5

The windshield wipers emit a steady squeak as Anna, William, and Percy drive back from the airport. The car’s a Lexus, and it’s last year’s model. It shouldn’t make infuriating noises. Anna makes a mental note to call the dealer tomorrow.

Her earlier panic and determination have dissolved into exhaustion and badly jangled nerves; from William’s white knuckles on the steering wheel, she guesses he feels the same. Percy huddles in the backseat. He’s hugging his backpack; his small duffel bag sits next to him. When Anna spotted him waiting for them at the curb, he looked as impossibly huge-eyed as a child. He hugged her more fiercely than he has in years.

“You’re all right. You’re safe,” she told him. “Oh, Percy, it must have been horrible.”

“Yeah.” He shivered. He didn’t seem to want to meet her eyes; he was probably steeling himself for a barrage of questions. “Can I get into the car now? It’s cold here, after Mexico.”

“So,” Anna says now, risking one question at least, “do you feel like talking about it?”

“Not yet,” William says firmly. “Not while I’m driving, please. Save that for home. Tell us about the vacation part. There must have been some fun, too. You were there five days before—”

“Yeah,” says Percy. “Well, you know, I swam every day. I went snorkeling, and I saw fish, but there are more in Hawai’i, and the water’s clearer and warmer. But I saw sea lions and manta rays; that was pretty cool. And there were whales and dolphins. And the market there’s awesome, Mom, you’d love it, it’s right around the harbor with all the cruise boats and tour boats and stuff, all kinds of jewelry and pottery.” Even over the windshield wipers, she hears him swallow. “I was going to buy you something, but I was waiting until the last day, and then—”

“Percy,” she says. “For God’s sake. You’re home and you’re all right. That’s more precious to me than any souvenir.”

“Your mother bought you something,” William says. “A plane ticket. For tomorrow. Only then it turned out you were already on the plane.”

Anna feels her jaw clenching. Is he going to give her grief about the two hundred seventy dollars? Under the circumstances, that’s spare change. “I’ll try to cancel it,” she snaps. “I don’t even remember if it’s a refundable ticket. It probably isn’t, but if I call—”

“I’m sorry,” Percy says. “I’ll pay you back, Mom. I should have called you to say I was coming home, but it all happened so quickly.”

“Honey, it’s okay.” William, eyebrows raised, shoots her a glance. Percy’s never, ever, offered to reimburse them for anything before. Anna shrugs, mouths “shock.” People act oddly in crises.

“You hungry?” William asks, changing the subject. “We can stop to eat. There isn’t much in the house.”

“Nah, I ate at the airport. I want to go home.”

No one says anything for the rest of the drive. When they get into the house, Bart trots up with a joyous bark to greet Percy, whose face brightens into a smile when he sees the dog. Bart jumps up, putting his paws on Percy’s shoulders, and licks Percy’s face.

“Bart,” William says, snapping his fingers, “down. Come on, Perse—you know better than to let him do that.”

“This once,” Anna says, “I think we can forgive it.”

“No bad habits. If he did that to my mother, she’d collapse under the weight.”

“He doesn’t like your mother. He ignores her. Percy’s his person.”

But Bart, obedient, is down on all fours again. Percy looks like he’s about to cry. His eyes are red; his fingers tap a jittering rhythm against his thighs. “Sweetheart,” Anna says, “sit down. Let me make you some soup, anyway.”

“Not hungry, Mom.” But he sits on the couch, and seems to calm a little when the dog’s head is pillowed in his lap.

“All right,” William says. “Now. Now, tell us about it.”

Percy looks down at the dog’s ears. He starts running them through his fingers, but stops when Bart pulls away with a soft whimper of displeasure. “I—this morning I got up and went to the pool, but there were all these police outside one of the rooms, and then somebody said there’d been a murder, and I just—I wanted to come home. A bunch of us did. We all got a van to the airport and booked flights.”

“What did people at the resort say about the murder?” William’s leaning forward, eyes narrowed. Sometimes Anna thinks he should have been a lawyer, not an art dealer. Does he have to probe? Right now, this minute, when Percy hasn’t even been home for an hour? Can’t he just let Percy say whatever he needs to say?

“Well, nobody knew much. Some lady, stabbed in her room, they said, and somebody said the place had been ransacked, robbed, but it was all rumors. I mean, the police weren’t saying anything, which meant the resort people weren’t, either.” He hugs himself, shivering; his foot’s beating a tattoo against the carpet. “I don’t want to think about it. I want to go to bed now.”

“All right,” William says, but he’s frowning again, and Anna wonders how in the world Percy’s going to sleep, with all that nervous energy. This isn’t like him; he’s usually a fairly calm kid. “We know you must be tired after the flight. It’s good to have you home, Perse.”

