“Where exactly?” Nicholas asked. He was perhaps ten at the time.
“In the northern part.”
“Show me,” he said, quickly retrieving a large world atlas she also had on the shelf, and which he was always poring over. He certainly knew all of the national capitals, and most of the major cities.
“Here,” she said, her finger tapping on a spot, with conviction. “Here, near Mantova.”
She found that concrete facts would put him off for a while, even as she knew that such loose improvisations could only lead to trouble. So why had she persisted? She had wanted to keep their world as small as possible, for them to be simply a mother and son, as well as to circumscribe time, make only the present the time that was real. But of course Nicholas, an imaginative and artistic young boy, had begun to reconstruct what he wanted from whatever she said, to build up his own mythologies, until an irresistible mystery had naturally emerged.
During his senior year Nicholas told her that he would like to defer his college acceptance and go traveling, and at that point June had no objections, if that’s what he desired. He had savings from his summer jobs and, of course, his household chores, and she didn’t mind in the least offering him an extra thousand dollars so he could extend his travels. He said he didn’t need it, that he preferred to work odd jobs wherever he was so he could actually live in the place, but she ended up stuffing an envelope of cash into his hand before he left. He thanked and kissed her-he had never minded kissing her, even in front of his friends-and scooted into the taxicab and then, to her disappointment, sat back without rolling down the window as the car roared off.
June did have worries, as any mother would, about his well-being, though her concern was less about the usual dangers of such a journey than it was about him. His sense of independence should have been reassuring to her, and yet she couldn’t help but wonder if it was a quality of his that was already too evolved. Perhaps he didn’t need to keep going it alone. As his teachers and others often said, he was well liked, and anyone could see he had plenty of friends, but she noticed that he never seemed interested in having a best friend, or even two or three buddies he would get together with regularly. He dated several girls in his junior and senior years, but June never would have said that he appeared to be in love with them, or even to be infatuated. He was enthusiastic with all of them, reliably available to anyone who called or invited him to a party, but June would have to say that he moved on too easily from one friend or set of friends to the next, sailing through the forest of them, from vine to vine like his hero Tarzan in the old movie series he loved to watch on Sunday mornings.
Over the years of his travels, the postcards he sent to the shop grew briefer in their messages, the ones he wrote out in pen somehow as cold as typescript, and then even more impersonal in nature, given the messages:
Doing fine. N.
Okay here. N.
Still kicking. N.
Later he would simply type out his name, with no message at all. Once he’d neglected to do even that, compelling her to examine her own name and the address of the shop with the focus of a detective, trying to glean some significance in the press of the key strike, the freshness of the ink ribbon. The city or country postmark rarely matched the pictured site, and she thought he might well have bought a variety pack at an airport kiosk the very first day and posted them back to her whenever the idea struck him that his mother might think he was no longer alive.
In fact she had sometimes woken up in a panic, before and during the time she was living with David, certain that Nicholas was seriously injured, or ill, even dead, and David would calm her with an embrace and, at first, ask what was wrong, but she would never tell him. He knew she had a grown son, and, as with everything else in their quite happy but too brief union, he treated her with great solicitousness, never once pushing her to reveal the source of her distress, though he probably had guessed; David was a senior litigator at a prominent Midtown law firm and was as thorough in his work as anyone. Maybe it was because he knew how fragile his heart was from a previous heart attack, but once he came home in the evening he was wholly relieved to be with her, his weariness only softening his spirit, and the first thing he would do was sit her down from whatever she was cooking for them and ask her, like a good father might, what small pleasures had marked her day.
Her night panics had, strangely, subsided after David died, as if being alone again had firmed the resolve of her psyche. But they had started again with a phone call last year; the call had roused her well before dawn, an Englishwoman’s voice on the other end, saying that her son was badly injured. June was still mostly asleep and terribly sick, perhaps out of her mind at the time with a third round of treatments, and she’d somehow blurted that she had no son and hung up. It was a monstrous thing to do, but the boy had not written her in more than a year and in her weakened state she couldn’t help but give herself over to the sharpest, cruelest impulse. She felt immediately sickened and so called the operator right away to see if she could dial the caller back, but it was no use. She waited for her phone to ring again but it stayed quiet and she eventually fell asleep and by the morning it seemed it had all been a wicked and terrible nightmare.
A couple of weeks later she did in fact receive a postcard from him in the mail, saying that he was writing from a rural hospital because he had broken his leg, and quite badly, while riding a horse at a friend’s country estate. I’m going to be fine, he wrote. Maybe just a little crooked! He didn’t ask for money or anything else and she was happy that nothing had come of her hideous conduct on the phone, and the next time he wrote he didn’t mention the accident, or his leg, only how he was going to continue his travels, now indulging in a slightly more expansive tone. The postcards didn’t actually sound like him, but to her it was a signal that they’d turned a corner, that something new was beginning.
He hadn’t asked her for money until recently, when suddenly he began to send postcards with requests for small sums to be wired to post offices in Amsterdam, then Frankfurt, then Nice. They were modest requests, $200 or $300, but that last one, for $1,000 (for which she sent $2,000 and mailed an enthusiastic note about his coming birthday), made her certain they would be reunited soon. She needed it to be soon. But then no word came. Each day afterward she awaited the arrival of the mailman, who soon enough knew what she was looking for and told her each day by the sorrowful hang of his eyes that he had nothing in his bag. It was through the mailman, in fact, that she got the idea of hiring Clines. The mailman was a chatty fellow with an oddly high voice who was a little off in the head, one of those reasonably functional people who was perhaps mildly mentally disabled. He didn’t hesitate in telling her how he’d hired an investigator to follow his wife, as he suspected she was cheating on him. Clines eventually discovered that she was having an affair, but with the mailman’s own brother. This is what Clines had meant when he asked if she truly wanted to find Nicholas: the truth is often more difficult than one might wish to believe.