“Please help me,” she whispered.

“Oh, God,” Dora said, mortified. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I’ll go. Just help me, please. I’ll go. My car should be back by now.” Dora first tried to lift her from beneath her arms but it hurt too much and she had to crouch and kneel herself in front of June and hoist her almost onto her back to get her up on her feet. June grabbed her handbag. They trudged this way for a few feet, until June got her legs working again, and then Dora tucked her shoulder beneath hers and it was all June could do to keep up as they walked out of the apartment. It had rained, the air moist and heavy. Dora kept asking where her car was but June couldn’t answer. She was the simplest creature now, a beast trotting dumbly forth. Paradoxically, it was the pain that was now holding her up, this most rigid of infrastructures, as if she only existed through its searing lines. But she wanted to recline, if just for a moment, to feel the cool damp grass of the apartment lawn that now wove through her sandaled feet. Or was that elsewhere? Was it the pain, secretly, that she lingered upon?

So let me lie down.

Have the briefest rest.

Here…

Dora barely caught her, struggling to keep her upright. June was on her knees, being held up by the woman’s warm, soft arms. She had to lie down. “My bag,” she murmured to Dora. “I need my bag.”

Dora took it quickly and splayed it out for her and June found the vial and little syringe. Her hands suddenly grew calm. She plucked off the protective cover and drew some liquid from the vial. It was too dark to try to read the lines.

“Should you do this right here?” Dora asked, standing what seemed many miles above her. “Should I help you?”

June didn’t answer. She was on her side in the weedy grass, trying to open the alcohol pad. She fumbled it and Dora retrieved it for her but June couldn’t wait and hitched up her skirt and blindly stuck herself, the tiny bee sting blooming into a wide, clean coolness that reached all the way up to her throat, her mouth, a temperature that she could almost taste.

And then washing back down over her was the flooding warmth, this lush, weightless blanket.

The world shifted, clicked back. Dora asked her if she wanted to get up and she said yes and without any pain-or perhaps there was pain, if unrequited-she was able to stand up. There was no sign of Clines or their car but June didn’t mind, for at the moment she had misplaced her purpose for being here. All she knew was that this woman holding her was Dora, and that Dora was goodly, was basically kind, and that she would very much like to remain in her arms. The streetlamp above them went on and June had to cover her suddenly sensitive eyes from its bright, tinny light by tucking her face in Dora’s neck and hair as the two of them trudged past the sidewalk and stepped off the curb into the street. The three dogs from earlier were scampering about them now, sniffing and baying playfully at their heels, each vying for their attention. Dora shooed them away. Several blocks down the wide, two-way street, headlights appeared in the distance. “Maybe it’s yours,” Dora said, and waved at it, and the car replied with a flash of its lights. It sped up.

“I don’t want to go yet,” June said, but the sounds she made surprised her, by how weak and deformed they were. She was near mute. She felt herself slipping from Dora’s hold and so Dora leaned them up against the trunk of a parked sedan. Dora was turned to the approaching car, so she could not see what June saw, that behind them and across the street, beyond the cast of the streetlamp, a man with two white plastic shopping bags in his hands was strolling in his own penumbra, contented in his posture and step, maybe once and for all. Was it he? June murmured, “Hector,” and Dora simply answered that she would have to leave now. The car was fast approaching and this was the end. She could see the driver behind the wheel, glasses on. But the dogs, like June, had noticed the man, too, perhaps picking up the good scent in his bags, and the three bolted across the road, directly in front of the car. The car swerved and just missed the trailing dog, but then lost control and shot wildly forward on the slick pavement, striking Dora where she stood at the back of the parked car.

Had there even been a sound? A crashing of metal? To June a new opacity reigned, as if she, or else the world, had been dipped once in candle wax. The layer was fast hardening. The car had careened diagonally across the street and bounded straight into a telephone pole. The corner of the parked sedan, just where she and Dora had been standing, was pushed in, smashed. June herself was untouched. But Dora was lying still on the pavement. The man knelt beside her, his back to June, his white bags discarded in the middle of the street. One of Dora’s legs was all bloody, a mangle of flesh, though June couldn’t exactly tell. Dora was crying, very softly. Then she stopped crying and was quiet and then cried a little again and then she no longer made any sounds at all. He tried to resuscitate her. After a moment the man kissed her, on the forehead, and then let go of her hand. The dogs had come back around and were rooting in the bags. The man rose and without acknowledging June’s presence went past the dogs to the ticking car, where it was hitched up onto the curb. She walked into the street. Clines had slumped sideways into the door, the windshield in front of him cracked. His face was bloodied. His hand jittered up by his throat and he was lamely pulling at his own collar, as though he couldn’t quite breathe, and when the man got to him it was with the feral hunch of menace. He was going to clench Clines’s neck and snuff him. But before he could touch him, Clines bucked once on his own and lay back, still. The man stepped away then and faced June, and it was at last in the pale lamplight that she could be sure it was he.

FIVE LONG DAYS IN THIS COUNTRY, and Hector could not say if she would last another week. They were on their way to Siena. Of course anyone could see June might be terminally ill but to look at her now, riding beside him in the car, her eyes steady and sparkling with the grassy light reflected off the Maremman hills, her skin warmed by the heat of the roadway, one could believe she was safe for another month, perhaps even a season, that she could last as long as she herself willed it, that she was still in control.

She certainly had been in control back in Rome, despite being utterly exhausted after the long flight from JFK, moving them through immigration and the terminal as if she were his guardian and he were the infirm one; at one point she may have literally led him by the hand. They arrived in the early morning and her plan, as she’d explained to him on the plane, was to rent a car and drive north immediately, but he was in no mood to do so, dazed and sullen as he was, completely silent, drinking nonstop on the flight, and she’d had the taxi driver take them to a nearby airport hotel so they could gather themselves before moving on.

They were forced to share a room because a laid-over Japanese tour group had overrun the small hotel, but he was sure she had somehow arranged it that way, so she could keep him close. She would not quite fall asleep even though she had medicated herself. He was with her out of necessity and desperation after what happened in Fort Lee and she was clearly afraid that he would soon abandon her, though where he could go or what he could possibly do was not obvious to him. She kept the passports in her handbag, then transferred them to the room safe, even though he had in fact used Clines’s passport to enter the country. She and Clines had planned for Hector to apply for his own, but because of events and June’s hurry to leave they had taken a chance at immigration: she’d folded five one-hundred-dollar bills into her own passport, saying to the officer that he’d get another five at customs if he allowed the man behind her entry. After they collected her single bag from the carousel (he had no luggage) the officer appeared and hooked June by the arm and walked them straight through to the receiving lobby, where she paid him the rest.