Anna follows him into his room, garish posters be damned. She wants to sit with him while he falls asleep, the way she did when he was small, wants to stand guard over him to keep the monsters at bay. But he turns to her, face slack with exhaustion, holding his hands up as if to ward her off. “Mom. Do you mind?”

Stung, she steps back. The boy who hugged her so fiercely at the airport has vanished. “I—”

“I know you’re glad I’m back. I’m glad I’m back. But I’d like some privacy.”

Anna tries to smile. “All right. Will you let the dog stay in here, though?”

To her relief, Percy nods. “Yeah. I’d like him to. I missed him.”

Anna sticks her head into the hallway and calls Bart, who lopes joyously toward the summons. Bart’s ancestors hunted wolves, and Anna feels a primitive relief in the assurance that the animal will protect her child.

She finds William in the study, peering at the computer. He’s still frowning. When he hears her walk into the room, he looks up. The frown dissolves, but his face remains grave. “Anna, I’m reading the news stories. AP, Reuters. They say no description of the killing has been released to the public: that cop thing of using the details to weed out suspects and false confessions.”

Percy’s home. That’s all that counts. She shakes her head. “So?”

“Sit down.” William pushes the extra desk chair toward her. She sits. “According to the news stories, one of the housekeepers found the body and called the front office, who called the police, but they kept the whole thing very quiet precisely because they didn’t want the other guests to panic.”

Anna rubs her eyes. She’s very tired. She feels like she should know what this means, but her mind veers away when she tries to consider it. “Yes, and? William, I’m sorry, but can you cut to the chase? I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

William gives her a long, level look. His voice is strained, on the verge of cracking. “The guests weren’t told what had happened until a few hours before it made the news. None of them knew anything until then; the cops came in plainclothes. A guest interviewed at the resort said it just seemed like a normal day, with people hanging out by the pool and eating in the restaurant. They specifically asked that no one leave until the police had interviewed everyone.”

Now Anna’s frowning. The angles of the room seem to be bending, and she has to blink to make them straight again. She doesn’t want to understand this. She doesn’t want to know what he’s trying to tell her. “But Percy said—”

“Yes. Exactly.” William shakes his head. He looks older than he did two hours ago. “By the time the news went public, he was already on the plane. He had to be. The timing doesn’t work otherwise.”

*   *   *

Melinda’s life as a mother begins with a thirteen-hour flight home to Reno from Guatemala City. Jeremy, who’s two and a half but looks younger, who’s unused to motion and pressure changes, cramped space and strange adults holding him, howls almost the entire way, earning glares from other passengers. Melinda and Walter try to quiet him with food, with toys, with songs and games. He won’t nap, and Melinda refuses to give him anything to help him sleep, although she’s heard of other parents doing so on planes.

Long past both exhaustion and tears, she tries to cradle her new son, whispering into his hair, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” She’s intensely grateful that Walter came with her. What would she have done without him to handle paperwork, bribes, luggage, and maps?

Everyone they’ve encountered on the trip—except the officials directly involved in the adoption, who know the true story—have mistaken Walter and Melinda for a couple. It’s a logical mistake, and it’s no one else’s business that Melinda decided to adopt as a single parent, so she and Walter don’t correct the well-meaning fellow passengers who congratulate them on the adoption.

Jeremy has brown skin and dark black hair. Melinda’s hair is ash-blond, already graying, and Walter’s a redhead. It’s obvious that Jeremy’s adopted. Melinda has thought about this, about the problems Jeremy will face because he looks different—Reno is still in many ways a small town—but has decided that life in an orphanage would be much worse.

They have to change planes in Dallas; that flight’s delayed, and the wait turns into a new species of hell. Jeremy lies on his back, kicks his heels, and screams himself purple. But finally a flight attendant produces a finger puppet from somewhere and sings a lullaby in Spanish, and he quiets. Spanish isn’t really his mother tongue; K’iché is. But Spanish is what he heard at the orphanage.

Melinda—shamefully, she now realizes—knows only one Spanish song, the hymn “Santo, Santo, Santo, Mi Corazón,” which the overwhelmingly white congregation at St. Phil’s sings every few weeks. She and Walter take turns singing it to Jeremy, until at last he sleeps.

They sleep, too, on that second flight, and wake on landing. Rosemary and Tom, beaming, are waiting at the gate with a new stroller. Veronique’s there, too, not beaming—Melinda wouldn’t recognize her if she were—but bearing a shopping bag of toys and clothing. Everyone admires Jeremy, coos at him, touches his soft skin. Melinda’s grateful that he continues to sleep soundly through all this, worn out from his previous tantrums.

The other four come into the house, help get Jeremy settled in his crib—soon enough he’ll need a big-boy bed—and praise his loveliness. “You’re home,” Rosemary says. “The hard part’s over.”

