The Surrendered

NINE

AT THE END OF HER WRITTEN STATEMENT to the local constabulary relating her dealings with Nicholas, the antiquities dealer in London added a coda to her testimony: “Mr. De Nicole, or whoever he may turn out to be, was by every measure a charming, delightfully assured, extremely knowledgeable young man. Aside from the value of the stolen pieces, his departure will certainly prove a considerable loss to our firm.”

So, June thought, someone else was missing him, too.

That the sentiment was barely a month old was a cause for special heartache, and as June peered out the window glass from the back of the sedan Clines had rented for them, she realized that what she was feeling, despite the circumstance, was a deep flush of motherly pride.

Delightfully assured.

The clean type of those words was a sudden salve to her flesh, for otherwise she could hardly keep from crying out from the frightfully sharp pains in her joints and limbs. For the moment they seemed to be far-off alarums, urgent enough and real, though happening to some other unfortunate, dying woman. This dying woman, on the other hand, this one wearing a woolen skullcap and a green silk shawl wrapped snugly about her shoulders on a warm autumn evening, was in fact enjoying the first good day of the end of her life, and not even the jarring, potholed drive up the West Side Highway could call her back to her miserable bones. For she could believe that Nicholas was basically all right; that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with him; that no matter what crimes he’d committed he was essentially a promising, capable young man; that he needed, ironically, only to come back in from the world in order to thrive.

This was the mad logic of her illness, of course, and even as she understood it to be so, she took the same comfort and refuge in her thoughts of Nicholas as with the palliatives from her doctor, these new warm blankets of her life. Something had begun to happen to her body in the last weeks, and she recalled now what her doctor had warned of a month ago when she told him she was not going to see him anymore, that she was going away. Dr. Koenig said the pain would change and evolve, grow worse, much worse, and that eventually it would overwhelm her. She liked his frankness, even before she’d quit as his patient. When Dr. Koenig first informed her of the diagnosis of the stomach tumor she’d felt that horrid bleat arise in her throat, for she could tell by the grip of his unwavering stare that there was little hope for her. He wouldn’t say that, of course, Dr. Koenig being famous for his aggressive, innovative techniques, but also for his utter refusal to relent, no matter the circumstance.

June’s case was compelling, she was told by a resident, because the tumor in her stomach had insinuated itself in a manner rarely seen. She asked how and the young doctor told her, with unintended poetry, Like fingers in a jar. Eventually the cancer would spread to the other organs, but during the initial examination Dr. Koenig told her they would succeed, that they would first excise certain sections and then use other experimental regimens, some brand-new, and despite what she’d first seen in his eyes she very quickly came to believe him.

“You will realize I’m very greedy about life,” he said to her, in his stripped, weary baritone. “It’s life or nothing.”

For a time June was a model patient, and though not trying to be she became perhaps his “favorite,” a special case even among his special cases, a status she sensed whenever she had to stay a few days in the hospital, by how frequently his residents dropped in on her and wished to hear of her condition and even any complaints, none of which she ever expressed. She placed herself at his disposal, completely, never declining or even hesitating when he would request that she undergo yet another uncomfortable or painful procedure or submit to a new battery of tests. They drew blood from her as if from a tap. Of course she was encouraged by his doggedness, his decision to operate even when others believed it was no use, his aggressive regimens of radiation and then his constant calibrations of medicines, until one day, during a weeklong hospital stay, by then every strand of her lustrous black hair gone and her bones droning with a pain that was insidiously alive and the veins in her arms as brittle and ruined as Roman aqueducts and the right half of her back angrily stippled with an outbreak of shingles, June at last said no to a minor request by a resident to have an umpteenth CAT scan, for which she would have to drink a foul, metallic-tasting shake. The resident, a very smooth-shaven and bespectacled Pakistani fellow, had not quite heard her, or else believed that he had heard her assent, and ordered the nurse to prepare the concoction, to which June again said no, this time louder, and the young doctor paused for a moment before leaving her room without another word. Soon Dr. Koenig appeared at the foot of her bed with his hands splayed out as if he were a wounded suitor. His eyebrows, bushy and graying, were wilted with strain. He seemed already to know what she was going to say. Still, he quietly asked her what was the matter. “Has something gone wrong?” June shook her head. “Are you terribly uncomfortable? Are you suffering? We can address this.”

“That isn’t it.”

