A Private Sorcery (41 page)

That's how you saw it. That you'd caused everything she experienced. Her desire for you. Her disappointment in you. Her fear of you. Her fear of her desire.

I am nodding. Goddamn idiot that I am, I am nodding as I approach the Henry Hudson Parkway, the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey now in sight.

I felt exactly the same. That I was the cause of Mitch losing his legs. And now you feel the same way about me. That you are the cause of everything I did. That it was all because of you.

The megalomania of this washes over me. The madman's trick of turning the wish to disavow all responsibility into assuming it all. The pleasure of self-flagellation. The comfort of mea culpa, of a world completely under one's own control.

Not until I'm in bed does what you've told me, that you are going to attempt to return to working as a doctor, sink in. That you, braver soul than I, are going to try again.

16
Rena

For a week after her return from Guatemala City, she'd not gone back to work. Bernardo's ashes sat in their urn on her dresser. She considered sprinkling them in the orchard adjacent to Ruth and Maggie's country house. She considered donating them to a library or some kind of archive. Then, one morning, she woke with an idea fully in mind. She opened the urn and removed the plastic bag. A body reduced to a few pounds of silt. With the bag in her backpack, she took the Broadway line to the last stop and boarded the Staten Island ferry.

It was early morning, just a little past seven, and the ferry was empty save for a handful of night workers returning to their homes. She buttoned her sweater and pulled open the glass door that led out to the deck. The sun, still low in the sky, cast an amber sheen over the water. Gulls dipping for fish screeched in anticipation of their kill and a foghorn blasted from the east. The ferry traveled quickly into the channel, and within a matter of minutes they were in open waters.

Moving toward the back of the boat so she would not be in view of the captain, she took the bag of ashes from her backpack and held them close to her body. As a child, when she was scared, her mother would whisper,
Just close your eyes
. Rena had done this with Nick. She'd done this with Joe. She'd done this with Saul for most of the year after Mitch. Not until Bernardo had she forced herself to look.

They were passing between Ellis Island and Fort Jay. To her right, she could see the crowned head of the Statue of Liberty, the green hand hoisting the light. Her mother's mother, Filomena, had made the passage from Italy to New York in 1912 at the age of four. Her mother's father, the drooling old man she'd met at Betty's house, had done the same eight years later. And her father's parents? If Eleanor had even known, she'd not said.

Rena opened the plastic sack. Inside was a gritty white substance
with small pieces of bone. She leaned over the rail of the boat and let the ashes fall. They blew back, some catching on the wet side of the boat, some drifting down to the water. She thought of Santiago weeping as he told her that his wife had died of grief.

To the east, the sky was fully lit. To the west, dark clouds, the remains of the night, moved toward the sea. A fleck of sandy ash stuck to her palm and for a moment she saw eye sockets, thought,
are you there
, but then the wind lifted the ash and as it disappeared in white air she whispered, “Bernardo, rest in peace.”

At home, she drew the blinds and closed her bedroom door. She pulled open the top drawer of her file cabinet and lifted out the folder marked
G
. She counted the remaining giraffe money: six thousand two hundred dollars.

In the afternoon, she called Sari. “Thank the goodness you're back,” Sari sighed in her Urdu-inflected English. “The girl who filled in for you is too stupid to even use the spellcheck properly. Last week she made a typo on the word
formulate
and then selected
fornicate
as the replace option. The partner whose brief it was yelled so loudly that people ran in, thinking there was an emergency. And you won't have Mr. Beersden breathing down your neck any longer. He's been transferred to the Chicago office.”

Rena returned to work the following night. She slipped into the old routine with the ease of a swimmer rediscovering her stroke: the evening walk, the stop at Grand Central, the wee hours chamber music, the walk home at six. On the weekend, she went to see Saul. When he asked about Guatemala, she could think of nothing simple to say. “They showed us a body. I hope it was his.”

There was something new and hard in Saul's face. Not hard in a wizened, scarred way, but hard like a diamond blade.

