All That's Left to Tell(72)
And then, one early morning, when Jeremy has gone to work and left his little girl sleeping beside me, I dream of a man who says he is my father. He is sitting with me in a café in Karachi, where my mother told me my father was killed. We sit sipping from cups of tea in the bright late-afternoon sun, neither of us speaking, as women pass by in hijabs, men in suits, my father wearing a jacket and tie and set back in his chair, his legs crossed. I feel his eyes on my face, but when I turn toward him he is always looking elsewhere, at a boy waving to someone from a window, and then at a limping man pushing a cart down the street.
“How’s your mother?” he asks me, and loops his finger into his teacup.
“You know I haven’t seen her in months.”
My father still won’t look in my eyes, but he nods. He turns his hand up and studies his fingernails. A waiter comes by and puts the check on the table, and my father looks up at him and gives him his good smile.
After the waiter walks away, my father says, “I suppose you’re in love with this Jeremy.” Now he’s looking out over the roofs of low buildings, their shadows advancing in the low sun.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember what that’s like.”
He nods again, looks down at his watch, and then reaches in his pocket and pulls out a coin and places it on the check. He stares at it as if he wonders if it will be enough, and then begins to glance through the crowd of people moving past. Finally, he finds a mother walking through the marketplace holding the hand of her daughter, and he says, “Back when you were that little girl’s age—”
But I say, “Don’t.”
Then he finds a young woman without a head scarf, and says, “Of course, by then you were—”
And I say, “Stop.”
At last, he looks at me. He lightly touches his fingers to his face as if he needs to make certain it’s his. The sun has dipped behind the buildings, and we’re in shade.
“Claire, don’t you want to remember?”
I nod my head, because I do. I do want to remember. But I’m in that space between sleeping and waking where images of a dream collide with the coming demands of the day, and I want to go on dreaming.
So instead, I say to him, “Tell me a story.”
Acknowledgments
For their unflinching support and friendship, thanks to Claude Hurlbert, A. D. Feys, Tim Johnson, Dave Martin, Mark L. Shelton, Tom Sweterlitsch, and Jay Letto. With admiration, thank you to Stewart O’Nan, Laila Lalami, and Christopher Scotton. For their dedication to good books, thank you to my astute and extraordinary editors, Amy Einhorn and Caroline Bleeke, and to all the fine people at Flatiron. At the Gernert Company, thank you to Flora Hackett, Anna Worrall, and especially my agent, Andy Kifer, whose brilliance lit the lantern for my manuscript and guided it down every right path. And to depths I can’t express, thank you to Erin Cawley, who through draft after draft of this book turned over each word with intelligence, acuity, and devotion.