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“Retrovir,” he said, but there was no reason she would have heard of Retrovir unless she was HIV-positive herself. “Anti-retrovirals.” He waited for her shock and reproach but she just kept staring at the ceiling. One of her eyes was full of blood where a vessel had broken the night before. He wondered if she was unable turn her head and then he wondered if she knew what the word meant. Anti-retro-viral. He was ready to tell her. He had been ready to tell somebody since he saw those two men in the street outside his apartment two nights ago. All along he had been waiting for someone to ask r u n

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him, at the airport, on the plane. The woman sitting next to him put on her headphones and an eye mask and turned her chin towards the window. The flight attendants made their soulless trek up and down the aisles like members of the living dead. Someone should have turned to him and asked what had happened. Why was he leaving so quickly, what had he done? Had the balance of the scales tipped over from the living to the dead? Had he, without ever knowing exactly when it happened, started taking too much medicine out and putting too much purified water in? He had made up so many stories, fashioned credible lies out of pieces of absolute truth, but in the end no one had questioned him about anything. He had bought a one-way ticket, after all, and thanks to his hurried departure he had only the small bag. At every checkpoint they let him pass. In Logan, the customs officer stamped his passport and said,

“Welcome home.” No one took a firm hold on his upper arm. No one asked him to step aside. He had steeled himself for the barrage of questions from his father, from his brothers who would certainly pull him off into the kitchen and whisper to him when they were alone, but then there was that scene that blew in through the front door with the snow, Tip in his boot, Teddy and Doyle so shaken.

There was that doe of a girl who remained the focus of everyone’s attention. No one was asking him anything. He wondered if this was the way it felt to the spies. They wanted to tell what they knew but they were doing too good a job and so nobody ever asked. Criminals lingered near their crimes like narcissistic teenage girls who longed to unburden their souls with talk. But he wasn’t a criminal, nor was he like them. The drugs were his to begin with, or at least they were in his control. It wasn’t hard. He delivered to the hospitals, to the doctors. Tip was not the only one who had a grasp of basic science in this family. It wasn’t all fish. Measure out what you need and what you have and it becomes perfectly clear that they allow for a certain a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 148

amount of waste in the dosage. All you have to do is take the waste off the top.

“Is there any more ice?”

Sullivan slid out a piece and gave it to her. It was small. “You should take what’s left. It’s melting.”

“I don’t feel well,” she confessed.

“Should I go get the nurse?”

“Have you been in Africa all this time?”

He wondered if she had heard anything he’d said to her. She must be at least as tired as he was. She had been hit by a car and was pumped full of what he imagined to be a complicated cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics. It was even possible that her hearing had been damaged in the fall. They probably hadn’t understood a single word the other one had said. “I’m going to let you get some sleep.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I told you.”

“Boston,” she said.

“Why did I leave Boston?”

“It’s your home.”

It had been a long, long time since anyone had asked him that.

Leaving Boston for Sullivan was just a given. What amazed people was that he ever came back at all.
It was the weather,
he wanted to say to her
. I couldn’t stand the way they pile the snow up in walls between the sidewalks and the streets so that you spend half the winter
wandering around like a goddamn rat in a maze. And the business
of having to always move your car to the opposite side of the street
when there never was a spot for it, I hated that. I hated all the colleges and their sweatshirts, the self-righ teous liberalism that made all
the children feel so good about themselves while their parents coughed
up $45,000 a year in fees to keep them safe. There was also the
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construction. It would never be finished in my lifetime. I left because
my father gave up on me as soon as there were those other boys for
him to bank on, and I hated those other boys, your sons, because they
took his attention and his love without any effort at all. Besides, everything reminds me of my mother. That was reason enough to go. Every day I am in Boston I think of how she died and I will tell you that
the Christ to whom you pray knew nothing of suffering compared to
what she endured at the end. Outside of Boston I do not see her face
on a daily basis
. He could come up with a list that was longer than the phone book and every bit of it was true, but she was a spy and the only answer she’d settle for was the answer she already knew, and so he told her: he left because of the accident.

“Tell me.”

“What am I supposed to tell you? If you know where we eat dinner then you certainly know I was in a car accident. People who don’t even know my name know I was in a car accident.” Sullivan stopped and rested his forearms against her bed. There was always that sound of the lights in a hospital. He could hear them from the hallways and for a second it made him think of Africa, that relentless buzzing just off in the distance and how in Africa it was another thing entirely.

“How long ago?”

He closed his eyes. Certain things exist outside of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother’s death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day. “I was twenty-three. I’ll be thirty-four in June.”

“You were hurt.”

“You know this.”

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“I read some things.”

“Oh,” Sullivan said. “But you want to know what happened because you never believed that story anyway? No one believed that story.”

She stayed quiet then and she waited. Sullivan admired her tac-tics. He thought of the snow outside. The sky was bright blue now and the wind coming straight down from Toronto would be bitterly cold, but he could have walked it. Sally the nurse could have given him the fare to get home. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought to ask her in the first place. He could have promised her something, a phone call later on. The promise of a phone call was worth a dollar and a quarter to a fat girl. “Natalie always wanted to spend the weekend in Boston, but I liked to come up to Amherst. I had talked her out of spending her junior year abroad. Her three best friends had all gone to Paris and I managed to talk her into staying even though I had graduated. I wasn’t even there and I made her stay.” Sullivan tilted back the Styrofoam cup and took the little bit of water and the last shards of ice down the back of his throat. Tennessee Moser was right about that ice. It was brilliant. “It’s funny, but when I think about Natalie and everything that happened, the thing I feel worst about in some strange way is that I cheated her out of a year in France. I never came right out and said she had to stay, but everything I did made it clear: my mother left me and everybody leaves me and now you’re leaving me, too. She was twenty years old and she was so bright, A’s in everything, but she wasn’t smart enough to see through such a simple bit of bullshit. The truth is I would have been fine if she’d gone. I would have sulked around and slept with other girls and she would have memorized every painting in the Mu-sée D’Orsay and spoken French like Simone de Beauvoir and we both would have had a great time. But I missed being in college. I liked going back on the weekends and sleeping in her little twin bed r u n

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in the dorm room. I liked the idea of a girl giving up something as big as a year in another country for me. That was the kind of proof I needed in those days. That was love.”