“Oh, no,” Melinda says, looking at her sleeping child. So small. He’s been stunted until now, like most of the orphanage kids. But she paid for an American-trained doctor down there to evaluate him, and he’s basically healthy. He’ll grow, and she’ll help him grow, and she’ll grow, too. “The hard part’s just started.”

*   *   *

Jeremy awakens to the sound of birdsong. When he opens his eyes, he sees sunlight streaming through a window, and he thinks the sunlight should make him happy, because it was raining yesterday, but the window’s in the wrong place. This isn’t his dorm room, and it’s not the house. Where is he?

And then he remembers where he is, and why.

He wishes he could go back to sleep, but he knows he won’t be able to. He’s alert now, awake. Too awake: tense. He slept well. This is a better bed than any he usually sleeps in: expensive sheets, just the right kind of pillow, a fine firm mattress. And everything smells like fabric softener.

The smell of clean laundry has always been the scent of safety for him. But now it brings a vertiginous rush of memory, and he understands quite clearly that everything he sees and hears and smells and tastes from now on, for longer than he wants to imagine, and maybe for the rest of his life, will plunge him into Mom-movies.

His mother, sorting the laundry, letting him fold the easy stuff, the towels and dishcloths. How old was he then? Six? Eight? If you’re really good, I’ll teach you to iron.

Mom, waving a red fabric napkin like a bullfighter’s cape. Using a pair of socks as hand puppets and challenging him to match the other pairs in under a minute, while her two hands delivered an NBC sports–style commentary. Right hand wagging, fingers and thumb opening and closing like a talking mouth: “Will he find the other argyle? He only has ten seconds left, Joe! Can he do it?”

And now the left hand: “Yes! Yes, Cindy-Lou, he used his eagle eyes to find the other argyle inside the arm of that shirt! Here he goes! He’s putting them together! He’s matching heel to heel!”

Back to the right: “And yes, he’s done it! Look at that, Joe! He matched all the socks in under a minute! Jeremy Soto is once again the champion sock-matcher!”

Mom doing the laundry, every week, several times a week. Putting clean, soft jeans, neatly folded, on his closet shelf, even when he was fighting with her, being shitty to her, neglecting his own chores. Yard work. Taking out the garbage.

They had such stupid fights about taking out the garbage.

They had fights about how much time he spent reading CC instead of doing homework. They had fights about going to church camp. They had fights about the fact that he was adopted.

He’ll always remember Mom, and he will never remember his birth mother, never know anything about her. All he knows, from the Internet and the library, is the chaos of the country he came from.

Why couldn’t Mom vacation in the States? She could have gone to San Francisco, Sedona, Palm Springs. If she’d stayed here, she’d have been safe. Safer.

Is he being a racist now? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.

He forces himself to sit up, to swing his feet out of bed and onto the floor. He has to get up. He can’t lie in Hen’s guest room and cry all day.

Get a move on, kiddo. Time’s a wasting. Mom’s voice, in his head.

He grabs the small duffel bag on the dresser—Hen stopped by the dorm last night so he could pick up some clothing—and pulls on jeans and a shirt. Then he shuffles into shoes and follows the smell of food downstairs.

Lasagna. He smells lasagna. Mom always made lasagna, because it was his favorite food.

He hears voices before he rounds the corner into the dining room. Very Bitchy. She’s the last person he wants to see. He knows he should thank her for taking the phone last night, for canceling class and driving him to Aunt Rosie’s, but all he feels right now is despair and rage. None of it should have happened. He shouldn’t have to be in a position to have to thank VB. He shouldn’t have had to wake up in a strange room, shouldn’t have to be wondering if someone else’s lasagna will be as good as his mother’s.

Hen, VB, and Rosemary are sitting around the table. They look up as he enters. VB and Aunt Rosie say, “Good morning,” nearly in unison, too obviously trying to sound cheerful.

“Jeremy.” Hen isn’t trying to sound cheerful. “How are you? Did you get any sleep?”

“I slept fine,” he says, and sits down. The table’s huge, meant to seat eight or ten, too large for the room. Behind Jeremy is a cabinet with glass doors showing piles of teacups and little statues and stuff. Fragile stuff, all pink and blue. If he moves, he’ll break something. If he breathes, he’ll break something.

“Are you hungry?” Hen says. “Everybody from church has been bringing food, because I told them you’re staying with me and they don’t know what else to do. We have enough lasagna to feed the five thousand.”

“I guess I could eat.” Much as he loves lasagna, he prefers cereal right after waking up. But he’s a guest, and has to take what he’s given.

His rage grows, flaring in his gut. His whole life, he’s been a guest.

