One of the reasons Maud had been so attracted to Christian in the beginning was how easily place-names fell from his lips, money having made travel as common to him as looking for bargains at the grocery store was to her. He had family still in London and Vienna. He would take her to Europe.
She doubted he thought he would die in Europe, but Christian never thought anything bad would happen — to him.
“Toronto,” the officer said, pulling the name from somewhere in his head and smiling.
“Three hours north,” she said, and he nodded as if a map had suddenly materialized on the desk between them and the location of the dead man’s summers had been pinpointed.
Earlier in the summer, before Christian took Maud to Europe, he’d taken her to the cottage to meet his mother, whose skin was as white as the sweater and trousers she wore. The woman’s black heels made a staccato sound along the granite floor before stopping in front of a sofa in the living room. She motioned for Maud to sit on a chair across from her and tea was brought out.
His mother’s blond hair was a helmet that didn’t move, but her red fingernails tapped the side of her cup at a pace that made it jump on its saucer. She stared at Maud, whose own fingers caught in her cup’s handle, spilling tea into her lap.
“You’re very pretty,” the woman said, watching Maud press the napkin into the pool of milky tea.
“I’m studying history at university,” Maud said, looking up from her lap and then staring at Christian. For once she wished he would interrupt her like he usually did and tell his mother that they met at a lecture and not some bar, which the woman obviously thought, but he stared out the window at the dock and the shining lake.
“We met at school, at a talk on Queen Anne that a professor from Oxford was giving. She had seventeen pregnancies, but no children survived her,” Maud said, and heard Christian sigh.
“Queen Anne or the professor?”
This time Maud sighed. “Well, I mean Queen Anne.”
His mother stood up. “Aristocratic blood gets so polluted with all that inbreeding. We should have a light lunch before you leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Maud said, focusing again on the officer’s mouth. “What were we doing in Zurich? Like I told you, we were waiting for the evening train to Vienna. We were going to visit his uncle. Albrecht. He is a banker.”
“Christopher Albrecht?” The officer suddenly straightened in his chair.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
He chuckled. “I know of him. They say he will become Austria’s president in a few years.”
Maud’s shoulders heaved. She was still dehydrated, despite the water they’d given her at the police station. Neither she nor Christian drank much water all those hours on the ferry. He brought a single bottle with him, saying that since it was a tour boat there would be a canteen. Even when it turned out the boat was a ferry and there was no canteen, Maud had only a few sips of the water. By midafternoon, she told the officer, her head was so thick that she had to focus on every movement.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Walking had become as exacting as marching.
Everything felt so heavy, she said, and he nodded.
Now her feet fluttered up from the floor beneath her chair, although he couldn’t see them from where he sat. Besides, he had returned to staring at the shiny red spot at the base of her throat, the size of a thumbprint, although he hadn’t yet asked about it.
When she’d seen the spot this morning, it reminded her of a bull’s-eye. The other marks, almost lacy on her collarbone, down across her breasts and the sides of her body, mapped out movements she was still trying to recall. Everything had been easily hidden by her sweater and jeans, but having thrown all her scarves in the garbage after seeing the marks on her wrists, she had nothing to cover up the bull’s-eye. It bothered Christian to see it, and she was glad then that she hadn’t made any effort to hide it.
The officer had said something again, she suspected, because he knit his fingers together the way he did every time he waited for an answer. They reminded her of that game her grandmother played at the kitchen table when Maud was eating her snack before bed.
This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the doors, there’re all the people.
In another version, her grandmother kept all her fingers straight, as the officer did now, and asked, “Where’re all the people?”
Maud would open her own church doors and wiggle her fingers. “There they are.”
The two of them always laughed.
Now Maud’s fingers were stretched out, quiet in her lap.
The officer looked at her with something that might be concern, but she understood now that people’s expressions were as malleable as plasticine and as easily refashioned. Her own didn’t betray the fear she felt, not that she would be blamed for Christian’s death but that she was starting to remember what had happened to her, and once she did, no amount of water would wash that away.
Maud told the officer that by midafternoon the ferry had already stopped five times to let off people with bags of vegetables and books pressed against their chests and she and Christian realized that this was not a tour boat, as they’d been promised, but a ferry. She didn’t say that the sun pounded into them and the water, which from shore looked that beautiful teal blue, was black as she bent over the railing, waiting to throw up. For a moment she wondered how cold the water was and whether she was a strong enough swimmer to get to shore, any shore.
That thought left as quickly as it arrived, and leaning on the gate, Maud felt it give a little. She pulled back, but with another wave of nausea, she lurched forward and threw up what remained in her stomach, a sour-smelling liquid that formed an orange circle on the surface of the water.
When she looked at Christian again, he was watching her while drinking the last of the water, some of it running down his chin.
As she tucked herself back into what little shade the roof of the bridge provided, Christian closed his eyes.
A smell was coming off him, the smell he had when he was angry or excited, and it made her want to gag.
She had hoped for a lot of things on this trip, but mostly to feel secure in her choice of him and that he took their relationship seriously, but she realized, as she’d suspected after meeting his mother, that he took nothing seriously except his own wants. She could be easily replaced; she doubted he’d spend much time mourning her loss.
She closed her eyes for a few minutes, fighting back tears, although the hopelessness that had welled up in her as she stared out train windows had worn away. Things had festered for too long. Maud had learned, growing up, that there was a point of no return, when things or people couldn’t be saved.
Her grandmother had raised her after her parents died in a car accident when she was seven, and although she was good to Maud, she made the girl traipse around the island they lived on to help care for the sick and dying.
Eleanor healed people, not with a laying-on of hands like a pseudo-Christ but with poultices and ointments, drafts and brews her father had taught her to make. Maud looked at wounds, with their murky gray infections and skin as fragile as tissue paper, and applied hot cloths that allowed the infections to flow out of the skin like undammed rivers. She lifted people’s heads and forced liquid between their lips, and when she protested because of the rattling sounds and the stench, her grandmother’s withering look was worse than anything confronting Maud in strange beds.
People who could not be saved whispered in Eleanor’s ear, and, nodding, she patted a shoulder or an arm.
“I will keep them,” she said of the sins they gave her to hold, and the dying fell back on their pillows, relaxing into death.