Was this Nicholas like him? Was he truly nearby? June had shown him an old school picture on the plane, and though he merely glanced at it (he had folded himself against the window seat in the most miserable mourning, walling himself off with a dozen little liquor bottles), the momentary flash of the creased photograph was enough to convince him of his paternity: the boy featured the same squared line of jaw, the prominent, gently angled brow, even the mouth, which was not quite Hector’s but rather his father’s, those full, ever-risible lips of Jackie Brennan. He suddenly realized how obtuse he’d been, plain dumb to the fact that June wasn’t solely asking for his help but aiming to bring the two of them together before she was gone. Was it a final, sentimental gesture? The wish of a dying mother, of not leaving her son completely alone in the world? She was losing her grip for sure but even she couldn’t possibly believe that connecting them now would be beneficial to Nicholas in any way. With Hector she was just saddling the young man with an unnecessary drag on his psyche. Slowing him down.
If he had any fatherly instinct at all it was that he ought to warn the boy of his presence, scare him off for good as if he were some stray dog you couldn’t afford to feed. Of course he had never come close to wanting children of his own and had no feelings either way for Nicholas; but a curiosity was steadily gaining on him, too, even as he was trying to dispel it, a wonder about this elusive, apparently criminal person whose bloodlines were drawn from a most unfortunate pairing. Was he as diamond hard as June? Was he a misfit like Hector, some self-incarcerating soul? Or was he, like anybody else, desperately yearning to be discovered again, by any good stranger or beloved? It might be as simple as that. But of course a flat-out fear, too, was afflicting Hector as he turned down the dusty, unfamiliar side streets, the thought of actually facing Nicholas raising alarms in his heart, not simply for the awkward talk they would have to suffer through but the specter of something infinitely more disturbing: the prospect of his failing yet another person, even in the smallest way, someone else he should honor or protect or love better than he ever could.
Back at the hotel he had found June vomiting onto the floor between the twin beds, which they’d pushed apart as far as the room allowed, barely a foot. It was just watery mucus and he cleaned it up. When he wiped her mouth with a hand towel she batted at him from her medicated half-sleep and Hector had to calm her, though simply folding her arms seemed to cause her pain. Her feet were terribly swollen, distended into hideous, red-purplish bags. The flight had finally caught up with her. Yet despite her condition he kept seeing her differently, as the lean, angular child he once knew, the unflaggingly angry, aggressive, icily silent girl who wouldn’t let anyone touch her or get too close. Everybody at the orphanage was wary of her and kept their distance, even the toughest boys, not wanting to risk a hard shove or even a kick in the groin. One day she’d taken on two of the bigger boys at once, breaking the middle finger of one and nearly scratching out the eyes of the other; the memory of it was clear enough that Hector unconsciously reclined gingerly on his bed, so as not to make the springs creak and disturb her. And though he could have easily taken all her identifying papers and the large sum of money she’d given him and let her die there anonymously and be done with it he was amazed by her ceaseless, spearing will to persist, a life force that her physical distress was somehow sharpening rather than blunting. He was awed by the way she could push herself, ignore her obvious wretchedness, and apply herself like a tool.
The next morning she was miraculously improved, her cheeks no longer the light slate color, her movements as she quickly repacked her bag steady and efficient, like any woman leaving on a business trip. They had a breakfast of tea and stale rolls (June took only the tea) and flagged a taxi to the rental-car office and soon enough they were on the road, headed north, June reading the map for them. Hector was driving and they made it to Livorno by noon, but it proved to be a worthless trip. Directing them was a dossier of documents from Clines’s contact in Rome, but they were following a trail that seemed to Hector a pathetic, frayed yarn.
