“Please help me,” she whispered.
“Oh, God,” Dora said, mortified. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I’ll go. Just help me, please. I’ll go. My car should be back by now.” Dora first tried to lift her from beneath her arms but it hurt too much and she had to crouch and kneel herself in front of June and hoist her almost onto her back to get her up on her feet. June grabbed her handbag. They trudged this way for a few feet, until June got her legs working again, and then Dora tucked her shoulder beneath hers and it was all June could do to keep up as they walked out of the apartment. It had rained, the air moist and heavy. Dora kept asking where her car was but June couldn’t answer. She was the simplest creature now, a beast trotting dumbly forth. Paradoxically, it was the pain that was now holding her up, this most rigid of infrastructures, as if she only existed through its searing lines. But she wanted to recline, if just for a moment, to feel the cool damp grass of the apartment lawn that now wove through her sandaled feet. Or was that elsewhere? Was it the pain, secretly, that she lingered upon?
So let me lie down.
Have the briefest rest.
Here…
Dora barely caught her, struggling to keep her upright. June was on her knees, being held up by the woman’s warm, soft arms. She had to lie down. “My bag,” she murmured to Dora. “I need my bag.”
Dora took it quickly and splayed it out for her and June found the vial and little syringe. Her hands suddenly grew calm. She plucked off the protective cover and drew some liquid from the vial. It was too dark to try to read the lines.
“Should you do this right here?” Dora asked, standing what seemed many miles above her. “Should I help you?”
June didn’t answer. She was on her side in the weedy grass, trying to open the alcohol pad. She fumbled it and Dora retrieved it for her but June couldn’t wait and hitched up her skirt and blindly stuck herself, the tiny bee sting blooming into a wide, clean coolness that reached all the way up to her throat, her mouth, a temperature that she could almost taste.
And then washing back down over her was the flooding warmth, this lush, weightless blanket.
The world shifted, clicked back. Dora asked her if she wanted to get up and she said yes and without any pain-or perhaps there was pain, if unrequited-she was able to stand up. There was no sign of Clines or their car but June didn’t mind, for at the moment she had misplaced her purpose for being here. All she knew was that this woman holding her was Dora, and that Dora was goodly, was basically kind, and that she would very much like to remain in her arms. The streetlamp above them went on and June had to cover her suddenly sensitive eyes from its bright, tinny light by tucking her face in Dora’s neck and hair as the two of them trudged past the sidewalk and stepped off the curb into the street. The three dogs from earlier were scampering about them now, sniffing and baying playfully at their heels, each vying for their attention. Dora shooed them away. Several blocks down the wide, two-way street, headlights appeared in the distance. “Maybe it’s yours,” Dora said, and waved at it, and the car replied with a flash of its lights. It sped up.
“I don’t want to go yet,” June said, but the sounds she made surprised her, by how weak and deformed they were. She was near mute. She felt herself slipping from Dora’s hold and so Dora leaned them up against the trunk of a parked sedan. Dora was turned to the approaching car, so she could not see what June saw, that behind them and across the street, beyond the cast of the streetlamp, a man with two white plastic shopping bags in his hands was strolling in his own penumbra, contented in his posture and step, maybe once and for all. Was it he? June murmured, “Hector,” and Dora simply answered that she would have to leave now. The car was fast approaching and this was the end. She could see the driver behind the wheel, glasses on. But the dogs, like June, had noticed the man, too, perhaps picking up the good scent in his bags, and the three bolted across the road, directly in front of the car. The car swerved and just missed the trailing dog, but then lost control and shot wildly forward on the slick pavement, striking Dora where she stood at the back of the parked car.
Had there even been a sound? A crashing of metal? To June a new opacity reigned, as if she, or else the world, had been dipped once in candle wax. The layer was fast hardening. The car had careened diagonally across the street and bounded straight into a telephone pole. The corner of the parked sedan, just where she and Dora had been standing, was pushed in, smashed. June herself was untouched. But Dora was lying still on the pavement. The man knelt beside her, his back to June, his white bags discarded in the middle of the street. One of Dora’s legs was all bloody, a mangle of flesh, though June couldn’t exactly tell. Dora was crying, very softly. Then she stopped crying and was quiet and then cried a little again and then she no longer made any sounds at all. He tried to resuscitate her. After a moment the man kissed her, on the forehead, and then let go of her hand. The dogs had come back around and were rooting in the bags. The man rose and without acknowledging June’s presence went past the dogs to the ticking car, where it was hitched up onto the curb. She walked into the street. Clines had slumped sideways into the door, the windshield in front of him cracked. His face was bloodied. His hand jittered up by his throat and he was lamely pulling at his own collar, as though he couldn’t quite breathe, and when the man got to him it was with the feral hunch of menace. He was going to clench Clines’s neck and snuff him. But before he could touch him, Clines bucked once on his own and lay back, still. The man stepped away then and faced June, and it was at last in the pale lamplight that she could be sure it was he.
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.
June was deep in sleep, her kit opened, the miniature syringe carelessly dropped on the bed beside her. When he checked her neck for a pulse-her skin was blue-tinged and quite cool to the touch-she didn’t stir and he had to press hard to find it. He lay back down in the bed and tried to go back to sleep but he couldn’t and so had wandered the streets of the cruddy airport town, looking for another drink. It was a hard-surfaced, unadorned settlement of low-slung concrete slab buildings, the ground floors of shuttered storefronts topped by shuttered residences above. Nothing was open, not even the gas stations, and then nothing seemed alive besides, no lights or voices or sounds of any insects or birds. It was a gritty, modern place with electrical wires sprouting everywhere from the ugly, featureless façades and the sickliest trees he’d ever seen, and with its air laced with the stink of jet fuel he felt he was in a fitting place, the kind of forlorn hole where someone like him might choose to crawl in and cover himself with dirt.