“Holy fuck,” he said. “Mercedes Parsons.”
“I thought you were dead, Wish.”
Delayed was the word that came to his mind but he couldn’t manage to get it out. Mercedes watched him as calm as you please, not a feather out of her. And her composure fed the panic rising in him. She’d expected to find him here at this table, had tracked him down somehow. “My God, Mercedes,” he said.
She pulled out a chair to sit at the table. She said, “Hello, Lilly.”
Lilly bowed forward in her wheelchair.
He felt light-headed, almost drunk, smiling stupidly to cover his surprise, the rush of fear. There’ll be no stopping her now, was his thought. He fumbled with the box of matches, placed two more on the crib board and looked across to her as a question. They sat in silence while Wish shuffled and dealt. Through the course of that game and the next they spoke only what was required to play the hands or tally their points. He took refuge in the arbitrary fall of the cards, the simple patterns layered one on another as each hand played out, trying to guess what she was doing here, to figure out what he could get away with telling her. Mercedes seemed content to sit there as if they’d sat across from one another all their lives, as if nothing between them awaited answers or explanation or apology. Every time she smiled at him Wish felt much the same as he had that first afternoon in the Cove when he’d been waiting for her and she managed to surprise him anyway, standing in the doorway of the church hall. Expectant and caught out. Fearful, childish, impatient. All at sea.
On the far side of the room, the piano player stuttered out a song Wish knew from the war, the words called up in his head by the music: We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. The tune seemed impossibly ancient to him, almost as old as light.
Lilly nodded off in her wheelchair. Wish considered taking her back to her room but was afraid of breaking the spell of the cards, of setting things between him and Mercedes off on another road. He dealt Lilly out of the game instead and they carried on with a two-hander. Wish knocking the cards for luck when he cut the deck. Kathleen came by to wheel the old woman down the hall to her bed and they played a while longer. But Lilly’s absence unsettled them, as if it pointed up a raft of other absences. Mercedes dealt a hand and looked up at him over her cards.
“What are you doing home?” he asked.
“My husband asked to have his ashes scattered up here.”
“He’s dead?”
“Three years now.”
He thought he should offer condolences but managed only to say, “How did you know to find me here?”
“I came by to see Lilly last week. Kathleen told me you were a regular visitor.”
“The fucking mouth on that one,” Wish said. He picked up his cards and moved them around aimlessly in his hand. “How did you know to find Lilly?”
He could see her hesitate as if she had concocted a lie and held it back at the last minute. She shrugged. “Just luck, I guess.”
The numbers and faces on the cards were meaningless to him, the light-headedness creeping back.
Mercedes said, “Tell me about Jim Harris.”
He glanced up quickly.
“Jim Harris,” she repeated. “He sent me a note and that length of string after the war. To say you were dead.”
It was an accusation she was making and he could feel the colour flooding his face. “You were already knocked up by then, weren’t you?” he said.
The uninjured side of her face startled, as if he’d slapped her.
“According to Hiram you were,” Wish said, trying to sound like less of an arsehole.
She said, “I waited for you until I—” She stopped and ran her hands along the length of her skirt. “I never heard a word from you,” she whispered.
He took out his handkerchief and wiped at his eyes. Old man, he thought. He cried at the drop of a hat these days, as if someone was turning on a tap in his head. He’d gone to the war memorial on the anniversary of D-Day and wept before the ceremony even started, wiping away snot with a handkerchief. Pathetic old fucker. He cleared his throat and looked away out the window.
“Jim Harris,” she said again.
“Jimmy Harris,” he said and he cleared his throat again. “He was with me in Nagasaki, him and Anstey. Anstey never made it out. And Harris got sick on the train home from San Francisco. Just racked up with cancer, wasted away to nothing.” Wish leaned forward to stare at his feet, one elbow on the table, the other on the back of the plastic chair.
“You were with him,” she said. “On that train home.”