It turned out they’d gone to Livorno because someone with a name similar to one of Nicholas’s aliases had been was arraigned there recently on check-kiting charges, but when they got there nobody at the courthouse knew anything or could even find a file on the man. The court officer who was contracted to deal with them was on vacation. June put it down to the confusion of the aliases and the language difficulty, but Hector was not convinced; Clines’s contact in Rome, a talkative fish-mouthed fellow with an Australian accent to his English, struck him instantly as a crook and a liar, the sort who maybe specialized in swindling old people and women, and after June paid what he said he’d been promised, he offered up the name of a court officer in Livorno, assuring that a sizable bribe to him would erase the indictment.
There was little point in going back to Rome, for the contact there was probably gone, too. After staying a night in Livorno they went to the medieval town of Massa Marittima, a place where her son had briefly worked in a fancy antiques shop after leaving London. They found the shop, but it was no longer an antiques store; it had changed hands recently and was in the midst of being renovated as a tourist shop, and the Czech construction workers could tell her nothing. But they got lucky: it was only because June had suddenly craved something sweet, a gelato-the one thing she felt like eating anymore-that they stopped at the stand on the other side of the tiny cobbled street and struck up a conversation with the English-speaking counter girl. June asked if a young man had worked there and the girl said that an Asian-British man named Nicky Crump had indeed worked in the shop.
June gasped that this was sure proof; Crump Antiques had been the name of her shop early on, after the original owner, before she changed it to just Fine Antiques, Nicholas himself scraping off the old name and painting the new one on the glass panel of the door in matte gold and black lettering. When June showed her the old school picture the girl had at first hesitated, scrunching her nose, but when June pressed her she agreed that it was he. Apparently Nicky Crump had told her when he learned the shop was closed that he was heading to Siena, as there were a good number of antiques shops there. The girl was gentle and bookish and not unattractive and seemed to want to say something else, maybe that she had liked him, but before she could June had whisked them away, saying they should move on, move on.
Now, heading to Siena, they seemed to be lost again, stuck on a rutted two-lane road outside yet another unsigned town. The
autostrada
had been full of tourist traffic and delivery trucks and marred by construction sites and after inching along for several half-hour stretches June decided they ought to take the smaller roads that ran alongside the main highway. But then there were countless unmapped roundabouts and side-jogs and because it was hazy they couldn’t read the sun for direction. They’d doubled back several times already, even ending up twice at the same roundabout, as they were now, and June suddenly cried, “This can’t be where we are!” ripping the page from the map book and crumpling it with rage.
Hector kept quiet, but while he drove them he began to wonder about the reality of this all, how Clines’s contact had been able to get any of this information. He thought maybe Clines had been playing her, or been duped himself. Or perhaps he had been simply pulled along, just as Hector was being drawn along now, pulled forth in the wake of June’s intensity, her inhuman stamina. And yet the questions about her son kept accruing, if more to him than to her. She seemed to ignore the fact, documented in Clines’s folder, that the name of the person she’d wired money to in the last weeks-a Paul Ferro-was very different from the names Nicholas had used in the past, or that the sums requested had dramatically increased. She was simply aiming herself toward him as he kept moving and it didn’t matter that hers was a likely folly of a journey and destined to end in nothing at all.
But soon they found the right road, and she retrieved the balled-up paper from the car floor, wincing as she reached for it, and then opened the map book and carefully smoothed the page out to go back in its spot. Her mood would swing erratically like this, depending on the changing matrix of the pain, the drugs in her system, or the periodic attacks of vertigo that seemed to be gaining in strength and frequency, and with it would ebb her energy and ability to reason. In the space of thirty minutes she might change their routing, or break down, or even lash out at him for driving too slowly. Every so often June tapped him to pull over at the next shoulder so she could shut her eyes for a minute and regain her equilibrium, or else so she could retch, yet time after time she’d emerge from the restroom and don her sunglasses and walk quickly back to the car like she was ready for another hundred kilometers and open the spiral map book to the connecting page.
