Free Breakdown by Katherine Amt Hanna Page B

stone wall topped with curled wire. He began to run, but it wasn’t fast enough. He could see them in the distance: two shadowy figures, running ahead of him. He called out to them to wait, but they didn’t hear. Behind him, the blackness got closer, sweeping swiftly toward him, occluding everything, muffling the gunshots. He tripped and fell, found himself on top of Beryl. He held her in his arms, his back to the wall, watched the blackness creeping toward them while she gasped for breath and then went still. “You have to go,” a voice said as the door slid back and bright light assaulted him.
     
    Coughing painfully was a lousy way to wake up. Add regret and despair and guilt, and Chris remembered why he preferred to work himself to exhaustion—to limit the dreams. He blinked and shuddered. He heard Beryl’s last words in his head, over and over. He coughed more, harder than he needed to, using the pain to kill memories.
    The sun hung at about the same place as when he had arrived the day before. Twenty-four hours here, most of it in bed, hard to believe. Time to get up.
    At the bottom of the stairs, Chris glanced into the little sitting room. Marie was there, on her hands and knees, sweeping with a brush and dustpan around the fireplace. She glanced up.
    “Oh, hello. Y’know, I used to hate hoovering. Now I realize what a lovely, easy job it was.” She laughed.
    “We never realize how good we have it until it’s gone,” Chris said. It came out harsher than he’d wanted it to.
    “That’s true.” Marie got to her feet, careful not to spill the dustpan. She smiled. “But then, sometimes we don’t realize what we were missing until we find it, eh?”
    “Yes, I suppose,” he agreed. “Can I help?”
    “Aren’t you supposed to be resting?”
    “I have been. Just woke up. I’m feeling better, really. I’m not used to doing nothing. Let me help, please. I’ll sweep.” Chris put out his hand for the brush.
    “All right, you can do the stairs.”
    “Brilliant.”
    When he’d finished the staircase, Chris found Marie in the kitchen and asked for something else to do.
    “I can show you how to trim lamp wicks.”
    “I know how to do that. Shall I clean and fill them, too?”
    “Lovely.” She got him scissors, a rag, and a bottle of lamp oil. He did the lamps downstairs first, then went upstairs.
    Marie had told him to do all the lamps in the bedrooms, but he hesitated before he went into Pauline’s room. She kept it very neat, like the spare room. There were no clothes lying about, no clutter. It was much bigger than the spare room, of course. There were more pictures on the walls, more furniture, little knickknacks on the bureau and tables.
    The lamp sat on the bureau. Chris cleaned and trimmed and filled it, put it back carefully near a group of framed pictures. He stopped to look at them: Pauline and George when they were teenagers, their parents—he recognized Grace—a young Michael lounging in a punt on a river, George and Marie’s wedding photo. One picture showed Pauline and Michael together, from many years before, dressed up to go out somewhere fancy. He wore a tuxedo, she a shimmering dark-green strapless gown. They had their arms around each other.
    The last two pictures showed Pauline and George, both much younger, and another young man together on the couch in the sitting room downstairs, and the young man by himself seated on a stone wall. Chris looked closely at the three of them and could see the family resemblance. It was the missing brother, obviously. Chris thought that Michael had probably told him, but he couldn’t remember the brother’s name.
    He went into the other two bedrooms to do the lamps there and saw other pictures of the same young man at different ages.
    When he’d finished, he went back downstairs and sat with Grace and Marie in the kitchen, doing small jobs at the table while they cooked supper. They told him about various people in the village, but didn’t