All That's Left to Tell(51)

“You have a son, Saabir? A boy?”

Saabir’s eyes narrowed, but he looked more troubled than angry.

“Josephine told me.”

“Josephine,” Saabir repeated.

“And a wife who died.”

He half expected Saabir to reach back and strike him, and he did lift his hand, but instead he brought it to the side of Marc’s face and rested his fingers for a few seconds on his cheek, and then patted it slightly.

“Girl,” Saabir said. “Marc’s girl. Died.”

Marc felt the familiar cut in his diaphragm.

“I want to see Josephine,” he said.

Saabir took his hand away and stepped back and smiled, and Marc belatedly recognized the irony of his statement.

“Eat,” Saabir said. “Josephine after.”

But it was long after. When he’d finished the cereal, Saabir walked him around the small perimeter of the two buildings; rarely did he see anyone in these slow, ten-minute walks, and he realized now this was likely by design; he might get a glimpse of a long-limbed boy through a narrow space between buildings when they came around to the door again, but he was always at least fifty feet away, and never turned his head to look at him. And there was the man he saw in the next building the one time, and the empty cups of tea. But when he was inside the room, he often heard people passing by. Many must have known about him now, but he was unable to hold that knowledge as comfort. He was thinking less and less of Lynne, and more of Josephine, and Claire as a woman, and himself as a lonely man who Joline had said was a hostage, as if this were a destiny no matter if Claire lived.

Through the extended afternoon he sat up on his mat and thought of them. The day was particularly warm, and even sitting still, sweat dripped from his face and into his lap. Saabir alternately sat staring at his feet, or sweeping up only the dirt that his broom raised, or stepping outside, Marc assumed, to escape for a minute or two the rising suffocation of the room. Saabir spoke only when he brought in his noon meal.

Marc understood that Claire seemed the least real of the people that Josephine described. In his telling of his own memories of her, she had grown increasingly vivid, and the ache in his stomach as he spoke had slowly developed a knife’s edge that only eased when Josephine began her storytelling. He still couldn’t grasp its purpose. Could not get the point. Why should Claire seem less formed? Because he’d known her? Because he loved her? Because she’d died? Josephine had described her as someone who wished she could choose a day that her life would begin, and Claire’s more distant memories, at least of her childhood, seemed to pass through her like a sieve, and only Genevieve’s story of Marc at the lake house seemed to take root in her. And why should that concern him? It was all an invention. It was preposterous. There was something horrific about the entire construct. But Josephine’s voice, deepening slightly as she narrated her tale, was the only thing that soothed him anymore, and any apparition of Claire if she had lived was better than—what exactly? Don’t let her die, he thought. And yet, she was dead.

For the last two days, toward evening, a shaft of sunlight angled through the small upper window, and the beam now slanted half a foot above Saabir’s head, and the rectangle of light on the floor seemed almost brilliant in the darkening room. He remembered a year after his parents separated, where he and his mother and sisters lived with his grandmother. On the wall adjacent to the dining room table, where each night he sat to do his homework, there was a small stained-glass window that would brighten near sunset on the few winter nights that were left undimmed by clouds. He had tracked the progress of the light across the glass for weeks, how a blue rectangle would brighten at a certain hour, and then a few days later, the yellow one next to it as the sun arced higher across the sky through the lengthening days. Even in June, when school was out, he’d find a way to escape his friends—their pickup ball games in the field near the well house, their cooling swims in the nearby murky lake—to sit in the chair at sunset, and his mother began to worry over him, asking why he would come in to sit alone after dinner when there was another hour of daylight to play outside.

He was waiting for something—though he was unsure of what, perhaps the return of his father, whose face he was struggling to recall—when, the last day of June, the sun found a particular sliver of the sky, and shone through the glass so that a patch of colored light was cast on his chest where he sat in the chair. In his mind, it was as if he’d stopped time, and he thought to call in his mother, but wanted to keep the moment for himself, and for five nights afterward on a brilliant stretch of sunny days the square of light traveled up his chest and was finally cast on his face, warming it slightly through the heavy panes of blue and yellow glass, until, two nights later, it disappeared altogether.

Now, he watched the rectangle of light travel up the far wall, narrowing with each minute, as if it, too, might in time bring a revelation. When it had become the width of a flashlight beam, he heard her knock on the door.

Saabir pulled the chairs so they were facing one another in the now familiar ritual, and Marc rose to his feet without being prompted and sat in one of them, and then Saabir bound his wrists and wrapped the blindfold around his eyes.

When she came through the door, the sounds outside were briefly amplified: someone’s footsteps on the street, and what sounded like a cart with a broken wheel being dragged through a distant alley. He realized part of him had been waiting for the call of the muezzin and the sunset prayer, but it had yet to come. She said a few words to Saabir, and closed the door. He wasn’t certain, but he thought Saabir was still in the room, and Marc listened to her settle her garments as she sat down in the chair.