“I threw his ashes over the water. Next to the Statue of Liberty.” Saul took her hand. Out in the open. His hand felt like a stranger's, the delicate fingers now thickened and rough. She peered at the skin showing over the vee of his uniform shirt, wondered if the bird's-nest hollow had disappeared under a shield of muscle, flushed at the thought that he would feel different now.

T
HE SECOND GIRAFFE
had arrived in late July. A box again from Barcelona. Again, she drew the blinds. Using sewing scissors to cut the puckered stitches at the base of the giraffe's neck, she pulled out a piece of folded paper. Two words—L
A TRINITé
—with a cross drawn underneath.

She crumpled the paper into a ball. This is lunacy, she tried to reassure herself. He cannot expect me to find him from two words on a scrap of paper.

She took the wrinkled paper to the travel bookstore in Rockefeller Center, where she unsuccessfully searched the Spanish guidebooks. Reluctantly, she approached the information counter.

“I'm looking for a place called La Trinité,” she told the woman behind the counter. “I think it's near Barcelona.”

“Are you certain it's Spain? La Trinité, that sounds like France.” She thought about the
Atlas Routier
she'd taken from Bria's apartment. The dashed lines for the pedestrian routes through the mountains. “It could be.”

“La Trinité,” the woman murmured. “I wonder if that's the name of a church.” She stood. Her silver pageboy swung beneath her headband. She led Rena to the back of the store. Climbing up on a stepladder, she reached for a book on the top shelf:
Guide des églises et Chapelles de France
.

She flipped to the page. A paragraph entry and a dark photo of an engraved iron door. “The Pyrenees Orientales. That's about as close to Barcelona as you're going to get in France.”

Rena bought the book. At home, she read the brief entry about La Trinité. A Roman church from the twelfth century that had been a stop on the hermitage journey for the Catalans. Renowned for its elaborate iron door and the wooden altarpiece carved by a Monsieur Autel. Perched in the foothills of the Aspres, near Mont Canigou. Near the village of Prunet et Belpuig.

She found Prunet et Belpuig in the
Atlas Routier
, studied the map the way Reed had taught her to do. The towns thinned out as the white along the Mediterranean coast shifted to green. There were mountain
peaks near La Trinité, the Spanish border close below.

For a week, she alternated between astonishment at Reed's assurance that she would find him and the awareness that she did not want to go—not so much out of fear (it seemed unlikely that now, nearly a year and a half since Saul's arrest, anyone was watching her) but rather because it was too soon after Guatemala, those sights and sounds not yet digested. On her walks home from work, though, she was flooded with memories of Reed: how after three nights sleeping on the floor of her room in the apartment they'd shared by the beach, she'd come back from Alil's to discover a mattress and dresser he'd hauled home for her, discards, he'd claimed, from the moving company, but now, it occurred to her, things he'd probably bought. His taking her to Yosemite, the first time she'd ever seen a mountain, where they hiked through Alpine meadows blanketed with wildflowers and he hung their food from a tree to keep it from the bears.

She'd planned her trip for September, after the crowds but before the snow. She mentioned going to the mountains to no one. Instead, she booked a flight to Bordeaux and said she would travel on to Nice. A reasonable journey, traversing the country west to east. Not a trip anyone would expect to involve a detour into the Pyrenees.

Everyone had their hidden South of France they wanted to share: Maggie's list of the best
auberges
in the Dordogne for eating the real Quercy fare, her mother's boss's itinerary through the
villages perchés
of the Luberon, the Roman ruins at Arles, the Gorge du Verdon. Saul threw in his two cents—Bregançon, the campers' beach beneath a château that served as the southern residence for the president of France—and then, to Rena's amusement, a note from Klara with a clipping from
Vogue
on shopping in Saint-Tropez. Only Leonard, whose narrowed eyes had betrayed his disbelief at her bitten-by-the-travel-bug claim, offered no advice.

S
HE LANDS IN
Bordeaux at noon. Driving east, she crosses the Garonne in full view of the Pont de Pierre. A haze of heat hovers over the water, the bridge, older than anything outside a museum she's ever
seen before, a hallucinatory quality to entering a world where the centuries are layered on top of one another and schoolchildren race through thousand-year-old arches and plazas laid out in the time of kings. In San Francisco, the Victorian houses had been their ruins. In Novato, antiquity had been the shopping center on Route 101.