“I was with him the whole time, Mercedes. I was with him when the bomb was dropped. And picking through the ruins afterwards.” He glanced across at her. “What made him sick was in me too, is what I mean. The doctors told me as much.” He shook his head. “No one should have to go through that,” he said. “To watch someone die like that.”
She picked up her cards. “I kept that note for a long time,” she said. “That and the string.” No sign of tears. A cold, calm fury.
“I made him write the note,” Wish said, straightening in the chair. “He wouldn’t do it at first. Said it was—” He tipped his head to one side, as if listening to a conversation across the room. “I told him,” he said. “I’d let him die alone if he didn’t.”
She rearranged the cards in her hand. Weighing things up in her mind, he could see, trying to redistribute the facts of her life in light of his sitting there in front of her. He expected she’d despise him before it was done and he couldn’t blame her for that.
Before the Japanese surrender, the POWs at Nagasaki #14 were divided into work groups and taken into the city to collect the dead and burn them. Hundreds and thousands lying about the ruins, some barely recognizable as human. Blackened bones—spine and pelvis, femurs, skulls—still warm to the touch days after the explosion. They salvaged bodies from beneath the rubble, torsos and arms and legs, like bizarre deep-sea creatures brought up into the light of day. They gathered the corpses into piles, dousing the pyres of flesh with gasoline before setting them alight. A piece of cloth tied over their faces against the dense, drifting stench. A blue, mineral twilight persisting all hours of the day. Wish saw a woman sitting on a concrete step that first morning, her neck and face and one side of her head scorched raw, the dull-white of her skull visible in spots through the tattered scalp. She was nursing an infant, the skin of the baby’s back bubbled by the heat of radiation. It looked to Wish like pork rind just out of the oven. The woman seemed barely aware of her surroundings, of the child in her arms. Dead to the world, was his thought. But he felt nothing for her or the infant. He was only a day out of the cells, every movement excruciating, and he struggled through the heavy work of hauling bodies with a grim satisfaction. Praying for as much again on every yellow bastard in the country.
Mercedes said, “Would you really have let Harris die alone?”
A hard little smile crossed his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”
“The Wish I knew,” she said.
He shrugged.
She put her hands and her cards in her lap. “You never come looking?” she said. “Did you ever even think?”
“It was a long time ago, Mercedes.”
They walked together down the hall to Lilly’s room. Mercedes took his arm and he couldn’t think how to get clear of her hand until they stood back against opposite walls to let a resident go by in her wheelchair. He kept well to his side then so she couldn’t touch him without having to reach.
In Lilly’s room a young woman Wish didn’t know was sitting in a chair near the television. Mercedes said, “Hello, Bella.”
“I got tired of waiting downstairs,” the woman said. She was looking him up and down.
“This is my daughter,” Mercedes told him.
Wish stared at her and Mercedes in turn. “She’s too young,” he said.
Mercedes slapped him with the back of her hand. “I�
��m not that old.”
He caught himself and laughed, as if he’d intended only to make a joke, and introduced himself.
“Isabella,” she said, eyeing him warily.
He had no idea how much she knew of who he was.
Mercedes said, “How did you find Lilly’s room?”
“Ran into the Amazon as I came off the elevator.”
“Kathleen?”
“She told me I could wait for you here.” Bella stood up. “Are you ready to go, Mom?”
Mercedes looked around the room quickly. She seemed caught off guard by the question. She glanced at Wish but he refused to meet her eye. “All right,” she said. “I guess so, yes.”
Isabella walked out to the hall, where she waited for her mother. Mercedes was looking around the room again as if it had been her home for years and she was about to leave it for good.
“Mom,” Bella called.
“All right,” she said. “Goodbye, Lilly.” She turned to Wish and then went to the door. She stood there with her back to the room for a moment. “I’m going to visit the Cove,” she said. She looked back at him and Wish was struck by the length of the scar, the odd lifelessness on that side of her face, as if a stroke had paralyzed the muscles there. “Going to drive up to Fogo and see if I can’t find someone to take me across. You wouldn’t like to come, would you?”