Rosemary heaps his pink-and-blue plate, and Hen brings him a glass of milk. He looks down at the food. Mom made him lasagna every birthday. One year when he was little and into fossils, she cooked metal dinosaur charms into the lasagna, as if the meat and noodles were geologic layers. “Chew carefully, kids!”

His eyes are wet. He doesn’t want them to be. He stabs his fork into the food and winces as the metal skids off the bottom of the plate. No dinosaurs here: it’s just Hen’s china. He has to be careful. He can’t scratch the priest’s precious plates, even though he longs to break everything on the table, everything in the cabinet, everything in the house.

He can’t eat this. He puts his fork down.

“Tom’s going down to Mexico to get your mom,” Hen says. “Do you want to go? I need to ask now, because he’s leaving in a few hours.”

The smell of the food’s making him sick. “Why would I want to do that? He’s not ‘getting my mom.’ She’s not alive anymore. He’s getting what’s left of her.”

“Right,” Hen says. She sounds very calm. “Jeremy, do you want to see her body, or is it okay with you if she’s cremated there? You can take your time with that one. Tom won’t have to make that call for a day or two.”

“I don’t have to take my time.” He picks up his fork again. He has to try to eat. How can he eat? “I don’t want to see her dead. I don’t want to see what happened to her. Let them burn her.”

“Think about it,” Hen says. “Tom will let us know when we need to decide.”

“I’ve decided.” He can’t eat, not right now. He suddenly yearns to go jogging, to run forever, to burn all the fury out of his system. With each step, he’ll picture stomping on the face and balls of the bastard who did this. He’ll punch the air and imagine connecting with flesh, blood, and bone.

He pushes away from the table, stands up. “Not hungry. Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” Hen says. “We’re going to sit in the living room and start working on your mom’s service. Will you join us?”

“Yeah. Sure.” His fury flames and flares. “While we’re at it, are we having a service for my other mother? The one murdered in Guatemala?”

He’s only saying it to let out his rage, to make them feel guilty. He researched Guatemala because Mom expected him to. If he’s anything, he’s American. But Hen, for once, looks at a loss. VB and Rosie rustle, suck in air, cough. “Do you want us to?” Rosemary says at last. “We’ll certainly pray for her.”

“Great. Terrific.” Jeremy brushes past the treacherous cabinet into the living room and plunks himself down on the couch, hard. The others stand now, too, and follow him. “You gonna pray for everybody else murdered or disappeared down there? In the genocide? All two hundred thousand of them?” He realizes he’s punching the couch with each word.

Good. That feels good, even though he’s being a complete hypocrite. He doesn’t care about politics. He never has. Mom wanted him to be some kind of radical, but all he wanted to do was read CC, and he’s a hypocrite about that, too, because he’s not even a good Comrade. He’s just a fan.

But he’s on a roll, so he keeps punching. “You gonna pray for all the victims of all those other genocides, Germany and Cambodia and fucking Armenia, and Darfur and Sierra Leone and probably a dozen other places I don’t even know about?”

“Yes,” Hen says. “We are.”

“Yeah, good. That’ll really help.” He switches arms. Keep hitting, even though it hurts. “That’ll keep all those people from being dead, won’t it? It’ll stop people from killing each other, because that always works. Right.”

“Prayer,” says Hen, “reminds us to do other things. I believe that prayer helps by itself, but the other things certainly do. Helping with money and food, with medical supplies, with aid to relief organizations—”

“Not to mention military aid,” Jeremy said. Relief organizations: please. Fucking Comrade Hen. Even if Jeremy ever had been a good Comrade, he couldn’t be one now. Not anymore, not after this. Time to write a WISS essay. Jeremy will be a Minion for the rest of his life, eating donuts and lasagna.

He can’t sit anymore. The punching isn’t enough. He gets up and moves restlessly around the room, hating himself for his charade but unable to stop. “The U.S. underwrote the Guatemalan civil war. They supported the government because they were afraid of communism, even though the government was butchering Mayans. The U.S. knew what was going on, but they kept providing training and weapons and money. Just like we funded fucking Al Qaeda.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Very Bitchy says, giving him an odd look, and Hen nods.

Rosemary’s frowning. She would be. Walter was military before he went to law school, and they’re Republicans. Somehow Mom still stayed friends with them. “Rosie and I just don’t discuss politics,” she told him once.

Tough luck. He glares at Rosemary, says, “Oh, you think it doesn’t matter? You think this is a wonderful country of freedom and liberty, and I should be grateful, right?”

Rosemary coughs. “Well, actually—”

“Well, actually, it kind of sucks that the country that took me in is also the one that helped kill my real mother.” All three of them wince, but he goes on. He doesn’t care whose feelings he hurts, and he realizes in a giddy rush that he isn’t faking anymore. “Yeah, I know, Mom was my real mother because she took care of me, and if she hadn’t I’d be in an orphanage and I wouldn’t be able to talk or walk, boo-hoo, you probably wish right now that I couldn’t talk, right?”