She was in fact suffering, but as yet still only in the corporeal sense. Her mind, she felt, was still sharp, and steely. It could still see each moment from every side. “Then I don’t understand, June. Why must you do this? Why thwart our efforts? You must appreciate how far we’ve come already.”

“Of course I do. You’re magnificent. Everyone here has been magnificent.”

“Then let’s keep on!” he said. She could tell he’d registered her appreciation by his rolling over it. More than anything else, she liked Koenig for this feature of his character.

“You should have a patient who wants to be here fully. There are dozens waiting, I know.”

“We’ll care for them in time. We are focusing on you now. We choose our patients carefully and we give everything we have and we don’t let go from day one.”

“But you knew then.”

“What? What did I know?” Koenig gasped, waving his hands.

“That I was already dead.”

“So aren’t we all!” he shouted angrily. The sudden flash of his feeling animated her and deliciously, if only momentarily, suspended the pain. “We cheat time, June, all of us, whether we’re ill or not. Most of us only realize it when we’re not well. But I don’t believe we have a certain allotment at birth or one fixed by fate or anything else. We can extend time for anyone who wants it. And I don’t want to hear about ‘quality of life’ or some such. Life is quality of life. If you can take nourishment and communicate and conceive of tomorrow, then another day is riches enough.”

He spoke as he always did, with the ample authority and startling egoism of a celebrated healer, and yet through his conviction and bombast June could discern the doctor as a less than invincible figure, perhaps a boy whose mother died young, or whose sibling grew up chronically sick, someone who had witnessed a wretched dwindling and instead of abiding the measured response or swift act of mercy had become an unceasing forge of the realm.

“I won’t disagree with you,” she said to him. “I can’t.”

“Then don’t give up now!”

“I’m not giving up.”

“You will be if you leave. We’re at a critical moment. We’re on the cusp of succeeding, but it’s perilous, and there’s no room at all for hesitation. Even the short time we’ve wasted this afternoon can make a difference. I believe this. Now, I’m going to call my resident back in here and you’re going to allow him to do his work. Do you agree that this should happen? I know you do. You do, yes? Today and tomorrow and the next day.”

He had held her by the points of her shoulders and his gaze was not so much searching as it was rallying her. Or attempting to. But even the gentle cupping of his hands felt as if he were abrading her skin, this wildfire skittering over her back and neck, and she could barely keep from grimacing. It was not that she meant to deceive him, though she knew she would be doing so. After he had gone and before the young resident could return, she dressed herself quickly and wrote Koenig a note:

My whole life I cheated days. Please give the rest of mine to someone else.

How she wished that she could take that note back. Somehow her condition improved dramatically after she left the hospital, her body lithe and loose and vigorous, but since the day she met Clines her condition had deteriorated. She was now more and more dependent on the painkillers Koenig had had his resident deliver to her, her mind feeling sharpest when she was counting up the pills and vials (which was a way of counting time), as well as the stack of forward-dated prescriptions he’d insisted on giving her. The last few reached well into the following year, and sometimes she shuffled through them with gratitude like they were unanticipated greeting cards, salutations from a future telling of a very different longevity.

As the car crossed the bridge to New Jersey, the southerly view of the evening lights of the metropolis glinted beckoningly, showing a path to the harbor and then the open sea. She was always somewhat fearful of the water, having never learned how to swim, yet now she imagined pulling herself through the black river, her limbs motoring in purposeful rhythm, every muscle singing with heat, her body once again bristling. She saw a young Nicholas swimming beside her, instinctively trusting her to lead them and staying close, keeping up when she pushed the pace, then tucking himself against her belly to rest. She placed her hand on her stomach now and it was as if she felt him there instead of the huge dense egg of the tumor that had taken her over and had spread itself in every part. When she was pregnant with him she was terribly sick, not just in the first weeks or in the morning but constantly and nearly right up to the birthing, a welling, tormenting nausea that reached high in her throat and kept her from eating much and nurtured the horrid idea that if she were to fall so ill as to have to terminate, then let it be. When the nurse placed him on her chest after she awoke from the emergency Caesarean (he wouldn’t come out, his head too large) she’d actually gagged through her tears of wonderment-she only found out later that sickness often came after anesthesia-and the first words she said to him were, I’m sorry.

She was sorry, was she not?

