“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!”
He was about to tell her she would rot in hell when he realized he was arguing with a woman who had in almost every way disappeared. She immediately said she was sorry, trying to follow him to the door in her feeble hobble, and she might have caught him had he not leaned forward in the last quarter of a second, half-bolting onto the landing and down the steep steps of the tower; he was a world-class sprinter, at such distances. As he rounded the corner he caught sight of her ruined silhouette, halted at the end of the landing with her hands outstretched like a flightless bird, her desperate apologies echoing down the stone well of the tower after him, and though he felt ashamed for the velocity of this easy escape he kept going, his rage making him want to punish her.
Downstairs, in the bar that doubled as the hotel lobby, he slumped at a corner table. The young manager came over and asked if he wanted something and Hector didn’t answer and the manager suggested a beer. After serving him the bottle, the manager stole glances at him as he stacked cups on the coffee machine, as did an older German-speaking couple sharing a plate of cheese and salami and a carafe of white wine. The couple had been just sitting down when he carried June into the hotel, and the fleshy, ruddy-cheeked woman now regarded Hector with kindly eyes and a sympathetic purse to her mouth that made him helplessly think of Dora. He drank from his beer but after a sip he put it down, despite the fact that his insides were crying out; for once in his life he didn’t want to douse the parchedness, that driest, coldest flame. He wanted his own sentence, for all his deeds and non-deeds, for every instance when he had failed. For when had he not? If he were truly eternal, as his father Jackie madly fantasized, the sum of his persistence had so far only added up to failure. Failure grand and total. Ask Dora what she thought. Ask Patricia Cahill. Ask the Chinese boy soldier if Hector had done right by him. Ask Winnie Vogler about the collateral calamity he had wrought. Ask the Reverend Ames Tanner if his end was the one he had envisioned for himself. Ask them all if Hector had been their right attendant fate.
His failing found expression now in even the small measures, too, like the fact that he couldn’t quite summon the hatred even June assumed he should have for her. In the car, in her delirium, or perhaps under its cover, she told him what she had done. Yes, she had caused the fatal fire. Yet in his own way he had stoked it, too, with his rank, blinding want, and he had always believed that it should have been he who never emerged.
On that last night, Sylvie had begged him to let her be. Why had he not heeded her? Why hadn’t he simply stayed in his room? Once the fire started, surely he would have rushed inside the dormitory first and gotten them all out. He’d been drinking all evening, sitting in his dim room with a bottle of harsh Japanese-brand scotch whiskey, feeding his accelerating thoughts, which alternated between wanting to flay Sylvie with harangues, with the lowliest of sentimental entreaties, with self-pitying rants and outright attacks, and trying to figure out how he might lovingly convince her to stay on. To love him back. But he was useless at romance. He had no profound or pretty words. He thought she had made up her mind on the day they had all collected leaves around the orphanage, when she had followed him into the chapel. Afterward they left the chapel and headed in different directions but she met up with him as he had asked, about one hundred meters along the most southerly trail, where there was an obscuring thicket of woods. They didn’t make love but had still fallen upon each other in a primed, overdesperate state and in a matter of minutes they had clawed and tasted one another with the privation of ghouls. They had hardly undressed, and yet later, when he was bathing, he could feel the tines of her fingernails striping his back, his neck, his thighs. He’d done the same to her but with his mouth, his ravenous teeth, biting her wherever she pointed to herself, as if they were playing some curious grade school game. She had gasped with each snap, tears filling her eyes, then pointed again. It was then that Hector was sure that he had won, mishoping, misreading her erotic fervor for a deeper devotion; for he was too young and ignorant to know that she was not acting or dissembling but rather offering herself to his pure and towering want, surrendering to his great keen need, which to her was as lovely as he.
It was already midnight when he finished the bottle and went to her cottage, knowing that the next day Tanner would be back. He and Sylvie had not yet made love while her husband was presently away, his carrying her after she twisted her knee in the soccer game the first time he’d time touched her since the brief, furious moment in the woods. Simply holding her was an alert of his craving but a kind of anchoring, too, how he needed the literal burden of her to offset the hateful, numb condition of his being. His unassailable body. And as he went around to the back of the cottage he realized how vulnerable he felt whenever she was close, as though he were at last mortally subject, as prone as the next. His heart a boy’s, brimful and shaking. Yet he knew, too, though he was still resisting it, that it was already finished between them, or that it had never truly begun, and it was this dire feeling that pushed him to try to be with her again. The window shade was down and when he tried the door it was locked and he rapped at it harder and harder until the sound was loud enough to rouse the children across the way. She opened the door and let him in. Her knee was still just as he had wrapped it and she limped away without even looking at him.
“Does it still hurt a lot?” he asked her, following her to the bed.
“Not anymore,” she said wearily, her head bowed. He knelt before her and took her knee in one hand and her calf in the other, gently and carefully testing the joint. She winced with its play. “It’ll be fine. Please go now. Please.”
“I said I would come.”
“I asked you not to,” she said, pushing off his hands.
“So you don’t want to see me anymore?”
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow!” Hector cried, the instant thunder in his voice surprising even him.
She was silent. “Please, Hector. You can’t be here now.”
“Why? Because you’ve changed your mind?”
“I’ve never changed my mind. Not about you. It was never a question of that.”
“Then what was it a question of? Would you tell me? Because I’m stupid. I’m confused. Are you in love again with your husband?”
“I’ve always loved him,” she murmured.
“You’ve always loved him,” he scorned her. “I guess you were loving him right from the beginning. I guess you were thinking about how you loved him when you were fucking me on this bed. You’ve thought about him so much that every time he goes away you come around to wherever I am.”