A Place of Hiding

“You talk to Matt, don’t you? You must still see him when he visits his parents. What do you know, Cherokee? Is he...” She didn’t know if she could actually say it, so reluctant was she in truth to know. But there were his lengthy absences, his trips to New York, the cancellation of their plans together. There was the fact that he lived in LA when he wasn’t traveling and there were all the times when he was at home but still too busy with his work to make a weekend with her. She’d told herself all this meant nothing, placed in the scales against which she measured their years together. But her doubts had grown, and now they stood before her, asking to be embraced or obliterated.

“Does Matt have another woman?” she asked her brother. He blew out a breath and shook his head. But it didn’t seem so much a reply to her question as it was a reaction to her having asked it in the first place.

“Fifty bucks and a surfboard,” he said to his sister. “That’s what I asked for. I gave the product a good guarantee—just be nice to her, I said, she’ll cooperate with you—so he was willing to pay.”

China heard the words but for a moment her mind refused to assimilate them. Then she remembered the surfboard all those years ago: Cherokee bringing it home and his triumphant crow, “Matt gave it to me!” And she remembered what followed: seventeen years old, never had a date much less been kissed or touched or the rest and Matthew Whitecomb—tall and shy, good with a surfboard but at a loss with girls— coming by the house and stammering an embarrassed request for a date except it wasn’t embarrassment at all, was it, that first time, but rather the sweaty-palmed anticipation of collecting what he’d paid her brother to possess.

“You sold—” She couldn’t complete the sentence. Cherokee turned to look at her. “He likes to fuck you, China. That’s what it is. That’s all it is. End of story.”

“I don’t believe you.” But her mouth was dry, drier than her skin felt in the heat and the wind that came off the desert, drier even than the cracked scorched earth where the flowers wilted and the rain worms hid. She felt behind her for the rusty knob of the old screen door. She went into the house. She heard her brother following, his feet shuffling sorrowfully in her wake.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I never meant to tell you.”

“Get out,” she replied. “Just go. Go. ”

“You know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you? You can feel it because you’ve felt the rest: that something’s not right between you and hasn’t been for a while.”

“I don’t know anything of the sort,” she told him.

“Yeah, you do. It’s better to know. You can cut him loose now.” He came up behind her and put his hand—so tentative a gesture, it seemed—on her shoulder. “Come with me to Europe, China,” he said quietly. “It’ll be a good place to start forgetting.”

She shook his hand off and turned to face him. “I wouldn’t even step out of this house with you.”





December 5

6:30 A.M.





ISLAND OF GUERNSEY


ENGLISH CHANNEL





Ruth Brouard woke with a start. Something in the house wasn’t right. She lay motionless and attended to the darkness as she’d learned to do all those years ago, waiting for the sound to repeat so as to know whether she was safe in her hiding place or whether she should flee. What the noise had been she couldn’t have said in this moment of strained listening. But it hadn’t been part of the nighttime noises she was used to hearing—the creak of the house, the rattle of a window in its frame, the soughing of wind, the call of a gull roused out of its sleep—so her pulse quickened as she worried her ears and forced her eyes to discriminate among the objects in her room, testing each one out, comparing its position in the gloom with where it stood in daylight, when neither ghosts nor intruders would dare disturb the peace of the old manor house in which she lived.

She heard nothing more, so she ascribed her sudden waking to a dream she couldn’t remember. Her jangled nerves she ascribed to imagination. That and the medication she was taking, the strongest painkiller her doctor would give her that wasn’t the morphine her body needed.

She grunted in her bed, feeling a bud of pain that flowered from her shoulders and down her arms. Doctors, she thought, were modern-day warriors. They were trained to battle the enemy within till the last corpuscle gave up the ghost. They were programmed to do that, and she was grateful for it. But there were times when the patient knew better than the surgeon, and she understood she’d arrived at one of those times. Six months, she thought. Two weeks until her sixty-sixth birthday, but she’d never see her sixty-seventh. The devil had made it from her breasts to her bones, after a twenty-year respite during which she’d got sanguine.

She shifted her position from her back to her side, and her gaze fell on the red digital numbers of the clock at her bedside. It was later than she’d thought. The time of year had utterly beguiled her. She’d assumed from the darkness that it was two or three in the morning, but it was half past six, only an hour from her usual time of rising.