girl, terribly bright, brilliant at maths and also at music.”
His thumbs rubbed against his khaki trousers, over and over. My words died in my lungs. I found a crate of my own and perched on the edge, mindful of dust.
“Her name was Anke,” he said. “Anke Mueller. She was sensible enough to reject my overtures out of hand, and kind enough to do it so gently, I hardly felt the wound. We continued to correspond after I returned home to England. I urged my friend Mueller to emigrate, to encourage his family to emigrate, but he refused, because to emigrate meant to give up everything, all their wealth, their friends and relatives, the damned country they loved, despite it all. Everything they knew. And then one day, I had a letter sent back to me. It had been opened and rather crudely resealed, marked addressee unknown. Anke’s letters stopped altogether, and Mueller’s. I made inquiries. It turned out their father’s business, their beautiful apartment in Friedrichstrasse, everything had been confiscated by the state. My friends themselves had disappeared. I went to Berlin, I searched everywhere, but nobody knew where they had gone, and eventually the authorities began to make trouble for me. Arrested me, confiscated my passport, interrogations, that sort of thing, until at last I was able to make contact with the British Embassy and get them to step in.”
“When—when did this happen?” I asked.
“January of 1939,” he replied. “Not long after the Kristallnacht. You know what happened then, don’t you?”
“Everybody knows about that.”
Thorpe stared down at his hands on his legs. “Anyway, I never did hear from the Muellers again. I tried, I searched. I was frantic. After Poland, after the war started, I asked certain friends of mine to—to do what they could. Find them and get them the hell out of Germany, somehow. But I haven’t heard. Anke . . .” He paused. His thumbs went still against his trousers. I couldn’t see his face. I thought he was hiding from me deliberately, that he’d said more than he planned, and now he couldn’t go back. But he could hide his face from me.
“Are you still in love with her?” I whispered.
Now he looked up, with an expression that seemed to regard me as if I hadn’t understood a word he’d said, hadn’t understood the point of it at all. “Lulu, that was years ago. I was a boy.”
“But she was that kind of girl, wasn’t she?”
“She was. But she told me it was impossible, and I—well, I suppose you could say I honored her enough to believe her.”
I couldn’t speak. I sat there mutely and stared not at his face, which was too much, but his hair, which had caught a glint of sunlight from the window, and looked sort of rumpled, as if he’d gone for a swim earlier and not bothered to brush it afterward. I’m sorry, I thought, and it seemed to me that I hadn’t understood the meaning of that word until now.
Thorpe rose from the crates and turned back to the French doors, to the ocean behind them. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I can’t say what I believe in anymore,” he said. “A just God in heaven? I don’t know. But if anyone deserves mercy from the Almighty, it’s her.”
I looked down at my hands, which were twisted together on my dress of blood orange. I had picked out this dress with great care. I thought it suited my eyes of light brown, my olive complexion, my hair now streaked with Bahamian sunshine. I had wanted to look my best for such an important encounter. How my heart had drummed away as I stood there on the dock, waiting for Thorpe to arrive in his boat.
“I killed my husband,” I said.
He spun around. “What did you say?”
“I killed him myself. Sort of an accident, but not really. We were living in Bakersfield at that point. It was a new town every four or five months, until the bills caught up with us, and now it was Bakersfield, California. I don’t guess you’ve ever been there. Charming spot. Hot and dry. They bring in water in ditches to irrigate the place for farming, for ranching and that kind of thing, olive groves, almonds. Otherwise you could hardly live there.”
Thorpe just stared at me, waiting for the rest of the story. I thought I should hide my face from him, the way he had hidden his from me, but