“No.” All of them speak in unison.

Which means yes. He doesn’t care. “The day Mom told me about the war in Guatemala? The day she told me my real mother had been killed by the fucking Guatemalan army with weapons from the U.S.? They destroyed six hundred and twenty-six Mayan villages. They cut open the wombs of pregnant women and cut babies in half. ’Course she didn’t tell me those parts. I had to do research. Had to find out on my own.” He glares at Very Bitchy. “You think I’m stupid. You think I don’t know how to do research, but I do.” Even if it was just to get Mom off my back.

VB gazes coolly back. “Yes, you certainly do, Jeremy. So do I. The genocide was in the early eighties. You were born in 1990, and your mother adopted you in 1993.”

“Yeah, 1990.” Library facts he doesn’t even know he remembers march out of his mouth. “The year the army massacred thirteen people, including kids, in Santiago Atitlan. And 1993? That’s when the UN peace talks were suspended because they weren’t working. There’d been civil war that whole time, remember?”

Very Bitchy’s sitting up straighter now. She gives him one of her thin smiles and starts to say something, but Henrietta interrupts her with a cough. “That must have been very hard,” Hen says quietly. “Learning about your birth mother.”

“Hard? Hard for Mom, or me?”

“Both of you.”

“Yeah, sure.” He jabs the air with both fists, one-two. VB and Aunt Rosie shrink back. Hen simply watches him. “I don’t know if it was hard for her, because right afterwards she gave me this speech about how God is great and loving and we have to do good deeds to try to fix the world, like anything could fix my real mother being dead.”

He looks at them, these white white women, with their white skin even whiter now because they’re all paler than usual. His fault. Aunt Rosie’s started to cry. His fault. He doesn’t care. He’s tired of being the only brown person. Not in Reno, certainly, but in Mom’s circles. He’s tired of being Mom’s token. “My real mother. The one who looked like me. The one who took care of me and loved me until she got her head blown off, or maybe she was raped by some army bastard and didn’t love me. Or maybe she was raped and loved me anyway. I figure those are the three most likely options. Or maybe somebody else took care of me, but I know somebody loved me, because I was still alive. And whatever happened, it ends with heads being blown off, and you’re going to talk to me about God and love?”

They stare at him. “This is entirely healthy and very understandable,” Hen says. “Of course you’re angry. So are we.”

“Great. That makes me feel so much better.” He sits down again, in a free chair this time, and starts clenching and unclenching his hands to try to get them to unknot.

“Jeremy,” Aunt Rosie says. “Your mother loved—”

“Me. I know. And all of you love me, and all your husbands or whatever love me, too. Walter was great, really, a great guy, when he still knew his own name. Tom’s a great guy.” He looks at Hen. “Ed’s a great guy. But none of them look like me, and they aren’t my dad. Even if my dad was a rapist.”

“No,” Aunt Rosie says. She hasn’t reacted to the Walter barb. Not visibly, anyway. “They aren’t. Would you rather have stayed in the orphanage?” Her voice is very gentle.

“No.” Exhaustion sweeps over him. “’Course not.”

Very Bitchy is still peering at him. “Jeremy, what would Comrade Cosmos do?”

“What?” Jeremy squints at her. VB, deigning to talk about Comrade Cosmos? Either she’s on drugs or Jeremy’s much more pathetic than he sounds even to himself. “How the hell do I know? He’s just a story. A comic book, remember?”

Very Bitchy nods. Hen’s frowning, and Rosemary looks as startled as Jeremy feels. “Yes, I know. But he’s the story you live your life by, and you just outlined a series of stories about what might have happened to the people who raised you. Stories are important.” She sits forward on her chair. “Well?”

“I have no idea. What could he do? What could anybody do? He restores order. He makes things right again. But entropy’s won, down there. It’s too broken to fix.”

“Nothing’s too broken to fix,” Hen says.

He stands up, shaky, breathing hard. “Mom is. And I don’t see your God doing anything about it, and a comic book can’t, either.” He swallows, throat raw, and says, “I have to get outside. Have to walk. You—all of you, make your plans. I’ll tell you if I want to change anything when I get back.”

They murmur assent, and he escapes to the front door. Here’s his jacket, hanging with Hen and Ed’s stuff. Here are his hat and gloves in the pocket. Here’s the doorknob.

And then he’s out, away, into a gloriously golden autumn day. Run. Run it out. Run forever.

*   *   *

“That was smart,” Hen says. “Asking him about Comrade Cosmos.”

“Thank you.” Veronique despises comic books, the dumbing down of narrative, but they’re what speaks to Jeremy. And she thinks that she doesn’t despise them as much, right now, as she despises any Judeo-Christian god who could allow this to happen to Melinda.

