Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer Page A

their openness. Was it Sam’s injury? The never-asked question of how it happened? She’d always assumed they were protecting each other with that silence, but what if they were trying to injure, to transfer the wound from Sam to themselves? Or was it older? Did the withholding from each other predate meeting each other? Believing that would change everything.
    The resentment that was fear, that was resignation, that was shame, that was distance, that was closeness, was too heavy to carry all day, every day. So where to put it down? On the kids, of course. Jacob and Julia were both guilty, but Jacob was guiltier. He’d become increasingly snippy with them, because he knew they would take it. He pushed, because they wouldn’t push back. He was afraid of Julia, but he wasn’t afraid of them, so he gave them what was hers.
    “Enough!” he said to Max, his voice rising to a growl. “Enough.”
    “Enough yourself,” Max said.
    Jacob and Julia met eyes, registering that first act of talking back.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Nothing.”
    Jacob let it rip: “I’m not discussing things with you, Max. I’m tired of discussion. We discuss
too much
in this family.”
    “Who’s discussing?” Max asked.
    Deborah went to her son and said, “Take a breath, Jacob.”
    “I take too many breaths.”
    “Let’s go upstairs for a second,” Julia said.
    “No. That’s what
we
do with
them
. Not what
you
do with
me
.” Then, turning back to Max: “Sometimes, in life, in a family, you have to just do the right thing without endlessly parsing and negotiating. You get with the program.”
    “Yeah, get with the pogrom,” Irv said, imitating his son.
    “Dad, just stop. OK?”
    “I can lift the whole kitchen,” Benjy said, touching his father’s arm.
    “Kitchens aren’t liftable,” Jacob said.
    “They are.”
    “No, Benjy. They are not.”
    “You’re so
strong
,” Julia said, her fingers wrapped around each of Benjy’s wrists.
    “Immolated,” Benjy said. And then, in a whisper: “
I can lift our kitchen
.”
    Max looked to his mother. She closed her eyes, unwilling or unable to protect him as she did his little brother.
    —
    A godsent dogfight on the street brought everyone to the window. It wasn’t actually a fight, just two dogs barking at a smug squirrel on a branch. Still, godsent. By the time the family reassumed positions in the kitchen, the previous ten minutes felt ten years old.
    Julia excused herself and went up to the shower. She never showered in the middle of the day, and was surprised by the force of the hand that guided her there. She could hear sound effects coming from Sam’s room—he was obviously ignoring the first commandment of his exile—but she didn’t stop.
    She closed and locked the door of the bathroom, put down her bag, undressed, and examined herself in the mirror. Reaching her arm to the sky, she could follow a vein as it traversed the underside of her right breast. Her chest had sunk, her belly had protruded. These things had happened in tiny, imperceptible increments. The wisps of pubic hair reaching to her belly had darkened—the skin itself seemed to have. None of it was news, but process. She had observed, and felt, the unwanted renovation of her body, at least since Sam was born: the expansion and ultimate shrinking of her breasts, the settling and pockmarking of her thighs, the relaxing of all that was firm. Jacob had told her, on their second visit to the inn, and on other occasions, that he loved her body exactly as it was. But despite believing him, some nights she felt a need to apologize to him.
    And then she remembered it. Of course she did: it was put there for her to remember at this moment. She didn’t know it at the time. She didn’t know why she, who had never stolen anything in her life, was stealing. This was why.
    She raised one foot onto the sink and held the doorknob to her mouth, warming and wetting it with her breathing. She parted the lips of her pussy and