When Taro grew keen on an idea, he’d point, an ink-blotched finger rising, his eyes lifting beyond those he was talking to. Adela noticed this first. Then his forearms. When she reached his face, she realized he was beautiful. She tried to stare at her notes or a scuff on the wall. But her need to look at him won—childlike in its insistence, adult in its attention to detail. Taro was a TA in her American foreign policy seminar. He spoke with an earnest smartness that left others in the class following at a far distance. He made complicated points about economic violence and Adela felt the same restless excitement that captured her years before when she’d taken off from Frankfurt by herself. When he poked holes in a person’s points, Adela spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about a phrase he’d pulled from the air, how what had seemed certain a moment before was revealed as rickety.
Adela read everything off the syllabus, found syllabi for graduate classes and read that material, too. She listened to him so carefully that she had to take deep breaths not to get stuck on a word, or his finger jabbing the air. Adela jotted down his phrases word for word. She read them late at night and thought of the quiet deepness of his voice. Taro wore the same button-down each day. Adela found out a month later that he had three identical shirts, three pairs of the same pants; an apartment with only a bed, table, and chair. “People usually ask,” Taro said on one of their first nights together, “why I don’t have anything.”
“You have enough,” Adela answered, and he told her she was the most beautiful.
“I find that hard to believe,” she answered.
“Don’t do that,” Taro said. Adela turned ashamed. Of his directness, or because being called beautiful felt like a sham.
Sex with him carried the same quiet confidence with which he spoke. Halfway through, that night, she’d come unexpectedly. Adela grabbed his forearms, kissed Taro’s shoulder, and whispered for him to keep going.
Taro dropped out of his Ph.D. program just as Adela finished her senior year. The two of them stayed in a rented room in Oakland so small that it only fit a twin bed. They slept pressed against each other, planted tomatoes on their fire escape that they pulled off the vine, biting into them as if they were apples. Adela found work at a nonprofit. Taro got a job selling Christmas trees. He came home with a reject tree that filled the little space left in their room. They had no ornaments, so Adela decorated it with old postcards, and Taro’s smile grew wide. He had a beautiful, wide face, a mouth that always wanted to kiss Adela’s neck and stomach. He spoke about her breasts as if they were a best-loved poem. Taro never slipped into slang. He told her about the childhood summers he’d spent reading the dictionary, about the day he’d tried to memorize the X section. “Xanthate is a salt or ester,” he said as he fiddled with the tree’s branches. “Xeric: requiring a small amount of moisture.” His head rested on her rib cage. He defined xiphoid and xylose, told her he’d never had a Christmas tree before. At work the next morning, Adela found sap stuck in her hair.
Then he came home one day with news of a diplomatic job he’d been offered in South Africa. Adela hadn’t known he’d applied for it. She tried to gird herself for what she was sure came next: news that he was leaving her. When he said instead that he wanted her to go with him, Adela’s face flushed, and she remembered Udo’s dream of the two of them together at university, how she’d felt something for him until it abruptly ended. But Udo felt far away, in distance, also importance. It shocked her how long she hadn’t thought of him, after years in Modesto where she sometimes talked to his imagined version, sometimes pictured him pressed against her. She and Taro lay in their bed. “I hadn’t said anything about the job,” he said—traffic outside rose and fell—“because I didn’t imagine I’d get it.” He went on that he wanted it, wanted her more. “So you would go or stay based on my answer,” Adela said, half in jest. Taro nodded. A voice on the street called out the name Ricky. Taro’s look of need floored her, then lifted her. Adela said yes.
Arriving in Johannesburg, Adela saw sick people everywhere. Some lived in shantytowns. But they also cleaned public restrooms and worked the front desk at the apartment complex where the embassy staff lived. Watching a woman who sold newspapers go from young to old to gone in one summer, Adela remembered Miri, thought of the world’s indifference she’d witnessed even at Berkeley. When classmates had talked about a problem, they’d spoken of the past or a theory. Or they sloughed off a difficult discussion for a cigarette or a story of a roommate they hated more than they had a right to.
