It is not until the third day that the Husband appears at the hospital. He arrives carrying a plastic Castro bag from which he removes homemade sandwiches packed in tinfoil for everyone, and a large thermos of sweet tea. The brown felt hat has been replaced with a straw one for summer, which he hangs on a hook behind the door. He has been away, and came as fast as he could, he explains. He does not say where. Maybe the others know, or maybe for them it is irrelevant: the point is that he is here with them now. Remy and Iris greet him with smiles, glancing at their mother, whom they seem to hope will not say or do anything untoward. Tamar watches him take her own mother’s hand. He doesn’t assert himself into the family dynamic, and yet at the same time he seems simply to be accepted there, with kindness and gratitude. Watching him, Tamar thinks of something Katie sometimes said: that there is no man anywhere so difficult, that there is not some woman somewhere dying to take care of him. If, having had enough of being a woman, she decides to throw in the towel at last—if such a thing were actually possible without extreme hardship, and every form of pain—could Tamar also give herself over to those that would bring her up the stairs to an unknown door, where a woman would be waiting, perhaps a whole family, to take her in with open arms and no questions asked?

Ilana insists that they all take a break and go out to sit under the trees in the playground for a while. Shlomi and Dan haven’t left the hospital since they arrived, and the sun and air will do them good. Tamar goes down with everyone, but once outside realizes that she’s forgotten her handbag with her sunglasses. Returning upstairs, she pauses at the door of Tom’s room and looks in to find the Husband sitting next to his crib in a shaft of light from the window, talking quietly to the baby in his strange language. The moment has no logic, it exists outside of reason, nor does it carry anything inauthentic. No one and nothing has any more right to it than the new child, foreign like every baby who arrives from the unknown, and the foreign old man who now begins to softly sing to him.