Ari, her first husband, was an impressive Egyptian soccer player. He remembers asking Ari one time about the conflict in the Middle East and the athlete telling him about his time in the Israeli army. Although he’d never been under fire, the experience had been enough for Ari to know he never wanted to be a participant in war ever again. 

He thinks of Ari as having the archetypal facial structure and build of an Arab man. When she married Ari, her parents almost disowned her because her mother disliked that he was poor and had dark skin. Her mother barely escaped the Nazi’s, but she still doesn’t believe that she’s Jewish and she remains a hostage in Israel. 

He hadn’t seen her or Ari in years. Since then, she’d emigrated to Maine and married an American named Michael. Today, he, his wife, and kids are having lunch with the couple and their child, Eli. She and him stayed on the boat dock after lunch ended and caught up on their families and what happened with Ari. 

She tells him that she loves her life with Michael and Eli, but that they are both gone at school and work all week and she doesn’t have many friends. He asks her if Ari had ever suspected that he and her had been more than friends when they’d been together, but she says he never picked up on the flirting. Then, she asks him how he can stand to live here where people hate him based on the color of his skin, but he says he doesn’t know where else he would go. When he asks her how Ari feels about the daily shootings of Arab children on the West Bank, she says she doesn’t know. 

With his wife and her, her husband, and Eli, they feed the ducks and discuss the crisis in Israel, where guerillas have demanded the release of fifty freedom fighters or they will begin killing the ten people they’ve taken hostage. He considers how hostages are like people who have already died and are waiting to be resurrected and how their existence is paradoxically material and immaterial. 

After Eli is put to bed, she considers the newness of her life in America, compared with the historic sites in Israel. From her second-story window, she watches Black immigrant girls wearing designer jeans in the street below. She wonders how they can afford the jeans and remembers how Ari used to say he was poor, not cheap and would go to the barber instead of just letting her cut his hair. She wonders if it’s Ari she’s waiting for this morning, as it is most days. But today, she’s simply waiting for Eli’s father to drive up in his German car, which she’s jealous of. She imagines crawling into the backseat after he catches his daily early train and sleeping there until he comes back, but how if he forgot about her she would turn into a raisin and when he’d discover her she would be a pile of smelly goo that would embarrass him. 

She remembers two dreams. In the first, girls are playing in a manicured backyard. They have just discovered that they all have the word “Van” in their name and are laughing about it, but when they notice how quiet the yard is besides them, they grow silent, and suddenly it becomes apparent that there is only one, not many, girl, and she is all alone with no one to share the moment with. If she doesn’t wake up from this dream, she will die, but she doesn’t want to wake up because then it will be 2 a.m. and she won’t be able to go back to sleep. She lifts the covers and cool air flows over her body, and she sees someone beside her in bed, dead and naked. She knows it’s her own body and feels paralyzed. 

She wonders how the island girls she’d observed the day before would convince her husband not to leave and remembers how Eli had fallen sick with pneumonia as a little child and she promised God she would do anything, even forfeit her life, to let him live. 

When he’d arrived at their Maine residence, he had thought about how fun it would be to see her again. At the same time, Guerillas have demanded the release of 100 freedom fighters or else they will start executing hostages and he can’t help but wonder if the Guerillas are devaluing their own lives and if this is reverse discrimination. 

Once, when she was in her mother’s womb, she heard a voice threatening her mother she’d lose her child if she didn’t do exactly what they asked. It reminds her of the myth of Adam weeping uncontrollably as Eve gave birth to what becomes another hostage in the garden. She thinks about the relationship between the Black women below her and wishes they would talk to her.

One afternoon, she watched her husband’s home movies with him. She tells him this and says she can because he is Black. She also shares how her mother had been imprisoned at Auschwitz. In one movie, a large amount of people tumble out of a car and the party’s audience is amused. She worries that her husband will be abducted while abroad. While she’s watching the movie, she imagines the young version of her husband as a hostage and wonders how many lives would be spared to free him.