Outside a tourist shop, a woman asked for money. Adela saw sickness in her face and gave it to her. When she watched an ambulance pull slowly away from a building, her heart sped up. Some days, Taro came home and she couldn’t talk to him. Or she asked him why he chose this part of the world, then felt ashamed at her selfishness. After a day when she cried as she hadn’t in years, holding on to the collar of Taro’s T-shirt with a bully’s fervor, she found a clinic and began to volunteer there. She took patients’ information. Kept children occupied as mothers went in for appointments. Sat with young women reeling from test results. One from an affluent family had come to the clinic because of its anonymity. “I’m going to die,” she kept saying. She wore the uniform from her private school. Her hair was plaited in a way that made her look younger than seventeen.
“There are options now,” Adela said.
“But I won’t get better,” the young woman answered.
Afterward, Adela went behind the clinic. A nurse gave her a cigarette. She smoked half of it, threw up, and said she felt better.
Patients at the clinic started to recognize her. An older man—whom she later found out had infected his wife and girlfriend—called her Yoyo. A mother of three called her Sefate, which meant tree. Others called her Gorra Ou, which she learned was slang for asshole white person. “Look at Gorra Ou playing doctor,” a woman said when she found out Adela had no medical training. “Gorra Ou must feel really good about herself,” a man answered when she told him that his appointment wasn’t until the next day. She tried to explain herself; the man walked away.
But there were other patients who sought her out, young women in particular, whom she talked to after their appointments were done, about the boyfriends who’d gotten them sick but claimed they hadn’t, jobs they’d lost, or problems with their insurance. And each time a patient looked for her, Adela felt the distance between them and her shortening, and worked past her shift or offered patients rides home. Some asked about Adela, grew incredulous when she told them of her life in Germany and California. Some of them even learned German phrases, wishing her “Guten Tag,” or calling her Fräulein. “The Fräulein is here,” one woman said each time she came in. Another patient told her of his love of The Sound of Music. When a patient died, she went to the funeral—often the only white person there. And if she got to talk to a family member, they often knew who she was. One time, a relative said, “Yes, you’re the German Lady.”
Then one night Taro talked about a promotion in Pretoria and Adela became terrified. She thought of the patients expecting her at their next visit, how on days the clinic was closed she burrowed into medical textbooks to understand how antiretrovirals worked, and why.
“Since when do you care about a promotion?” Adela asked. Taro wore a tie. The clothes he once taught in were now reserved for weekends.
“You’re not the only one trying to do good,” he said, and went on about the community health services he’d found funding for, his finger jabbing at the sky. Adela said no.
“You said you wouldn’t go without me,” she answered.
“But you’re not making money,” Taro said. “And,” he added, pausing again before he went on, “there are plenty of sick people in Pretoria, too.”
Adela didn’t have enough of her own money to stay. She walked through Braamfontein and chided herself for the pretend-certainty she’d watered and weeded. Felt a hate for Taro as fierce as the love that had struck her when he’d been her TA. She stayed at the clinic until the cleaning staff told her she was in their way. Slept on the sofa of a doctor friend. After three days of this, Taro showed up at the clinic. He wouldn’t leave until she talked to him. When she finally came out to the waiting room, he told her he’d go wherever.
“Cleveland?” she asked.
“What’s in Cleveland?” he asked back.
Adela answered, “Nothing.”
They went to their apartment, and the sex they had wound back to their first months in Berkeley, when it was hard for her not to look at him.
“I’ve applied to nursing school,” Adela said. “In Pretoria.”
They lay naked on their bed. Taro moved his fingers through her pubic hair.
“Where I’ve been offered a job?” he asked.
“Unless there’s another Pretoria,” she answered, and lay on top of him. They had sex again, though her heart hadn’t slowed from their previous round.
For years Adela had focused on ideas with the steadfastness of a bird sitting on an egg. Now she wanted action. Not debates or theories but needles in veins so sick people could sleep. As she went through nursing school and started her first job, she thought of Mutti’s stories of the Pflegeheim residents. A year into her job, Adela found herself pregnant, which made her happy in a way she didn’t understand. Taro became euphoric, too. She worried about working in the clinic as her pregnancy grew conspicuous, but patients touched her stomach and told her stories of their children, of their mothers living hundreds of miles away. Taro kissed her stomach each morning. He thrummed her belly button when it started to stick out. Adela worked until Peter left her too breathless to get up a set of stairs.
“I don’t think it’s good for Peter,” Taro said one night when Adela came home late. He sat on the sofa, their child asleep next to them. Peter was a month from five.
“I was talking about you working all the time,” Taro added when she didn’t answer.
“And you working all the time?”