Rosemary and the priest are trying to be kind, including her in the funeral planning the same way Melinda always included her in social events, picnics and Scrabble nights and the Alaska cruise. She knows it’s good of them. She doesn’t care. Her knee still hurts, even though it’s not raining anymore. Her head throbs. Her chest aches. She envy’s Jeremy’s ability—his license—simply to leave. He’s Melinda’s son. He can do whatever he wants right now, short of damage to property or people.

She plans to cancel her classes next week. She’ll call in sick. She has plenty of sick time, and she might as well use it. Given how rotten she feels right now, it’s not even a stretch.

Only relatives get bereavement leave; it doesn’t matter that Melinda was her best friend. These days, Veronique and Sarabeth could register as domestic partners, if Sarabeth were still around, but there’s nothing similar for platonic friends so close they might as well be family.

Part of her knows that her department would understand, even if there’s no formal paperwork for the situation. But she’d rather nurse her resentment.

“We need to pick out hymns,” Hen says quietly. “Can you tell me which were Melinda’s favorites?”

“The old ones,” Rosemary says. “‘Simple Gifts.’ Shape-note hymns. She liked Taizé, too.”

“Good. That’s a good start. Thank you, Rosie.”

Veronique shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t do this even if I knew Melinda’s taste in church music. I can’t think about pretty little songs right now. I should go home. I’m not a churchgoer. You two can plan the service.”

The priest nods. “If you need to go home, we’ll understand. But what do you want to talk about?”

Veronique glares at her. What does this woman think she wants to talk about? What other topic is there, right now? “I know Melinda didn’t believe in the death penalty. I know you probably don’t, either. But right now, if I could get my hands on the guy who did this—”

“I know,” Rosemary says. “Me, too.”

“Me three,” says the priest, but she’s as unruffled as ever, and Veronique’s stomach feels like a cauldron. Honor complexity, she always tells her students, and they never do, but she has to. “Except that before I came over here, I browsed the Net a bit. Read the news stories, which didn’t say much. No one heard anything, even though the rooms on either side of hers were occupied.”

Rosemary shivers. “Weird.”

“That’s one word for it. No leads, but the police are collecting DNA samples from staff and guests, yada yada. So then I looked at the reader comments: equal parts ‘what a terrible tragedy’ and racist rants about how Mexicans just love to murder American tourists, and those made me furious, too. So if I want to kill the killer and I want to kill the idiots spewing bigoted filth, what does that make me?”

“Human,” says the priest. “Are they using her name yet?”

“No.”

The priest nods. “I think that has to wait until Tom’s identified the body. Even though there’s really no doubt.”

Veronique can’t imagine having to identify the body. Someone should go with Tom, just for moral support, but she certainly won’t do it. She should go home. She should leave. Why does she keep talking?

But she keeps talking. “I keep thinking about Melinda’s book group at the library. I was there once when some woman asked why Melinda wouldn’t let us read murder mysteries. She could have been one of my students: ‘Why do we have to read all these serious books?’ Idiot. And Melinda said, ‘I don’t want to read about people dying horribly, especially in books that aren’t supposed to be serious.’ She said, ‘Those books turn senseless, violent death into a puzzle with a neat solution: once you’ve caught the murderer, the puzzle’s solved, and the world’s safe again.’ She said that was fundamentally dishonest.”

Rosemary laughs; the priest raises an eyebrow. “She said all that? To a library patron?”

“She did.” If you can’t imagine her doing that, lady priest, you didn’t know her very well. “The woman walked out, of course. But here we are, in a murder mystery. I hate murder mysteries. I hate this. Melinda would have hated it.”

“We all hate it,” the priest says gently. She looks at her watch. “But planning Melinda’s service is the best thing we can do right now. It’s necessary, and it’s constructive. And I’m sorry, but I have to leave in fifteen minutes. I promised to keep the church doors open this afternoon. A lot of people will want to talk. I’m glad Sunday’s All Souls. That’s one small blessing.”

And I, Veronique thinks, am sick of talking, and think the word “blessing” is obscene in this setting. She stands. “I have to leave now. I’m sorry. You have my number if there’s anything specific I can do.”

As she walks down the priest’s driveway to her car, she wonders if she’s just running away. Women in flight. But she can’t flee this. No matter where she goes, she can’t unknow what has happened. If she could, she would.

*   *   *

Rosemary drives home in a haze of pain and grief. This is even worse than Walter’s diagnosis and decline: for all its horrors, Alzheimer’s is an illness, a natural process. What happened to Melinda—

She can’t even think what to call it, how to describe it. Her brain freezes at the mere attempt.