They sometimes took the ride over like this to Palisades Park when he was in elementary school; they lived in Morningside Heights then and it was easier to cross the bridge than go downtown to Thirty-second Street for an early-Sunday dinner at a Korean restaurant. They would take a taxi because she never learned how to drive, and on the rides home with a small bag of groceries between them Nicholas would fall asleep while half-holding his nose because of the sewer-smelling radish kimchee and dried cuttlefish beside him. They had gone only because he kept asking about where she was from and what other Korean people were like and she figured the ready setting of an eatery would do the trick. But once there her own spirit would gradually dampen and sour and Nicholas would hardly say anything and would pick at his quarter-eaten bowl of bibim bap. She’d harangue him to finish and maybe snap at a waitress and then they’d buy some foodstuffs she’d mostly let rot before getting around to preparing. Still, they went a half-dozen times, and then no more, June herself accepting that whatever nostalgia she was hoping to conjure for him had long been obliterated and that there was nothing she wished to latch on to. Nicholas didn’t complain, but on their last time going over he asked if he could stay in the taxi while she shopped and even ate. She told him of course he couldn’t and asked him why he would want to do such a thing and he replied, Because you get so angry when we’re there. As the taxi approached the restaurant where they usually ate, June instructed the driver to take them back to Morningside Heights. At home she made them peanut butter sandwiches and after they ate he went to his room to read, as if nothing at all had happened. He was a sensitive boy but every once in a while he could exercise a remarkable composure: that perfect distance he could keep, an exquisite self-balance and suspension.

Was the letter from the antiquities dealer in London evidence that during his years away he had moderated the extremes of his person? Or was it proof of a more frightening mastery? That he had decided to work in the antiques business, of all things, made her think she hadn’t damaged him. He certainly enjoyed the shop. After school Nicholas would contentedly spend the hours until dinner polishing up the inventory with an oiled rag, or else fix things, like replacing the drawer slides of a desk. He was naturally handy without really trying, merely needing to inspect the mechanism quickly to understand what was missing, or see how an operation was going wrong. Besides furniture he could also fix mantel clocks and music boxes and really anything that wasn’t too far gone or required a special tool or parts. He possessed a certain empathy for machines that in a different circumstance could have found him engineering bridges or as some gifted mechanic; but she never encouraged him and sometimes even playfully taunted him for his old jeweler’s posture as he crouched beneath the spotlight of a work lamp, saying a boy should take in the fresh air (even of New York City) and run and leap and stomp on things, live with his feet and legs more than his head and hands. That she could ever utter such a thing seemed monstrous to her now, but back then it was just the two of them in the world and her focus on him alternated between being unrelentingly sharp and then dialed so wide that the boy was but a ripple in the broad field of her vision, a mark of pale, this faint smudge of her blood.

He kept mostly to the back of the shop, and whenever a customer entered he would say hello with warmth but then discreetly vanish to the tiny back workroom or the basement. The customers would invariably comment on what an attractive, well-mannered boy he was, and June could then engage in a conversation about children or parenting that would elide nicely into a talk of objects for the home. She was not a natural saleswoman or a person given to charming others, but she could sense an opening instantly and couldn’t help but lodge herself in any breach. She was dogged and opportunistic, and commerce was mere play compared to what she could resolve herself to do. Perhaps it was pure coincidence that the shop did well on the days Nicholas chose to hang out, but she knew for certain that his presence helped her, that it was a necessary preface to a story she could never begin telling on her own, and for this reason she was always slightly cruel and tried to compel him to be elsewhere, not wanting to feel guilty about using him to good advantage, which she often did.

But Nicholas had not appeared to mind-he certainly never said so-though June now thought that through those early years of her shop on Lexington he must have learned something about the unhappy patterns a son and mother could fall into. When the last customer had departed and she shut off the lights of the display window, Nicholas would emerge from wherever he was working and she would say, “The mole-boy appears,” sweetly enough but with an edge more aptly directed at a peer or friend than a reticent boy of nine. He would answer her with his eyes closed and a wide, exaggerated smile, freeze in his position as if stricken with palsy, and then fitfully hop away. They played at it together, but it was a strained comedy. Back at the apartment he would do his homework or make drawings while she fixed dinner (always something simple, something basic enough that it was hardly real cooking, like rice and steamed fish, or elbow macaroni with jarred sauce) and nothing would be off, but sometimes in the middle of the night she awoke to the sounds of gasping coming from his room; the first time she nearly tripped while getting up too fast, afraid that he was choking, but it turned out, then and other times, that he was crying in his sleep. He wasn’t deeply distressed-it was the softest crying, self-muffled, if that was possible-and although it would have been the simplest thing to wake and comfort him, she inexplicably stood over him in the dark, staring at his racked mouth and the tight, quivering shrug of his shoulders, and it took everything in her to renounce the thought that here was a boy she would have to carry about forever.