“Both of us, then,” Taro relented. But his tone, the points he seemed ready to make but didn’t, made it clear that he saw her job as the lesser. Taro asked if she was hungry. She said yes but went to lie down. She remembered him years before reminding her that he made all the money. Both of them kept working.
One night, though, things felt different, easy. They had a lovely dinner. Peter told them stories about a boy in his class who always talked about Jesus. “And I asked him why he never brought Jesus to the playground,” Peter said. They laughed. Peter looked relieved. In bed that night, Adela slipped out of her T-shirt and underwear. Taro did the same.
When they finished, Taro said: “That felt strange.” She answered that he was an asshole.
“I don’t think I’m an asshole,” he said. Naked, he went to sleep on the couch. Adela spent the night mumbling at the ceiling. Each time she got close to sleep, she sensed she was falling off the bed, grabbed the headboard or moved her fingers to the floor and pressed against it.
The next morning, she found Taro asleep on the couch still. His ass glowed in the sun. Peter walked into the room, looking from one parent to the other as if his father weren’t sleeping but injured. When his regular look of annoyance surfaced, her son summoned up a “What’s wrong with him?” before shaking Taro awake.
A month later Taro told her of a director position he’d been offered in Ghana. Adela had a stethoscope around her neck. She kept taking it off and on.
“I’m guessing you’re not coming,” he said.
“What a way to ask,” Adela answered, though he wasn’t asking. At work that day a man who’d been a model patient looked exhausted. After his blood work came back, she saw a drop in T-cells so large that she had to go to the bathroom and wash her face. As she did, Adela left the water running, though it was expensive. And a year after that, the job in Pretoria having worn her down to a frayed nerve, Taro called and told her that he’d finally gotten the position in Washington he’d been waiting for. Taro of their Berkeley days had spoken of the government as a dour foster parent. Now he went on about working from within the system. Being a single mother had flattened Adela. Peter wanted her close just so he could ignore her. When she was tired, he was awake. When work was its busiest, Peter claimed that he was sick, that she needed to be the nurse for him. So, when Taro emailed about a friend’s clinic in D.C. that was a perfect fit, she said nothing for a week, then yes. I’m going to visit my family first, she wrote. Because it was on the way. Because Udo’s death left Germany suddenly open to her, as Kritzhagen must have been for Mutti after the wall switched to past tense. California? Taro had written. The other ones, Adela answered.
The rain didn’t let up. Gert lay next to Adela, unobtrusive even in sleep. As she slid downstairs to check her email, she saw another message from Dad. Emails from Taro that told her he’d registered Peter for school. Figuring out flights, Adela wrote him back, though she was figuring out whether to go or stay. The plan had been a visit. But within weeks of arriving in Kritzhagen, the version of Michael as selfish and disinterested molted into the younger one that used to wake Adela up to tell her when he’d had a terrible or fantastic dream. Each time she’d thought to tell him what her plan had been, what the new plan could be, she switched subjects. Because being back was easy. Adela rarely saw things as easy. And she worried that, on telling Michael they were staying, he’d lose interest in her. So, when she’d start to talk about D.C., she said something about the clinic instead. When she thought to admit that she’d fallen for Kritzhagen, Adela asked Michael about a man he slept with.
Dunes behind the house genuflected. The day before, she and Gert had biked to the end of the island. The wind pushed so hard it felt as if they’d been pedaling in place. When she’d called Kritzhagen, Peter told her he’d learned to play spades and asked when she was coming back. “I just left,” she’d answered.
Gert came downstairs—tall and shirtless, thin apart from the smallest spread of stomach. He moved his tongue into her mouth though neither of them had brushed their teeth. Adela pressed her hips against his.
Twenty minutes later, Gert said: “What if we stay an extra day?” Adela didn’t have to be at the bar until Friday. Taro had written back immediately: How long does arranging flights take? Thirty seconds after: I mean, I can arrange them, if that’s what’s holding up the show. Taro from a decade before would never have used a phrase like holding up the show, would have pointed at nothing if he’d heard those words, deconstructing the problems with that metaphor.
“An extra day,” Adela said, and curled against Gert’s shoulder, a shoulder that might turn into more than an interlude. She decided not to answer Taro’s email, to think only about the hours they had to fill, the ride into town to get dinner.
She stood outside the house that had been Udo’s, technically now half hers. Adela had read the emails he’d sent over the years, which unfolded on her screen as one endless apology. More than angry or annoyed, Adela had felt pity for him. Udo was stuck, as she’d felt when they’d first moved here.