She remembers the last time she saw Melinda, at church the Sunday before she left for Mexico. She’d been happy, glad that Jeremy was surviving his first semester of college, glad that she was taking a long overdue solo vacation.

It was an utterly normal Sunday morning: no omens, no premonitions, no gathering thunderclouds. Walter’s condition had at least produced clues, growing evidence that something was wrong, that worse was coming. There had been time to adjust, to prepare.

Walter. Should she tell him about Melinda? Can he understand? Will he remember Melinda?

Will he remember Rosemary?

Can she even bear to visit him?

She weighs options as she drives. Melinda’s name hasn’t been made public yet, but it will be soon, within the next few days. There are televisions all over the nursing home, and while Rosemary doubts that the staff often puts on the news—especially in the Alzheimer’s wing—this is a local story, one that might even interrupt other programming. And people will be talking about it. Can she trust that Walter won’t see or hear anything, or that if he does, he won’t have one of his sudden, increasingly rare flashes of recognition and understand his loss?

She can’t take the gamble, can’t risk his finding out when she isn’t with him. She has to try to tell him.

Melinda’s one of their oldest friends. Walter and Rosemary knew her before Veronique did, before anyone at church did; they were the ones who invited her to St. Phil’s.

Walter has more memories of Melinda than anyone else Rosemary knows. Even if Rosemary decides not to tell him that Melinda’s dead, maybe she can somehow spark those memories. Maybe, if even only for a few minutes, she can take both of them back to a happier time.

And so, instead of going home, she goes to the nursing home for the first time in weeks. It’s early afternoon, and Golden Meadows has a rehab wing, which means that many of its denizens still get visitors. Right now, the bright halls bustle: aides, doctors, relatives with flowers, children bringing crayoned artwork to their grandparents. Residents sit in the corridors in their wheelchairs, aimless but smiling, able to respond to a passing stranger’s “Hello” or “Good morning.”

At night, the visitors leave, and the halls darken. The wheelchairs and their occupants gather around the nursing station, carried by time and gravity, like leaves collecting in a drain. The residents moan; sometimes they scream or sob, reaching out clawlike, beseeching hands to anyone walking by.

During the day, the facility seems clean, almost antiseptic. At night, it smells faintly of urine and feces, interlaced with the astringent scent of bleach and the mostly unappetizing aromas from dinner trays.

Rosemary hates the nursing home at night.

Even at 1 P.M. on a brilliantly sunny day, she’s shaking as she walks into the facility. She realizes, with shame, that she worries what the staff will say about her, the wife who no longer visits, who’s abandoned her husband.

Maybe they won’t judge her. Maybe they’ll understand. The day Walter was admitted, an aide told Rosemary, “It’s so hard, with Alzheimer’s. They stop knowing you, and it gets too painful to visit.” Even at the time, she recognized this as a kindness: a stranger giving her permission to let go, to leave Walter’s husk behind.

Guilt grips her anyway. She remembers a presentation on grief during her chaplaincy training. Guilt’s a universal response to loss, the teacher said. Everyone feels it. What you need to tell mourners is that if they didn’t feel guilty about whatever’s tearing them apart right now, they’d feel guilty about something else.

Rosemary walks to Walter’s room without looking right or left, without meeting the eyes of staff or other visitors or the helpless creatures in their wheelchairs. Later, she’ll go to the nursing station and alert someone there about the Melinda situation, but right now she needs to see Walter, before she loses her nerve. She wonders if he’ll look different: thinner, grayer. But there’s been no dramatic change in his condition. They’d have called her if there had been.

When she enters his room, an attendant’s helping him out of his wheelchair and back into bed. She can see only his scrawny neck and large ears, the random tufts of gray hair he’s kept despite swathes of baldness, his stooped shoulders under the blue-and-white cotton pajamas she bought on sale at Macy’s last summer. Walter has always insisted on 100% cotton pajamas. From the bunching of the bottoms around his waist, she can tell he’s wearing Depends under them.

No one has seen her yet. She stands and watches his tottering rise from the wheelchair, his slow-motion crash-landing in bed, the fussing of the aide who tucks him in. “There you go, Walter. Do you want me to raise or lower the bed? Do you need another pillow? What’s that, sweetheart?” Rosemary didn’t hear him say anything. “Do you want the TV on?”

Oh, God. Not the TV. Please, not the TV. Not unless it’s cartoons or old movies, with the news locked out.

Aching, Rosemary tries to look at Walter as if he’s a stranger. If he were a patient in the ER, someone she’d never met, what would she see? An old man, frail, being helped by someone kind. An old man who’s safe despite disability and disintegration. She isn’t watching a tragedy. She’s watching an act of compassion.

But she can’t get that distance. He’s Walter. They’ve spent over half their lives together.

