All That's Left to Tell(53)

“Thank you.”

When she turned back to her chair, her clothing moved the air over his skin.

“So, like I said, my vision was blurred. But, like everything else that afternoon, her beauty seemed vivid. Striking. I wanted it closer, and ran my coat sleeve over my eyes, and saw that it was Claire. And I thought I was losing it, then. For a few seconds, I thought I was falling apart, hallucinating, and I was terrified. But it was her. And she was beautiful, but not in the way I’d first seen. She was walking with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, no gloves, in a navy-blue coat. She had a wool cap over her head, but I could see her red hair falling to her shoulders. Her eyes were focused on a spot on the sidewalk always a few feet ahead of where she was stepping. I guess I was transfixed. Her expression from that distance—I thought it was troubled, but why wouldn’t I? She looked pale, but she was always pale. And then a man walked into that space in front of her, and she glanced up at him, and she smiled with—well, people call it a radiance, but it was actually that way—and then I saw her mouth the words Excuse me, and she reached up and tapped the man’s shoulder as she passed. And it was only then, after she touched him, that I thought to say her name. My jaw was tight with the cold, and I probably said it barely audibly at first. By the time I said it with a shout, she was already heading around another corner.

“But she heard, and she slowed and looked back. I couldn’t tell you if she saw me. From that distance, you can’t tell when someone’s eyes meet yours. But she kept on going. There was a lot of traffic on the street. By the time I’d crossed over, she was gone.”

He heard Josephine stand up again, and again she wiped his forehead, and ran the garment in precisely the same motions she’d used earlier, as if it were a ritual she’d been observing for months.

“Thank you,” he said again. But he was feeling the knife edge in his gut. She was sitting in silence in front of him. He was under the blindfold. Claire was turning the corner. She was turning the corner. He called her name again. She looked back. She was turning the corner.

“I want to see your face,” he said quietly.

She sighed, but it sounded more like she was blowing a candle flame to make it flicker.

“Marc, you know that will never—”

“I want to see your face,” he interrupted.

“I’m going to tell you about Claire and Genevieve now.”

“No,” he heard himself say. “I want to see your face.”

“Marc—”

But he was standing up. “I want to see your face,” he said more loudly.

“You have to stop this.”

He took a step toward her voice, and almost stumbled, and when he found his balance, she brushed against him but stepped away.

“I want to see your face!” He was shouting now.

“Marc—”

“I want to see your face!”

Then Saabir came through the door and put two hands hard to his chest and pushed him, and he sprawled across the floor, and he knew she had gone, but he was shouting, “I want to see her face!”

“No face,” Saabir said. Marc rose to his feet and charged at the voice, but Saabir had moved, and he slammed into the wall.

“I want to see her face!”

“Who face?” Saabir said, mocking him. “No face.”

He again ran at the sound of it, and Saabir caught him, wrapped him in his arms, and pushed him to the floor with his mouth to his ear.

“You die? You die now? Who face?”

But now he was shaking, shaking, and the sobs were working their way up through his throat, and he thought he would vomit. “Her face,” he said. “I have to see it. Please, please let me see—” And he could not stop it then, saying over and over, “Her face, her face,” and everything he’d ever known about her, about anything, was coming up: “Dad, I don’t want your help.” “But if you just shift the paper this way—I don’t want your help!” On Lake Michigan, she was lifted by a heavy wave and went under. “She’s drowning!” Lynne shouted. “No, she’s not; she’s learning how to swim.” He was a boy, and his mother was an hour late from the store, and he was alone in the house, and a panic rose in him. Later, she ran her hand through his damp hair. “What were you afraid of?” “That something happened.” “That what happened?” But he could not tell. Claire was sprinkling brown sugar over the entire surface of her bowl of oatmeal. “You trying to make candy out of that, kid?” “Yep. I like candy.” Lynne, so small when he first knew her, lay with her head on his bare chest and her nude body stretched out the entire length of him. “Do you think this will last?” “What will last?” “This. This. The incredible comfort of this. Me lying on top of you like this.” At seventeen, Claire took a black-and-white photo of herself, and her expression, under black freckles that seemed overexposed, was a kind of amused confusion, as if she weren’t certain the camera would work properly, and when she hung the photo on the wall, she said, “That’s my all-time favorite picture of me.” Just before she asked him to leave, Lynne had said something uncharacteristic, and she was holding a glass of orange juice when she said it, the sun pouring through the kitchen window. “Mornings shouldn’t feel like this. Not morning after morning.” “Like what?” “Like a shroud. This November sunshine feels like a shroud.” Claire wanted to play the whisper game. “The whisper game? We haven’t played that in like two years. Since you were maybe nine.” “I know, Dad.” It was a game where you spoke in the other’s ear in the faintest voice possible to see if the other could still discern the words. The angles of her face were becoming more like a woman’s. She put her mouth to his ear. “I like boys.” He had heard her, but he told her he hadn’t, so she repeated it again, with a half-suppressed delighted laugh at the end. “I like boys.”