The Gold Paper Gate

Chapter 1Three Weeks of Toothpicks

For three weeks, Rivky Adler had been building the Beis Hamikdash.

It was a school project, but it did not feel like one. It felt like a promise. She had glued toothpick pillars one at a time, each as straight as a ruler. She had cut the courtyard from a cereal box and painted it the color of sand. And in the front, she had made the gate: a tiny arch of gold paper no bigger than her palm, folded and creased again and again until it shone like a coin.

The model was due on Monday. It was Thursday afternoon.

Rivky came home from school with her bag bumping against her back, already planning. Tonight she would add the Menorah. Tomorrow, before Shabbos, the last row of pillars. She dropped her bag by the door, walked into the living room, and stopped.

Her little brother Shmuli was sitting on the carpet, right next to the model. He was seven. He had a glue stick in one hand. In the other hand, he held the gold gate.

It was in two pieces.

Rivky did not think. That was the strange part, afterward. She did not decide to feel what she felt. It just came, a hot wave that started in her stomach and climbed her chest and filled her ears with a roar.

"WHAT DID YOU DO?"

Shmuli's eyes went huge. "I didn't, I just..."

"I TOLD you not to touch it! I told you a hundred times! Three weeks, Shmuli! Three WEEKS!"

"Rivky, I..."

"You ruin EVERYTHING! You always do!"

The words flew out of her mouth like sparks. The anger was a wave, and it was not her fault that it came. What she did with it, the shouting, was hers. She saw Shmuli's face change. It did not get angry back. It got small, and very still, like a door closing.

He put the two gold pieces down on the carpet, carefully, as if they were made of glass. Then he got up and walked out of the room without a word.

Rivky stood there breathing hard. In the kitchen, Mommy turned off the tap. Rivky heard the soft squeak of her slippers coming closer.

Chapter 2The Wave

Mommy came to the doorway with a dish towel in one hand and her blue tichel tied neatly at the back. She looked at the model. She looked at the broken gate. She looked at Rivky.

"I heard," she said.

"He broke it!" Rivky's voice cracked. "He just sat there and broke it! I'm going to fail!"

"Rivky." Mommy's voice was quiet, which somehow made it louder. "I can see how big this wave is. I don't think you can hear me right now, and that's okay. Do you want to go to your room for a few minutes?"

"I don't want to go to my room! I want my gate back!"

"Then I'll wait."

Mommy did not argue. She did not say calm down. She just stood in the doorway, and after a long time Rivky noticed what her own body was doing. Her fists were clenched so tight that her fingernails had left half-moons in her palms. Her jaw ached. Her breath came in short, hard bits, as if she had been running.

Mommy had taught her once that a wave has a top. You cannot stop it from rising, but if you ride it and breathe, it always comes down.

Rivky sat on the arm of the couch. She pressed her feet flat on the floor, the way Mommy had shown her. She breathed in for four, out for six. In for four, out for six.

The roar in her ears slowly became a hum. The hot feeling slid down from her face and settled somewhere around her elbows.

"Better?" said Mommy.

"A little."

"Good. Now the wave is lower, and you can think. What do you actually know?"

Rivky stared at the gate. "I know it's broken. I know Shmuli was holding it."

"Okay. Those are two true things. Is there anything you are guessing?"

Rivky opened her mouth. Then she closed it again.

She was guessing that Shmuli had broken it. She had not seen it happen. She had come in and seen a broken gate and a boy holding it, and her mind had done the rest in half a second.

"I guess," she said slowly, "I'm guessing he broke it on purpose. Or by being careless."

"Mm-hm."

"But I don't actually know."

"No," said Mommy. "Not yet."

Chapter 3The Clues

Rivky did not feel like a detective. She felt like a girl whose shoulders hurt. But Mommy gave her a plain cup of water and then went back to the kitchen, and Rivky found that being alone with the question was different from being alone with the anger.

She knelt down next to the model and looked at it the way she imagined an investigator would. Not at the whole thing. At the pieces.

First clue: the gate was broken along a straight crease, not a ragged tear. Paper that had been crushed in a fist would be crumpled. This looked like it had folded in half and snapped at the weak line.

Second clue: the glue stick. Shmuli had been holding it, which meant he had been trying to glue something. But the gate was in two pieces. Had he been fixing it, or had he used glue and broken it by accident?

Third clue: there was a small smear of glue on the front pillar, and a second smear on the courtyard floor. Not a big mess. Careful dabs, as if somebody had been trying to be neat.