How very different things had come to be.

“I must advise you again, Mrs. Singer,” Clines said to her now, not looking at her in the mirror. He had put on glasses for driving. “You should not be bothering anymore with this man Brennan.”

“Yes.”

“We should be in Rome by now, looking for your son instead.”

“We will fly out tomorrow night. There won’t be any more changes.”

“I’m sorry to be so frank, Mrs. Singer, but you’re in no condition to delay.”

“Then you can always drive a little faster, Mr. Clines.”

She could see his lips tightening in the rearview mirror. He didn’t want to drive back over to New Jersey, saying it was a waste of time, but in fact she could see it was because he was also fearful of Hector. But he did as she acidly suggested, accelerating slightly for a stretch before eventually easing back to his unusually slow driving style; he was indeed an older man than he wished to let on, and she could see him straining in the twilight to see the road. He had asked that she sit in the back because of a chest cold that he said he didn’t want to transmit to her. But this was primarily an excuse. Clines, she had come to see, was a terribly formal sort; he was someone who liked the comfort of having a designated station for himself, a place. This was fine by her, for she knew exactly where she stood with him without much discussion. Discussion for her had become a hardship. She had a purpose and Clines was aiding her and there was little else to talk about.

Nicholas, of course, had always been especially subject to her commands; even as a teen he couldn’t help but follow her wishes without argument. At some point she would find herself being particularly unreasonable, sometimes squarely merciless, hoping he would argue or talk back sharply to her, but he never did, merely assenting or else drifting off to another room of the apartment. Was it his character to be so compliant, or had she also formed him with those trenchant comments at the shop? Like any mother she sometimes found herself furious with him, for nothing other than his being a child. Later on the reasons would be different. In any case, she couldn’t help herself and probably Nicholas couldn’t either and after he left home and had been gone for months and neither written nor telephoned she wondered whether an objective observer would determine that on balance she had been the most damaging presence in his life.

That he had gone on so readily to a career of larceny seemed confirmation enough of the notion. Clines reminded her several times that these were still alleged crimes, but she knew the truth had already been long determined. For Nicholas had a history of stealing. It was not a problem before, though in truth only because he was never caught. From the time he was seven he filched candies and gum from the news shop and playing cards and felt markers from Woolworth’s, and later on, when he was in middle school, he stole record albums and books from the public libraries, expensive clothes from department stores. She periodically discovered a cache tucked deep in his closet or between the mattress and box spring of his bed, once finding three brand-new pairs of designer blue jeans, another time two ski parkas, none in his size. She supposed he sold them, or gave them away to his friends. It didn’t surprise her that he was never caught: he was a smart, charming, gentle-faced boy who walked easefully into rooms and could still look you in the eye and say hello while fitted with whatever goods he’d tucked beneath his shirt.

What was remarkable was that June never confronted him. Not a reprimand, not even an innocent question or comment about the loot. She would put the stuff back in its place, as if she’d found a pornographic magazine. But why? It wasn’t as if stealing were a typical boyhood stage to be outgrown. She could have spanked him the very first time, on finding a dozen packs of various gums stuffed into a sock, harshly punished or scared him into never doing such a thing again. But it seemed that each time she found a new stash she’d somehow discount the previous instances, see them as isolated, even accidental, cases in which Nicholas simply forgot to pay; she’d done that herself a couple of times, once resulting in an embarrassing frisking at a store entrance by the security guard. Nicholas was naturally preoccupied, yes, that was a problem, but the truth of the matter was that June began to look almost expectantly to the stealing. She would go into his room whenever he wasn’t there, half-hoping to find something. Of course whenever she did she felt frustration and bewilderment, but then a kind of dreadful curiosity about the moment itself took hold of her such that the larger, more disturbing picture dissipated and she focused too discreetly on the act; she would wonder about the particular circumstances of its moment, the part of the store he was in, if he had been nearly caught and his heart had raced terribly, and then what he was thinking, or not thinking, the faces of his compulsion.

