“The father of a student.”
“Please, could I have a name?”
At that moment a door to his right opened, and a woman stood there with considerably less aplomb than her assistant, also requesting a name.
There was a brittleness about her, an upright, gray-lined brittleness. Her hair was cut short, the dulled color of cornhusks, and it was shot through with gray. She wore a loose-fitting campesino blouse with a matching skirt, but her sweater gave her away. It was a mix of fall colors, even though the month was May and the day was heating up as they stood there. The sleeves were pulled up to the elbow, exposing sinewy wrists. She wore two copper-colored bracelets. The earrings were made of bronze, short dangles of an Aztec design. He thought of Hernando Cortez: with his single-mindedness and handful of soldiers, horses and dogs, he’d burned his boats and given the world these earrings. He looked Madeline Pratt in the eye and said he’d like to talk to her in her office alone.
She had a pleasant, practiced smile she could replace with a matter-of-fact one, which told him the facts would not be to his liking. The eyes were hazel, more green than brown, and he didn’t doubt she could turn their natural kindness into something administratively cold.
She showed him into her office. Stepping around her, he picked up the uninviting scent of some herbal mixture. Her walls were decorated with photographs of Spanish cultural monuments—a cathedral altarpiece, coated in gold, a pool reflecting Moorish arches—and there were prints of Spanish paintings, none of which he could identify. One was of two young women, perhaps a century ago, at a beach. They were standing beside the billowing cloth of a bathhouse. The clothes they wore were diaphanous, their hair was, the light that bathed them was a pale diffused yellow.
“Sorolla,” the woman beside him confided. She’d caught him off guard. He stiffened, and she added, in a measured, marveling voice, “Has anyone ever painted the Mediterranean like that?”
He turned to her and they exchanged a look.
“If you’ll tell me your son or daughter’s name, I’ll do my best to help you.”
He paused. He had a name to give, a name to give up, and in that single lucid interval he knew he should keep the name and take it home with him. He had a home. He had a daughter in college, with no desire to go abroad, who loved him.
“Michelle Williamson,” he said, adding before the name could register, “you might not remember, she was only here for a month before she was killed, and that’s been almost three years now.”
Stunned, Madeline Pratt sat down behind her desk. “Of course I remember,” she half-whispered.
“When she was little we called her Mick, sometimes Mickey Mouse,” he went on, giving it all up, with a flat grudging vehemence in his voice he couldn’t control, “but she probably hadn’t been here long enough to get to the nickname stage.”
Madeline Pratt lowered her eyes to her desk and shook her head. There was a single framed picture on her desk that he could only see the back of. He checked the urge to reach out and turn the picture toward him, but promised himself he would see it before he left this office. It was, he understood, a way of moving ahead, making these small daring promises to himself. He added, “But come to think of it, she would never tell you that nickname. We teased her with it, and she didn’t like to be teased.”
Madeline Pratt raised her head and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Williamson. I don’t know what to say to you.”
Her eyes were moist. They were large in their sockets, the hollows beneath them were washed out. She looked utterly unresourceful. What was a woman like this doing running a program responsible for the safety of fifty students a year?
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sure you said it all to her mother when she came to bring the body back. I stayed home. I had no desire to come to Spain. Spain didn’t interest me in the least.”
“Yes, I remember your wife well. I was astonished at how well she bore up.”
“My ex-wife,” he corrected her. “Not many marriages will last after a thing like that.”
“No,” she allowed, but only to do him the courtesy.
He didn’t want the courtesy. His ex-wife, Gail, would never do that, but he didn’t want his ex-wife either. She sold real estate now and was enormously successful because she had a talent for disarming you with her honesty. It was a talent she’d developed, a strategy: here’s what’s going to drive you crazy about this house, but here’s where the balance tilts slightly in your favor. She’d kept a balance sheet on her marriage in a similar way until the balance tilted against him, against it.
He’d once loved her, her beauty and the freshness of her outlook, her mind, her very being, until that freshness had hardened into something brusque and hurtful. That was before their daughter had been killed. Gail had put on weight too, and in the name of that hardened freshness, she knew how to throw her weight around. After the divorce she’d told their daughter that her father was a fool. No one could be such a romantic sap about a woman looking the way she looked now. No one she’d want to be married to. She’d gotten a divorce, and had actually told their daughter that. Annie. Their surviving daughter.
Then he told Madeline Pratt what he did want. It brought a flinch to her face and a start to her eyes. “I want you to take me where it happened,” he said. “I understand it’s not far from here. I want to stand there,” he was more emphatic now, speaking from the unsounded depth of his desire, “where they killed her.”
She took a moment to compose herself. She drew a deep steadying breath, which she made no attempt to disguise. “I could show you on the map,” she conceded. “But I shouldn’t leave the office. I have someone coming in.”
He didn’t believe her. “They’re still killing people, aren’t they?”
She hesitated. “ETA?”
He hated the anonymity of the initials, that uppercase shield. “Yes, the Basques,” he said impatiently, “ETA.”
“ETA only represents a tiny minority of the Basque people.”
“Those who want Basque independence.”
“Yes, but not even a majority of those.”
“Only the most violent.”
“Yes, only the most violent. The fact is, the Basques are prosperous, and most prefer to remain part of the Spanish state.”
“Yet they permit the presence of ETA on their soil,” he reminded her. “They don’t get rid of it.”
In her forbearing half-whisper, Madeline Pratt said, “Because they are afraid.”
He was vigilant. He would not join her in her forbearance. “Are you afraid?”
“Of ETA?” Again she hesitated. She tried to assume a professional bearing. She was going to yield to him. A director of an American study abroad program was going to yield to a distraught parent. Somewhere it was written: parents who feel their children are lost to them, lost on foreign soil, should be treated with the utmost consideration, babied if that’s what it takes.
She nodded. “If you live in Spain for any length of time, you get used to the threat of ETA. You learn not to think about it and to go on with your life.”
She bit back a tiny grimace. You go on with your life if you’re still alive. She should not have put it like that.
Suddenly it became clear to him what she was going through. He would be willing to bet that she had never lost a student under her supervision before, under any circumstances. Surely that was a director’s worst nightmare, and at that nightmare’s darkest depth, to have lost a student as his daughter had been lost . . .
His heart went out to her.
He couldn’t afford any more excursions of