"Sorry," Michael said.
"And my friend Junot, your friend…"She shook her head, out of words for it all. "And that woman."
"Lara."
"Her."
Without whom, he realized all at once, he would live a life suspended on the quivering air, the beat of loss, moment by moment.
When they were coming down at San Juan, McKie spoke to him again.
"So maybe you got rich, huh? Maybe you'd like to talk about it?"
"No," Michael said.
"I saw the drums got to you," Liz said. "I know about that. Did you find God?"
"No," he told her. "It was the same, understand? What happened to you happened to me."
She shook her head, looked at her watch and began to cry.
22
ROOMS WITH BATH were available at the Student Union during the summer. Michael Ahearn rented one. Every day he used the pool at the athletic department. Often he swam hour after hour, amazing and finally unsettling the young lifeguards. After his swim he would go to his office and read himself to sleep in a chair.
Some floors of the Union building contained dorms. When term started in late August, the leaden quiet of the place exploded in adolescent riot. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the screams would make him think he was on the island again. The place he was afraid to name, even in his thoughts.
Arriving home the previous spring, he had immediately sensed Kristin's simmering anger. After three days of empty politeness she found the boarding passes for their flight to Puerto Rico, his and Lara's.
Then she permitted herself rage. In Paul's hearing, she said things to Michael he would not have imagined her saying. Her passion was startling, even to him. Crouching like an assassin, she delivered calculated, scalding, phosphorescent anger. It hurt to the depths of him.
"Conniving son of a bitch," she said. "You do not maintain a mistress on me, fella. Maybe your pals will think you're a sport. But I don't think you're a sport, I think you're weak."
She went on and he had nothing to deploy but grief. He had had time to realize what he had done to Lara. What he had done to Kristin seemed not nearly so bad but she seized it like a whip and beat him lame.
"Do you think I came to you with no dreams of my own? That all I wanted to do was plant roses? But finally I gave you everything. And everything involved you. Oh yes, I thought you were hot shit, fucker! I thought you were the beginning and end and nobody really knew how great you were but me."
"I wanted more," he said.
"Oh yes," she said. "Maybe you think I don't understand such desires? But I had a life to complete here. Our work and our child. And I thought when we got that taken care of — with a little luck — life would provide. And we would learn the trick of getting more. You and me. That was a key thing, ya? Us."
She put a wad of paper towel under the kitchen faucet and wiped her face.
"I thought, wait, it will come. Then you humiliate me with that creepy greasy whore. The Latin bombshell."
"We can come through," Michael said. "We can put it behind us."
"Not," she went on, "that I wasn't hearing reports. Not that I didn't have suspicions. But I chose not to see any of it."
"It was a passing madness," Michael said. "Insanity."
"Passing?"
"Yes, Kristin. That's over, over."
"Well, it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm seeing to my own survival. Mine and my son's."
He had another flash of the fever that had burned him on the trip. It seemed never to quite disappear. Confusion came with it, a touch of panic.
"Look, Kristin, I know you can understand this. The thing came. There I was. A crazy impulse. Fugue."
"Chance of a lifetime, right?" she said. "I understand. Understanding's not enough. Confess and be understood? Be absolved? No dice."
She backed away from him, fixed him with her dead father's eye.
"You see," she said, "my vanity is not the problem. Respect. Respect is the problem."
She was silent for a while.
"I feel strong now somehow. I feel I see clearly. I don't want to let you talk me out of that."
"I'll never leave you again," he said. Dumb thing to say. It earned him her slight scornful smile.
"You know the secrets of the heart, Michael. I know you do."
"Don't forget it," he said, trying to turn a joke.
"But you talk too much," she told him. "My father was right about that."
"God," he said. "That old sod rat."
She laughed.
"But you do know the secrets of the heart. You truly do. Me," she said, "I look for signs. I ponder signs."
They stood around the kitchen not speaking. He watched her, hoping for forgiveness, feeling like a sick dog.
"I never questioned your loyalty," she said. "I feel so insulted." She looked distractedly out the window.
When she walked out, the first astonishing blaze of the fever struck him. A bolt of raw heat. His wrists twisted and swelled so that he could not hold up his hands.
And that was how it ended. There was nothing for him to do except leave. Paul hid from him that day. Before the week was out she had a lawyer.
The next day he had simply moved into the Student Union and he was still there when the term opened. The night sounds there worked themselves into his dreams, which were nearly always frightening and febrile. Breakbone fever dreams.
The symptoms grew worse; he had not been in the Union a week before he landed in the hospital with what appeared to be dengue. There were uncertain factors. One of the doctors thought it might be a kind of malaria. His case was a very bad one, with cerebral complications, and for a few days his vision failed. Half blinded, he was alone in a bright gray maze, buried alive with his pain and his visions. He kept trying to straighten himself out around the drums but they brought him only confusion.
He had the sensation of being wrapped in dry rubber, along with thirst, fever and unreasonable pain that made him think of Père Lebrun. They put a wall of sheets around his bed. Within that was the wall in which he was buried, blind. He was trying to find Lara. Lara was trying to find him.
Kristin came to see him while he was in the hospital. There was no mistaking her tall soldierly form.
"Anything I can do, I will do," she told him. But when he left the hospital it was to return to the Union.
The doctors told him that it was likely he would suffer a relapsing fever. They gave him a supply of pills and told him to avoid alcohol.
Phyllis Strom had passed along to the larger academic world and every few days he wrote a letter of recommendation for her, trying his best not to let it slide into boilerplate. His new teaching assistant had come from Russia as a child. She was plain, intelligent and efficient. Lately he had been subject to lapses of memory and the young woman did her best to remind him of what had to be remembered. She attended his classes too, insisting they were sheer delight to her. Ahearn had never before doubted his own authority in a classroom. Everyone said he was witty and incisive. That fall he felt less sure of himself.
All summer he had been waiting for the consequences of his adventure to strike. Sometimes he worked himself into paroxysms of anxiety over everything that had happened, unable to eat or sleep or read. At other times he was passive and numb, untouched by fear or remorse. The details of the trip slipped away from him. He forgot names and sequences of events. Eventually his sense of unreality about the time in St. Trinity overcame his dread. Nothing happened to concern him personally. He had no communications, none of any kind, from Lara. For a long time he heard nothing at all from Liz McKie.