Inside, Peter and some young woman played cards.
“You were supposed to come back yesterday,” Peter said.
“I left a message,” Adela answered.
“Did you get Oma’s messages?” Peter asked.
Adela held up her dead phone. Peter scowled, then put down a card.
“This is Ines,” Peter said.
“The babysitter,” the young woman added.
“Supposed to come back yesterday,” Peter repeated.
“It was just a day.”
Peter slapped down another card.
“I think he—” Ines said.
“Michael’s okay,” Peter interrupted.
“Was worried,” Ines finished.
Peter stood and began walking upstairs. Adela imagined him forcing Mutti to call over and over, her phone going right to voice mail, Adela so busy being on vacation that it wasn’t until they were on the ferry back that she realized her phone was dead at the bottom of her bag.
“You thought I wasn’t coming back?” Adela said.
“Michael’s okay,” Peter answered, from the stairs’ landing.
“What are you talking about?” Adela asked.
“About what happened to him.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“The assholes from the bar,” he answered.
“Peter!” she said, thinking of those three belligerent men, her stomach dropping as it had while the ferry from Juist pushed through wind and waves. “Where is Michael?”
“It was in the paper,” Ines said. “I guess they beat the crap out of him.”
“I think you can go,” Adela answered.
The young woman’s eyes opened wide, though she didn’t move. She was waiting to be paid, Adela realized. Adela looked through her wallet, found nothing.
“I’ll get the money from Frau Haas,” Ines said, and left.
Adela plugged her phone in, though it was too dead to start up. She looked around the room for the newspaper so she could read the story. She had to pee, but held it.
“Michael wouldn’t serve them,” Peter said, his voice so loud it echoed. “They waited until he was outside. One of them was named Michael, too.”
Peter moved into their bedroom; Adela followed. Clothes crowded the floor.
As she stood in the bedroom they treated as their own, Adela realized that if someone asked where they’d be in a week, she wouldn’t know how to answer.
“Where is Michael?” Adela asked.
“Shut up,” Peter said. He kicked clothes covering the floor. When she’d left, their things had been folded in their suitcase.
“Shut up,” he said again.
“I didn’t say anything,” she answered.
Adela picked up her clothes and dropped them into the suitcase. Peter walked to the suitcase and threw them back across the room.
“Stop it,” Adela said. She grabbed his arms but he yanked himself free.
The drunks from the bar had assaulted her brother. Peter had imagined her gone. When she asked about Michael again, Peter answered, “Hospital,” and tossed a pair of jeans across the room.
“They were so drunk they could barely walk,” Peter went on. “One of them almost fell over after he hit Michael. But he got up again, and he—how do you say kick in this language?”
“How do you know all this?” Adela asked. Peter tossed a sweater, its arms spread as if cheering.
“I was there,” he answered.
A man spoke to Michael, whose bruised face stayed stuck in a wince. He held a cup of ice chips and could barely open his left eye. Machines beeped in rhythm.
“That’s the Potato Farmer,” Peter said, followed by, “He’s not really a potato farmer.” Her son hugged the man’s knees. Adela felt like she’d been away for longer than a week.
“How was Juist?” Michael asked.
“Give the two of us some time,” Adela answered.
Peter and the Potato Farmer left. It was raining in Kritzhagen, as it had been in Juist. Every once in a while, it clapped across the window.
Michael looked a mess. The drunks had come at him hard, with fists and feet. Peter had watched it happen.
“I’ve been thinking,” Michael said. “I’m on some drugs, you know.”
Someone wearing a ring of keys walked past. Michael’s hands were bandaged.
“Why was he there with you?” Adela asked.
“I keep thinking about Udo,” Michael answered. “In the water and—I don’t know. How it happened. If he wanted it.” One of Michael’s eyes had been beaten closed, his jaw a ridge of distended purple. His swollen lip or the meds he was on, or both, garbled certain consonants.
“I think he was always waiting,” Michael said.
“Why was Peter at your bar?” Adela repeated.
“You’re supposed to ask what Udo was waiting for.”
“Peter was with you. At the bar, Michael,” Adela said, though she’d been the one who wouldn’t answer her son’s questions about school, Peter’s interest in German a raft for him to hold. As she listened to a nurse squeak down the hall, as Michael touched his nose with a gauze-softened fist, Adela couldn’t believe she’d let them float for so long.
