“Willem,” Andy says, and stops. “I can’t. I told him I’d let him do it.”
“Well, he hasn’t said anything to me,” he says, and he can feel himself fill with strata of emotions: fear layered upon irritation layered upon fear layered upon curiosity layered upon fear. “Andy, you’d better tell me,” he says. Something in him starts to panic. “Is it bad?” he asks. And then he begins to plead: “Andy, don’t do this to me.”
He hears Andy breathing, slowly. “Willem,” he says, quietly. “Ask him how he really got the burn on his arm. I have to go.”
“Andy!” he yells. “Andy!” But he’s gone.
He twists his head and looks out the window and sees Jude walking toward him. The burn, he thinks: What about the burn? Jude had gotten it when he tried to make the fried plantains JB likes. “Fucking JB,” he’d said, seeing the bandage wrapped around Jude’s arm. “Always fucking everything up,” and Jude had laughed. “Seriously, though,” he’d said, “are you okay, Judy?” And Jude had said he was: he had gone to Andy’s, and they had done a graft with some artificial skin-like material. They’d had an argument, then, that Jude hadn’t told him how serious the burn was—from Jude’s e-mail, he had assumed it was a singe, certainly not something worthy of a skin graft—and another one this morning when Jude insisted on driving, even though his arm was still clearly hurting him, but: What about the burn? And then, suddenly, he realizes that there is only one way to interpret Andy’s words, and he has to quickly lower his head because he is as dizzy as if someone had just hit him.
“Sorry,” Jude says, easing back into the car. “The line took forever.” He shakes the mints out of the bag, and then turns and sees him. “Willem?” he asks. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”
“Andy called,” he says, and he watches Jude’s face, watches it become stony and scared. “Jude,” he says, and his own voice sounds far away, as if he’s speaking from the depths of a gulch, “how did you get the burn on your arm?” But Jude won’t answer him, just stares at him. This isn’t happening, he tells himself.
But of course it is. “Jude,” he repeats, “how did you get the burn on your arm?” But Jude only keeps staring at him, his lips closed, and he asks again, and again. Finally, “Jude!” he shouts, astonished by his own fury, and Jude ducks his head. “Jude! Tell me! Tell me right now!”
And then Jude says something so quietly he can’t hear him. “Louder,” he shouts at him. “I can’t hear you.”
“I burned myself,” Jude says at last, very softly.
“How?” he asks, wildly, and once again, Jude’s answer is delivered in such a low voice that he misses most of it, but he can still distinguish certain words: olive oil—match—fire.
“Why?” he yells, desperately. “Why did you do this, Jude?” He is so angry—at himself, at Jude—that for the first time since he has known him, he wants to hit him, he can see his fist smashing into Jude’s nose, into his cheek. He wants to see his face shattered, and he wants to be the one to do it.
“I was trying not to cut myself,” Jude says, tinily, and this makes him newly livid.
“So it’s my fault?” he asks. “You’re doing this to punish me?”
“No,” Jude pleads with him, “no, Willem, no—I just—”
But he interrupts him. “Why have you never told me who Brother Luke is?” he hears himself ask.
He can tell that Jude is startled. “What?” he asks.
“You promised me you would,” he says. “Remember? It was my birthday present.” The final words sound more sarcastic than he intended. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me right now.”
“I can’t, Willem,” Jude says. “Please. Please.”
He sees that Jude is in agony, and still he pushes. “You’ve had four years to figure out how to do it,” he says, and as Jude moves to put the keys in the ignition, he reaches over and snatches them from him. “I think that’s enough of a grace period. Tell me right now,” and then, when there is still no reaction, he shouts at Jude again: “Tell me.”
“He was one of the brothers at the monastery,” Jude whispers.
“And?” he screams at him. I am so stupid, he thinks, even as he yells. I am so, so, so stupid. I am so gullible. And then, simultaneously: He’s scared of me. I’m yelling at someone I love and making him scared of me. He suddenly remembers yelling at Andy all those years ago: You’re mad because you can’t figure out how to make him better and so you’re taking it out on me. Oh god, he thinks. Oh god. Why am I doing this?
“And I ran away with him,” Jude says, his voice so faint now that Willem has to lean in to hear him.
“And?” he says, but he can see that Jude is about to cry, and suddenly, he stops, and leans back, exhausted and disgusted with himself, and suddenly frightened as well: What if the next question he asks is the question that finally opens the gates, and everything he has ever wanted to know about Jude, everything he has never wanted to confront, comes surging out at last? They sit there for a long time, the car filling with their shaky breaths. He can feel his fingertips turning numb. “Let’s go,” he finally says.
“Where?” Jude asks, and Willem looks at him.
“We only have an hour to Boston,” he says. “And they’re expecting us,” and Jude nods, and wipes his face with his handkerchief, and takes the keys from him, and drives them slowly out of the gas station.