Once she had followed him, seeing him by chance walking by on the other side of the avenue from her shop. He was thirteen at the time. She quickly closed the shop and trailed him until he went into a record store. She peered in at him from the sidewalk, making sure he couldn’t see her by standing at the edge of the large display window. She was terribly anxious; she couldn’t see how he could possibly take anything: as it was a warm summer day, he was wearing the lightest clothing, just a polo shirt and gym shorts. He browsed albums, lingered at a bin of tapes, a poster rack, and then, as if idly picking a leaf from a shrub while strolling by, he took an album and walked toward the entrance, which was right in front of the cashier. He was almost outside when the man stopped him and pointed to the album in his hands. Nicholas seemed to wake from a trance-and not in the least like he was pretending-and after apologies and a shared laugh, he paid for the record and left. By chance he departed in the opposite direction from her and when she caught sight of him again around the corner he was discarding the new album, paper sack and all, into a steel mesh trash can. Then he reached behind himself, lifting his shirt, and from the band of his shorts pulled out an orange-colored eight-track tape. He seemed genuinely pleased, letting the light play off the clear plastic wrapping like it was a prismatic mirror, regarding the lettering closely front and back, but then with a chilling casualness he dropped it into the trash as well.

Afterward Nicholas headed south on Third Avenue, his hands calm and empty. Was he on to a usual string of unsuspecting shops? His skinny form bobbed and then finally disappeared on the crowded lunchtime sidewalk. She tried following him but lost his trail. But she had to halt, too, because she was caught squarely by the feeling of her chest tightening around the ingot of a sudden pleasing fascination; for it was the picture of his surface equanimity, his self-mastery, that she was so gratified to see, to watch him exert himself upon the world, when the rest of the time he seemed too willingly subject to its turns. He was more like herself than she had guessed; for even though she held no illusions of being an admirable person, she had always been capable of making her way, no matter what.

“Do you have any children, Mr. Clines? Excuse me, I don’t even know if you have a wife.”

“My wife died many years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have a daughter,” Clines said. They were stopped at a long traffic light. “She lives in Philadelphia.”

“What does she do?”

“She and her husband are both clerks in a grocery store.”

“Do they have children?”

“No.”

He was clearly hesitant to continue, but for some reason June felt like querying him.

“You must see her fairly often, being nearby.”

“Only sometimes.”

“On holidays?”

“No, not on holidays,” he said, clearing his throat. The light changed and they proceeded for a few blocks in quiet. He was driving quite stiffly, with both hands firmly on the steering wheel, his head locked straight ahead. She was ready to drop the subject but then he said, “We haven’t spoken in some time.”

“May I ask why?”

“I don’t know why, Mrs. Singer. Nothing bad ever happened between us. There’s no animosity. In fact, I would like to leave her with a decent amount of money, whenever I go. If I didn’t have her, I’d probably have retired already. But she would never know that. I would have to say we didn’t talk too much. Even when she was young.”

“Do you think you should have?”

“I doubt it would have made a difference. Neither of us is very talkative. But I truly don’t know,” he said, with a sudden heaviness that revealed his full age. “Do you think you should have done something differently?”

“With Nicholas? No. I don’t think so.”

Clines didn’t say anything else, and although she knew she was likely sounding defensive or callous she let him drive on without explaining herself further. For she had indeed offered Nicholas everything she had been capable of giving, and more, even as she knew by the time he was three that it might somehow never be enough. Perhaps no matter what you did you could never love someone out of his nature, love someone out of his fate. Love, she had come to believe, had no such power.

Was his nature hers? In the antiques business she had tried to be honest whenever possible, though with old furniture and objets d’art it was difficult to follow completely ethical practices. It was a structurally unreliable enterprise, if not, at times, downright chicane. For one could never really be sure of the provenance of a piece, no matter what anyone told you, whether well intentioned or not. She herself, especially in the beginning, had often paid more than she should have, from dealers and “original owners” alike. Certainly there were markers that you could look to on a piece of furniture-say, details of the drawer construction, the quality of the leg fluting-but ultimately those things could be contrived. Fakes abounded in every era, most of them poorly done, but there were always a few masterfully executed works. Of course, for the vast majority of non-auction-house items there was only the experienced eye and what one could say about them without simply lying or even sounding like a prevaricator. Authenticity ultimately lay in the story you could tell, a tale most effective when it was at once fanciful and mundane. You had to offer differing scales, unlikely modulations, though all based upon the firmest-seeming foundation. It turned out she was quite good at this, her upright bearing and careful, precise way of speaking enjoining her clients to trust both her and their own taste implicitly, and if over the years there were a few instances of suspicion or unhappiness, she never had any problems with the final disposition concerning anything she had sold.

