She said, however, “We’ll have to try to convince him again.”
“If that’s what you wish,” Clines said, frowning as if the skies had begun to pelt him with rain. “I’ll arrange for a meeting when we return from Italy. If it happens that we’re away longer than I expect, I’ll have someone back here keep track of him.”
“You misunderstand,” June said. “I want you to take me to him. He must come with us.”
Clines’s brows knit sharply with alarm. “Your coming along is difficult enough. But I can’t have him as well. Especially when he isn’t interested. It can’t work this way.”
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to manage.”
“Some situations aren’t manageable. This is not some guided tour.” He considered her gravely. “Frankly, Mrs. Singer, you’re much too ill for any of this.”
She paused for a moment, hoping that somehow he might not have noticed; it was the reason she had kept the lights of the shop dimmed.
She said, “I’ll be fine.”
“What do you have? Is it cancer?”
“Listen,” she said, gripping his arm. His flesh was malleable through the thin wool of his blazer and she could feel the soft plait of his musculature; she realized that he was quite a bit older than she thought, maybe even in his sixties, and could now see from the lightness near his scalp that he colored his hair. But rather than dishearten her, his lack of sturdiness only focused her, made her want to gain a better hold on the moment.
“Listen to me. I promise it won’t be a hardship for you. You’ll be able to do your job. You should know right now that it will be more than worth your time. And we won’t get in your way. Hector can stay back with me, if I’m not feeling well.”
“This is a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said. “Especially if you want to find your son. I know you were briefly married to this man, but is he the boy’s father? Is that why you want him to come with us?”
“It’s how it has to be,” she answered, explaining nothing else.
A little later, she saw Clines out into the street. The early-evening air held a residual warmth from the glorious day but now she clicked with bodily triggers that she had not known before, and they told her this endeavor had best be finished soon, before the autumn coolness descended for good. Would the cold bury her? She had given Clines another check to cover the next two weeks, and at triple his rate for taking on the extra difficulty. Naturally, she had planned to tell him that Hector was the father of her son. But in that moment she suddenly thought otherwise, deciding that it was a matter between Nicholas and Hector and no one else. That Nicholas was his son would likely mean little to Hector. But she was hopeful it would be meaningful to Nicholas, so that someday, when perhaps he felt differently, he would know that he was not alone in the world. At this point in her life all she could do was to make a temporary bridge. Let them stand on it, if they wished; let them test its span; let them decide to bolster its footings, or else let it tumble.
She locked the door and shut off the lights save for the floor lamp beside the mattress. In the tiny bathroom in the back of the shop she brushed her teeth with lukewarm water. Any colder and it was like biting ice. She had to brush them very gently, as she remembered doing for Nicholas when he first got teeth, hers now feeling as if they were made of chalk. The next swipe might wear them right down to the nerve. She gargled and spit and then clipped up her hair to wash her face. It had grown back surprisingly quickly, if a shade grayer than before and not nearly as thick, and she had shocked her stylist by asking him to cut it in a boyish style. From afar, even across a room, she looked as youthful as ever, but up close the vigor was only in her eyes. Her face was more stilled than smooth, as though she had fought and fought and for the moment won but would never quite fight again.
Now she lay down on the bed and turned off the light. She felt her body unburden itself, shutting down in stages like an industrial complex. She could help it along: she had pills her doctor had dispatched an intern to deliver to her, including a special black kit fitted with the little syringes and vials, which the intern said she might eventually like to try; she’d even showed June how to do it, filling a syringe and demonstrating on a pillow. June had indeed tried it once already, and liked it plenty. But she refused to give in to the pain. Not tonight, at least. She had worked herself hard the last week, and look how much was accomplished. They were on their way. She wanted to feel her corpus. Her toes and fingers curled up first and then her joints contracted and the blood that had coursed with determination all through her returned to her heart depleted, nearly conquered, making her chest rheumy with its flood. All down her spine there was a serial drone of relief, each segment loosing itself from the next.
Only her belly couldn’t rest, unceasing now as always, ever grinding about the original tumor in its futile attempt to consume it. But of course she was the one being consumed, from the inside out, being transformed into something else entirely. It was almost laughably ironic, that the cancer should be in her stomach. That she would die with her belly full. Hadn’t she made that very pact a hundred times, a thousand times, when she was marching on the dismal road? Let me eat until I can’t, let me fill this infinite cave, and I’ll die right here. I’ll surrender. And thus here she was, never to feel anything like hunger again. But she might take it on now, in trade for her life, that clenching weight of famishment. There was no more perverse fancy June could have.
She could easily remember the feeling. One afternoon long ago it had overcome her when she happened upon an American soldier. It was one of the final days of the war. She had been on her feet for three days and nights, having eaten nothing but chrysanthemum leaves and wild onions, sleeping a few anxious hours at most in a ruined, roofless cottage, and at the sight of the American down the road, a couple hundred meters away, she managed to leap down off the road and run into the gaseous knee-high muck of the rice fields where he wouldn’t bother to pursue her. She was certainly delirious and half mad with thirst and her vision had been hinging and unhinging for a couple of days and when she looked back to the road he had transformed into a scouting party and turned toward her. The lone man raised his hands to show he was unarmed but she saw him instead as the herald of death, finally come to embrace her. She slipped then and fell and her mouth filled up instantly with the mud and as she tried to raise herself from the muck it only drew her in. She could not die. She was utterly, miserably wretched and her body was acceding to the darkness but she would not now let anyone else have dominion over her.
But then she could breathe; he’d plucked her up from the mud by her shirt, ripping a sleeve at the shoulder. She hit him in the chest and tried to scratch his eyes but in a flash he struck her back; when she came to she was lying in the shade of a rusted truck carcass that had been pushed off the road, some thirty meters from where they had been. The side of her face stung. But her shirt was still on, and her trousers were as well, and the American was sitting on the metal frame of the seats, torn out of the truck cab, chewing on a stalk of hay. She began to crawl away and was trying to get up on her feet when he rattled a yellow object in his hand; it was a pack of Chiclets. He tossed it at her feet and before she could open the end fold of the flat box, her mouth watered so fulsomely that she had to cough before she could stuff in all the pieces. Their hard shells cracked and then burst with sweetness.
“Take it easy, sister,” he said. He told her his name, and asked hers.
She knew English well enough that she could have answered him, but the deliciousness of the mass was so overwhelming she couldn’t help but swallow, the sticky strings of it catching at the back of her throat. She gagged, reaching into her mouth with her fingers, and then finally threw it up. When she picked up the shiny clot from the dirt to try to eat it again, he told her there was food where he was going. Other children, too. It was an orphanage, in fact, ten kilometers ahead. He had risen and stepped up onto the embanked road, his rucksack hitched over his shoulder. She could come with him if she liked.