“You could get better here.” He paused again. “Maybe if you’d try. Obstbaum says it isn’t a question of that. But what if it is? You could try. Everything could be the way it was. Better. The war’s over. All the terrible things.” Knowing as he said it that they weren’t over-people still in camps, boats still being turned around, everything she had gone away to escape still happening. What was there to come back for? Him? The drawer he shouldn’t open. Was it my fault? Another casualty of the war, Obstbaum had said, but what if she had left the world to leave him? Something only she knew and wasn’t coming back to answer. Not ever. Gus would fly home, all the others, and he would still be here, talking to himself while she stared at the garden. “You have to be patient,” Obstbaum had said. “The mind is like an eggshell. It can withstand tremendous pressure. But if it cracks it’s not so easy to put it back together.” A Humpty Dumpty explanation, as good as any other, but it was Leon who was sitting here, his world that had been cracked open.

“I have to go soon. Tommy wants to have a drink at the Park. On a night like this. Not that rain ever kept Tommy from a drink. Still. You know what occurred to me? He wants to bring me inside. Run my own operation. I mean, a job like this tonight, it’s not messenger work anymore. There’d be money in it. It’s about time he-” Babbling, filling time. “Do you have everything you need?”

He got up and went over to the bed, putting his hand on the dark hair fanning out beneath her. Lightly, just grazing it, because there was something unreal about physical contact now, touching someone who wasn’t there. And there was always a moment when he flinched, apprehensive, expecting her to reach up and snatch at his hand, finally mad. He passed the back of his hand over her forehead, a soothing motion, and she closed her eyes to it, looking for a second the way she used to after they made love, drifting.