All That's Left to Tell(10)

He was aware that beneath the blindfold his eyes were open, as if he were looking at her. But then he closed them.

“She was—” He pulled at the ropes on his wrists, and the memory tumbled forward as his resistance eased away. “Maybe twelve. Fifth grade, I think. Maybe sixth. I was in her room gathering laundry. No, I wasn’t the house domestic, but I tried to pitch in, and Lynne had trained me to go through pants pockets.”

Claire’s room appeared to him then. There were no posters of boy bands, or photos of friends, or Disney princesses. Instead, a poster of Jimi Hendrix after Claire had started playing guitar, a large, blue drawing of his head with a joint in the corner of his mouth. Harmless, Lynne had said, when he’d questioned it. Bob Dylan as a young man in the streets of New York. Janis Joplin in her wire rims, and a rapper who’d been murdered whose name he couldn’t remember. “I like your wall of dead friends,” he’d said to Claire.

“Bob Dylan’s not dead,” she’d told him.

“Depends on your perspective.”

She’d smiled.

“What did you find in her pockets?” the woman said, and he realized he’d fallen silent. “A note, I assume?”

“A letter. A letter from an older school friend when, you know, even then kids were texting. So I was surprised. The girl’s name was Sally. It was a pretty long letter, with names of kids, only some of which I’d heard of, and the girl, Sally, was going on about how she was so sorry that she’d taken away Claire’s innocence. I had no idea what that meant. Claire was twelve years old. But at the end of the letter, the girl wrote that she wasn’t being serious when she asked Claire to cut herself to prove that she loved her, and that she couldn’t believe she’d done it and she should never do it again. I didn’t tell Lynne right away. But that night, when Claire was asleep, I walked into her room. She was a sound sleeper, and it was a hot night, and her blankets were off. She still had these thin legs and arms. She was a child. Still a small girl. But high on top of her thigh was a long slice, still scabbed over. I woke her up on the spot. She was disoriented. She told me she’d dropped a pair of scissors when she was wearing shorts, but I didn’t believe her. I stood over her, asking again and again, ‘Did you make the cut? Did you make the cut?’ As if I were asking whether she’d made the girls’ softball team.”

“Did she tell you the truth?” the woman asked quietly.

“Not then. Lynne bought her story. She told Lynne that she’d lied to Sally about cutting herself. Then years later, about the time she turned eighteen, when she was applying for colleges, I was sure she wouldn’t get in because of her grades. She was a smart kid, good test scores, and all. A good writer, but didn’t give a damn about her high school classes. Then she was accepted by the University of Chicago, which no one expected. She called me the day the letter came, and after reading the first paragraph, she said, ‘So, Dad. Looks like I made the cut.’ And when I said something innocuous like, ‘That’s for sure,’ she said, ‘No, Dad, get it? I made the cut. I made the cut.’”

The woman laughed loudly at this. “That’s a good line,” she said. “She had a sense of humor.”

He nodded. “I suppose I don’t find it particularly funny right now. She dropped out of high school soon after that.”

He heard the door open, and Saabir came in and asked something in Urdu in a tone of insistence. She turned her head and explained it to him in firm, but patient, detail. He offered a curt sentence in return, and closed the door.

“He heard me laugh,” she said. “I have to go soon.”

“You’re not allowed to laugh?”

“We’re not supposed to be enjoying ourselves in here.”

“Little risk of that.”

She let out a long breath. Beneath her garments, she seemed to cross and uncross her legs.

“So Claire is thirty-two,” she said.

“What?”

“So Claire is thirty-two. Her birthday is in—?”

“June.”

“June. And she’s thirty-two now, and she’s living far away from you. Far away from Lynne. In a small town out west, in Montana, maybe, or eastern California. It’s a town on a highway, not an interstate, but a state road. It’s traveled more heavily in the summertime because tourists pass through going from one place to another, but they do not come to this town to sightsee. There’s a range of mountains, and on clear days you can see one that’s snowcapped, but it’s too far away once you’ve lived in that town for a few years to think about driving there to cool off in the summer heat. Claire and her husband own a small motel where mostly truckers stay, and the people passing through who don’t want to spend the money on the Best Western a few miles farther up the road. There are twelve rooms all on one level, with paneling inside, and the musty smell of bedspreads Claire smilingly describes as ‘vintage’; they bought the motel over a year ago, and they talked about making improvements, but others in that town that too slowly warmed to them told them they loved the place as it was, and anyway, shortly after they’d bought it Claire had become pregnant, wasn’t particularly happy about it, and now the baby is three months old. She uses cloth diapers to save money, washing them in the big machine along with the soiled sheets of the guests of the motel. But the diapers she hangs on a clothesline behind the building because she thinks the sun and the wind coming down off the hills scent them in ways that a drier sheet never could. The clothesline is worn, and breaks on occasion, and money’s tight enough that she’s stubborn about buying a new one, and one day, while repairing it again, she’s pulling it so taut, anchoring it under her foot so she can draw it level with the sky, that it snaps on the other end, flies at her, and whips across her thigh just under the hem of her shorts, and leaves a long welt. She curses once, and rubs it, and sees it running almost parallel to an old threadlike scar. And she remembers then this girl she loved when she was a child who asked her to put it there, the first person she’d ever loved, a girl she had kissed so as to know what kissing was like. And then she smiles, looks down at the baby sleeping in her bassinet, and goes back to fixing the clothesline.”