“Priority is twenty-one euros.”
“That sounds fine,” Neil said. He paid with some of the money from Magdalena, then he ran all the way back to the archives. He knew he should hurry upstairs—the archives staff didn’t like it when researchers left documents lying out in the reading room for longer than the time it took to have a very small coffee or use the bathroom. But those eight vellum pages had kept their secrets for centuries; they could wait. Neil had one more thing he had to do. He sat in front of his locker and went through his notes until he found a map of the Camino Francés, the pilgrim route that started out in France. The address Magdalena had written from was one of the first few towns in Spain, which meant she was making good time. He took his computer out and walked around the locker room until he found a place where the wireless signal was strong enough to check the bus fares on the Eurolines site. Neil’s debit card got a lousy exchange rate; it would be better to go to the bus terminal and pay in cash. But he didn’t trust himself to wait. Magdalena wouldn’t get to Finisterre for at least a week or maybe two, and that would give Neil way too much time to change his mind. The ticket was ninety-eight euros. Well, if he spent that much he’d have to go. Neil punched in the number on his debit card and bought the ticket.
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
It takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach the Earth, my Uncle Walt once told me. Just eight minutes for the light to travel all that way, and when the sun goes out, for eight minutes no one down on Earth will know a thing about it.
Uncle Walt must have read that fact in one of his astronomy magazines, and it must have come into his mind on one of the summer dusks we spent digging our shovels into mud, trying to block the irrigation water in the far corner of the field for long enough that the hard ground would be persuaded to let a little in. I remember looking up at the sky bleached by a sunset without any clouds and imagining the sun blinking out and darkness sweeping down through outer space, while for eight strange minutes the trees were still growing and people were still walking around, opening their newspapers and watering their cows in a doomed light, not knowing that the sun was already gone.
That thought has stuck with me all my life. It is less a fear of darkness than it is of those last few minutes of sunlight, of the world still going on normally when in fact the great irreversible event has already taken place, the end has already come and disaster is hurtling down.
One evening a year or two before he died when Walt and I were sitting in the old truck looking out at the half-drained pond, I asked him if he remembered telling me the fact about the eight minutes. He didn’t, but I suppose adults and children live in different worlds where words mean different things, and a remark a grown-up person doesn’t even remember making can bore right to the core of a child and stay there for the rest of his life.
Well, it’s those eight minutes of sunlight that come to mind as I think back over my first few days in Paris, when certain sights or sounds kept tugging on memories the way the shadows might begin to come in at different angles as darkness rounded Venus and rushed toward Earth on the heels of that final sunlight. Which is not to say my world went dark. As I made my way to the archives of the Assistance Publique-H?pitaux de Paris I felt no subtle warning run down along my spine, no sense at all of what I would find there. And that is probably for the best. I am no Inga Beart, to put out my eyes at the sight of knowledge, however difficult that knowledge may be to bear.
During Uncle Walt’s last year I had Diana come out to the ranch every couple of weeks to clean. Walt and I didn’t do much picking up after ourselves; still, most of the dust and the clutter in that house was from years past. Diana would fuss over Walt, getting him another pillow and that kind of thing, and I think he liked it. I liked having her there too, and it wasn’t only because I knew she needed the money that I started asking her to come every week instead of every two. She washed the windows and cleaned out the back kitchen, where we found an electric mixer the size of a sink still in its crate, unused for all those years.
When she’d finished with that I had her go through Aunt Cat’s boxes, though I knew Pearl would be mad if she ever found out. The will hadn’t been entirely clear about who they belonged to, saying just “For Ricky, the boxes in the back closet. There’s something of your mother’s you might as well have.” Both the lawyer and I interpreted that as meaning all the boxes in that closet, even though the only thing that had been my mother’s was a little doll trunk with Inga stenciled on it. Pearl didn’t agree, but though she’d gotten worked up about it right after Aunt Cat passed away, she hadn’t so much as set foot in the old bedroom in the years since, let alone looked in the closet, where Aunt Cat’s clothes were still on their hangers. So I figured it was as good a job as any for Diana. I set aside the doll trunk and I looked through a few of the other boxes—candlesticks and tablecloths and such from old Grandma Beart. I took what I could find of the silverware, thinking that Pearl’s daughter, Carly, might like to have it someday. It made me sad to think of getting rid of the things my Aunt Cat must have thought I’d be the only one with any patience for, but I knew Diana appreciated the work and I was running out of things to ask her to do. I told her to set aside any papers or photo albums, keep what she liked of the rest, and take everything else to Goodwill.