“I think he was waiting for you to forgive him,” Michael said.
“Peter’s seven.”
“Udo always talked about you,” Michael answered.
“He told me what he saw.”
Michael’s bruises glistened with ointment. The drunks had hit him, Peter in the car that rattled each time his uncle fell against it. Michael talked in a stream about the community center where Udo had volunteered. How he’d convinced Heinz to hire some of the immigrants he’d trained there, these men so loyal that they’d shown up to his funeral.
“Michael,” she said, gripping the bed frame.
“Are you going to hit me, too?” he joked.
She winced at the thought of it, at jokes he made even now.
Michael gave her a boneheaded smile. He’d always treated terrible things as amusing. For a time Adela had, too. She couldn’t imagine how she’d explain the delay to Taro, her bartending job, a sort-of boyfriend who changed bike tires, her brother all the while acting as if it were wonderful.
“I don’t care about Udo,” she said.
Rain soft-shoed down the window. Her brother’s blanket slipped, his legs bruised and bandaged, too.
“If I’d called you,” he said, “or texted while you and Gert were in the middle of your fuckfest, and I told you Peter was in the bar’s office watching TV, you would have said no?”
His unharmed eye stared at her. The bandage on his forehead fought the force of his lifting brow.
“You would have said no?” Michael asked again. “Would have predicted what would happen, like it was something you read in an asshole book?”
Adela touched his arm, but he shooed it away. She wouldn’t have cared. Each time Peter tried to show her something true, she went to the bar or took a nap or stayed away with Gert for an extra day. One of Michael’s toenails was missing.
“But you didn’t,” Adela said. “Ask me.”
His heart-rate monitor sped up. She waited for a nurse to come in and check on him.
Michael’s look told her to stop pretending; for a moment she was worried that she didn’t know how to do that. She wanted to blame her brother, to hand him everything she hadn’t done or seen. But he hadn’t forced her to work at the bar, hadn’t insisted they stay with him. He’d only woken up each day, pleased or confused or relieved that she was still there. Like Peter, he’d asked her questions. Adela hadn’t answered them.
Michael’s heart flew. A hundred and thirty bpm, Adela guessed.
“You’re always happiest when you have someone to blame,” he said.
Adela remembered when she used to worry that he could read her mind.
“I don’t think,” she said—he breathed, fast and with sound—“that I’d call it happy.”
In the window behind him, Adela saw a hotel, the wet beach.
“And now you left Peter with someone you don’t even know,” he said.
“I know you,” she answered, realizing he meant the man with the nickname.
Michael shifted and his gown inched upward, showing off his wounded shins. Adela wouldn’t go back to the bar. Wouldn’t stand on it and rank people’s raunchy fiascoes. Her face heated at the fun she’d bled from that place, her dream that someone would claim the neo confession. The look of shame she’d wanted from Michael, who’d been with Udo at the camp decades before, standing behind Udo rather than trying to stop him.
Adela needed to find Peter. To tell him that school would be in Washington, where his father was. That she’d get a job as a nurse again and be awake in the morning when he got up.
She walked to the nurses’ station. She asked the woman there if she’d seen a small boy.
“What’s his name?” the nurse asked.
“Michael,” she said.
“My name’s Peter,” Peter answered.
He stood in the hall, the Potato Farmer next to him.
Adela walked toward her son and leaned down. She tried to see in his face how these last weeks might have changed him. He looked the same. It was only his hair that had grown. The first thing they’d do in D.C. was get it cut. She took his hand. He looked confused.
“What have we been doing?” she asked.
Peter’s look answered: You weren’t even here.
But then he smiled. He put his hand on her knee and she hoped to remember this as a moment when their course began its correction.
“I was telling him,” Peter said, pointing to the man who surely had a real name, “what Oma and I did while you were gone.”
She thanked the Potato Farmer, told Peter they had to go. He walked toward Michael’s room, though the elevator was in the opposite direction. Adela didn’t want to see Michael’s mauled face again, worried she’d forget everything she’d just realized, or pretend to forget it as Michael and Peter did a comedy routine about the drunks who’d broken three of his ribs, sprained his wrist, and left him with a concussion. One of them had your same name! she imagined her son saying, as if it were the most hilarious coincidence.
