At that, I think of my dream of Wyatt, and my face is so hot I turn away.
“You’re helping a woman on her deathbed keep a secret. No, actually, it’s worse than that. You’re the match that could burn down that whole marriage even after she’s gone,” Brian says. “But you were angry at me for not telling you about every moment I spent with Gita where nothing happened.”
“I would have been angry even if youdidtell me,” I explode. “The only difference is that if you’d told me, I would have known right away that there was apparently something so wrong between us that you had to go looking for it somewhere else!”
My voice rings in the silence between us. One thing I’ve always told caregivers and clients is that last words are lasting words.
I’ve always wondered what’s preferable: knowing the worst, or not knowing. Is it better to get a terminal diagnosis and count the days till you die, but have the time to say goodbye to everyone and everything you love? Or is it better to die immediately—an accident, a stroke, an aneurysm—and not have to wait for the inevitable? I think the answer is: neither. Both outcomes are terrible ones.
“There are things I’ve never asked you about…before we met,” Brian says haltingly, and suddenly the reason for his indignation is laid bare. “I figured, after all this time, you’d have told me everything.”
There are things you wouldn’t want to know,I think. But I look him in the eye. “I have,” I say, because what’s one more lie.
—
FOR THE PASTfew days, I’ve relayed to Win that I’ve been searching for Thane Bernard. She has had more energy lately, which happens sometimes before the end.
She knows that I haven’t made any significant headway, but I think that the mere fact someone is looking for Thane makes her feel as if the world is righting itself. “Maybe we should write that letter,” I tell her, multiple times, but Win shushes me.
“We have to do something else first,” she insists, and then she asks me to run an errand.
I come home from the art supply store with everything on Win’s list. She is too weak to stretch a canvas herself, so she directs me with military precision. The way you know if you’re stretching a canvas right, Win tells me, is if there’s tension.
I seal and prime the canvas, and we let it dry, and then Win asks me to go to the locked room and retrieve her paints. She keeps them in a plastic tackle box. Some tubes are so crusted over that I have to wipe their necks with warm water to get the caps unscrewed. I prop up Win with pillows on a window seat where the light is good. I watch her squeeze thumbnail-size bits of color onto a glass palette: white, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, ultramarine. From the primary colors, she blends purple and green and orange. She shimmies an entire scale from red to blue, filling the middle with purple shadows. She gives rise to rainbows.
I check out the window to make sure that Felix’s car is still gone. “Do you know Thane’s birthday?” I ask. “That would help me.”
“Why?”
“Because when you use online search engines to find missing people, it’s the first thing they ask.”
“He isn’t missing.”
“Well, that’s the other problem.Andhe’s overseas. Almost every database I’ve found is American. Plus, I don’t speak French, so I have to use Google Translate for everything.”
“I know he’s a Leo, that’s all. But we didn’t talk about our ages.”
Why would they, when he was her professor? When it only highlighted the differences between them?
“I know he was nearly forty,” Win says. “Which at the time, felt ancient.”
It would, to a twenty-year-old. I remember Win telling me that his wife had been pregnant. I wonder how old she was.
“Tell me again where you’ve looked,” she asks, as she touches her brush to the canvas.
“Facebook. Twitter. Instagram,” I say. “Genealogy websites. The white pages. The prison system in France.”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t find him there, if that makes you feel better. He doesn’t show up in court records, either.”
I haven’t told her this, but I plan to check death records next. I don’t think it’s occurred to Win that Thane might have left this world without tellingher.
“What are you going to paint?”
“Death. What else?” She glances at me. “Don’t peek.”
Instead, I catalog her. Her wrists are so fragile that the skin stretches tight over the bones; her complexion is ashy, her fingernails jaundiced. But her eyes are brighter than they’ve been in a week, darting from her palette to the painting and back again. There’s something almost mystical about her looking at a blank canvas and seeing something that nobody else can, yet. I suppose it’s not that different from peering over the edge of this world into the next.
