TWELVE
FIVE LONG DAYS IN THIS COUNTRY, and Hector could not say if she would last another week. They were on their way to Siena. Of course anyone could see June might be terminally ill but to look at her now, riding beside him in the car, her eyes steady and sparkling with the grassy light reflected off the Maremman hills, her skin warmed by the heat of the roadway, one could believe she was safe for another month, perhaps even a season, that she could last as long as she herself willed it, that she was still in control.
She certainly had been in control back in Rome, despite being utterly exhausted after the long flight from JFK, moving them through immigration and the terminal as if she were his guardian and he were the infirm one; at one point she may have literally led him by the hand. They arrived in the early morning and her plan, as she’d explained to him on the plane, was to rent a car and drive north immediately, but he was in no mood to do so, dazed and sullen as he was, completely silent, drinking nonstop on the flight, and she’d had the taxi driver take them to a nearby airport hotel so they could gather themselves before moving on.
They were forced to share a room because a laid-over Japanese tour group had overrun the small hotel, but he was sure she had somehow arranged it that way, so she could keep him close. She would not quite fall asleep even though she had medicated herself. He was with her out of necessity and desperation after what happened in Fort Lee and she was clearly afraid that he would soon abandon her, though where he could go or what he could possibly do was not obvious to him. She kept the passports in her handbag, then transferred them to the room safe, even though he had in fact used Clines’s passport to enter the country. She and Clines had planned for Hector to apply for his own, but because of events and June’s hurry to leave they had taken a chance at immigration: she’d folded five one-hundred-dollar bills into her own passport, saying to the officer that he’d get another five at customs if he allowed the man behind her entry. After they collected her single bag from the carousel (he had no luggage) the officer appeared and hooked June by the arm and walked them straight through to the receiving lobby, where she paid him the rest.
In the hotel room he had continued drinking, sitting on the floor in the corner with two bottles of cheap brandy bought from the tiny shop downstairs, while she lay on her side on the twin bed with her dark eyes open wide but not quite focused, fluttering shut every once in a while, the steady traffic from the street and the harsh noise of jet engines blaring loudly enough that there was little reason to talk. She was not hungry and neither was he. He didn’t want to look at her and tried to seal himself instead in the hermetic chamber of the liquor, which put him, as usual, in a state not of inebriation but of severance, though this time her presence was a steady encroachment and he ended up swigging from the bottle with an arm draping his face.
Once night fell, however, the streets grew quiet and the planes were approaching and landing on a different vector and it was then that she began to speak to him, in a voice that he suddenly remembered for its effortless, humming resonance, which was remarkable even back then because everything else about her was so abrasive and flinty. She could have been a singer, at least in another life.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, still on her side, her knees drawn up to her chest beneath the thin covers. She periodically shivered. She had been chilled on the plane as well, asking for extra blankets, her body as drawn as when he’d first met her on the road more than thirty years before. “She was a good person, wasn’t she?”
When he didn’t answer, June said, “I know she would not have been out in the street but for me. As I tried to tell you on the plane, she was helping me to the car. I’m very sorry for what happened. But I think you should know she was helping me. She was being very kind.”
He ignored her but her expression didn’t change and he could see that she was relieved he wasn’t blaming her, at least not enough to make him reconsider his presence. He wanted to blame her; she had indeed shifted the course of events, and now Dora was gone. But he was lying to himself, for he knew that what had happened was the result of the more significant alteration of himself, having merged his grimy existence with the decent one she made pains to keep up, with her always pressed, dry-cleaned dresses and prettily manicured fingers and how neatly she was keeping his apartment. It may have appeared hers was prevailing, and yet from a wider viewpoint it was easy to see that his was the overriding condition; he was the cause, and the symptom, and the disease; he was the dooming factor for everyone but himself.
June said, “There was nothing you could do for her.”
He couldn’t answer, the unintended truth of the notion cutting inside his chest as if he’d swallowed the broken top of a bottle. Dora was lying there broken and unwhole in the street soaked with her blood, so frightened and confused right up to the last moments that he found himself shaking with horror and rage. Then in an instant she was gone. He tried to breathe life into her, tasting even the wine from her mouth. But she was turning cold, her face already honed into the marble-smooth mask. She had bled out. The swiftness of this final cruelty had driven him to want to hold Clines’s throat until his eyes shimmered and a racked sigh arose from his lips, but the man had expired on his own. Sirens had already gone up in the distance, and it was only because Dora was so instantly, irretrievably gone that he had approached the figure standing beside the parked car, this woman who was calling him by name. He recognized her immediately and instinctively wanted to run the other way but some people had come out from the apartments pointing at him and the sirens were wailing and she told him in a sure and measured voice that she would tell the police what had happened, that Clines was already dead, which is exactly what she did while the ambulances took away the bodies.
“Why don’t you rest now,” she said, gesturing to the twin bed that was pushed right up against hers due to the almost ridiculous narrowness of the hotel room. The plaster walls were bare and there was a single, small window set too high and if he didn’t know better he might have thought they were in a shared prison cell.
“Have you slept at all since we left New York?”
He shook his head.
“You should, because you’ll have to drive tomorrow, first thing. You know, you don’t look so good.”
“I’m okay.”
“I don’t think you are,” she told him. “Please, don’t drink any more. Come and lie down. I won’t bother you. I won’t talk.”
But she did keep talking, urging him to rest, and she held her hands out to him like some angel of mercy, though one who was strangely frail and wrecked, and as much as she appeared a wraith of sorry bones, her rich, plangent voice began to wash over him, envelop him as though it were the revival of Dora’s living, lush body. His eyes were burning. He was not weary so much as stripped of hope and volition, but the moment he lay on the mattress the previous thirty hours suddenly accrued on the crown of his head where his consciousness prevailed and compressed him to a near-perfect erasure; oddly, all he remembered dreaming was that only his feet remained of him, and when he awoke in the middle of the night his work shoes had been removed, his rank gray socks slung over the towel bar in the bathroom, airdrying after having been hand-washed.