“Maybe I could have,” he said. “But it would have taken a long time.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
He nodded, startled by this seeming flash of lucidity. He had unpacked the rest of her clothes and put them into the armoire and begun emptying his own small satchel when he saw the book that he’d forced Nick Crump to hand over to him in Siena. He couldn’t bear to handle it and had immediately thrust it beneath his clothes. But earlier, at a rest stop, while she was napping, he couldn’t help himself and had peered once more into the book. It was the same, except that the cloth of its cover had been burned away, its pages made brittle by the trauma. He noticed two inscriptions on the title page. The first, to Sylvie, he recognized from all those years before; the second was in a different hand, the ink newer: To Nicholas, my dearest wayfarer. May you find great treasure and riches. He was confused as to how June had come to possess it, whether it had been singed in the terrible fire, and how, if so, it had ever survived. But like a promise of ill reckoning, the scent of smoke that rose up from its binding quickly quashed his questions and he had pushed it back into his bag.
Now he gave the thin volume over to her, the thing literally falling apart in his hands. When June took it he could see her fingers straining against it, as if she wanted to press it back to life. She opened the book and turned its first pages to a photograph of the author, a young-looking man with muttonchops and a gold watch chain on his suit vest. Opposite was the title page, twice inscribed, as he’d seen, and June seemed to linger on the handwriting, her expression one of confusion. Finally she caressed the page as if it were the cheek of an infant. With hardly any difficulty she stood up before the large window, her hands braced against the wide marble sill. In the framed vista the church at the top of the hill gleamed in the late-afternoon sun, the rising gravel path darkly ribbed with the long shadows of the cypress trees, and though it must have been the first time she’d seen it her eyes only narrowed coldly while taking its measure, her gaze no pilgrim’s.
“I didn’t mean for him to be alone in the world,” she said. “Not forever, anyway. I thought it would be good for him to get away from me. Not to depend on me. But I haven’t asked you. Was he still angry with me? I mean to say, did it seem to you that he had forgiven me?”
“Forgiven you for what?”
“I told you,” she said, wrapping the book with her arms. She looked strong all of a sudden, her posture as straight as when she was a child, her chin forward, elevated. That orphan girl, carved from rock. For a long second, when she turned back to look at him, she appeared as if she might not be ill at all.
“Didn’t I? When he was injured in England while riding. After the hospital called. I waited until I got a postcard from him. In the end it was okay but I keep asking myself why I didn’t try to reach him right away. I wanted to talk to him so much. I wanted to see him. It had been many years. I could have told him I’d fly right over and be with him. But for some reason I just passed the hours. I opened the shop the next day. I went to dinner by myself. For two weeks I didn’t sleep. Then his postcard came and after that the nice letters, and it seemed that he cared about me again, but I’ve been thinking it was only because he was angry for so long that he ended up being kind. Do you think that can happen? Do you think that’s what happened to my son?”
She then stepped back from the window and sat down on the bed, her head heavy and bent, all the girding of the prior moment now fled from her body. She set the book aside on the bed beside her. He asked her if she wanted to change now into the special clothes.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I can leave if you like.”
“That’s not it.”
“You don’t want to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice suddenly sinking. “I don’t know.”
She began to cry, which took them both by surprise. She was weak enough that it hardly seemed to be crying at all, more as though she was having trouble breathing, her meager tears barely wetting her cheeks. But he had never seen her cry, not at the orphanage, not once since, and the sight broke open a fear in his chest: here, about to perish, was surely the strongest person he had ever known. She wiped her face roughly with her palm. “Give me another shot now, okay? I want a little more time, without it hurting so much.”
“I gave you one just two hours ago.”
“I’d like another.”
He obliged, another heavy dose. Hector drifted into an armchair across the room, trying to avert his gaze. He could have loaded up another half-dozen syringes and instantly extinguished her but he couldn’t help but think that she might somehow come back for him if he did, in a malign form, hound him for eternity for cheating her of even a few hours.
“I’m sorry, Hector. But I think now I want to rest.”
“Okay. I’ll leave you alone.”
“But just for a little while. I don’t want to fall asleep for too long. I can’t let this day pass. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything tomorrow. Where will you be?”
“Downstairs, I guess.”
“Would you come for me in an hour? We’ll go up to the church then.”
“Okay.”
“Would you bring me back something?”
“What do you want?”
“Something to eat.”
“You’re hungry?”
“I don’t know if I can really eat anything. But I want to try.”
“I can bring something. What do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want this to be the last feeling I have.”
He went to close the curtains but she told him to leave them drawn open, so the room would stay awash in the light. It was good light, being reflected light, as it was now late in the day, all of it fully drenching the room, the tops of the trees and the terra-cotta roofs and stuccoed buildings illuminated by the strong, low sun, the color of their lower halves in the warm penumbra glowing in a muted scale, the white church atop the rise of land as brilliant as a lodestar. “Just an hour, Hector. Don’t let me sleep any longer. You’ll remember to come back up? Won’t you?”
“You think I wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know,” she said, the shot having settled deep into her now. From her loosened posture he could see that it had already met and quelled the harshest pain. She was almost herself again.
“I know you must hate me,” she said. Her eyes were narrowed.
“You do, don’t you? You’re the only person in the world who knows anything about me now, and I don’t want you to hate me.”
“I said in the car I didn’t.”
“Even after everything I told you?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”
“Please just say it again.”
“I already did.”
“Please say it, Hector, please!”
“What do you want?” he shouted. “What the fuck do you want from me?”
“I don’t want this!” she shouted back, slapping at her own shriveled, wasted thighs. Her face was a cracked, broken mask. “Not this! Maybe you wouldn’t care if this were happening to you! Maybe you never cared whether you lived or not. But I do!”