All That's Left to Tell(13)

“It wouldn’t have brought her back.”

She laughed.

“That’s not the answer. That’s the answer anyone would give.”

He was sweating now, and couldn’t wipe it from the back of his neck.

“I couldn’t face it. Please. I was a coward. I am a coward. Like all Americans.”

“Stop that crap,” she said, so sharply there was a faint echo off the walls. “You may be a coward. But you can’t keep me away with this one-dimensional sarcasm.” He heard her stand up, and he could feel her shadow near him. Was she going to slap him? Then her hand was on his forehead, or rather some edge of her gown wiping away the perspiration, and then her fingers themselves on the back of his neck, and he flinched at their light, calloused touch. She sat back down.

“Why are you sweating so much? It’s a cooler night than that,” she said quietly. No one had touched him with anything approaching tenderness in months. Then she said, “I think we both know the reason why you didn’t go back home, but it’s such a sentimental illusion.”

“What is it, then? You tell me.”

“When the man I loved was killed here—I told you his throat was cut—I was nearby. A few blocks away from where they found and laid out his body. Someone had come and told me, and I was shaking, shaking. Not crying yet. And the impulse I felt—you must have felt this impulse—was to run to the place because I didn’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t believe it until I saw for myself. I’d seen violence at that point. I’d seen the aftermath of a bombing, the blood, the limbs. But I also knew that if I saw his face after what they’d done, I could never remember it in any other way. So I didn’t want to walk those few blocks. I knew he was dead, but I knew if I didn’t go, I would be freer to remember him as he was. Or believe that he might still be alive.”

“The thing that radicalized you,” he said, but she didn’t respond.

“So what did you do after that?” he asked.

“You know what I did. I’m sitting here in front of you. And yes, I was unprepared for it. I’d lived something of a protected life to that point, maybe more so than your daughter. I was unprepared for that depth of grief. But, Marc, it’s a sweet little illusion that by staying in Karachi, by not answering your wife’s calls, that you somehow were keeping Claire alive wherever she may be back home. But it’s sentimental, and she deserves better.”

He felt his eyes go heavy, but the knot of cold in his chest remained. He thought she was only partly right. “And how is it not sentimental, then? How is it not sentimental to tell the story of a life she’ll never live?”

“Because it will not be a father’s story for his daughter. It won’t be the idle, hazy dreams a father has when his daughter is young.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you will tell the story of her past. Honestly, I hope. You’re the only one who holds it now. Forget Lynne, and Claire’s friends, her lovers. Their stories are thousands of miles away, and you may never hear them again. And I’ll never hear them at all. Her story is yours to tell here with me. But the story of the life she’ll never live—that belongs to both of us.”

“It turns my stomach to think of doing this here. With you.”

“Good. People spare the pretty details when their stomachs are turning.”

“I still think you’re waiting for me to say something that you can turn into a ransom.”

“I’m not saying that isn’t true. And I’m not saying that what I’ve told you about my own life to this point is true, either, and that what I might say in however many days we may spend here will be true. If you ever go home, I don’t want to become a target. But whatever happens to you, it’s not as if my life here is necessarily secure. Claire’s isn’t the only story we will tell.”

“It seems desperate,” he said.

But she didn’t respond to this. They sat quietly for what seemed a long time. They were past the hour for the evening prayer, and now he heard only occasional voices in the distance, unable to discern what they were saying even if he had understood the language. Sounds of insects nearby were punctured by a dog that barked three times. Two children passed by, saying, “Shh. Shh.” But someone, probably Azhar, chased them away.

“After Lynne asked for the divorce,” he said, his voice louder than he’d anticipated, “she called me. Claire called me. From someone else’s phone, I’m sure, because she didn’t want me to have the number. I’d already moved into an apartment in the city, and it was late at night. I couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t slept. I was playing music from twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen, or something like that, trying to pretend that it was sometime other than now. My phone was in my hand, and I was trying not to call Lynne. I was pretty sure she was seeing someone. And it wasn’t that I was enraged, but it was strange how sex mattered again after not mattering for years. I had a physical craving for her that seemed apart from the habit of her. Which is what you miss most. The habit, I mean. Friends had warned me about that. So I was sitting there, probably at 2:00 A.M., three weeks after I’d found the apartment, my phone in hand, on the verge of either calling Lynne, or, because this craving wouldn’t let me sleep, on the verge of speaking to the habit of her—I mean, as if there were a person lying on the other side of the bed with whom I could have a conversation—when the phone rings, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I had a fleeting sense that it might be Lynne, that we were somehow lying awake on opposite sides of the city conversing with the habit of each other, but it wasn’t her number that came up, and no one else would be phoning that late. A wrong number, I was sure. But I answered, anyway, because any voice would have been better than none. And it was Claire.”