Chang-rae Lee - The surrendered

“You have to stop talking about him and me,” he said sharply. “Or this can’t work. I found him for you but that’s all I’m going to do.”

“Don’t you have any feeling for him? Any feeling at all?”

“I don’t want to see him, okay?” he shouted, with as much vehemence as he’d displayed since being with her. “I don’t want to think about him anymore. He’s gone his way and we’ve gone ours.”

“We could go back for him.”

“Is that what you really want?” he cried. “I’ll turn us around and take you. I’ll do it right now. Well?”

She couldn’t say anything and she thought he was going to slam the car door and walk off forever but instead he crouched on his haunches in the opened doorway, his head cast down with the kind of exhaustion that she had always counted on engendering for her own benefit. But she didn’t want to see it now. A car shot past, again too closely.

“Please don’t stay out there!” she pleaded. Two more cars careened by, in either direction, each honking at him in ire for impeding the road. “Please, Hector! I don’t know what I’d do if you got hurt. I couldn’t even drive you to a hospital. Please!”

Finally he got back behind the wheel. He drove them to the other end of the bridge and pulled off onto the grassy shoulder. He cut the engine and got out of the car, wandering off into the woods. She was going to tell him how sorry she was for upsetting him, that she was deeply grateful for his efforts, that he had been quite wonderful to her when all she was offering him was this toilsome, perhaps disturbing errand, but her body was once again rudely alive, shuddering with pain, and before she could summon any words he was gone.

When he hadn’t returned after fifteen minutes she wedged her swollen feet into her flats and lifted herself out of the car. She followed his direction, finding a deer path that snaked through the high weeds and into the woods. The undergrowth was brambly and dense at first and she didn’t think she could make it through, but then the brush gave way to firs, the higher canopy looming dark and cool above the open forest floor. The ground was covered with soft needles, and as it sloped steeply toward the valley floor she had to step sideways so as not to slide down or fall. Her legs were quivering and the pains from her belly and up her back and neck jolted her with each measured step, but she clenched her teeth and told herself as she had throughout her life whenever she needed to persevere that it was wartime again, those days between what happened to her siblings on the train and when she met Hector on the road, when every last cell of her was besieged by hunger and fear but was utterly resolved not to flag, and never did.

Yet a terrible feeling about Hector was overwhelming her and she quickened her pace and stumbled over a tree root in the path. She fell on her hands. An ugly, sharp squeal flew up from her throat. Her left wrist felt shattered. She tried to squeeze away the pain. On looking up she thought she could see something through the silvery green of the trees and she got up again, ignoring the pain-or, better, forcing herself to meet it differently, as if it were the embodiment of her own harsher self, the one that had mostly ruled her life, this cold, cruel woman she had relied on and befriended and to whom she would now lash herself in punishment.

The stand of firs thinned and the slope bottomed out to more level, open, arid ground and she found herself pushing through some large wild rosemary bushes to see an exposed ledge of rock. To the right of her was visible the long bridge they’d just crossed, at the same level as she, but before her was just air, in the distance a lovely expanse of dry rolling hills and verdant farmland and terra-cotta-roofed houses, the vista like any of the third-rate landscape paintings she’d periodically sold in her shop, except that this one was dotted by a single brush of dark, reddish hair in the foreground, the crown of a man’s head floating somehow out beyond the ledge. What was he doing? Suddenly a panic speared her chest and she called out his name, but he didn’t answer. She stepped gingerly to the platform of the rock, but once there she had to drop to her knees for the sudden attack of vertigo, the high clouds in the sky twisting about her. She had to crawl to the edge. Below her on a short spit of outcropping Hector sat with his legs hanging over the steep hillside that fell away below him. He took a last slug from the bottle of beer he’d taken with him, then tossed it into the chasm. It made no sound that she could hear.

“Please, Hector,” she said, fearfully gripping at the weather-worn face of the granite. Though it was only slightly canted she was certain she was about to slide off. Her mind was racing, desperate not to focus on the horizon. “Please climb back up. We still have many miles to go to Solferino. I won’t talk about you and Nicholas anymore. I’ll shut up, I swear. Let’s go now, all right? Please, Hector? I don’t like it up here…”

She started to cry, the sudden flood of which took her by surprise, for there was no calculation or aim behind it, no stratagem, just the involuntary release of someone who was genuinely spent. Her cheek lay against the warmed rock, this giant headstone. A marker for them both. She was going to witness him disappear, fall away from existence. But then he stood up and without the least regard for his precipitous position or the poor footing he simply turned and hauled himself up onto the ledge.

“Okay, now,” he said, his hand heavy on her back, “take it easy.”

“I’m so sorry for what I’ve done.”

“You’ve done nothing to me.”

“I have!”

“I’ll handle it.”

“It’s not about Nicholas!” she gasped. She was going to say more, to tell him everything, but she was coughing hard, just as she had begun to over the past few days, the one store of energy left to her, hacking violently enough that some blood was starting to come up, and he gathered her in his arms and held her up so she wouldn’t buck herself against the rock.

“What is it, then?” he murmured, his eyes wide but lit inside by a flicker of dread. “Is it about her?”

But she could not talk, could hardly breathe, and he kept patting her gently on the back, caressing her, and it was in this instant that she decided not to speak another word, retracting herself into the ever-slackening coil of her body. This pile of frayed rope. She shut her eyes, trying to fill her lungs, fill them again. He hoisted her up and she could feel the strength of him as he piggybacked her up through the trees. She would not open her eyes, fearing she might be sick. He lowered her into the pillow-strewn backseat of the car. He started the motor and rolled onto the road, heading again in the same direction.

The ride was smooth, which calmed her. He said he could stop at the next town and look for a doctor but she shook her head. There was no more time to pause. She could recall very little of the past thirty-six hours, could not even remember if she had said farewell to Nicholas. But she knew this: she was being borne on this swift raft, the taste of blood like that of an old coin on her tongue. Would she be allowed to cross over? Would her family be awaiting her? The Tanners? Her parents had not practiced any faith, nor had she, but it seemed reasonable that there should be simple questions now about all that one did in one’s life, and whether those commissions were on balance decent, humane. Whether she would do them again, or else they were regrettable enough to disavow, to try once more to forget.

HECTOR GLANCED in the rearview mirror every twenty or so kilometers to see if June was awake, but all he saw was her mouth hung open or shut depending on the depth of her slumber, her head lolling back to one side or the other. He was skeptical of her regret for whatever she had “done” to him, figuring she was characteristically angling to get her way, contriving to move him forward, yet her outburst had seemed as genuine as her physical misery, which he knew from both wartime and peacetime (if the hours at Smitty’s could ever count as the latter) was as good a truth serum as anything else. Had she told Dora something hurtful about him? Taunted her with the fact of their brief union, and the existence of Nicholas? She was definitely capable of that. He wanted to be angry with her and a flush of heat rose up in his neck but it wouldn’t build to rage, or anything else. What was there, really, to be concerned about now? It was just the two of them from here on in, a pair of souls in a barrel floating down the last stretch of the river, twirling in one of the quieter eddies before being drawn into the chute toward the falls.