“But I don’t think you should have to pay for your father’s mistake.”

Her voice had taken on a shrill, self-righteous tone.

I drew in a breath, and pushed it out again through my teeth. Everyone seemed entitled to speak about my father today—first Professor Pindar and now Sharon.

“What mistake?” I asked, in a voice that was not quite my own. “Using me for what?”

“They want it to close,” she said.

“Want what to close?”

“The hotel, of course,” she said quietly. “It’s a desecration.”

This again, I thought. “A desecration of what exactly?”

Sharon made a chirping sound of disbelief.

“It’s like making a hotel out of Auschwitz,” she said, forgetting to whisper now. “The missions were—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said, cutting her off. Really there was only so much of this one could take. “The missions were furnaces of death.”

I hung up the phone, my heart ping-ponging in my chest, and when it slowed to a more reasonable speed I looked around. My foot was numb, and parts of my left knee felt perilously incorrect. The days when I could nap curled up like that had passed, that was for certain.

But was that what had happened? The love seat cushion was indeed imprinted with the outline of my head. Could that entire sequence of events—the meeting with Professor Pindar, the atrium, the lecture hall—have been part of my dream? That would, after all, be more believable than much of what had occurred.

But—the whale-shaped paperweight was sitting on top of a stack of papers on my desk. I picked it up and gave it a little shake. So it had all happened, implausible as it was. I looked over to where the leather briefcase was perched on the chair opposite, like a tiny, silent visitor. I slid it toward me across the desk and opened it.

I put the paperweight inside and closed the gold buckles with two crisp, final-sounding clicks. It was so much heavier now, I thought, as I rose to my feet with the briefcase at my side. Then came that strange feeling I’d had before in Professor Pindar’s office, the one that took me far from the room, of the weight being familiar and somehow correct, as if I’d been meant to have it all along.

29

I’d made my move too quickly, I thought. I should have allowed myself more time to recuperate after the misunderstanding on the Alexandra Bridge, because it was that, and how I’d handled it, that had more or less caused the rupture with F, I could see now, almost thirty years later, as I nosed the car out of the medical school parking lot and onto Campus Drive.