might change could be ignored for a time.

He doesn’t like it that she comes to the shelter. She’s taken to downplaying it, not mentioning it. It makes him tense and she wonders why, what raw nerve does it touch. Her own parents think it’s beautiful, they’re proud that she can reach out to others; they would never understand the way Uri feels threatened by it.

She and Nati go ahead, past the Byzantium pottery collection, and the artists’ depiction of October 7, complete with creepy music. They reach Lights of the Future. They’re handed headsets and phones, and Nati presses all the buttons in a row, so that he’s listening to a woman apologize that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been temporarily relocated, due to the war. Maya pulls off the headset; looking after Nati is enough for her. He’s taken off his shoes and is sliding down the long ramp that leads from Jewish Life to Synagogues Around the World.

They sit together on two beanbags in an alcove on the side of the museum corridor. The floor is huge, dark marble slabs that wouldn’t look out of place in a graveyard. There’s a water fountain just to their side, and someone looks down at them as he bends over to fill his bottle. From their angle, they see legs: people walking to and fro, small groups, a huddle of children, a mother dragged by a toddler.

“What’s up?” she asks. Nati has suddenly been overcome by tiredness.

Nothing.

Vaguely, she registers noises. Slamming of doors. The crackle of walkie-talkies, or is it the nasal recordings of the virtual tour guide, you are now standing in front of exhibit E56, a group of bride dolls from Yemen, given to the young girls before they were betrothed.

She looks at her phone. Another hour and the van will be there to pick them up.

He reaches deep into his bag. It’s a yellow drawstring bag, one of the gifts given when he registered for the summer day camp run by the Iriyah. Not that he had a choice. It’s the kind of bag that can carry swimming gear and a bottle of water, a package of Oreo cookies.

He pulls out his hand and she wonders what gift he will offer: a soggy sandwich? A few chocolate Clics stuck to the bottom of the package?

He pulls and the surprise gets stuck, he has to remove his hand and open the toggle and pull open the bag from the top.

He spills it out onto the floor and there is a clang on the marble that makes Maya jump. A hollow musical sound of metal hitting stone. And then there it is, spilled out onto the floor in front of them.

A menorah.

She blinks.

Brass. A base with eight candleholders, an elaborate brass back, topped with two eagles. Imperial eagles. It probably originated in Austria or Hungary, had probably survived two world wars and the disintegration of a world. More, it’s probably even older: outlasting generations, year after year, century after century of Maoz Tzur and flickering flames.

She reaches out to touch it, but then pulls back her hand.

Nati didn’t just pilfer any old ten shekel menorah from a stand along Rechov Bar Ilan. This is a menorah from the collection.

From the Light Up the World exhibition, open to the public between December 1 and 30, in honor of Chanukah, and with references to the other festivals of lights in different cultures around the world, including Islam and Christianity, because look how multicultural we are.

Taken, of course, from that big, drafty hall, with the gray carpet and the ramp, which the kids saw and took off their shoes and went sliding down on their socks, because it was the only part that wasn’t covered in fuzzy, scratchy gray carpet and instead was slippery. She had thought it was the most interesting part of the trip.

But apparently not.

There were bigger prizes than a slide.

An 18th-century menorah.

Nati looks at her and she looks at the menorah and the only thing she can think to say is, “But you don’t need a chanukiah. What about the one you made in the pottery class last week? You even painted it with that special shiny paint.”

He moves his lips around in that way that Nati does when he’s nervous or thinking or just because and then lifts his hands into the air. “It broke.”

“It broke.”

He nods.

“Ah.”

She rubs her forehead. Keep calm.

“You can make another one if you want. There’s clay left over. We can do it together.”

Just keep calm.

The place is covered in CCTV. How long exactly until the pair of them are surrounded by police officers?

How long till they notice the empty spot on the glass shelf on the wall?

Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb, leaving the display open. Why didn’t they put them in locked cases? The stupid pieces of broken pottery are all enclosed in glass, why not an 18th-century menorah?

Although of course, it would be easy to pocket a shard of pottery, then put it on the mantelpiece at home, point it out to guests — oh, this is a piece of Canaanite pottery. Picked it up from the Israel Museum. A conversation piece.

Okay.

