NOS4A2(71)

“I bet she’ll let us have it,” he said. He wrote the word “OURS” in the dust on the side of the tank. “What kind of old lady is gonna want to haul ass around on a mother like this?”

“The kind standing right next to you,” she said, and reached past him and wiped her palm across the word “OURS.”

Dust fluffed up into a shaft of early-morning sunshine, a flurry of gold flakes.

Below where the word “OURS” had been, Vic wrote “MINE.” Wayne held up his iPhone and took a picture.





Haverhill


EVERY DAY AFTER LUNCH, SIGMUND DE ZOET HAD AN HOUR TO himself to paint his tiny soldiers. It was his favorite hour of the day. He listened to the Berlin Orchestra performing the Frobisher sextet, Cloud Atlas, and painted the Hun in their nineteenth-century helmets and coats with tails and gasmasks. He had a miniature landscape on a six-foot-by-six-foot sheet of plywood that was supposed to represent an acre of Verdun-sur-Meuse: an expanse of blood-soaked mud, burned trees, tangled shrubbery, barbed wire, and bodies.

Sig was proud of his careful brushwork. He painted gold braid on epaulets, microscopic brass buttons on coats, spots of rust on helmets. He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.

He was working on them the day it finally happened, the day when they finally did begin to move.

He was painting a wounded Hun, the little man grabbing at his chest, his mouth open in silent cry. Sig had a daub of red on the end of the brush, meant to put a splash of it around the German soldier’s fingers, but when he reached out, the Hun backed away.

Sigmund stared, studying the one-inch soldier under the bright glare of the lamp on its articulated arm. He reached with the tip of the brush again, and again the soldier swayed away.

Sig tried a third time—Hold still, you little bastard, he thought—and missed entirely, wasn’t even close, painted a crimson slash across the metal lampshade instead.

And it wasn’t just that one soldier moving anymore. It was all of them. They lurched toward one another, wavering like candle flames.

Sigmund rubbed his hand across his forehead, felt a hot and slimy sweat there. He inhaled deeply and smelled gingerbread cookies.

A stroke, he thought. I am having a stroke. Only he thought it in Dutch, because for the moment English eluded him, and never mind he had spoken English as his first language since he was five.

He reached for the edge of the table, to push himself to his feet—and missed and fell. Sig hit the walnut floor on his right side and felt something snap in his hip. It broke like a dry stick under a German jackboot. The whole house shook with the force of his fall, and he thought—still in Dutch—That will bring Giselle.

“Hulp,” he called. “Ik heb een slag. Nr. Nr.” That didn’t sound right, but he needed a moment to figure out why. Dutch. She wouldn’t understand Dutch. “Giselle! I have fallen down!”

She didn’t come, didn’t respond in any way. He tried to think what she could be doing that she wouldn’t hear him, then wondered if she was outside with the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman, a dumpy little man named Bing something, had turned up in grease-stained overalls to replace a condenser coil as part of a factory recall.

Sig’s head seemed a bit clearer, down here on the floor. When he had been up on the stool, the air had started to seem soupy and slow, overheated, and faintly cloying, what with that sudden smell of gingerbread. Down here, though, it was cooler, and the world seemed inclined to behave. He saw a screwdriver he had been missing for months, nestled among some dust bunnies under the worktable.

His hip was broken. He was sure of that, could feel the fracture in it, like a hot wire embedded under the skin. He thought if he could get up, though, he could use his stool as a makeshift walker to get across the room to the door and out into the hall.

Perhaps he could reach the door and shout for the air-conditioning man. Or to Vic McQueen, across the street. Except: no. Vicki was off in New Hampshire somewhere with that boy of hers. No—if he could get as far as the phone in the kitchen, he would just have to call emergency services and hope Giselle found him before the ambulance pulled in to the driveway. He didn’t want to shock her more than was necessary.

Sig reached up with one gangly arm, got the stool, and struggled to his feet, keeping his weight off the left leg. It hurt anyway. He heard bone click.

“Giselle!” he screamed again, his voice a throaty roar. “Gott dam, Giselle!”

He leaned over the stool, both hands on its edge, and took a long, trembling breath—and smelled the Christmassy odor of gingerbread again. He almost flinched, the fragrance was so strong and clear.

A stroke, he thought again. This was what happened when you were stroking out. The brain misfired, and you smelled things that weren’t there, while the world drooped around you, melting like dirty snow in a warm spring rain.

He turned himself to face the door, which was not twelve paces away. The door to his studio hung wide open. He could not imagine how Giselle could fail to hear him shouting, if she was anywhere in the house. She was either outside by the noisy air conditioner or shopping or dead.

He considered this array of possibilities again—outside by the noisy air conditioner, shopping, or dead—and was disquieted to find the third possibility not quite preposterous.