In the kitchen, Nina said, ‘I’ll make tea, shall we take it out into the garden?’ but he replied, ‘Let’s sit at the table,’ because it reminded him of his first evening in the house and how he and Poppa had sat at the kitchen table drinking milkshakes and he had gazed longingly through the window at the garden and Jimmy the dog. Jimmy had died many years ago but there was still the iron stake dug into the grass at the bottom of the slope.
It was six years since his last visit: he had come for two weeks just before he began his military service in Holland. Nina’s brown hair was stranded with white, she was stouter round the stomach and there was a certain stiffness in her movements. She fetched down the tea set he had brought from Amsterdam on that trip, the blue and white, standing on a chair to lift it down, refusing his help, holding it under the rattling tap for a few minutes to clean it of dust. When the kettle had come to the boil on the stovetop, she warmed the pot and the cups, set it on to boil again.
They were enjoying each other’s presence so much that they talked of unimportant things until she wiped her hands on her light blue apron, joined him at the table and said, ‘He will be so pleased to see you. I can’t wait to see the look on his face.’
‘How is he?’
Nina tried to prevent her smile from becoming effortful. She lifted the teapot. ‘It’s not good, Nic,’ she said. ‘A year, maybe, maybe less. Sometimes. .’ She did not finish the sentence but Harper guessed she had been about to say, sometimes I wish it would be a lot less. The news that Poppa’s condition was terminal had come just before Harper had left Holland for Jakarta. It had not stopped Harper taking the job.
It would be less than a year, as it turned out. Poppa would succumb to his illness five months later, and two years after that, while Harper was working as a labourer on a farm in the north-east of Holland, near the German border, Nina would be knocked down and killed by a Dodge pick-up that was speeding round the corner of Firestone Boulevard: and with Nina’s death, his last link with America, those five years he had spent in California as part of a family, with grandparents and a little brother, would be gone. He would never return.
‘Is the doctor good? Should I speak with him while I’m here? Do you have enough money?’
Nina smiled then. ‘You were always trying to send us money.’
‘What else am I going to spend it on?’
‘Well you know what your Poppa would say, booze and women, son, booze and women.’ This was a joke: Poppa had always been such an upright citizen.
‘I like a bit of whisky, I guess. Drank a bit too much of it over there.’ It was risky, mentioning his life in Europe. He wouldn’t do it in front of his grandfather as it would be sure to prompt a question, but Nina was used to not-knowing things. She had not-known about Michael for year after year, not-known how Harper was getting on in Holland — never really known exactly how it had happened, losing Bud.
‘And women?’
He shook his head slowly, grinning at her, already copying his grandfather’s grin. ‘Tryin’ to marry me off?’ He heard how his accent had aligned with hers. There had never been any Dutch in his English, not after those years here, but in Europe and Indonesia his English accent was completely blank — and here he was, in Nina’s kitchen, drinking fine hot tea, already regaining his West Coast edge.
‘You’re a good-looking young man, mid-twenties, perfect age some would say.’
‘I’m not sure marriage is for me.’
‘Marriage is for everybody.’ She had waited many years for it to be legal for her and Poppa to wed, just because she was Latina, him black.
‘There’s not a lot of women would want a husband does as much travelling as I do.’ This, too, would be dangerous territory in front of Poppa.
He saw her glance at his forearms then. He was dressed in a loose T-shirt — the scratches had mostly faded during his time on the run but there were still some very fine white tracks on his brown forearm, unnoticeable but to anyone who really looked. If he had thought about it, he would have worn a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe he had wanted her to notice, wanted her to say, are you okay? What happened over there?
Nina raised her teacup to her lips, put it down.
He read the question in her face. ‘I always meant to come back, but, you know, military service, and then this job, you know, and travel. I’m not saying never. I have to go back and straighten things out with work, then maybe, I don’t know.’
Nina smiled delicately, to take the sting out of her reproach. ‘We always kind of hoped for another child around the place one day, if you got married one day I mean. We always hoped you would come back here for good once you were old enough so’s Anika didn’t have any say in the matter.’ Quickly, she added, ‘But we knew in our heart of hearts, once we lost you to Europe. .’ She shook her head. ‘It’s funny, you know, how when kids grow up, you can look back and see what they’ve grown into. You always wanted to go places. You once set off up the road when you’d only been living with us a month, taking a look around. Poppa and I came to the front of the house and just watched you head off along the pavement, up the hill. You didn’t look back once. We were so amused, we just watched you, until you disappeared over the brow of the hill, that is, then Poppa got worried about you getting lost and came chasing after you. Don’t know why, you were old enough to find your way back, it was just ’cos you were new to us. We worried about you as if you were an infant but you were six, after all.’
There was a long silence. Then Harper saw that a tear was making its way slowly down Nina’s cheek, leaving a shining trail.
‘Come on. .’ he whispered.
She fumbled with one hand for the handkerchief stuffed up the other sleeve, then whispered to herself, ‘I’ll never forgive her. I know that’s wrong of me. But to take you away from us, when we’d already lost Bud. We were the only family you knew.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘We had to put you on a boat with a tag around your neck, send you off like a parcel, across that big ocean, all on your own, just a boy, to somewhere you couldn’t even remember. Wasn’t it enough, what we’d been through? Everything we had been through?’
‘Well, she didn’t quite see it that way, I guess.’ His mother — the mother who had demanded him back, after what happened to Bud, only to make it clear that having a son living with her again was a mighty inconvenience when it came to her complicated love life.
‘Don’t go upsetting yourself because I’ve showed up.’
She lifted her head then, gave her face a final wipe, right and left, beamed at him resolutely. ‘You showing up is always the best thing in the world, make no mistake about that.’
She looked up at the ceiling, then back at him. It was time.
The first thing he noticed as they mounted the stairs was the smelclass="underline" a strong smell of antiseptic, something faintly rotten underneath. Then, as they paused on the landing, both of them listening to see if he was awake, the harsh rasp of Poppa’s breathing, the effort in it, the sound of a man exhausted to be alive. The door was ajar; Nina pushed at it gently. Poppa was in the middle of the bed and on the other side of the room was a small cot that Nina must have been sleeping in at night. An oxygen cylinder stood upright on an iron support by the bed, the mask and tube hanging from the post of the bedstead. They still had the same flowered wallpaper, dusty roses, was how he had always thought of that pattern, faded now in the light through the net curtains.
They stopped just inside the door. Poppa looked asleep, his mouth open, his face tilted to the ceiling — even in repose, his brows were knitted in pain. Harper stared at him; the concave hollows of his cheeks, the white stubble on his chin.