But when they got in there, they found the German Lady sitting on the edge of his bed. She’d brought Michael magazines, also pudding. Her hand touched the one space on his arm where there was no bruise. She opened one of the pudding packets, spooned it into his mouth. She wiped his lip, and Michael gave her the closest thing to a smile he could muster. Mutti fed him another spoonful. The overhead light shone across his bandages, on Mutti’s gray hair. Michael’s heartbeat was slow again. Peter stood in the doorway rather than walk inside.
“It’s okay?” Peter finally asked.
Mutti looked up, as if brought back from a daydream. Adela saw something young in her face. Mutti when they’d lived in Glens Falls. Mutti at Liesl’s wedding.
“I think your uncle is tired,” Mutti said.
Adela had wanted to blame her, blame Michael, which made nothing feel fixed or better.
“Get some sleep, Michael,” Peter said.
He raised a gauzy fist.
“Imagine that’s a thumbs-up,” Michael mumbled.
Peter lifted a fist, told Michael to imagine, too.
“We’ll see you tomorrow?” Mutti asked Adela. Each morning she, like Michael, must have woken up unsure if Adela and Peter would still be here.
“Tomorrow,” Adela answered, knowing it wasn’t true.
Outside, rain was light and cool. Before they got into Michael’s car, Adela stopped, pulled her phone from her pocket, and told Peter she needed a minute.
When Taro answered, she said, “I don’t know what I’ve been doing.”
He stayed quiet on the other end.
“You there?” she asked.
He answered that he was.
Peter climbed into the car he’d been in two days before when those awful young men had attacked Michael. She tried not to think of what would have happened had the men come after him a minute earlier, Peter on the street with Michael, her son panicking instead of making perfect choices. The car’s driver’s-side mirror was smashed. Adela imagined Michael thrown against it, the bandage on his forehead covering dozens of cuts and bruises.
“You there?” Taro asked.
“We’re both here,” she answered.
Taro gave a sniff that she hoped was a laugh. Peter rolled down the window, shrugging to ask what was keeping her. Taro asked Adela if she was ready.
“I left something at Oma’s,” Peter said that night, after they’d finished packing.
An annoyed sigh leaked from Adela before she said, “Fine.”
But when they got to Mutti’s house, Peter wandered from room to room. He picked up objects from shelves. Opened the kitchen’s junk drawer. Adela was relieved that her mother wasn’t here.
“What are you looking for?” Adela asked. She felt ready to sleep for days, though in a handful of hours a taxi would come to take them to the train station, train to a plane to a city neither of them had been to.
“I don’t know,” Peter said, and moved into the dining room.
Adela lay down on the couch. Closing her eyes, she worried that she’d sleep so hard that they’d miss the cab and have to explain to Mutti in person where they were going, what the plan had been. She and Michael used to make fun of the way their mother turned the w in coward into a v. “Covard,” she said, and fought to keep her eyes open.
As she lay there, Adela wondered what would happen if the German Lady appeared just then, Peter rushing in and telling his grandmother that they were leaving. Perhaps Mutti would get angry. Maybe she’d retreat as she had when Adela had decided to move to California. As Adela’s eyes grew heavy, as Peter kept opening and closing drawers, she imagined the German Lady in front of her, telling her that leaving was a mistake. Okay, then, Adela might have answered, Mutti crossing and uncrossing her arms. Convince me.
When Michael and Adela were in fifth grade, she’d come down with the flu. Classmates asked where she was, and Michael answered—without thinking—that she’d died. The more he was cajoled, the more serious he got. He stood on the asphalt behind the cafeteria, a basketball bouncing nearby.
“A freak virus,” he said.
“Why are you here, then?” someone asked, breath bright with chewing gum.
“Too much sadness at home.”
Most classmates saw through his lie. But a few paused, and the what-ifs in their expressions felt powerful. The next day he wore black and wouldn’t talk to anyone. When people called him a liar, Michael closed his eyes. His heart raced at the certainty of getting caught.
When Adela returned to school, she heard of his stories and confronted him.
“What a bunch of liars,” Michael said. They stood in the hallway between the two fifth-grade classrooms. Her nose red, her narrowed eyes a hand grabbing his collar.
“You said I was dead,” she answered.
Michael told her it was a joke.
