Homesick

by Ariela Zucker

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Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

My daughter and I speak almost every day. Perhaps it eases the sense of distance—or perhaps it heightens the anxiety. It’s hard to tell anymore. The calls have become their own ritual, like lighting a candle in the dark. In the background, the kids are laughing, screaming, running. Every so often, one of them sticks their face close to the camera. A gap-toothed grin. A silly song. A blur of movement. And then they vanish again. For a few precious seconds, I’m there—folded into the surreal life they’re living now.

“Remember the Gulf War?” I ask. It was thirty-four years ago. She was eleven, but of course she remembers. Some things settle too deep to forget.

Chavik, my cousin, came to stay with us then, with her young daughter, Shira. Our house in the desert offered a relatively quiet refuge. Their house in a Tel Aviv suburb took a direct hit. A missile through the roof. A nursery turned to rubble. There was nothing to return to.

“I remember,” my daughter says, giggling lightly from her perch on the couch in her mother-in-law’s apartment in Jerusalem. They had left their Tel Aviv home just days after the nightly bombings began. “The kids were too scared,” she explains, as if explanation were needed.

“We sat in that ridiculous safe room made of plastic sheets,” I say, half-laughing. “With the duct tape and the gas masks lined up along the wall. We pretended we were safe.”

It feels like I’m narrating someone else’s story. A younger woman. Brave, determined. Too tired to be afraid. We were so young then. Young enough to believe that fear could be folded up and stored in a drawer when morning came.

“And no Iron Dome to protect us,” I add, though we both know the Dome isn’t a guarantee—it’s a prayer disguised as technology.

“Then we gave up and went to the bomb shelter instead,” she says, and I can hear her smile change shape.

“And Keren said—‘Boom!’” I laugh, remembering how her little sister mimicked the sounds as if it were a hide-and-seek game. It became part of our family lore, a way to reclaim a moment we had no control over.

“We’ve come a long way since then,” my daughter says. Her voice shifts—calmer, quieter, more inward.

Have we? I wonder. But I don’t say it aloud. The silence after her sentence is answer enough. We’ve built layers of protection, and yet we still descend stairs in the night. We still text Are you okay? and wait for the little checkmarks to appear. We still pray.

“Have a quiet night,” I say, though we both know it won’t be. Words are like amulets—we say them, anyway, hoping they might help.

Later, in my bed thousands of miles away, I keep the warning app on my cell phone open. I shouldn’t, but I do. From the stillness of my room in Maine, I listen to sirens. I watch the map, the red square glowing in the dark like a beating heart.

I imagine them—my daughter, my grandchildren—descending the stairs to the shelter in the middle of the night. The youngest clutching her stuffed bear, the older one pretending she isn’t scared. I picture my daughter uttering calming words. I pray for their safety. I cannot do more.

In the morning, I will call. We’ll talk, as we always do. Exchange words like bandages. Wrap the silence. Repeat the same stories, because they are all we have to hold onto.

And I will say, again, Have a quiet night.

And she will answer, You too, Mama.

Born in Jerusalem, Ariela spent two decades between the U.S. and a Judean desert town before settling in Maine in 2001. There, she and her husband ran a motel near Acadia for sixteen years. A lifelong bilingual writer, Ariela now devotes myself fully to writing in retirement, drawing on a rich tapestry of places, people, and memories that have shaped her journey. She offers online classes and blogs regularly at Paper Dragon (http/:www.paperdragon.me)