Natalie was a Jewish girl from Cleveland whose paternal grandfather had brought home the unfathomable surprise of a Japanese bride from his peacekeeping tour of the Pacific. And while no one would have been able to name it by looking at her, the one-quarter Asian blood swimming around amidst the three-quarters Eastern European, there was something quietly exotic in the planes of Natalie’s face and in the heaviness of her hair that she wore in a braid down her back. There were a million boys like Sullivan, Irish all the way back to the dawn of time, but Natalie was a singular genetic concoction. The fi nest elements from every part of her heritage had managed to step forward. No matter how many grandchildren those four-quarters produced, there would never be another with Natalie’s balance, the warm light of her skin, her intelligence and grace.

She was not the girl you saw at fi rst. She did not turn heads coming into a room. But once you saw her, really saw her, there was no looking anywhere else.

“Natalie died.”

“You know she did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We should be talking about you, anyway,” Sullivan said, and suddenly he was irritated with her. This is what spies do, after all.

They get you going on about yourself. She was flat on her back and barely able to open her mouth and still she had gotten him talking about things that should not be discussed. “With all due respect to your impending surgery, any person looking at this exchange would say that you are the one who should be answering questions. We could start with the simplest one: Why did you give up your children? Teddy I can see. Maybe you’re poor and you’re young and a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 152

you’ve already got one kid and so you have to give the second one away, but then to give away the fi rst one, too? How did you give up Tip? How did you go back to your house and pick up this child who is more than a year old and give him away?”

“She was driving,” Tennessee said.

“You don’t get to make all the decisions.” He kept his voice low, even as it was edged in fury. He managed to stay seated in his chair.

She did not flinch at all and again he wondered if she could hear him.

“Finish this,” she said.

He only listens to you,
his father had told his mother. She was already sick and moving in one inexorable direction and still his father was complaining to his mother about Sullivan. He could hear their voices from where he stood outside the bedroom door and from that moment on he thought yes, I will only listen to my mother, and if she is gone I will not listen to anyone ever again. So what he could not understand at all was his desire to listen to this woman. He wanted to finish this story. No one ever asked him about the things he needed to say. They were always so busy asking him about things that couldn’t possibly matter. “I drove up Friday night after work to pick up Natalie like I said I would, but by the time I got there I’d changed my mind. I wanted to sleep in her bed and go to a movie on campus. I let it get later and later but she said she wasn’t falling for it. I had promised we were going back to Boston and we were going back. She was restless that year. I was gone. Her friends were gone. I was in a bad mood. I’d taken something, a couple of Darvocet Natalie had in the bathroom from when she’d had her wisdom teeth out over winter break. We were drinking Jack Daniels out of tea cups.

She kept laughing even though I knew she was getting mad at me.

She was saying, ‘You’re not doing it this time. We’re going to go.

We’re going to go.’ Until finally there was nothing I could do. I had to take her back. I had promised to take her back.” r u n

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The rest of it he really didn’t remember. Whether that was the time or the drugs, the concussion or the loss or the willful release of knowledge he may once have held, he couldn’t say. He walked into the winter night with Natalie, snow blowing in circles around them, a soft, enveloping sweep. She held his arm. He had her suitcase, a quilted bag containing a toothbrush and a nightgown, underwear and extra sweaters, a copy of
The Magic Mountain
that she was reading for a course called Twentieth-Century Classics in Translation.

Sullivan had taken the class himself three years before and had done well in it. He could remember the contents of her suitcase but nothing about getting in the car, nothing about Natalie getting in beside him. Nothing at all until he saw his father sitting by his hospital bed in a room that was not unlike the one he was sitting in now.

“When I woke up my father was there and he told me that Natalie had died. My memory is that he was kind about it. He cared for Natalie, I think. He saw her as a good influence. I honestly didn’t understand at that point that she had died with me or that my being in the hospital was connected to her death. The accident had shaken everything loose in my head and it was very difficult for me to fi gure out what part of what was happening was real.”

“I know,” Tennessee said.

He nodded. “Yes. Exactly like that. So it was awhile, a few minutes or an hour, I don’t know, before I put it together: Natalie, me, the car, and I asked my father what I had done.” At this Sullivan stopped for a minute because it was not a sentence he ever said, not to himself, not to anyone. He tipped back the cup for some water but it was already gone. “In my memory, and I don’t know if this is true or not because there were only two of us in the room and God knows we never talked about it again, in my memory my father took my hand and leaned over the bed.” And Sullivan, in a moment of genuine feeling, took Tennessee’s hand and leaned towards her. “He a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 154

said, ‘She was driving the car. If you don’t remember, that’s fi ne, but I’m telling you, Natalie was driving the car.’”

“Maybe she was.”

Sullivan shook his head. He didn’t think about her so much anymore, not like he thought about his mother. He thought about how he was adrift in the world, but for the most part he managed to block out the source of his launch into darkness. Sweet Natalie.