Okay. What next?

Soon enough — any minute, really — there’ll be police sirens and alarm systems. There’ll be a search of the premises, probably a search of everyone present; a mess. A mess, mess, mess.

Her heart is pumping, and Nati looks scared of all a sudden; he can read her face. Just like she can read other people, it’s one of those superpowers that develops when you live with people who want to make your life a misery. He can tell that she’s pressured — understatement, that, but she needs to keep calm.

She is angry, all of a sudden, for the real theft.

All the things that were taken away from him. All the things Nati does not have. How unfair it is that a little innocent kid is not born into trust and love, but into fear. Four walls where his mother listens out for his father’s footsteps, each night hoping and praying that he will not have drunk, or encountered traffic on the way home, that no one will overlook him or offend him, or have stirred up that black squall inside him, so that when he comes through the door, he will not have to unleash the demons that have risen inside him that are waiting to be unleashed.

Maya closes her eyes for a moment. This whole museum. The journey of mankind, testimony to the development of civilization. See, it seems to say. See how we have moved from paganism to a place of civilization.

But what has changed, really?

What great civilization is it that can’t keep kids safe. Or women, either.

Really, in our collective journey toward humanity, how far have we come, anyway?

The floor is cold and she presses her palms against it. She takes Nati’s hands in her own. He is doing funny things with his lips, pressing them together and moving them this way and that.

Suddenly the anger flares up inside her.

It’s such an ugly thing, this little menorah.

And now this. She rubs her eyes with her palms. The beanbag shifts underneath her, and she can hear the faint tumble of its filling as it pours and shifts.

Well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have a beautiful menorah? What else does he have in his life?

She closes her eyes. Nope. I don’t really think that.

Well, what do you think?

Her head is buzzing. The menorah. The menorah.

She lifts Nati’s hand and looks him in the eye. “Listen, kid, we have to give it back.”

She gets up and holds out her hand and he takes it. He picks up the menorah with his other hand, and together they return to the exhibit. The place is crawling with museum staff and police, and she finds a sweet young man with a museum uniform and thrusts the menorah into his hands. “Here you go. One of the kids wanted a look. A mistake, okay?”

Baffled, the man looks at the menorah in his hand and Maya gives a little wave and says, Well, we’re off to catch our ride home.

Maya is invited to the staff meeting, to sit in on the discussion of Nati and his grand museum heist. She’s only relieved that they didn’t hold her responsible; she had called Mrs. Freidman and told her the story as soon as they got back. Chagit, the social worker, begins by asking all of them for childhood memories of theft.

Maya crosses and uncrosses her legs. Group therapy, much? But still, she thinks of when she was a child and they were giving out bookmarks at the library. She had taken three, because she was always in the middle of more than one book at a time; this way she wouldn’t have to memorize the page number or fold down the corner of the book and then feel guilty because it didn’t belong to her. The librarian was young, with long, dyed-blonde hair, and she saw the three bookmarks in Maya’s hand. She had raised herself up off her swivel chair with her arms straddling the desk and said, hey, there, you little thief.

Maya’s face had gone red, her cheeks had burned, it was like a coal had been touched to her cheeks and then her throat. She’d dropped the bookmarks and they had landed on the floor, in the dusty carpet, and were trodden on by a service dog. She had fled the library and hadn’t returned for a few months, until she realized that the librarian had left the children’s department and was now working in adult non-fiction.

But she had been angry that she had not been allowed to explain. That she had been branded and condemned, as if she was some pickpocket, instead of a member of the library and who just wanted a bookmark for each of her three books.

Chagit claps her hands. “No need to share. Just to enter a space of empathy.”

The eim bayit again brings up the complaint that Nati eats everything he can find. Chagit nods, opens her eyes wide with understanding, and says, yes, we’ve talked about this a few times.

Even Maya has heard about the lock-on-kitchen-cabinet debate, a proposal that is always supported by the eim bayit and nixed by the psychologist and the social worker. No, they say, let him act on his hunger, otherwise it will express itself in other areas; his behavior simply tells a story of deprivation, and when something calms inside him, it will stop by itself. As well, as his mother slowly recovers, we’ll see him doing better.