Of course when she was young June had stolen things outright, too, but it had been a matter of survival, plain and simple, as with the old farmer’s blanket, and dozens of other items and foodstuffs during the war and its aftermath. And yet, even after she was settled in the orphanage, where there was plenty of food, where there was shelter and safety, there were instances when she would steal things from the other children that could hardly benefit her, and only gave them great unhappiness. Certain sentimental objects drew her eye: a boy’s prized marbles. A girl’s silver bracelet, which had once been her mother’s. A particularly egregious theft had been of a flimsy, creased photograph of a family, which she’d lifted from the back pocket of a sleeping boy. She had nothing against the boy, in fact he was sometimes friendly to her, while most of the others avoided her. Yet she waited three full days before giving it back. She watched him search frantically through his few things, comb the play yard and classrooms on his hands and knees, then could hear him crying one afternoon in the boys’ quarters, blubbering to his dead parents, asking their forgiveness for losing his only image of them. She felt immense in her cruelty, but she told herself, too, that he ought to accept that they were forever gone, that he was actually cursed by having the picture, that he merely weakened himself by examining it all the time and depending on it as though it were his sole source of strength and faith.

No one found out she had taken the photograph, nor about any of the things she’d stolen from the other children. She was suspected, naturally, but nothing was ever proven. The only time she was discovered was when she returned something she openly admitted to taking. It was a book of Sylvie Tanner’s, one that she always kept on the stool that served as a nightstand beside her bed. June had asked her if she could be their helper, and perhaps because of her reputation as a problem child Sylvie had agreed, assigning June the task of sweeping and dusting their cottage as part of her orphanage chores. There were always other books in the stack, books borrowed for Sylvie every other week by Hector Brennan from the Eighth Army base in Seoul, but those would change and rotate, while the slim volume would remain, the only book, besides the Bible and a hymnal, they had brought with them from the States.

June asked her to read it aloud to her but Sylvie said it was not like poetry, or a children’s story, something to be enjoyed; it was an account of war, and she said that June didn’t need to read about it. But June persisted, if only because she saw how Sylvie handled the book, with indeed a kind of enjoyment, a certain somber savoring. June would peer inside the bedroom when she was supposed to be dusting, or creep behind to the plot in back, and there would be Sylvie with the faded-blue cloth-covered book in her clutch, often not even reading it, more keeping it close, her form characteristically folded up in a chair with it tucked against her chest, or propped beneath her chin. Whenever June was in the house alone she would steal into the room and try to read a page. It was difficult for her-she was otherwise reading mostly English primers then, though easily-and she realized it would take her hours simply to get past the preface and initial pages of historical background.

So she took it, reading it in her spare late-afternoon hours in the cover of a natural bunker amid the hillside brush and weeds. When the account of the battle began the writing became clearer to her, the words sharpening and crystallizing and soon enough disappearing, the reading coming to her as easily as if she were viewing a picture show in a theater. What the author saw of the battle was horrifying, the grinding carnage of the cavalry charges, of the artillery rounds and chain-gun shot, the piles of sundered, crushed bodies and scattered human remains, the veritable rivers of blood, but it was in fact the days following that haunted him most. It was the unspeakable fate of the wounded that haunted him, their privation and “perfect torture” because of the grave lack of food and water and medical supplies, most of the caretakers being laypersons like himself or the local townsfolk, all willing to aid the survivors but frightfully incapable of doing so. All the churches in the area surrounding the town called Solferino were filled with miserable soldiers, the air of their sanctuaries fouled with the stench of the dead and dying.

After a few days Sylvie Tanner asked her if she’d seen the book. June shook her head, wondering aloud if Hector had taken it back by accident with some other books to the base library. It was an uncharacteristically poor lie from her, as if she intended to make obvious her guilt, but it worked, in that Sylvie told her that if they could somehow get it back from the base, she might be willing to read and discuss it with her. The next day June slipped off to the half-buried rifle-shell canister where she’d hidden it, brushed the dirt from its cover, and took it back to the cottage. Reverend Tanner recognized the book in her hands and asked what she was doing with it but Sylvie came in then from the small rear plot and exclaimed, “Oh, you sweet dear, you got it back for me!”

