Of course she knew that the longer she survived, the more any extension would mean something like this, that the cancer would duly migrate and settle and prosper, and if during the past rounds of treatment she had yielded completely she would certainly give herself over now for as long as possible, endure the role of host to the last. In her painfully sentimental dreams of late, like the one she had had last night, the tumors were wards of her nursery and she was naming them as she would children, these eager clumps in her bones, in her lymph nodes, speckles on her liver and lungs, all racing to see which of them would bring her its final gift: You’re darlings, she said to them, in a warm, matronly voice. She was dressed in white burial garments, just as her great-grandmother had been enrobed as she lay on her funeral bier. She pressed her hands against the length of herself, her still-sturdy body.

Ah, thank you, thank you.

Thank you, Mrs. Singer!

After closing up the hunter’s cottage they went back up to the car. She lost her footing on a stone while walking up the steep driveway and Hector offered to carry her up and although it wasn’t really necessary she let him. He lifted her easily, his arms girding her fragile spine, her fragile knees, and as her hand curled around his taut neck she drew herself close. She let her cheek lean on his shoulder and neck. He smelled grassy and sharp and there was a denser scent rising from under his shirt, like of a worked horse, and she wondered how long it had been since she’d been this close to a man. It had been David, of course, but he was admittedly overattentive to his hygiene and regularly used her body lotions and powders, and as he was remarkably smooth of skin and hairless (especially for a Jew, as he pointed out to her more than once) she would sometimes imagine when embracing him that it was a woman in her bed. Before David it was Nicholas, during his adolescence, when the air of his small bedroom was fetid and gymlike with soiled socks and clothes, and she’d briefly hold her breath on entering, and sometimes even when Nicholas hugged her. She didn’t feel guilty at the time-what guilt had she felt at all, in those days?-but the regret was now keen and though it would have been fitting for Hector to repel her it was nothing like punishment at all, quite the opposite rather, and now a welling arose low enough in her belly that she could almost believe it was not a pang of the illness.

“I’m sorry you had to sleep in the car,” she said to him. He was driving them slowly about the switchbacks of the wooded hillsides, braking and accelerating gently enough to minimize the tug of the turns. “When I woke up I realized there was no place for you to sleep.”

“I was only in the car for an hour or two.”

“You were awake the whole night? What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You weren’t drinking more?”

“I’m always doing that.”

“You weren’t thinking about driving off?”

He didn’t answer her.

She said, “You must be tired, anyway. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

“I’m okay,” he said.

And to look at him was to see that he was okay, at least on the surface, the only difference this morning being that he hadn’t shaved. Besides the drinking, it seemed to be his only habitual practice. He had shaved every morning they had been together (at least when they were housed in regular lodgings), which struck her as odd for a man who otherwise appeared willfully ensconced in a life so down in the mouth. But strangely enough the shadow of a day’s growth on his face made him seem only more respectable, not less, for in the new, still-creased denim shirt he’d changed into (one of a half-dozen she’d bought him on landing at the airport), he could easily be one of David’s square-jawed colleagues at a country home on the weekend, driving to the hardware store for a pet project in the yard.

“It must have been cold last night.”

“A little.”

“Tonight you’ll have a decent room.”

He nodded.

“I decided something, while you were cleaning up.”

“Okay.”

“After we find Nicholas, I want to go directly on to Solferino. For all we know he could be there right now. But wherever he is, I want to go there quickly. Even if it’s late in the day.”

“It could take five or six hours from Siena, judging from the map.”

“I don’t care. I feel stronger now, but you’re right.” She took a breath. “I’m going to die soon.”

“I said you’d die if you didn’t rest.”

“I know what you said. I know what you were thinking, too. So this is my wish. When he’s with us we’ll start right away. We can’t lose any time. I know you have doubts about finding him. I can see it in your face. But I know we will find him, and once we do he’ll come with us.”

“And if he doesn’t want to?”

“He can’t say no to me. Not the way I am. If he tries, I want you to persuade him.”

“Me?”

“He won’t say no to you.”

“He won’t give a damn about me.”

“I don’t mean that way.”

“What? What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to make sure he comes with us. Will you do that for me, Hector?”

“You want me to threaten him? Handle him?”

“I want him to be with me. If I had to, and could grab him and hold on to him myself, I would. But I don’t have any strength left. I have money but I can no longer exert myself. I have no strength at all. You’re my body now. You’ll be my limbs. It’s best for both of us if you just do what I want. As I told you, my attorney in New York will expect to hear from you after all this. After I’m gone. Or wherever you are, you can call him and he’ll wire what I’ve set aside for you. Then you’ll be able to do what you really wish.”

“And what’s that?”

“You really want to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“To go bury yourself for good.”

Hector drove on in silence. She didn’t care that he was cross at her. He was not here for the money, or for her, maybe not even for himself, if “for himself ” meant the usual reasons a person did anything: some principle, or necessity, or pleasure, or the avoidance of displeasure, pain. June had not thought it as a girl, for back then she was even more fixed in her purpose than she was now-to survive, always survive-but she had come to see over the last several days that he was a being who completely lacked desire. Clearly he had had deep feeling for Dora, but she was gone and now it seemed he had fallen back into an existence most familiar to him, which he wore like a grotty old cap. He wanted nothing. He yearned for nothing. Even his drinking was just marking the time, a busyness of the hands, the mouth. He hardly seemed to care whether he was living or dead. At moments this infuriated her, given how she herself was gripping the edge of the precipice; it made her want to push him out of the car and take the wheel. If anything, she thought, he was here to wallow in the memory of Sylvie Tanner, to punish himself over her, which she knew would also be her tightest lashing, her darkest charm, and keep him longer at her side.

She had plenty to punish herself with, too, but she was focused on Nicholas. She was becoming afraid that he might resist seeing her. Even refuse. It was perhaps mad, but she pictured how if Hector had to corral him, forcibly hold the boy down, she might decide to stick him with her syringe, in order to calm him down. Certainly Nicholas would have to accept them as the best option: either she and Hector would arrest him or the authorities would. And while they journeyed to Solferino together in the back of the car, she would tell him the things she had been meaning to tell him, since the day he left for Europe: that she was sorry for her selfishness during his childhood, her focus too narrow to include even him; that she thought him vastly talented; that his sensitivity was not, as she might have led him to believe, a weakness, but could be turned into strength, of which his stubborn distance from her was a sure sign; that she forgave him for taking her book on Solferino and that he should forgive her, if he could, if not now, then someday. Lastly, she would tell him that she had always loved him, despite her meager capacity to show it, that if she could will herself eternal life it would be wholly spent at his side.