All That's Left to Tell(8)

“Why?”

“It’s the first thing any mother would say about her grown child, whether he’s a hostage or on death row. If she can make him be seen as a boy, as someone who was once innocent and sweet, then there’s a chance he’ll be set free.”

“You sound like you know something about it.”

She stood up then and walked over to the window. He imagined her arching her neck to look outside.

“You were wrong about the leeches,” he said. “I was terrified of them when I was a kid.”

“No mother would tell a story of torture on her captured son. Even if the subject was leeches.”

“It was an interesting choice of details. You must know something about Midwestern lakes.”

“As if that were the only place there are lakes and leeches.”

He heard her step quietly back to the chair and sit down.

“You asked me about what I do when I’m not here. What do you do when I’m not here?”

It had been, he believed, over a week since his capture, but already the days had begun to run into each other, like a bleak version of a Florida vacation he’d once taken with Lynne where the sun and the ocean gave the illusion there were days and nights, but neither accumulating. Had he been more afraid, he supposed, the hours would have passed even more slowly, but with nothing to read, no conversation, no television or phone, and nowhere to move other than along the walls of the small room where either Saabir’s or Azhar’s eyes followed him as if they were watching a distant boat move along the horizon, he was consumed by tedium. At times, it was a blunt weapon that helped him fend off what he knew would be a disorienting sorrow, but other times it had become so unendurable that it would part unexpectedly, and an image of Claire riding on his shoulders (a photograph his sister had taken), or something commonplace, like Lynne setting a plate in front of him, would come slicing through.

“Nothing,” he said. “I look forward to eating. To counting each bite of food. I think I’m even starting to look forward to your blindfold.”

“So when you sit here for all those hours with nothing to do but think. No dreams? No erotic fantasies?”

He laughed at this. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Those things don’t disappear just because you’re a captive.”

“Well, they have for me.” He couldn’t help but wonder what she looked like, but he hadn’t for a moment thought about her sexually, much less anyone else in the past weeks with the possible exception of Lynne, with whom sex, infrequent as it was, had become a comfort.

“I’d like to propose something for you to think about,” she said. “For both of us to think about, given we have little else to take up our time together. I can only spend so many minutes plying you for a ransom, and you can only hope for so long for freedom or escape.”

“I’m not looking to escape.”

“I can tell that about you, which is why I’d like to propose this to you.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Your daughter. Claire. It’s a pretty name. I mean that with all sincerity. A hopeful name, in its meaning.”

The sound of it was like a hand closing over his heart.

“How well did you know her?”

“How well did I know her? She was my daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence. Or yours. We both know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. My own father showed almost no curiosity about me once I’d left home. Or once I was caught between childhood and puberty, to be honest, and my arms and legs no longer fit his pet name for me.”

He thought she’d want him to ask what it was, but he didn’t.

“So if you think you knew Claire well, I have a proposal for you. I would like you to tell me the story of her life.”

Something came hurtling at him from the inside, and he turned his head.

“I know about her death,” she continued. “A murder. By someone looking for someone else, though she shouldn’t have been in the room with that someone else. I’m sorry about that, Marc. About this. But here, in the slums of Pakistan, that’s an undramatic way to die. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s what everyone has come to dread, but half expect. And you probably don’t want to know the story of her death, or you would have gone back home for the funeral. Except for one detail, and that’s what she was thinking at the moment she was killed. And you can never know that.”

“I do not want to know that,” he said defiantly.

“Why not? I would want to know. Though I think it would usually disappoint us. I read once about Einstein’s death, and how his nurse couldn’t understand his final words because they were in German. As if, you know, he’d revealed a new scientific insight or was somehow translating for God in those last minutes. It was just as likely he could have been remembering a picnic he’d had with his mother when he was a boy. More likely.”

“What good would it do for you to know Claire’s story?”

“Good? It would do no good for anyone. Maybe for you. It might open some kind of window for you. I don’t know what might fly through it with you trapped in this unhappy place. But as for me. As for me and you, together, waiting here, I wonder about her past so that we can learn to tell the story of her life if she had lived.”