He shook his head. “Too quickly talking. Catterine, they talk of her, about her, they talk about September 11, about Arabs, but what they are saying?”

“Catherine was shot, but she will recover-she will get well. They didn’t say where she was hit, but they did say `serious but stable,’ which means a bad injury, but not one that will kill her.”

“That is true?” His eyes were painfully large in his thin face. “You-” His lips moved as he went through a vocabulary list in his head. “You swearing that is true?”

I swore to him that I was telling the truth about Catherine. I added that I would find out what hospital she was in and exactly how she’d been hurt, but that I needed to sleep first. I left out the rest of the story, the manhunt for him. He probably guessed it, but putting it into words would make it too stark; we both needed sleep, not anxiety, now.

I was too exhausted to think, or talk. When I got up to carry the plates to the sink, tears spurted down my face, involuntary, the body’s protest against further effort. No heartening slogans from the basketball court, no remembered lectures of my mother’s, could make me stop crying. Weeping, I led Benjamin to the second floor, where a series of narrow bedrooms stood, left over from the days when the Catholic Church was awash with priests and a parish like St. Remigio had five or six on its roster. Army blankets were folded at the foot of the beds, and thin down pillows, as ancient as the building, stood at the heads. The most elaborate furnishing was the wooden crucifix over each bed, carved so realistically that Benjamin looked at his in horror. I removed it from the wall over his bed and put it in the linen closet.

The rooms were cold, left unheated to save on fuel, but they held minute electric heaters for emergency guests like us. I turned them on, showed Benjamin where the bathroom was, put sheets on beds in two adjacent rooms and fell asleep, still weeping.

CHAPTER 30

Warming Up

I awoke from my most familiar nightmare. My mother had disappeared. I was looking for her, panic-stricken, because the only reason she would leave was that she didn’t love me any more. The search changes from dream to dream; this time I was in the dark culvert that connected New Solway with Anodyne Park. Behind me I could hear a hissing and knew, dreamwise, that it was the hissing of tires in the mud. I ran pell-mell until I crashed into the evergreen bush. The wheels came closer and I saw a giant golf cart about to run me over. I woke, my heart pounding, my arms and shoulders so stiff it was painful to move them.

When I pushed myself up on the narrow bed, my stomach muscles trembled. I sat blear-eyed, wanting just to lie back down and sleep for a hundred years. Until I felt well. Until Morrell came home. Until these times of fear and brutality passed. I thought of the horrors wrought in the hundred years now ending and didn’t think waiting another century for peace would bring much solace.