The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [152]
Sandoz stood and turned to leave. Giuliani reached out and locked a hand over the man’s arm to keep him from running away but released it instantly, startled by the strangled scream as Sandoz pulled away violently. "Emilio, please don’t leave. I’m so sorry. Don’t go." He had seen before this look of sheer panic, the terror that sometimes swamped the man when you least expected it. This has to be part of it somehow, he thought. "Emilio, what happened to you out there? What changed everything?"
"Don’t ask me, Vince," Sandoz said bitterly. "Ask God."
HE KNEW IT was Edward Behr who’d come after him. The wheezing was unmistakable. He’d felt his way down the stone stairs, blinded by the tears and the lingering pain, and when he realized he’d been followed, he swore viciously and told Ed to leave him the hell alone.
"Do you miss the asteroid?" Brother Edward asked curiously. "You were alone there."
Emilio laughed in spite of it all. "No. I do not miss the asteroid," he said as dryly as a crying man could. He sat down where he stood, feeling boneless and bereft, and put his head in what was left of his hands. "There’s no bottom to this."
"You’re better, you know," Edward said, sitting down. Emilio looked out at the Mediterranean, gunmetal blue and oily under a flat pewter sky. "Of course, there are good days and bad days, but you’re a lot stronger than you were a few months ago. You couldn’t have sustained an argument like that before. Physically or mentally."
Wiping his eyes on the backs of his gloves, Emilio said angrily, "I don’t feel stronger. I feel that this will never be over. I feel that I will never be over it."
"Well, I can only speak to the grief. You lost so much and so many out there." Edward saw rather than heard the sobbing and resisted the impulse to put a hand out; Sandoz hated being touched. "In the normal way of things, it takes about a year, when you lose someone you really care for. Before the worst of it lets go of you, I mean. I found anniversaries the hardest. Not just formal things like wedding anniversaries, you understand. I’d be going along, functioning fairly well really, and then I’d realize, today would have been ten years since we met, or six years since we moved to London, or two years since that trip to France. Used to lay me away properly, little anniversaries like that."
"How did your wife die, Ed?" Sandoz asked. He’d gotten a grip again. Brother Edward wished he’d let himself go, but there was some overriding need to keep control, something that couldn’t be wept away. "You don’t have to tell me," Sandoz said then. "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry."
"Oh, I don’t mind. It helps actually, to talk about her. Keeps her alive to me in some ways." Edward leaned forward, pudgy elbows on his knees, head close to Emilio’s now. "It was a stupid thing, really. I was rooting around in the glove box, looking for a tissue to blow my nose with. Can you imagine? I had a cold! Dumb luck. Kind of thing you do a hundred times and it makes no difference and then one bright winter morning, it makes all the difference in the world. Wheel hit a hole in the tarmac and I lost control of the car. She was killed and I was barely scratched."
"I’m sorry." There was a long silence. "Was it a good marriage?"
"Oh, it had its ups and downs. We were actually in a rough patch when the accident happened but I think we’d have sorted things out. We weren’t either of us quitters. We’d have done all right, I think."
"Did you blame yourself, Ed? Or did you blame God?"
"Funny about that," Brother Edward said, musing. "There was plenty of blame to go around, but it never occurred to me to blame God. I blamed myself, of course. And the council for not keeping the roadways in good repair. And the wretched little boy in the flat upstairs who gave me the