It's an hour's drive to the inn at Tremolat where she's reserved her first three nights' stay. She follows the innkeeper upstairs to her room overlooking the gardens behind the church. Closing the shutters, she bathes and climbs still damp under the cool white sheets of the bed. She sleeps until dusk and then, in the evening, walks to the café on the square where the college French she'd boned up on this past month works for an order of grilled trout that arrives with string beans fine as matchsticks.

For two days, she lackadaisically follows Maggie's itinerary for the region. She visits the medieval towns of Domme and Sarlat and the monastery in Souillac, picnics on white peaches and soft cheese from the
épicerie
on the square. Dimly recalling a canoe trip she'd made with Reed when he'd joked that he was going to have to teach her the things kids learn when they go to camp and, lucky her, she'd be spared the bug juice, she rents a canoe in Limeuil, where the Dordogne and Vézère converge and families of ducks make their home. Mostly, though, she is watching: watching to make sure there is no one watching her.

At night, she reads guidebooks and studies maps. Not about where she is, this gentle cultivated landscape, but where she is going: into the rugged mountains, where heretics and revolutionaries and resistance fighters have hidden and, she presumes, where Reed now lives.

S
HE LEAVES AT DAWN
, fighting to keep the little pit, half fear, half excitement, deep in her stomach. The fields are filled with people picking grapes for the annual
vendange
. Driving south, the farms grow scrappier, the picturesque yielding to light industry. At Montauban, she picks up the autoroute. She stops for gas and a sandwich in a futuristic rest area that abuts the Canal du Midi. Pleasure boats dock adjacent to the pumps, and families eat on outdoor tables surrounded by fierce
flies and the roar of the highway. She abandons her sandwich after two bites.

Fifteen kilometers north of the Spanish border, she exits the autoroute and cuts back to the west through the red clay town of Ceret, where she'd read that Picasso had fled one beautiful lover accompanied by another, toward the foothills. The fruit orchards disappear as she climbs and the towns thin to an occasional hamlet. The bends in the road sharpen and she downshifts, using the gears to control the curves.

It's nearly five by the time she reaches La Trinité. She leaves the car in a turn-out across the road from the church, hugging her arms in the cooling air. Across the valley, she can see the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees, the tallest already snowcapped. She'd expected a village, but there is only the church, a phone booth and a bulletin board with postings about the surrounding parkland. The little pit, now almost all fear, rises up as she thinks about how many leaps there'd been between the scrap of paper and this church.

The iron door is open. Inside, it's dim, the only light coming from a stand of prayer candles. A coin box requesting money to help pay for the electricity hangs next to a switch. She puts in a five-franc piece and flips it on. A faint spot shines on the altar where Jesus with outstretched hands is flanked by a man and a woman. Serpentine columns laden with marble grapes surround the threesome.

A woman with a lace kerchief tied under her chin plods flat-footed through the doorway. She turns off the spot.
“C'est fermé, mademoiselle.”
Rena follows her out to the courtyard. She asks if there are lodgings in Prunet. The woman shakes her head. She points up the road.
“Il faut aller à Saint-Marcel.”

It takes twenty minutes to reach Saint Marcel. Two men drink and smoke under a Cin Cin umbrella in front of a grim auberge. Inside, the proprietor leads her to a room on the top floor dominated by a massive armoire with a crack in the mirror. She leaves her bags and then, in the waning light, takes a walk through the village. Women sit in their aprons on the steps of the ancient stone houses. Teenagers with a tape player have congregated near the phone booth outside the post office,
the girls smoking and dancing, the boys just smoking.

She eats at the
auberge
, one of three diners. She watches the bar, which by the end of her meal is populated by a weathered-looking couple, a man in a leather vest and a young couple with their baby in a stroller. She knows that Reed will not simply walk through the door. Yet she half expects him to.