Yet she still refused to read the book with June, who then begged her if they might read others together regularly, after her chores. Sylvie hesitated, surely worried about showing even more favor to her, but eventually agreed when confronted with what June could contrive of her face, when she required, blunting its hardened aspects to the rounded eyes and tender cheeks of any other girl her age, back to the waif she should have been. After June quickly completed the cleaning they’d sit up in her bed and read aloud to each other until it was time to join everyone else in preparing the tables for supper. June found that her usually constant feeling of hunger would magically subside-after the war and for the rest of her life it would never quite disappear (she was like a stray cat that way, always willing to eat, no matter the state of her belly, of course except now)-and she would have stayed with Mrs. Tanner all night if she let her, losing herself in the warm tuck of her side.

Still, June kept reading the book to herself whenever she had a free moment; she couldn’t help but imagine that it was Sylvie Tanner who was the witness and author of the book, as if she had seen with her own eyes the fierce fighting and wretched wounded in the churches, had toiled to alleviate the suffering without the aid of medicines or clean bandages or food. There was an inscription on the book’s title page, written in a handsome, flowing, old-fashioned hand, To our steadfast daughter. May you be an angel of mercy, and it was Nicholas who once asked June, when he was seven or eight, what a “steadfast” person was, holding the very book in his hands. The blue cloth cover had been long burned away and the binding was crackly and exposed, though the inner pages were intact. Because of its fragile condition she kept it in a large jewelry box on her bureau.

She heard herself tell him what Sylvie had said to her, almost to the word: “Someone who is firm in his person and beliefs, who brings to the world a constant heart.”

“Are you an angel of mercy?”

“I would like to be one,” she told him, realizing that of course he assumed the inscription was meant for her. “We should all try to be.”

He nodded, then gingerly placed the book back in the jewelry box. Sometimes she could tell that he had come in and inspected the book, tiny bits of charred paper left on the bureau top, and though she would have preferred his not handling it, and then taking such an interest in its harrowing, difficult content, she grew to see the activity as a strange kind of intimacy between them, a way to let him peek into her life and past without her having to tell him a thing. Then one day, when he was older, in sixth grade, he came into the kitchen with the book and asked whose it really was-he’d realized the illogic of the English inscription, when her parents had been Korean-and she told him it was a gift from a friend. A woman who had helped her when she was a girl but who died after the war.

“What was her name?”

She told him and though it could mean nothing to him the name seemed to spark his imagination as might a character in a story. “What happened to her?”

“There was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“A fire.”

He didn’t say anything to this. Nicholas, always very mindful of her emotions, did not push her on it. They sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, “Is that where you met my father?”

“Where?”

“Solferino.”

She shook her head. “I’ve not been there.”

“Do you know what’s there now?”

“I imagine there’s a small town. I know there’s a church.”

“I bet it’s a special one,” Nicholas said. “You think it’s like in the book we have on the Vatican? Full of fancy stuff, like gold statues and paintings?”

“You mean great treasure and riches? Maybe so.”

“We should go someday,” he said excitedly. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes, we should,” she answered, even if she had always imagined visiting the place by herself.

“Could this be mine?” he asked her hopefully, holding the book.

“I don’t know if I can give it up just yet,” she replied. “Even to you.” But the expression on his face dampened and she quickly offered: “But how about I write something to you in it. How’s that?”

“Okay.”

He quickly ran and retrieved a pen for her and opened the book to the page with the inscription. She was composing her thoughts on what to write when the phone rang; on the other end was a wholesale dealer whose call she had been awaiting. Nicholas waited patiently but when she hung up she had to leave right away to get downtown, to inspect an estate lot and make a compelling bid before any others got there. Nicholas stayed home. When she returned a few hours later (having purchased most all of the estate) he had fallen asleep in front of the television, a half-eaten salami sandwich he had fixed for himself on his lap, and she gently roused and walked him to his bed.

Only many years later, after putting him in a taxi to the airport for his big trip, did she suddenly remember that she had completely forgotten to inscribe the book for him that day. She may not have even looked at it since then. When she got back to the apartment, she went directly to her bedroom and saw that the book was gone from the jewelry box. She searched beneath the bed, in her closet, on the living room shelves, and then in Nicholas’s room, still full of his things, poring through piles of his sketchbooks and records and posters (sure signs, she thought later, that he had planned to come back), but after going through everything and the rest of the apartment she was certain that he had taken it with him.