“What kind of joke?” she asked; he couldn’t answer. Part of him had enjoyed the attention of it. Part of him wanted to try on life without her. But mostly he didn’t know what kind of joke it was. Even as he’d gone into detail about the virus squeezing one lung, then the other—he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
For days he tried to atone. He stole her favorite Life Savers from the Cumberland Farms and handed her a pencil when hers broke. She wouldn’t talk to him. Michael felt his insides tighten. He had to go to the bathroom constantly, and when he went for the third time in one morning, he overheard Susan Doin—who rarely said anything clever—mumble that maybe Michael had gotten the virus, too.
A week later, taking the shortcut to school, Adela told him he had toothpaste on his chin.
“Maybe I want it there,” Michael answered.
“Maybe you look like an asshole.”
“Maybe I am an asshole,” he said, and she nodded. Leaves crunched underfoot. A crow cawed across the sky. Michael saw the sky after a week where everything was in his head, where he bumped into familiar furniture and crossed a room, forgetting why. But as his sister returned to him, a piece of her stayed hidden, and he knew something had been chipped, recovery and injury uneasy twins.
“Uneasy twins,” he said to Mutti when she came to the hospital and told him that Adela and Peter were gone. Adela had sent her a long text from the airport. Peter had left a drawing for her titled, Oma, Oma, Oma, as if she were three people in one.
“I brought more pudding,” Mutti said, and looked like she would cry.
She pulled the pudding from her purse. Michael told her it was his favorite.
After Adela left, Michael returned to the memory of his cousin and friend who’d thrown rocks at people who had nothing, who stayed when others left. Michael kept a smattering of Udo’s ashes in a small ceramic box his cousin had given to him.
Back in Udo’s house, a place that he’d briefly pretended was Adela’s and his, Michael wound back to the last time he’d seen Udo. Udo had shown up at his apartment at three in the morning. His hands and knees dirty, his face red.
“Something happened,” Udo said, and sat on Michael’s kitchen floor. Dirt streaked his hair. In the small kitchen, he looked enormous.
“What happened?”
“It was an accident,” Udo answered.
“What was?”
Udo covered his eyes. Michael imagined a terrible thing done to Angela or some stranger. He felt afraid for his cousin, afraid of him. Udo explained that he was driving and a dog appeared out of nowhere, that he couldn’t stop in time. He breathed hard. His feet ticked back and forth and smelled awful.
“Did you find out whose dog?” Michael asked.
Udo sucked in a breath as if about to slip underwater.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Udo said. “I buried it.”
“You have to unbury it,” Michael said. “Unbury it and find its owners.”
“What if it doesn’t have owners?” Udo asked, peevishly loud.
“What if it does?”
Udo nodded, so quickly it looked as if it hurt. Michael touched him and Udo stilled. He slipped on clothes and went with him.
Udo found the spot right away. He took a shovel from his trunk and got to work. The shovel chugged. Udo grunted. When a fragment of fur appeared, he used his hands and looked like a dog himself. Every once in a while, nearby headlights brightened trees. The dog was medium-sized and shaggy. Udo picked up the animal, dirt shivering from its fur. In the glaring headlights, dog at his chest, Udo seemed monstrous. Michael saw something disgusting in Udo then, who buried the dog out of rattled guilt, who needed someone to tell him what he should have known. Michael rarely felt fed up with Udo, but in that moment he wanted to call him an asshole, to tell him Adela’s unreturned messages weren’t as crazy as he thought.
“Check for tags. Then put it in the backseat,” Michael said.
When they finally located the owners, it was morning. They parked in front of the house. The dog in the backseat had begun to stiffen. Just when it appeared Udo would sit there indefinitely, he got out, picked up the dog, and walked to the door. Though Michael stayed in the car, through the opened window he heard Udo knock, a woman’s voice as she answered. The woman leaned close to the animal. “An accident,” Udo kept saying. “Why is she dirty?” the woman asked.
They drove away, and Udo became a different person. He turned up the radio, asked Michael if he was hungry. Michael answered that all he needed was sleep. But he wanted to ask Udo what was wrong with him. He closed his eyes for the ride back to his apartment. He got out and didn’t look back at Udo, who in his relief turned vulgarly happy. Didn’t remember what he said to his cousin, if he said anything. And though that night he’d thought to tell Justine about the dog, he felt like an accomplice. Udo texted an effusive message of thanks. Michael answered with a Sure.
Now his ashes sat in a box Udo had given him. Michael thought to spread them at the beach, but the sea had enough of him already. Considered the yard behind the house, but that house had brought him mostly misery. He could sprinkle them in front of the Adult Learning Center where the Roma camp had been. Udo had volunteered there, teaching basic wiring to immigrants, part of him forever trying to atone, atonement not a single act but a perpetual emotional fitness.