Perhaps she’s made a noise, because now one bony finger points at the door. The aide turns to follow it. “Why, look, Walter! You have a visitor!”

Rosemary has never met this aide before. How long has the woman been working here? What will she think of the wife who’s only appeared now for the first time?

“I’m Rosemary. Walter’s wife.”

“Walter! Your wife’s here!” The aide beams, introduces herself with some Filipina name that speeds by in a blur and that Rosemary’s too embarrassed to ask for again, and then says, “Walter just had a nice lunch. Didn’t you, Walter? You had ham and mashed potatoes. You had a good appetite today.”

“That’s wonderful,” Rosemary says weakly. Ham. He’s always loved ham. She used to love making it for him. She blinks back tears and says, “Thank you for taking care of him.”

She expects the aide to retort, Someone has to. But instead the woman only says cheerfully, “It’s my pleasure. I’ll leave you two alone now, so you can have your visit. Let me know if you need anything.” Short and bustling, she looks Rosemary in the eyes as she passes, and smiles, and squeezes Rosemary’s arm. It’s okay, the touch seems to say. It’s okay that you haven’t been here. He didn’t miss you, and the rest of us understand. And you’re here now.

Rosemary walks to the bed now, sits on the chair placed there should Walter feel like sitting up, or should anyone come to see him. “Walter? It’s Rosie. Do you remember me?”

“Hello,” he says, and holds his hand out for her to shake. Throat aching, she does. “It’s nice to meet you.” His voice is soft, tentative, as if he hasn’t used it in a while. “Do you live here?”

She swallows. “No. I live in the house where you used to live. I’m your wife. Do you remember living with me?” She speaks gently, as she’d speak to an ER patient, a stranger.

His gaze clouds now, and his hand goes to his mouth in a gesture she knows, a signal of social embarrassment. It’s what he’s always done after a faux pas: mangling a client’s name, forgetting an appointment, neglecting to ask after a neighbor’s sick child.

His body still remembers, even if his mind doesn’t.

And she’s made him feel bad: stupid, stupid. Of course he doesn’t know her. It’s obvious that he doesn’t. Why did she even ask? “It’s all right,” she says. “Shall I tell you a story?” When Walter was a little boy, he loved hearing his mother tell him stories. Later, he loved the radio. He’s always enjoyed listening more than reading.

He smiles uncertainly, but nods. “Why, sure. That would be fine.”

“All right. I’m going to tell you a story you knew once, to see if you still know it. But if you don’t, it’s all right. It’s not a test.” He looks anxious again; he picks up a corner of his sheet and frets it between thumb and forefinger. She shouldn’t have said that.

Squeezing his hand, to calm herself as much as him, she takes a breath. “Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved listening to stories. When he grew into a young man, he went to the theater one night, and he met a young woman who loved stories, too. They fell in love, and they got married.”

“What did he look like?” Walter asks.

“He looked like you,” Rosemary says steadily, “and the young woman looked like me, a long time ago. Have you heard this story before?”

“Noooo.” He draws the word out thoughtfully, frowning.

“Well, that’s all right. I’ll tell you some more. The young man and the young woman got married, and they were very happy, except that they couldn’t have children. But they had each other. They loved each other very much, and they loved their friends. One of their friends was named Melinda. She’d never found anyone to marry, but she decided she wanted a child anyway. She learned that there was a little boy in a faraway country called Guatemala. His parents were dead, and she decided she’d be his new mommy. So she got on an airplane to go get him.”

Walter’s gaze has wandered away; he’s looking out the window. Rosemary can’t tell if he’s heard her or not.

“Melinda didn’t go to Guatemala by herself,” she says, taking a deep breath. “The young man—well, he wasn’t so young anymore—the husband of the couple, he went with her. To help her, and to keep her company. His wife stayed home. Walter? Do you remember this story?”

At his name, he turns to look at her again, eyes cloudy. His hand goes to his mouth.

Rosemary swallows. “You were the young man, Walter. You got on the airplane with our friend Melinda. You went to Guatemala to help her get her son. Do you remember any of this?”

His hand travels up from his mouth to scratch his ear. “Jeremy?” he says.

“Yes!” Rosemary feels a surge of hope. “Yes, Jeremy! Melinda’s son. Our godson. The two of you went to Guatemala to get him! Do you remember?”

“He cried.” Walter shivers and hugs himself. “He kept crying, poor little boy. He didn’t know where he was. Too many strangers.” Walter’s weeping now himself, slow tears dripping down his furrowed cheeks, and Rosemary, stricken, knows that Walter is on a plane full of strangers, headed from a life he cannot recall to a destination he cannot imagine.

She won’t tell him about Melinda. She can’t. It would be too cruel, after everything else he’s lost. If he ever remembers Melinda, let him remember her alive.