From JFK to Arizona to Palm Springs, California. We fly 2,705.4 miles away from our home.

My ears pop again when we finally land.

Afterward, the three of us stand in the Palm Springs open airport, cool air blowing in our faces and palm trees scraping the sky. It’s the coolest thing ever, being in a place you’ve never been before, breathing air you’ve never breathed before.

“This is going to be great,” Mom says.

Great is another one of her favorite words lately.

Since August 22, I’ve been standing on the wrong side of the highway. The side that has something to hide, where the cars are driving too fast, so they can outrun all the secrets that are chasing them.

At 19, as the oldest, I remember more than my siblings do. I remember hearing my parents fight when they thought I was sleeping, and then I remember a time where they argued but couldn’t care less if I was asleep, and so I naively thought that my father moving out and my parents’ divorce would be easy.

He packed his bags, took his white shirts, and moved into an office for two months until he found a house. And when he did, Avigdor joined him.

We went from five to three.

I celebrated that day. I got a strawberry shortcake and ate it all. It made me sick.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I talk to my brother all the time now, I text him, I tell him I love you. I tell him as your big sister I always will. But I’m forgetting his face and how high up his cheekbones are and how handsome it makes him look. I’m slowly forgetting the tune of his alarm that woke me every morning.

Avigdor’s name flashes across my phone screen. I pick up knowing he is fine, because when we left him with the wrecked car, he was okay, but a small part of me is scared. “Are you okay?” I ask him while Adina and I wait for the conveyer belt to bring the suitcases out. We snack on Jolly Ranchers and relax our jet-lagged feet.

“I’m fine,” he answers.

“The car?”

He coughs. “It’s broken. Completely wrecked.”

Our family is broken.

“But you’re fine, right, no bruises, no scrapes?” I’m so worried. I naively think I can do something from a million miles away. I think I can do something when I know nothing about my new life.

“Yes, Tatty came, he helped, he spoke to the police, and he took me home.”

“Good.”

“How’s California so far?”

“We’re still waiting for our luggage.”

“Call me when you get to the house. Send me pictures, and Chaya, stop sending me pictures of the same sunset over and over again.” I laugh.

Adina interrupts our conversations by jumping to her feet and cheering. “Finally, the suitcases are starting to come!”

WE wait. Mom counts the suitcases repeatedly. She checks all the colors and tags. Her face, when she turns to me, says it all.

“There must be a mistake. Our bags aren’t here, honey.”

“None of them?” I ask. The backpack that has weighed me down the whole day suddenly feels weightless. It has nothing in there, no clothes and no food, except for potato chips.

“None,” she confirms.

“So, to recap,” I start hotly, “we’re hundreds of miles away from home with no clothing, no kosher food, and missing half our family.”

There is silence around the three of us. I stop breathing.

“This was supposed to work. I wanted this vacation to work, and I wanted us to forget about… everything,” Mom tries.

Adina says what I’m thinking. “We can’t just forget this is our life now.”

Since last year Pesach we have celebrated the Yamim Tovim without my father.

It’s so different going to shul without him on Simchas Torah. And it’s so hard standing there in the shul as the fathers sing and dance holding the sifrei Torah and I have no one to look at. At no point can I say, “Look, Tatty’s holding the sefer Torah.”

Succos is so hard, sitting in my uncle and aunt’s succah and eating their food and drinking their water.

I can’t sing the songs, and I shiver in the cold upstate air.

My aunt asks me if I am okay. I nod.

She tells me that she knows I’m missing him, and that this is hard, but I am loved.

I am loved.

I am loved.

But oh, G-d, I don’t feel loved. My parents didn’t love me enough to stay together.

Chanukah is mom buying us a present for every night, pretending and smiling and lighting the candles on Tatty’s big silver menorah.

When Purim comes around, we sit in the crowded shul hearing the Megillah. I wish my father was back and I wish he was reading the Megillah at home while we were eating hamantaschen together and stomping at Haman.

I want to hear him reading the Megillah and he is not here.

Diane, the nice lady in the Palm Springs airport, tells us that our suitcases stayed behind in Arizona. Our stopover.

“Thanks, we figured that much.” I can’t seem to stop myself from being snide.

She ignores me. “We can get it for you by tomorrow, hopefully before two o’clock, probably at eight in the morning,” she assures my mom. “Six in the evening, latest.”

That’s a lot of times.

Tomorrow is Friday. Mom nods. Mom says thank you. Tomorrow is Friday.

“What are we going to do?” I ask. What if Shabbos comes before we have our food, and our clothes? What are we going to sleep in?

We sit on the hard, cold, gray chairs in the airport. Adina is crying. Mom is pacing. I wish I could do something other than thinking about Tatty and hearing the popping in my ears.

“We’re going to be fine,” Mom mutters like she doesn’t even believe it herself.

“Stop saying it. Stop saying that!” I yell. “That is a lie.”

WE have days that we are fine, and we don’t miss him in the way that it is ripping us apart. Sometimes we feel whole.

But most of the time, we’re left gasping and floundering in our new reality and I, I don’t know how to live like this.

I don’t know how to move on. To hold the separate sides of my life and topple without falling.

“We’ll think of something.” Mom says.

Adina gets us Sprite from a soda machine. “Can we think of something after we drink?”

While I drink, I search for clothing stores near me on my phone and I find one less than a mile away.

“Let’s go get some stuff. Just in case,” I say.

“Just in case.”

The store is brightly lit, and they have sneakers and slippers and swim stuff. We try on sunglasses and funny hats. We laugh a lot.

We’ll go swimming tomorrow in the house we’re renting for a week. We’ll climb mountains and rocks and we’ll stand at the very end of a rock that is more like a cliff with arms spread wide.

There’ll be cute cacti lining the streets.

I’ll wake up to a window wide open and watch the sunset every morning at five forty-two.

I’ll eat cherry pie filling out of the can.

My ears will stop popping and our suitcases will arrive.

California will be amazing and breathtaking and everything Mom wanted it to be. A break and an escape and a place to rest.

“We’ll be fine,” Mom repeats for the umpteenth time.

I squeeze her arm. “Yeah, we will.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 890)