All That's Left to Tell(54)

And then he felt Saabir whispering in his ear, still lying on top of him, pressing him to the floor. But he had not used his gun. “Stop now, Marc? Stop now?” He felt himself trembling under him, and was cold, though he knew the room was still certainly too warm. “I get up,” Saabir said, then something in Urdu. He used Marc’s shoulder for ballast and pushed himself to his feet. Perhaps Saabir had dropped the gun, because Marc heard him checking it, releasing the safety, and then reengaging it. He heard him kneel down again. Saabir said, quietly, “Last time, Marc. Yes?” Then he untied Marc’s hands and removed the blindfold.

Because Marc had been sweating so profusely, and had been pushed down onto the half floor with the hard-packed dirt, his arms were streaked with it, and he imagined his face was the same. Saabir was looking down on him, but must have felt no threat, because the gun was on his back. When Marc sat up, Saabir walked over and took Marc’s bedroll from the corner, and laid it out along the wall where he usually slept.

Marc did not bother getting to his feet. His shoulder ached from the hard fall, and he crawled over to the mat and lay flat on his back. Saabir stood over and looked down on him. His expression was almost sad.

“No face,” he said. “No Josephine.”

And then he took the gun from his back and tapped the near wall with the barrel, and Marc knew he should turn to face it. Fortunately, the shoulder he lay on was the one that wasn’t aching. He was still trembling, and his body smelled foul after the struggle. He felt as if something had spilled out of him, that he’d lost blood. The run of memories seemed bled out of him, too, as if pooling somewhere, part of him, but somehow now apart from him.

He did not expect her knock on the door, and he flinched when he heard it. Saabir pulled the door open, and he heard them exchange words that were increasingly heated. He slammed it shut and strode over to the makeshift bathroom, and then walked back to Marc and said, “Sit.”

With difficulty, he pulled himself up, and Saabir stooped and handed him a cup of water and a damp cloth. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and he quickly drained the cup and took the cloth and wiped his face and hands. Saabir again took the gun from his shoulder, but this time held it in his hands for a moment. Then he tapped the wall three times. Marc turned toward it.

He heard Saabir step back to the door and let her in, and she pulled the chair close to his mat and sat down. The room was deeply quiet, with Saabir, he imagined, standing with his back erect at the door. Marc could hear her sitting nearby, hear her steady breathing before she began.

“That night, Claire was once again lying on the thin mattress of the truck bed next to Genevieve, staring at a starless sky.”

“Josephine,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”

She didn’t respond immediately, but didn’t go back to her story, either.

“Maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe not to you. But it matters to me. It matters to Claire.”

“Claire is dead.” Even saying that, there was still something hard in his throat he had to swallow back down.

“Marc, you could turn and look at me now. That would be the end, but our time will end soon, anyway. As soon as tomorrow. So you could turn and see my face.”

He thought to ask if she would be the one to kill him, but he didn’t.

“I don’t want to see your face.”

She shifted on the chair then. He imagined she was lowering her head.

“But you want to hear the story, don’t you?”

“Yes.”





12

Claire had found a place to sleep that she imagined was safer, the parking lot of a nearby elementary school that was hidden from the main road in a small western Nebraska town just over the border. She’d pulled in near a streetlamp, but she’d parked the car outside the circle of light it cast. Genevieve had been sleeping for the last hundred miles, through the dark, flat land where moths obliterated themselves in the headlights.

Her face had been turned toward Claire, since she slept curled up with her seat belt unfastened against the cool air that came through the windows. In the light of the dashboard, Claire couldn’t decide if, sleeping, Genevieve looked older or younger than she was. She decided older, and over the course of several miles, she glanced over at Genevieve’s full mouth, which she imagined again would be pleasing to kiss, and then at her ears, which were unmarked by any piercings. Her nose seemed delicate, almost like a child’s. But mostly she remembered her gray eyes, a match for that kind of August afternoon where, out of nowhere, a cool, windless day emerges and a heavy bank of clouds sinks low. She thinks it’s the kind of face that someone could look at for a long time. Not for minutes, or even days, but for weeks and years.

Now, after unrolling the mattress, as they lay again in the truck bed, staring at the blank sky, it occurred to Claire that the air was heavy with moisture.

“Do you think it might rain?” she asked Genevieve.

“I don’t know,” Genevieve said. “I guess we’ll be the first to know, won’t we?”

“I guess so.” Claire tilted her chin up, waiting for a drop to fall. It wasn’t surprising that she felt thick with a sense of expectation. The story Genevieve told about her father had carried to her a version of him that she couldn’t have imagined. While it was true that images of her mother and father crossed her mind on occasion over these years, she had tried to sweep them behind her. It would be easy to close her eyes now and see the interstate stretched out before her, and to envision her father or mother hitchhiking as Genevieve had, only she would not pull over, and she would see them as shrinking dolls drawn into her rearview mirror.