How could he? At first she was shot through by pangs of confusion, then hurt, wounded as she was by his meager regard for her feelings, by his callous act of taking perhaps the one physical object in her life that had value. Her fury the next day reached a pitch so sharp that she pictured an accident in whatever city he was in, his bus rolling over, his hostel on fire, such that he would desperately try to phone her. But just as quickly a terrible guilt overcame her and she convinced herself that it was his own sentimentality, mixed up with his particular kind of secrecy and larcenous need, that had compelled him, and she came to see it instead as a kind of loving act, as though he’d stolen in and snipped a lock of her hair while she slept. Could it be that this was where her son had gone to hide? Her heart raced with the possibility. Her mind was beginning to fail along with her body, but she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. They surely must go to Solferino, too. She imagined Nicholas sitting at an outdoor café, waiting for her. Clines wouldn’t like it, but she would explain to him on the plane that they could only stay briefly in Rome, long enough to rest a few hours before renting a car and driving north.

A car horn wailed behind them, the driver leaning on it an extra few beats in a show of contempt for Clines’s slow driving; he’d been honked at several times already on the trip over from Manhattan. The car behind them came alongside and the driver gave Clines the finger and then cut aggressively in front of him, just grazing their bumper. Clines swerved, losing control for an instant, the steering wheel playing jerkily as the car fishtailed wildly. June was sure they were going to crash. Somehow he steadied it but now he was driving even slower than before and when another car started honking he left the roadway at the next exit, even though it wasn’t theirs. He drove for a few blocks before stopping, saying he needed to check his map, though it was clear he was shaken, his temple damp with perspiration.

June held the side of her head and face; she’d been knocked lightly against the side window of the sedan but in her condition it was as if she’d been struck with a rod, her cheek feeling like a cracked glass. And suddenly a nausea was welling up from her belly, rising and pushing against her lungs, up into her throat.

“Unlock the doors,” she said weakly.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Singer. We’ll be moving on now.”

“Please do it!”

The power locks jumped and she practically leaped out of the car, stumbling a few feet away from the door and falling on one knee in a weedy patch of the shoulder. She vomited very little, just the small mug of roasted barley tea she’d made herself before Clines picked her up, her spit tasting metallic and bilious; she was glad it was dark enough that she couldn’t make out the blood in the grass. She’d begun flushing the toilet at her shop with her eyes closed after she got sick in it, simply to avoid that wash of bright, wild color.

“You’re not well enough for this, Mrs. Singer,” Clines said, helping her to her feet. “Let me take you back to your shop now.”

“No,” she said firmly, but then had to lean into him to steady herself. His clothes smelled strongly of mildew and breath mints and she couldn’t help but gag and heave again, though there was nothing left in her to come out. She wiped the spittle from the corners of her mouth.

“We’re not going back yet, do you hear me?”

He nodded and helped her back into the car. He still seemed unsettled from the near accident and perhaps from her vehemence, too, and when they passed a diner she told him to turn around and he didn’t even ask why. Once he parked she asked him to leave her in the car for a while and go inside and have a coffee, and when he said he was fine she was sharp-voiced again and he sullenly trooped inside and sat on a stool at the counter.

She waited for him to order from the waitress before taking out a small black kit from her purse. Inside were the syringes and cotton balls and vials of alcohol and morphine that she’d received from Koenig’s resident. The needle was short and tiny, as fine as a filament, the kind diabetics and addicts used, but it was important, the resident said, to insert and pull it straight out, to avoid bruising or causing herself more pain than necessary. But now, on her own, in this condition, her hands shook with the screeching pains in her lower back and belly and she could hardly unscrew the bottle of disinfectant, and then jabbed her finger trying to push the point through the rubber cap of the morphine vial. She gave up, simply chewing two more bitter pills instead; she gagged on them but forced herself to keep them down. She tossed the needle into the kit; its dwarf scale somehow scared her. She was afraid that if she kept trying, one of her visions would appear along with it, that child in a perfectly sized doctor’s white coat whose mouth was too gaping and wide for his shrunken old-young face. Was it Nicholas? Was it her brother, Ji-Young? Koenig had warned her that she might experience hallucinations, and this one and others were accruing to her of late, apparitions that said little or nothing and seemed only to be awaiting her. She found herself speaking half-sentences to them, faint mutterings, beseeching them in a kindly, almost sycophantic tone she had never used for anyone, hoping that they might not wrench her away.

Please let me find him first, is what she said now, her head drifting down as she lay across the backseat. They were still heeding her and she believed that if she could endure their massing they might somehow forget about her, or else count her a kindred specter, let her soon join their number lingering in the ashen underworld gloom.