The box sat next to the sofa. Udo was gone. Michael’s greed for what was left of him remained. Already Adela felt like an ill-conceived affair. Already the anger of her going carried the hazy frame of memory.
A few days later, Michael was up at six in the morning. His ribs ached less than the day before. Sun moved across the wall. Then Mutti’s back door opened and she walked into her yard. Dead Cindy drooped in her hands. Michael moved to the door with careful steps. Seeing her son, Mutti’s face contorted.
“Morning,” she said, and tried to smile, which made her look worse. She seemed to sense this and looked down at Cindy, who was probably still warm.
“First Udo, now Cindy,” Mutti said. “Jesus, that’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
Dew cooled their feet. The trees behind Mutti were hit with light and as still as a painting.
“Every day you look better,” she said.
He thought to hug her, but she held the cat like an offering. And hugging hurt his ribs.
“Can you keep me company?” Mutti asked. “I need to dig a hole.”
After Mutti finished burying Cindy, they drank coffee in her kitchen. Dirt browned her fingernails. The radio reported on the Middle East’s endless combustion, also the story of a local politician embroiled in scandal.
“I know I shouldn’t care about a cat,” Mutti said.
“You should,” Michael answered. He wished he’d been kinder to Cindy, whom Mutti had just buried between two cherry trees.
When Michael’s doorbell rang, he joked to himself that it was the shawarma guy.
“You’re looking better than a week ago,” the Potato Farmer said, standing outside.
“How did you find my address?”
“Don’t I work for your doctor?”
“Isn’t that a doctor-patient violation?” Michael asked.
“You’d like me to leave?”
Four questions, Michael thought. He invited him in.
The Potato Farmer said nothing about the empty rooms, the piles of dishes.
“You’re less busy now, I take it,” the farmer said.
“My ribs are beginning to heal.”
The Potato Farmer wore shorts and a button-down. Every time Michael saw him, he remembered that he was handsome. Michael asked if he hated the nickname. The farmer asked if it was Michael’s mother he’d seen pulling out of the driveway next door. “We’re neighbors,” Michael answered. “Which is an accident, or a story.” When Michael asked after his dog, the Potato Farmer said, “I imagine you’ll see him soon,” and blushed. Michael wanted to kiss him but had a stitch in his lip. And leaning forward gave him trouble.
“I just wanted to see you,” the Potato Farmer said.
“Nice to be seen,” Michael answered.
“I’m going to take a nap,” Michael added. The Potato Farmer stood. “You don’t need to go. But it won’t be that kind of nap. Everything hurts a bit too much.” They went upstairs and lay on Michael’s bed. It felt nice to feel a shoulder against his own, to listen to another person’s breath. Had Udo been around, the Potato Farmer would have been a character for them to invent—his house lined in tubers, back permanently curved. Udo wasn’t here, he tried to remind himself. He was gone, or here but in a box. Ash and slivers of bone that Michael sometimes looked at, that he sometimes rubbed between his fingers.
When the farmer said he had to get going, Michael hobbled to the door. He said goodbye using his actual name.
Mutti’s car was gone. She must have been at work, relieved for its activity. Cindy’s carrying crate sat next to the garbage. Michael crossed to her driveway. The clematis that grew over her garden shed shivered in the wind. Michael picked up the empty carrier and brought it into his house. Mutti might want it again someday.
Back inside, Michael took the container of ash and went into the bathroom. He stood in front of the mirror and dipped a finger inside. He started with an eyelid, smearing until it turned gray. Dust slid into his eye and he closed it. He tried his cheeks next. It didn’t stick as makeup did, some streaking, some floating away.
“A faggot monster,” Michael said.
He walked through the house with the ash on his face. He stood on his deck and hoped someone would notice his exceptional ugliness. His phone sounded. From a number he didn’t recognize came a text: I heard about Cindy. Another message arrived a moment later: Peter spent the first few days of school pretending he spoke only German. Adela had been in this house a week before. He wanted to ignore her message, or write: He left half of this house to you. Michael missed Adela, was glad she was gone. Ash slipped down his face. Michael touched his cheek and stared at the gray on his palm. The phone rang this time. And as he stood on the deck, hands streaked with what was left of his cousin, he let it ring a second, a third time, and decided whether or not to answer.