All That's Left to Tell(5)

“Like my daughter.”

“I assume you loved her?”

He felt the question like a low-voltage shock.

“What color were her eyes? I’ve never seen your eyes. Were they the same as yours?”

It was a strangely intimate question. He had not thought of his daughter’s eyes, specifically, in years, but they had been a kind of green-gray, like neither his nor her mother’s.

“Her name was Claire,” she said. “A French name, of course. Claire Laurent. France, home of your ancestors.”

“Another imperialist nation,” he said, still resisting memory.

“I’ve been to Paris. Parts of it are beautiful. The way the sun lights those buildings on the first warm days of April. But to the extent that all that architecture arrives on the backs of the poor—well, many parts of Karachi are beautiful, too. You must have made it down to the ocean to watch the sunrise.”

“So I’m still in Karachi. On the outskirts.”

She shifted in her seat again and coughed once. She’d lowered her guard.

“You may be,” she said. “You may not be. But it’s no real comfort either way. Would you feel any closer to home?”

But he felt he’d gained some slight advantage, whatever that may have meant.

“Who were you traveling with in Paris?”

“Well, it wasn’t your daughter,” she said. “My guess is Claire Laurent never made it back to her ancestors’ homeland.”

He was stricken again at the mention of her full name.

“She wasn’t the kind of girl to go to the senior prom, was she? But an attractive young woman. Her hair cut close to her head. That tattoo on her left shoulder. A tree with no leaves and one bird. Pretty in a lonely sort of way.”

“So you must have seen—” But his voice caught. “You must have seen her eyes.”

“She drank too much,” the woman continued. “There’s a picture of her drinking straight from a bottle of whiskey. And she liked to read. One photo has her lying on a bed with Jack Kerouac. His book, I mean.”

“Stop it.”

“Your wife—Lynne. Lynne said that she’d enrolled in a community college for the start of the next semester. Had finished her GED. She was turning her life around, though I admit I’ve never known what people mean when they say that.”

“Please stop.”

“How do you turn your life around once it’s been turned inside out?”

If his hands had been free, he would have stopped up his ears.

“I do not—” He was trying not to choke on the words. “I do not want to talk about this. How do you know these things?”

“I’m not a mind reader, Marc. But I know where to look. There aren’t very many secrets out there anymore, except among the poor. And no one cares much to hear any of those.”

He heard himself breathing heavily, and recognized the same separation between his state of mind and body that he’d had since he arrived, even before he’d heard Lynne’s message on the machine. In the first weeks, walking the most urbane streets of Karachi, with men in suits, women without scarves, their hair shining in the sun alongside others whose eyes peered out of their hijabs, and the odd juxtaposition of an exotic written and spoken language among images of American companies he recognized (hell, represented), he was a stranger to himself, his life up to this point a kind of caricature that sat on his left shoulder and occasionally whispered its mundane preoccupations in his ear: What was the score of last night’s game? Sweetheart, this is a fine cup of coffee. It’s springtime. Time to throw some grass seed on the bare patches of lawn.

He heard her stand up then, and he thought she would leave without saying anything else, but instead she walked over in the direction of the window.

“Saabir won’t leave me alone with you for much longer.” Her clothes rustled, and the joint at her knee quietly popped. “You know, if you stand right up against this wall, and stretch, you can see the stars.”

Despite himself, he laughed.

“You have no idea how odd that sounds from where I sit.”

“No,” she said. She was quiet for a while, apparently contemplating the sky. “When I was in Paris, I was with someone I loved. It was years ago now. We traveled quite a bit because he had money. Money from his father, but money nevertheless. I loved seeing different places in the world. I may have been more in love with them than I was with him. But like many young men who come from money, he was taken with the people who lived on what he called the fringes. He gave those people his money, and some of those organizations did things to others that you would deplore. I deplored them, too. But I was young, like your daughter. I loved what I thought was the adventure. I loved him. He was killed, ultimately. Here. His throat cut. It’s not that it’s commonplace, but it’s common enough. For men like he was.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. But she seemed to ignore him.

“I hate the word radicalized,” she said. “As if people can be programmed to do awful things against their will. Do you know what I think radicalizes most people? Other than poverty. Do you know what radicalized me?”

She waited several long moments for him to answer, but he didn’t.

“Grief,” she said.