“Never told her you killed those people? I don't know how you could keep such a secret from your own wife, not a word in all those years. And your own daughter?”
He shut his eyes again, and the Japanese girl walked into the room in a white kimono bruised by plum blossoms. He could not understand the words she was saying but her tone was clear. He opened his eyes and leaned his back against the door. “Your mother and I were just married when I got called up. I never thought I would go, I was too old, you see, but they needed doctors.”
“To save people, not to kill them. What's the matter with you? Husbands don't keep such secrets from their wives. Not the ones they love, but maybe you never really loved her enough to trust her.”
“I just didn't see what good it would do. I didn't want your mother to be afraid.”
“To think the worse of you?”
Paul stepped toward his daughter, seeking forgiveness. “It was a world ago, Erica.”
She stormed past him, swung open the door, and ran off into the night.
And when she ran away for good, he remembered the day she had found the letter, saw it as the beginning of her break from them both. Already growing up and outside her father's desperate love, she turned to the misbegotten boy and his crazy ideas. She became lost to him, not all at once, but in stages of suffering until she, too, vanished. Just as they all were going from him. Those he had once loved.
27
They thought the malady might be the residual poison in her system or traces of the drug that had caused the sleeping sickness in west Tennessee, a relapse brought on by the shock of the accidental shooting, or a bad case of fatigue after more weeks on the road than planned, but whatever the cause, she could not stand the rolling nausea that struck with such force and tenacity. Under slow descent of dusk, they made it as far as the town of Shawnee, where she threatened to turn herself inside out if he didn't find her a motel bed for God's sake, where she could lie at anchor and get some sleep, for the flatland tilted at the horizon and the rising moon spun like a top. The next morning was no better, for the nausea returned, and she hung her aching head over the porcelain bowl in their six-dollar room. She felt dizzy and hot, drunk and dying, dead and about to be born. Because he hankered for doughnuts, Wiley left her flat on the floor, her face mashed against the cold hard tiles and praying to be taken from this life of such abiding misery. And she prayed for forgiveness, unable to get rid of the vision of the gunshot man, replaying the scene till she could see clearly the pen, and not a gun, in his hand, and she must have known as it happened, she told herself, that the first shot had come from Wiley; in that split second necessary to pull a trigger, she had realized her mistake, was penitent in the act of commission, but panic overwhelmed her judgment. I'm sorry, so sorry.
“Are you okay, lady?” A woman's voice enriched by the acoustics of the bathroom. “Wake up if you hear me.”
Opening one eye, Erica first saw the soft deer-brown shoes, the white-stockinged ankles and strong calves beneath the hem of a maid's uniform. In a rush of motion, the legs disappeared as the woman bent to her knees and lowered her head. Her thick black hair was drawn back severely, stretching the skin at the temples, and her eyes, black as holes, revealed no more information than her placid features. She reached out and brushed Erica's hair away from her face. “Have you been drinking? Drugs?”
“I am sick.”
“Do you need any help? A doctor?”
Suddenly aware of her nakedness, she drew in her limbs, curling into a tight ball. “Can you get me some of my clothes?”
The maid stood outside the door while Erica dressed, and when the door cracked open, she smiled and held out her arms to guide the girl to a chair. “You feeling better? You're white as a snowman. You had anything to eat today?”
Erica swiped at the air. “Nauseous.”
“Ginger ale and peanut butter crackers,” the maid said, and then left to fetch them from the vending machine just outside. When she returned she found Erica slumped in the chair. “Eat this. Old Indian medicine.”
“You're an Indian?”
“Lenape. You heard of the Delaware tribe?”
“You're a long way from Delaware.”
“No, I'm a local yokel. My guess is you're a long way from home, though. What's your name, child?”
“You can call me Nancy. What's yours?”