“Mrs. Pendleton, you make it seem as if I’m going to die or something!”

“I just want you to k now…” she trailed off. “Just know. That is all.” She got up and kissed Locket on the top of her glossy black hair. “Good-bye.”

She left Locket in the drawing room with her biscuits and her look of confusion, and a strange, tumultuous feeling in her own stomach.

1953

IN HIS DREAMS, she comes back to him. In his dreams, she forgives him.

“I was always searching for a saint,” Trudy says. Her hands are intertwined behind his head, her eyes looking up into his. “I thought you were the one.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I never pretended I was one.”

“Oh, I think you did,” she says, without anger. “You always had that saintlike aura around you. People always looked to you for guidance. You radiate confidence. Unlike me. I radiate… unreliability. But I’m much more fun.”

He touches her hair, the fine, glossy strands of umber and bronze.

“I never locked my door because of you,” he tells her. “I thought even if there was the slightest chance you were alive… Stranger things have happened. I couldn’t lock my door because I was tormented by the thought that you’d find your way back to me, and that I’d happen to be out, and that you would leave, and then I would have missed my chance. That’s why I could never move. People always wondered why I stayed there, stuck in the past.”

“Of course I would find you,” she says, in her clear, bell voice. “You’ve forgotten how resourceful I am.”

“You made me want to be the worst kind of man,” he confesses. “If I had a family, I would have left it for you. If you wanted a bauble, I would have stolen it for you. If you told me to kill somebody, I very well might have done so. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, and that’s the most terrible thing in the world. So I had to get away from it. I had to get away from you, to preserve myself.”

“Well,” she says, amused. “I don’t know if that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, or the nastiest.”

She has always told him she is not dependable, that she will leave him in an instant, that she is not to be trusted, but in all her declarations, he has just to look into her eyes, and he doesn’t believe her.

“I like to think about when all this is over,” she says. “I’m going to have ice cream and champagne at every meal and bathe in honey and wine. I am going to be so profligate, you have no idea! I’m going to act every inch the heiress and demand every extravagance-only soaps and scents from France will touch my skin and fresh, exotic flowers on my bedside table every night. This restraint is just killing me. I’ve become a dour, wartime matron and I intend to scrub every inch of that loathsome person off as soon as…” But she cannot say what will end the war.

He shakes her. He wants to bite her cheek, viciously, until flesh tears off and blood runs down his chin. He wants to devour her whole, until she feels the pain he has been feeling. The pain he has caused her too.

He surfaces, she recedes, he remembers the other one, the one that’s still alive. But he goes down again, into the past. Its pull is too strong.

The memory of those days. Sitting on his thin bed, helpless, outraged, angered by the endless monotony around him, the small concerns of the others-whether they were getting their fair ration, that someone had moved surreptitiously into an empty room that had not yet been allocated after the Americans had been repatriated. Ah, yes, the day that the Americans left, their government far more expedient in arranging a prisoner-of-war trade, the indescribable feeling of watching the lorries depart, filled with joyful, bedraggled people, pockets filled with messages from those remaining to loved ones around the world. They promised to get the letters out. The kinder ones had left all their blankets and extra clothes and equipment and even money, but a few took every last scrap, as if they wouldn’t throw it out the moment they got home. Funny, the mentality that springs up in such a place. And a few Americans stayed behind: the Catholic priests. They gave up their chance to return home so they could minister to the faithful remaining in the camp, regardless of nationality. Yes, there had been good people.

Another memory, from even before: the first Christmas in camp, a year or so after they had been interned. He remembered the half-dead grass in the center lawn and the dust kicked up by the children as they ran around, shouting excitedly in their ragged shorts-it had been unseasonably warm. The women had set up tables with watery lemonade and Christmas cookies donated from those still on the outside. A program with songs and recitals had been mimeographed and distributed. They had also managed to get ahold of some decorations so the straggly trees on the perimeter boasted tinsel and some garish ornaments. An old gramophone piped Christmas carols as the internees gathered around and chatted, sipping from their cups, a flask surreptitiously passed around. Bill Schott had acquired a Santa Claus costume and came out with a pillow stuffed next to his belly, much to the delight of the children, and handed out a motley but much squealed-over selection of presents: a collection of shiny buttons, a rag doll stuffed with dry grass, a Christmas collage made out of leaves. The mothers had been busy.

The Japanese soldiers watched with bemusement from the side. They had given packets of boiled sweets to the children earlier.

Regina Arbogast appeared before him suddenly, a red muffler wrapped dramatically around her neck. She still had flair.

“Will, Merry Christmas,” she said. Her husband was next to her. It was before the torture. That would happen months later. Will raised a glass to the couple.

“A year passes too quickly, doesn’t it? What a difference from last year.”

“And here we are,” said Reggie.

“You enjoying the furloughs?” Regina asked. Will’s fluidity between the inside and outside had been the source of much envy and speculation, although he always tried to bring back supplies to benefit everyone.

“ ‘Enjoy’ is a peculiar way of putting it,” he said.

“Trudy is tight with the current regime.” Regina let the statement hang in the air, a challenge.

“Is that a question or a statement?” Will asked mildly.

“How would you know anything about that, locked up in here?” Reggie said impatiently to his wife. “You presume too much, Regina.”

“Well, that’s what everyone is saying.” Regina winked. “But I suppose the less you know the better, right, Will?”

Reggie rolled his eyes and looked apologetic.

“Oh, look here,” he said. “The choir is ready to sing.” He took Regina firmly by the arm and led her away to where the older children and women were preparing to perform.

Will remembers this exchange with a sick feeling, and how it all ended up, how they were all playing at something that ended up being all too real.

Then 1945, the recurring sounds of aircraft overhead, whispers of a new kind of bomb. Something extraordinary, beyond imagination, an unthinkable death toll. A giant mushroom cloud of devastation over Japan. Snippets of information smuggled in through the daily vegetable delivery, the spinach suddenly wrapped in the English newspaper.

Guards looking sheepish, being slightly friendlier, allowed more privileges. Their rations grew larger.

Trudy still a daily thought, but now successfully muffled. None of his messages answered, no reported sightings from the people who visited other internees. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. Like her mother, he thought, and pushed that thought out of his head. In war, people die. Later, he would realize that was how a dying man would think.