She picked up the two gold pieces and held them side by side. On the back of one, near the edge, was a tiny wet shine. New glue. It had not dried yet.

Rivky sat back on her heels.

The gate had been broken already when Shmuli was holding it. Maybe he had been in the middle of fixing it. That was only a guess.

But why was it broken at all? She had left it perfectly whole that morning, standing in its place. She was sure. Mostly sure.

She looked at the shelf above the model. Something small and orange was tucked behind the end of it: her cat Tzippi's fuzzy mouse toy. The shelf had a gap beside it, wider than it should be.

She bent down. Beside the pillar, pressed into the sand-colored paint, were a few tiny paw prints, and a tuft of orange fur was caught on a toothpick. Slowly, a picture came together in her head. Maybe Tzippi had leaped up to the shelf, and a tail had swept across the model, and a gate had folded in half and fallen. It was still only a guess. She needed to hear it from the one person who had been in the room.

Shmuli, coming in from the kitchen, might have found it on the floor. Maybe he had picked it up. Maybe he had gotten the glue stick, because he knew how much it mattered. And then the door had opened, and his sister had come in screaming.

Rivky felt something cold drop in her stomach. It was a different feeling from the wave. It was the heavy, sinking feeling of a mistake that was her own.

Chapter 4What She Had Said

She did not run to Shmuli right away. First she sat for a minute and made herself say it, inside her head, in plain words. I yelled at him. He might have been trying to help. I told him he ruins everything.

That last sentence was the worst. She had said it so fast that she had not even heard it. But Shmuli had.

She found him in his room, lying on his bed with his face turned to the wall. His shoes were still on. The glue stick sat on the floor next to the bed where he had dropped it.

Rivky stood in the doorway. For a long time she did not know what to say. Sorry sounded too small. Sorry was what you said when you bumped someone in the hall.

"Shmuli," she said.

He did not turn around.

"I was wrong. I thought you broke it, and I didn't check. I think Tzippi knocked it down. Did you see what happened? Were you trying to fix it?"

A very small sniffle. Then, to the wall: "Tzippi jumped up and it fell. I saw her. I wanted to fix it before you got home. I wanted to surprise you."

"I know. I should have asked what happened before I yelled."

"You said I ruin everything."

"I did." Rivky made herself keep her eyes open. "That was a terrible thing to say, and it isn't true. You don't ruin everything. You tried to help me, and I treated you like a thief. I'm sorry. Not because Mommy would want me to say it. Because I mean it."

Shmuli rolled over. His eyes were red. He looked at her for a long moment, deciding.

"You really were scary," he said.

"I know. The anger got very big. That doesn't make it your fault. And I'm going to try to catch it sooner next time, before it gets out of my mouth."

"How?"

Rivky thought. "I noticed my fists. They went tight first. Maybe if I notice that, I can stop and breathe before I say anything."

Shmuli sat up. He considered this seriously, the way only a seven-year-old can. "That's a good clue," he said.

"It's the best one I found all day."

Chapter 5The Gate on Monday

They did not finish the gate that night. Rivky had learned that some things take longer than one afternoon, and this was fine.

On Friday morning, before school, she and Shmuli worked together at the dining room table. She held the two halves of gold paper while Shmuli, with a steadier hand than she had expected, dabbed on a thin line of glue. They pressed the halves together and held them. They counted to sixty. Then another sixty.

When they let go, the gate stood. There was a faint line down the middle, a pale scar where the crease had been. But the gold still shone.

"You can see it," said Shmuli, worried.

"I can see it," said Rivky. "I think I like it."

She surprised herself by meaning it. The gate was not the perfect gate anymore. It was something better. It was a gate that had broken, and been fixed by two people, and still stood.

On Monday she carried the model to school in a shoebox lined with a towel, and Shmuli walked her to the corner carrying the glue stick, in case, then went on to his own school. Her teacher, Morah Gross, bent over the model for a long time. She touched the pale line in the gate with one finger.

"This was damaged," she said.

"Yes," said Rivky. "It got broken. My brother helped me fix it."

Morah Gross smiled. "That's just what the Beis Hamikdash teaches us, you know. Even when something is broken, we can build again. It takes patience, and it takes everybody."

Rivky glanced into her bag, where a small gold paper star lay on top of her lunch. Shmuli had slipped it in that morning, with a note: For luck. She smiled.

That afternoon she came home and found Tzippi asleep on the shelf, curled around the orange mouse, completely innocent. Rivky laughed out loud.

"You," she told the cat, "owe me a gate."

Tzippi opened one eye, yawned, and went back to sleep.