They had traveled up well past the foothills now and the road narrowed and began to curl severely about the hillsides. The roadway lacked guardrails and the exposed slopes fell away so steeply that June was shutting her eyes as Hector marked the hairpin loops. A local bus had closed in behind them and was riding their bumper; he was driving with her in mind and didn’t speed up, but soon enough June signaled him to stop. The road was too curvy and it was only after a few more switchbacks that he could turn off onto a gravel drive, pulling in a bit too fast. The driveway was even steeper than the road and the car bottomed out on the spine of the rutted path and he had to gun the throttle to get it moving. They slid perilously for a few feet, the front wheel stopping on the edge of the knee-deep rainwater ditch that was cut alongside. June promptly opened the door and leaned over and gagged, dry-heaving; the color in her face was wrong, perfectly metallic and dulled, and he simultaneously noticed through the trees the faded terra-cotta tiles of a roof and followed the road downward.
“What are you doing?” June said, wiping her mouth. “I just need a moment. Then we can move on.”
“We’re stopping for a while.”
“I’m okay. Turn around now. Hector…”
He didn’t reply, and for the first time in the few days they’d been together she didn’t overrule him. She had already closed her eyes, holding on to the door handle as they bumped fitfully down the hill, kicking up a trail of dust. The driveway suddenly ran out around the next turn, stopping mid-hill, two large boulders marking its end; the house sat another twenty or so meters farther down, at the end of a footpath.
He helped June out of the car. She had trouble with the loose footing and he steadied her as they descended. When they reached the steeper footpath she lost her balance but he caught her before she fell, lifting her in his arms. She held on to him tightly, her hands slung around his neck. It stunned him, how she was hardly there; she was as light as a box kite. He felt uneasy, touching her. While they were briefly married he never touched her, except that final night before their agreed-upon separation, when she had plied him with more liquor after he’d come home from a night’s drinking and then later startled him from his dead man’s sleep, straddling him as he spasmed awake. She left their flat right then, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been not so much used as robbed.
Now he carried her to the house, where she asked to be let down, but she didn’t make a move to stand and he realized she wished to recline. There was an old wooden bench tipped over in the high grass near the house and he righted it with his foot and laid her down. She was suffering, her knees tucked up into her chest. Her sandals had come off and her feet looked blanched and skeletal. The haze had dissipated and the late afternoon sunlight was still brilliant, if not hot, and Hector decided to check the house to see if she could rest where it was less bright.
The cottage was perhaps a hundred years old, made of varied stones reset and remortared over the years, with a single square, shuttered-up window in the north wall speckled with dormant moss. The place was likely a hunter’s retreat, for there were ropes left hanging from a large tree nearby, for stringing up game. The short, scarred door was pad-locked but the screws played in the rotted wood of the jamb and with a few hard shakes he was able to free the rusted iron and push the door in. A faint smell of ash rose up from the darkness; someone had been there in the last few days. He opened the shutters of the windows and could now see the entirety of the space, a room roughly three meters by four meters: there was a hearth on the short wall and a rough-hewn table in the center with two stools, and a canvas cot topped with a sleeping bag. The plastered walls were hung with ancient threadbare tapestries that appeared they might crumble on touch. He unzipped the sleeping bag and it smelled of a person but not strongly and he went out and got June. He laid her down. She asked for her kit and he hiked back up to the car to retrieve it. But when he returned she was already asleep, her face pinched with hurt, mumbling like she was explaining something detailed and complicated and maybe unpleasant. Did she say the name Sylvie? He thought about giving her a shot anyway, to relieve her of course, but also in the hope of quieting her, so she wouldn’t make any such mention again, but he started a fire instead in the hearth, as the cottage was cool from being shuttered up.
Soon enough, however, she was awake. “Where’s the car?”
He nodded up the hill.
“What are you doing?”
“Making some food.”
He was filling a cast-iron pot with some ingredients he’d found. In a cabinet there was a stock of home-canned goods, jars of white beans and tomatoes and pickled meat and anchovies. There was also olive oil and bread crisps and several bottles of what looked like homemade wine, along with a canister of coarse salt.