The eim bayit wants to have a talk with Nati about self-control, pressing the pause button before we act. The OT wonders if he’s looking for sensory stimulation in his search for food: Does he like gum, and what’s he like at brushing his teeth, she asks, only to be reminded that they’re talking about stealing a menorah here.

It’s the staff psychologist who wins out. Seven years of training and all for what, for the magnificent and transformative plan of getting Nati to write an apology letter.

It’s Maya, of course, who actually sits with Nati. They’re in the small therapy room; she hangs up a scribbled sign that says busy, otherwise, the mothers will come in there and sit back on the tatty sofa and schmooze on the phone.

She should take out the puppets and send them off to someplace where one of them says brightly, oh, look, a candy. And then the other will put an exaggerated hand to his cheek and say, oh, no, we don’t have any money. And puppet number one, with the Pinocchio blue cap, whispers, let’s just take it, no one is seeing. But puppet number two says, oh, no, we’re not allowed to steal….

Instead she just sits him on the chair, hands him a pen and paper and dictates:

I am sorry that I took the menorah that does not belong to me. Stealing is wrong and I am very sorry.

Nati grips the pencil so hard that it breaks. A second pencil, and he manages the I and the a of am, but then stubs the tip, which ends up on a crazy angle. He gives a huge sigh that travels through his chest and ends with his head drooping and his kippah hanging over his eyes.

Maya laughs. “Here,” she says. “Let’s switch. You tell me what to write, and I’ll write it.”

He thinks for a minute, “Write what you said before. That was good.”

She does her best to imitate a child’s hand. Then she puts the pencil down and seals it in an envelope. “All set.”

“All set.”

The next day, they are met by the donor of the menorah along with the curator of the exhibition. The museum curator wears a blue rumpled shirt and sandals. The donor has curly hair that is long on one side and shaved on the other. Rings adorn each finger: big, chunky, misshapen silver things that look like they could double as weapons. Not what Maya had expected. She wonders who has briefed them, if anyone, because they both seem friendly, unconcerned with what happened.

The donor sticks out her hand. “Limor.”

Maya takes it and forces herself to shake it with a nice amount of confident pressure. She has rehearsed this speech many times over. That Nati comes from a deprived background, and that the whole thing was probably just a misunderstanding, nothing really happened after all, did it. She opens her mouth to speak but Limor puts up her hand. “I have kids,” she says, and gives her a wink. They walk over to the menorah exhibit and sit down on a bench, four of them in a row.

Limor looks down at Nati. “Listen, stealing is for people who don’t have. Chaser lahem.”

He nods.

“What is it that you don’t have?”

The question makes Maya flinch. What does the kid not have? A home, a father, security, innocence.

“A water bottle.” He holds up both hands and indicates the size.

Maya reaches into her bag and brings out a fresh Mei Eden bottle. She hands it to Nati. His eyes grow wide, long lashes fluttering. He takes it, but doesn’t say anything. But he won’t let go of it either.

Limor kneels down to look at him.

“And now tell me, Nati. Besides the bottle, what do you yes have? Mah yesh lecha?”

He looks at her and shrugs.

And Maya closes her eyes and thinks not of Nati, but of Uri and what she has: the constant dance — husband, stranger, husband, stranger — and the confusion that brings, never knowing if it’s just her, if she’s done something wrong, or if she’s offended him in some way, trodden on his dignity by mistake, by means of some dumb comment or joke. Or if her expectations are too high: Her parents were always best friends, even now they go everywhere together, and her siblings, too, each with their own style, but there’s an ease between them and their spouses. Maybe that’s what’s being stolen from her, an ease. A sense that she’s okay. She’s okay as she is.

She looks up at Nati, still clutching his new bottle and swinging his legs back and forth.

“I’ll tell you what you have, Nati. You have your future, Nati. All your future ahead of you.”

He looks at her, and he probably doesn’t understand a word of what she’s saying.

But it doesn’t matter, he can feel it. She can feel it, too.

“No one is chaser when they have a wide-open future ahead of them.”