“No,” he said. “No. Thanks. Couldn’t get away.”
He could see she was hurt by the curtness of his refusal and he had to bite his tongue to let it lie. He stood listening to Mercedes and her daughter walk down the hall to the elevator, taking in one long breath after another. Thinking, That’s done. And feeling no relief with the thought.
Billy-Peter’s truck was still parked in the gravel driveway when he arrived home in Calvert. Lights on inside as dusk came down, smoke rising out of the chimney, a fire laid in the wood stove to cut the evening chill. Wish sat in the car outside the house awhile. He was surprised to see Billy-Peter’s truck for some reason. He was surprised to see the house itself. He couldn’t remember the drive home, thinking about Harris, about losing Anstey just before the Japanese surrender.
In the last two days of his life, Anstey fell into sleeps so deep it was a kind of unconsciousness. He was oblivious to any movement or noise around him, to pain or discomfort, to his own hunger and thirst. They knew the war was all but over by then and somehow it made Wish feel more profoundly impotent that there was nothing they could do to help. The British doctor lifting the blankets to examine Anstey’s blue feet, the progress of the mottling as it crept to his knees. Anstey surfaced occasionally to ask what day it was, what time of day. He asked for Wish and Harris by name and nodded almost imperceptibly when they answered him. Then he went under again, for hours at a time.
There were spasms of inarticulate panic at the end, Anstey’s head ratcheted off the bed, the blind eyes wide, his jaws working as if the air was emptied of oxygen. Harris with an arm around his shoulders to ease Anstey down, whispering to quiet him though there was no indication he could hear a sound. Anstey slipped back into a dead calm within seconds, but the useless urgency of those moments made Wish nauseous. It was like being forced to witness an execution over and over again. Harris brushing Anstey’s forehead and cheeks with his fingers, his shoulders shaking. “That lousy fucker” was all he could choke out. “That miserable cunt.” And there was no question who he had in mind.
They cremated the corpse as soon as Anstey died, and Wish smuggled his ashes out of the camp the following night. Carried the urn and a flashlight in a cloth satchel, wheeling a bicycle he’d found propped against the wall of the main guardhouse. He half expected to be shot but no one paid him any mind. Some of the guards had deserted in the days since the explosion, the interpreter among them. Those who remained oversaw the camp with a blankness akin to that of the woman he’d seen nursing her child in the city. As if nothing visible to the naked eye held any significance.
He was too weak to ride the bicycle uphill, leaning on the seat and the handlebars as he struggled up the inclines, catching his breath as he coasted down the other side. At the French Temple he touched the Virgin’s feet before picking his way through the crowds taking refuge inside. He’d planned to say the rosary but civilians in various states of injury and distress were camped around the altar and he went straight to the basement.
He wandered the corridors, pushing doors ajar, shining the flashlight along the walls. Eyes staring back at him in every one of them. When he finally located the crypt, someone was stretched out asleep on the floor there as well. He picked his way over the man and played the beam of the flashlight over the shelves until he came upon a handful of names and units he recognized. He placed Anstey’s remains beside them and turned to leave, the light flicking over the sleeping figure. Wire-rimmed glasses folded and placed on the floor near the man’s head. Wish’s scalp prickled and he stood still until the dizziness passed. He crouched beside the man then. A smell of alcohol rising off his breath. The dark mole high on the left cheekbone.
Nishino had made himself at home in the room: a scatter of clothes, a mug, several bottles of the alcohol Wish had brewed at the camp, half a dozen votive candles for light. A bucket in one corner that stank of shit. He’d abandoned his uniform for civilian clothes but the kit bag still sat in a corner. Wish stepped over him carefully, raising the flap to look inside. The handgun in its leather holster. He glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping man and tried to think, think, think. Considered shooting him right there, a bullet to the head to finish him. He didn’t know if any other soldiers were camping out in the church or if they’d bother to come after him if there were. He took the holster from the bag and crept out the door. He emptied the chamber of ammunition, slipped the bullets into his breast pocket. Stepped back inside, replaced the gun and holster in Nishino’s kit bag.
