Archive of Our Own ^beta

Yonah Ziegler sits at his usual chair in the wardroom after a more than draining turn as the Officer of the Deck for the middle watch, a rapidly cooling mug of coffee in his hands. He had sighed the moment he did the math after the ops brief last night, knowing he’d be stuck taking the ship through merging into the traffic of the Luzon Strait in eight-foot tall waves. He had to relieve his conning officer of the conn no less than four times, and he can honestly hardly blame the poor ensign for losing his cool. 

He lifts his head wearily at the sight of shined boots stepping into the wardroom, and curses every ounce of effort he has ever devoted to learning the tells on his CO’s face the moment Commander Pereira stops in front of him, her face drawn. His heart hits the bottom of his stomach. 

Suddenly he’s Huck again, all of eighteen years old with his hands in his pockets, his sister and best friend all but shoving him up the steps to the podium to give the valedictory speech at their high school graduation. 

He mumbles out a bracha he hopes is the right one, stumbling over the last words as the phrase dayan ha-emet sticks to the roof of his mouth. Commander Pereira’s muted amein softens the ragged wound that is growing in his chest, but he can feel it starting to sting.

Before he can process just how adrift he feels, he’s got a go-bag in hand and his butt in a seat on a Navy helicopter taking off from the flight deck of the ship. The hull number fades as the helicopter climbs higher and higher over the churning sea. His mind is a blur of static and stillness. 

A piece of his soul is missing, it feels like. 

He knew on some level that he would miss things when he enlisted. It had really sunk in when he had not made it to say his goodbyes to his father, away on a months-long deployment that took him to the other end of the globe. 

He had never imagined missing this, simply because he had never dared fathom a scenario where he was here and Molly was gone. He was the one who signed up for a life of uniforms and frontlines. He should have gone first. 

Hopping from the helicopter onto an Army transport flight out of a base in the Philippines means it’s been just over a day since the news got to him through his CO. He stumbles into his parents’ house running on fumes, having spent more than fifty hours awake. His Momma catches him, her arms strong and sure around him as he shakes. 

Her face is pale and her eyes are as red as her hair, but her arms are strong around him. His Mom is a mess of placid hyperproductivity he knows hides her frantic energy, just as she was when his father died. 

He sleeps in Molly’s old bed. He wakes, and she’s still gone. He wakes and he still has to get up, tear his shirt, throw dirt over a closed wooden box in a hole lined with tattered and worn holy books, and become something unnameable. 

They’ve all become something unnameable. 

He wants to find comfort in the fact that his sister and his father are together again, but the fact that there is no name for his newfound state of having lost half of who he is, that his mothers are not just widows but parents who have lost a child are what sticks pins in his every step, his every breath. 

They sit shiva, three low chairs and covered mirrors and people streaming in and out of the house he grew up in for days that run into each other. Noah, his aunt Donna, and his uncle Josh come and hold them together, as do the rest of his uncles and aunts who have watched them grow up. There are fewer members of their family around with each passing year, but the ones who are still show up for them. The death of his barely-older big sister, the rabbi for the shul they grew up going to, means countless people sending food and lending hands. It means they have a minyan many times over every single day for Kaddish. It means he hears over and over and over how his big sister touched their lives. 

He remembers the shaky girl she was, the one who never thought she would see the end of high school, let alone build something of her life. If only she could see her life now. 

Shiva means he sits on the low chair he has claimed as his more hours than he knows, taking stock of all the years he has lived and all the years she will not have. He’s young enough, just so, that there will likely be a point he will have lived without her longer than he got to live with her, but he cannot stomach that thought. An act in the play of his life just slammed shut, and it is a long one he thought would be the undercurrent for the entire show. 

Sitting shiva for his sister is intermission, it seems, and he had been under the impression they were just getting to the good part. 

He already knows more than he’s willing to know about what happened. He knows it was sudden. He knows she didn’t suffer long. He knows she never wanted to be tethered to this plane by extraordinary measures. He knows, perhaps most importantly, that she saved four lives that were waiting on transplant lists. 

He wishes he knew what to do with himself in the aftermath. How to be the one left behind. 

Holding his mothers’ hands is all he can do as they move into shloshim and he needs to get back to work. 

He tells them to take care of each other. They dare not do more than make him promise to be careful. He turns, and he’s back on a plane to rejoin the ship at the SAC, fundamentally changed. 

With the ship in harbor for a short while longer, he finds time to call uncle Josh when their time zones line up humanely, even if the time difference still baffles his uncle. This unnameable state of being is something they now unfortunately share, and as much as he resents it, it is a balm. 

It is nearly a full week later when he realizes his sister died at the turn of the Jewish year, as the sun set on the end of Elul. The obligatory two day stay on her funeral is what let him be there to bury her. The gap between the last soil being thrown on her coffin and the beginning of shiva explained the fact that he had been gone from work longer than he thought. 

He calls his Momma and his Mom in their morning the day before they put out to sea again, and ends the call with a belated shana tovah . He lets his Mom remind him that Hashem waited as long as possible to take Molly. He tries not to think about why she was taken in the past year, young by nearly any metric. 

When he sleeps he dreams of big waves and the haftarah portion he did not hear this year. He dreams of his sister with the wind in her hair and trouble in her eyes. He dreams of calling her Moll, and her calling him Huck. He dreams, he wakes, and he puts out to sea. He will always be changed by this unnameable force that has slammed shut a discrete portion of his life. There will always be a line between these two parts – his life with Molly, and his life after Molly. Not without , but even so.