All That's Left to Tell(30)

“You know, his mom lived on a lake like that. My grandma.”

“Did she? Anyway, he’s friendly with his neighbors without making friends. They’ll ask him to watch the dog when they are away, and he’ll amble along the lane that circles the lake, keeping the dog leashed until they get to the small public access with the tall reeds—the lake isn’t large enough to allow anything other than small fishing boats—and then he’ll let the dog hunt minnows in the shallows, or he’ll toss a tennis ball into the water and watch the dog’s dark head pursue it out past the lily pads. Winters, the lake freezes over, and he’s one of the few people who continue to live there, and Saturday mornings he watches the ice fishermen trudge out through the snow, and hears the sharp thrust of their augers as they chip away at the ice come across the lake with the rays of the winter sun.”

The thought of ice and snow briefly cooled the inside of the cab. Claire felt herself being pulled into the story.

“And that’s how his days go. For most of those years you were gone. I mean, if you think about it, Claire. These years raising your baby. It’s not all that often—maybe Christmas, maybe the Fourth of July—you sit back and embrace everything that’s happened. But most of the time it’s day upon day, like it is for everyone, like it is for your father. What’s his name?”

“Marc.”

They were coming upon the Nevada/Utah border, and a town called West Wendover. Past the buildings, there was a vast stretch of flat white land, then a distant range of mountains.

“So one summer,” Genevieve continued, “Marc lays a wooden floor because he thinks maple boards will warm his house in the winter months. And another year, he tears down the wall that separates the little kitchen from the living area, so that when he turns away from the stove he can look directly out onto the lake. He’ll have a friend over every now and then to admire his handiwork, but his friends are as plunged into their own lives as he is into his, and so this happens less and less often. In the summer, early mornings before going to work, when the lake is so calm that the clouds are perfectly reflected, and the houses along the shore offer perfect versions of themselves in the water, he begins the habit of taking a small rowboat across the lake, all the way to the opposite edge where the remnants of an old farm still stand, and where an old-timer who had a cottage on the lake for forty years tells a story of hoisting his daughter onto a grazing horse, bareback. So he thinks of you. He thinks of your mother. After the lake freezes, when the cold is tolerable and the roads clear, he takes slow runs around the lake. He loses weight. For an older man, he’s strong. He realizes he’s trying to make himself strong, and all these years seem like a preparation. He is aware he is preparing. For the onslaught of old age? he wonders. Something else, maybe. Maybe something that will never come. He loves his little house, where now he’s planted a small vegetable garden. He bears his isolation.”





8

Two days had passed since the drive to the mountains. On the way back, once they were again in the outskirts of what he now knew was the city, Saabir had pulled the car over, and Josephine had stepped out without a word. For a night, Marc was taken to a different house, more pleasant, scented with what may have been incense, and where a small family may have lived—he heard their voices but saw no one other than Saabir and another man who stood guard with utter disinterest. He overheard Saabir arguing with someone he assumed was the father in the house, and the next day he was transported back to the room with the half-dirt floor and the high window. “Home,” he’d said to Saabir when he removed the blindfold, and even Saabir couldn’t help but give him a wry smile.

But he hadn’t seen Azhar in several days now, and since he seemed a reluctant participant in whatever group Josephine was a member of, and because he seemed gentle, and had children, Marc worried that Azhar had been caught in some sort of crossfire when they’d driven out of the city.

So Marc asked, “What happened to Azhar?” after Saabir had blindfolded him and tied his hands and he heard the woman come in and sit down.

“Azhar’s with his family,” Josephine said. “You will see him again.”

“Was he hurt?”

“So much concern for a terrorist, Marc?” She had returned to her tone of the first few days.

“He told you I called him that?”

“He mentioned it.”

“I like Azhar. But he sits watching me with a gun over his shoulder.”

“I know,” she said, and she was suddenly no longer his interrogator. “It doesn’t suit him. Like many people here, his family needs the money.”

“Does Saabir have a family?”

“Of course.”

“I mean a wife. Children.”

She hesitated a moment.

“He has a son.”

“And a wife?”

She seemed to turn her head toward the door.

“It’s best if you don’t ask too many questions about Saabir. His wife is dead. Let’s leave it at that.”

They sat quietly for what seemed several long minutes. He knew this was likely because of the intimacy of the storytelling during their past few meetings, which had perhaps surprised both of them, as if they somehow had become unintentional lovers who now had to bear the morning sun on their faces. The last time he’d felt such an awkwardness was the morning he woke in his home after Lynne had told him she wanted to separate. It was as if their years together had moved out before he had, and left him with nothing to say.