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.
But June was rarely hesitant in her life, and certainly would not be now. She said to Clines, “So it’s good that you found Hector Brennan last week.”
Clines nodded, clearing his throat. His face soured, as though he could not agree with her less.
“Where does he live, exactly?”
“In New Jersey. Fort Lee.”
June’s pulse suddenly spiked with the notion; all these years she’d assumed, for no reason, that Hector was still somewhere in the North-west, or maybe in Canada or Mexico, or else gone back to his home-town somewhere in upstate New York. That he was so close, just across the George Washington Bridge, and oddly-or not so oddly-where many Korean immigrants were starting to settle and live, gave her a fresh bloom of optimism.
“How long has he been there?”
“Apparently, at least ten years,” Clines said. “If not more.” He took out another folder from his briefcase and handed it to her. It was all he had been able to gather on Hector, details of what he had already told her over the phone: a couple of faxed arrest sheets and a list of convictions that went back to soon after he left her, ranging widely from Washington to Texas to Pennsylvania and, in the last ten or so years, New Jersey. All were for minor offenses, possession of stolen goods, assault, resisting arrest. Typical drifter trouble, Clines told her. Hector apparently had no phone, no credit cards, no driver’s license or car registrations, no bank accounts or loans. It had been pure chance that Clines had found an address for him; there was a recent judgment against him in small-claims court in Bergen County, where he was sued by his landlord for back rent and property damage. Clines had gone to the address, and though Hector was not living there anymore, a neighbor mentioned that he frequented a certain bar down by the river.
“What did he say?”
“Not much,” Clines said. “He didn’t want to talk.”
“But you tried to persuade him?”
Clines nodded.
“Well?”
“He wasn’t interested, Mrs. Singer.”
“What do you mean?” she said sharply, using the voice she reserved for intransigent antiques dealers, or customers whose checks had bounced. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Clines. You offered him money?”
“I did.”
“And he still didn’t agree?”
“We didn’t get as far as that. Frankly, once he heard your name, he didn’t say another word. He refused to speak to me. His friends told me I should leave.”
Her eyes were half blinded with anger and she was about to berate the man but then a square dose of dread cooled her heart. For of course she understood she was perhaps the last person in the world Hector Brennan would choose to see, much less aid.