The traffic in Jerusalem is terrible, the roads filled with cars jumping lanes and slamming palms on horns, trying to get home in time for Chanukah licht. Mrs. Friedman calls them, so does Nati’s mother, surprisingly enough: Should they light without him? The Chanukah party is starting soon, all the kids have slathered their doughnuts with caramel and toppings, don’t worry, there’s one for Nati, too, but how long? Outside, darkness is falling. The bus is thick with the smell of the heating and damp jackets; now rain starts to fall.

Mrs. Friedman will pick them up from the bus stop, it’s arranged.

Uri….

He’s not answering her calls. She closes her eyes. What waits for her?

She would try to explain, but he would take it badly and then that would be it, poof. Gone.

And when she raised it later on, he would tell her, you’re too sensitive, why do you have to take everything so personally? Why can’t you just move on? It’s because of your parents, I know that. Because they pandered to you, the youngest daughter, the princess. It’s their fault. They didn’t give you what you need in life. The resilience. The confidence. They made you dependent. Look at the way you get hung up over the smallest things that I say or do.

Nati’s eyes are closed and his head rests gently on her arm. It was a good trip, for all that she’d been dreading it. Nati would have a future. A whole community who are going to make sure of it.

And what of her? What kind of future will she have?

She ignores the sick feeling in her stomach and concentrates on the little boy, happy that he’ll be rested for the Chanukah party. The light, the hope, the singing. The whole dining room is festooned in pictures and dreidels that hang from the ceiling, covered in silver glitter. There’ll be chocolate coins and togetherness and it’ll be the first Chanukah of hope for many of these women. She smiles despite herself.

The can see Uri in the window of their apartment, standing in front of the lit chanukiah. Two flames, bright in the darkness. Disappointment weighs down on her chest; he didn’t wait for her after all, he didn’t even try to call her. First night of Chanukah.

She lets herself in, and he’s there in front of her. His handsome features are hard, and a harshness glazes over his eyes.

“Aren’t you going to apologize?” he asks, an edge to his voice.

She shakes her head, not understanding.

“Apologize. Where have you been? Did you not think I was worried?”

“Worried,” she repeats woodenly.

He turns and walks into the dining room, stands in front of the menorah: Small and silver, he got it for his bar mitzvah. It feels foreign to her.

She reaches into the pocket of her coat. Her fingers close around the envelope. Nati’s letter. They had forgotten to give it to the museum staff.

She folds it between her fingers and holds it like a charm.

“No. I don’t need to apologize. It was just one of those things.”

“One of those things.”

“Yes. Life. Life happens. And we just have to make of it what we can. Things go wrong. People mess up. That’s okay.”

“It’s okay to disappear and not tell me?”

“I tried to call you.” She should maybe hold back, why argue on the first night of Chanukah? But Nati and Chana and Chagit silhouette her movements. “And it takes two. You didn’t call me. It’s not okay for me to disappear, but it’s okay for you?”

“What do you mean? I’m here.”

He sinks down onto the couch, that hard fake-leather couch that she can’t stand.

“I mean, you’re here in your body. But half the time, you’re not with me at all. This is not a marriage. It’s like… like an endless game of hide-and-seek.”

She searches his eyes, tries to find something there, but he looks away. What is he thinking?

She sits down, cross-legged, in front of the chanukiah, and stares at the flames until they blur. She blinks and then turns to look at him. He’s covered his face with his hands. She waits. A teardrop runs down his finger, snakes down to his wrist.

It’s not you, a voice inside tells her. It’s the way you make him feel. When your love hits him, he feels all the jagged places inside. Everything he never had.

His shoulders shake gently and her heart twists.

Chaser lo.

What has been stolen from her husband? She doesn’t know, but she can imagine. The healing that can happen when someone is by your side, believing in the you that you are, as well as the you that can be. The trust that a heart, too, can find a home.

She gets up and sits beside him. “Uri. There are people out there who don’t have anything. We could have so much.”

Not far away, a little house is filled with light and noise. Chana’s doughnuts and Ruchele’s creamed pasta and glistening glittery dreidels that hang from the ceiling and there are women and children who are singing and laughing and snitching golden coins from each other. There’s a whole future ahead of them. Ahead of her, too.

Her and Uri.

A sudden lightness enters her, a hope that no one can steal away. She takes a deep breath and it’s like she hasn’t breathed for a long, long time and now there’s all the air in the world, right here for the taking.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 924)