He knelt before the Virgin outside the church, whispered a quick prayer. Pulled the bicycle out of the bushes where he’d stashed it and started back to the camp, euphoric, resolute. The phrase The Lord hath delivered him into my hands running through his head as he went.
Billy-Peter came to the door of the house. “Supper’s ready,” he called.
Wish opened the car door and shifted his legs out, using his hands to help move the dead weight of them. He didn’t know if he’d be able to stand and he hung on to the doorframe a few minutes to be certain. He leaned into the car to grab the coffee he’d picked up for the trip home and carried it with him. He staggered slightly as he came into the kitchen, caught himself on the kitchen table.
Billy-Peter said, “Jesus, Wish, that’s not the hard-on throwing you off your stride, is it?”
“Got a headache,” he said, walking by Billy-Peter toward the back bedroom.
“I’ll lay your supper in the oven, will I?”
He didn’t bother to answer. Closed the bedroom door behind him.
It was mid-morning the next day before he woke. He sat up on the side of the bed and looked slowly around the room, trying to guess the time by the fall of light through the window. The bureau top scattered with loose change and coffee mugs. Empty plastic hangers in the closet, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor beneath them. He felt viciously hungover, low and uneasy, though he couldn’t for the moment place the cause. He picked up the nearly empty Tim Hortons cup from the bedside table and took a cold mouthful.
He hauled on the pants and shirt that were lying on the floor by the bed and walked out to the kitchen in his bare feet, still trying to do up his fly. Found Billy-Peter sitting at the kitchen table with Mercedes and her daughter and another woman he didn’t know. All of them drinking tea like it was any old morning. And the whole of the day before breached the surface of his mind.
“Morning,” Billy-Peter said. He got up from his chair. “I’ll put on some coffee.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Wish said.
“Stayed over,” Billy-Peter said. “Thought I should keep an eye on y
ou last night.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. How did you know to find me here?” he asked Mercedes.
“Kathleen told me you were living in Calvert.”
“Jesus fuck,” he said. “The mouth on that one.”
Isabella said, “He’s a real charmer, Mom.”
The third woman was Mercedes’ sister, he could tell just from looking at her. She was holding a wallet-sized picture in her hand and he said, “Where did you get that?”
“I stepped in to see if you were awake earlier,” Billy-Peter said. “Thought they might like to see it.”
It was the photo taken in Hiram’s shop during the war, Mercedes as a young woman, the ancient black-and-white creased and faded. Wish hadn’t looked at it himself in years, had dug out the envelope the night before, alone in his bedroom. Just to remind himself of the physical fact of Mercedes’ face. To set it against the face of the woman who’d ambushed him at the nursing home. He’d left the picture lying on the bureau and a hangover fog of emotion flooded him now, seeing it on display. A rootless, insidious sense of betrayal. He pointed at Billy-Peter. “You blood of a bitch,” he said.
“Settle down, Wish.”
“Get the fuck out of here. And give me back the key to the front door.”
“There’s no lock on the front door, you foolish prick.”
He looked at Billy-Peter a moment. “Fuck,” he said. He marched to the porch and pulled his shoes on his sockless feet.
“Where you going?”
“Over to Mercer’s for a drink.”
“Mercer’s don’t open before noon.”
“I’ll wait.” He straightened up and reached for the door.
“Wish.”
“What, goddamn it?”
Billy-Peter pointing with a smug little grin on his face. “Your fly is down.”
“Fuck,” he whispered. Isabella and the other one, what the hell was her name? Both of them laughing as he hauled at the zipper. He took a ball hat off a coat hook and went out the door with it, crunching down the gravel driveway. Realized at the car that he’d left his keys inside.
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