Hiro’s voice was low and troubled and it came to her out of the darkness. “I can never repay my debt to you, not in a hundred lifetimes.”
“Forget it,” she said, “you would do the same for me—anybody would.” She didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but she could feel his embarrassment, some sort of macho Japanese thing, she supposed, and she was just talking to cover it. To change the subject, she asked him if he wanted a cigarette.
“No, sank you too much,” he said. His voice dropped even lower. “But how, Rusu, can you get me off this island?”
She didn’t have a clue. She didn’t have a car either, and judging from the look on Sax’s face that night on the sound, she couldn’t very well let him in on the secret. Or could she? “I don’t know,” she said, and she realized in that moment that she didn’t really want to get him to the mainland, not for a while yet, anyway. “But you can’t risk leaving here—the cabin, I mean. Do you understand? They’re after you—everybody on the island. And those two men—you remember the disco?—they’ll be back, I know they will.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when Hiro went rigid. “Shhhh, Rusu,” he said, “what was that?”
“What?” she whispered.
“Shhhh. Listen.”
And then she heard it: the snap of a twig, footsteps on the path. Suddenly a light played over the front of the house, and Hiro was on the floor.
“Ruth? You in there?”
Saxby.
She was on her feet in an instant—“Yes, yes, I’m here,” she called, trying to sound nonchalant, though her heart was boring a hole in her—and then she was at the door, intercepting him at the threshold.
He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and his hair had fallen across his eyes. He held the flashlight in one hand, angling the beam so it caught the side of her face. “I looked all over the place for you,” he said.
Her circuits were jammed. She couldn’t think. “I was here,” she said.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Sitting here in the dark? Were you talking to somebody?”
“I was working,” she said.
“In the dark?”
“I was thinking. Thinking out loud.”
He said nothing, but after a moment he lowered the flashlight and let the huskiness creep into his voice: “Hey,” he said, “you’re really weird, you know that, Ruth Dershowitz?” And then he took hold of her, the screen door gaping on its hinges, the beam of the flashlight playing crazily off the ceiling. “That’s what I like about you.”
She wrestled with him a bit, let him kiss her, held him. “Let’s go, Sax,” she said, whispering into his shoulder. “Let’s go back to the house.” Pause. “Somehow, I just don’t feel like working anymore.”
He kissed her again, hard and urgent. “Time for play,” he said, and his hand was on her breast.
“Not here,” she said.
“On the couch,” he whispered, and the flashlight clicked off and dropped with a thump to the weathered planks of the porch. He was struggling with her top, trying to pin her against the doorframe, lift her off her feet and find her mouth with his tongue—all at the same time.
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Out here, then. On the porch.” He had the top up around her armpits, a hand on her hip; she could feel his tongue wet on her nipples. “Out here,” she breathed, “under the stars.”
And then she swung away from him, caught at his belt and tugged him out of the doorway. In the next moment she was down on the rough planks of the porch and he was on her, breathing hard, and she was making room for him, giddy and hot and beyond caring, the screen door slamming behind them with a sudden sharp slap of punctuation.
She brought breakfast for him the next morning, and neither of them mentioned Saxby or what had happened the night before. Not right away, at any rate. He was awake when she got there, but he seemed withdrawn, insular, wrapped up in himself like a cat, and his eyes had a dull bludgeoned look to them. The light blanket she’d given him lay balled up in one corner of the loveseat, while he was hunched at the other, dressed only in his lurid shorts—he hadn’t bothered to pull on the sweatshirt or socks. And the place smelled of him—for the first time she was aware of that, of his smell—though the odor wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. Just different. There’d been a smell of old wood about the place, of fungus and moss and earth—a smell she could only describe as “woodsy”—but he’d replaced it with his own smell. A body inhabited this place now: his body.
As she moved around the place, fussing over the coffee things, setting the table, she could feel his eyes on her. The sky was overcast, close and gray. She’d brought soft-boiled eggs, wheat toast, marmalade and fruit juice. “Are you hungry?” she said, just to make conversation. “I brought some things.” He didn’t move. After a moment he gave her the faintest nod of his head—a parody of a bow—and rose to his feet. He looked like a waif, looked young, looked angry, sullen, ungrateful. Suddenly she was furious. “What did you want me to do,” she said, “—invite him in to play checkers?”
Hiro stood there, shoulders slouched, and turned his wounded eyes on her.
“He’s my man. My lover.” They were three feet apart. The eggs were getting cold. “You understand that?”
It took him a long moment to answer. “Yes,” he said finally, in a voice so soft she could barely hear him.
“You and I,” she began, gesturing with a single emphatic finger, “you and I are”—she couldn’t seem to find the word—“friends. You understand?”
There was the dull distant throb of a woodpecker assaulting a tree, and then the whine of a chainsaw starting up somewhere. The water on the hot plate came to a boil. Yesterday’s page curled over the typewriter.
“Yes,” Hiro said. “I understand.”
The next week passed without incident.
Hiro spent his days reading the books and newspapers she brought him, rocking in the chair and watching her as she pecked away at the keyboard, scribbled notes or gazed out on the wall of green, waiting for a word or phrase to come to her. He made himself scarce at lunchtime—she didn’t know where he went and more often than not didn’t even know he’d gone, so furtive had his movements become. But he reappeared, looking hopeful, the moment Owen turned and loped off down the path. And then he went through his daily routine—it was comical, really. He bowed, he smiled, he scraped and writhed and wrung his hands and he wouldn’t touch the lunch bucket —wouldn’t even look at it—till Ruth had assured him ten times over—and reassured him again—that she wasn’t hungry, that she didn’t want it, that it was for him and him alone.
In the evenings, when she left him, he made a poor meal of the groceries she’d smuggled in for him—bread and jam, wilted lettuce, a cupful of polished white rice—and then curled up on the couch beneath the thin blanket, and, as she imagined, dreamed of the City of Brotherly Love. In the mornings, he was always waiting for her, neatly dressed in the Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt or the madras plaid she’d borrowed from Saxby, and the cottage bore no trace of him but for his presence and the lingering faindy yeasty odor of his living and breathing. The books, the blanket and the groceries were hidden away, the floors swept, the mantel dusted, her papers and pens and pencils lovingly arranged on her desk. And there he was, her own pet, waiting for her, a toothy pure uncomplicated grin propping up his eyes and creasing the big joyful moon of his face.
At the same time, very gradually, in the way of a guerrilla band working its way down from the hills to infiltrate the provinces and finally lay siege to the capital, Ruth began to work her way back into the inner circle of Thanatopsis House. Since Jane Shine’s arrival, she’d kept a low profile—she had no choice, since she couldn’t stomach being in the same room with her. The battle lines had been drawn when Jane cut her that first night and Ruth had been left to fumble over the Iowa connection till Jane’s eyes had leaped the ski jump of her nose to settle on her as if on some insect, some legless beggar tugging at the hem of her imperial skirts, and she’d said finally,
