“You don’t know how I was.”
“She wasn’t the way you described yourself that summer. If she’d been that. If she’d had that.” The room was returning to him, slowly. Someone’s feet shuffled outside the door. “If you had died at age nineteen, and your father knew that story, I wonder if that would have been a comfort to him. To know that you had those months.”
“Like I’ve told you, my father was not like you, Marc.”
“The kind of father who would travel to Pakistan for half a year not knowing where his daughter was sleeping at night?” Marc asked. “Not even knowing for certain the city she was sleeping in?” But he knew better than to berate himself. It was what had led him to Lyari.
He said, “I couldn’t help you with the story of who she was when she died. So I can’t help you with the story of who she might have become.”
“So there’s nothing you remember from her childhood? A time where you knew things were changing? I don’t believe for a minute you don’t know some of her story.”
He was aware that beneath the blindfold his eyes were open, as if he were looking at her. But then he closed them.
“She was—” He pulled at the ropes on his wrists, and the memory tumbled forward as his resistance eased away. “Maybe twelve. Fifth grade, I think. Maybe sixth. I was in her room gathering laundry. No, I wasn’t the house domestic, but I tried to pitch in, and Lynne had trained me to go through pants pockets.”
Claire’s room appeared to him then. There were no posters of boy bands, or photos of friends, or Disney princesses. Instead, a poster of Jimi Hendrix after Claire had started playing guitar, a large, blue drawing of his head with a joint in the corner of his mouth. Harmless, Lynne had said, when he’d questioned it. Bob Dylan as a young man in the streets of New York. Janis Joplin in her wire rims, and a rapper who’d been murdered whose name he couldn’t remember. “I like your wall of dead friends,” he’d said to Claire.
“Bob Dylan’s not dead,” she’d told him.
“Depends on your perspective.”
She’d smiled.
“What did you find in her pockets?” the woman said, and he realized he’d fallen silent. “A note, I assume?”
“A letter. A letter from an older school friend when, you know, even then kids were texting. So I was surprised. The girl’s name was Sally. It was a pretty long letter, with names of kids, only some of which I’d heard of, and the girl, Sally, was going on about how she was so sorry that she’d taken away Claire’s innocence. I had no idea what that meant. Claire was twelve years old. But at the end of the letter, the girl wrote that she wasn’t being serious when she asked Claire to cut herself to prove that she loved her, and that she couldn’t believe she’d done it and she should never do it again. I didn’t tell Lynne right away. But that night, when Claire was asleep, I walked into her room. She was a sound sleeper, and it was a hot night, and her blankets were off. She still had these thin legs and arms. She was a child. Still a small girl. But high on top of her thigh was a long slice, still scabbed over. I woke her up on the spot. She was disoriented. She told me she’d dropped a pair of scissors when she was wearing shorts, but I didn’t believe her. I stood over her, asking again and again, ‘Did you make the cut? Did you make the cut?’ As if I were asking whether she’d made the girls’ softball team.”
“Did she tell you the truth?” the woman asked quietly.
“Not then. Lynne bought her story. She told Lynne that she’d lied to Sally about cutting herself. Then years later, about the time she turned eighteen, when she was applying for colleges, I was sure she wouldn’t get in because of her grades. She was a smart kid, good test scores, and all. A good writer, but didn’t give a damn about her high school classes. Then she was accepted by the University of Chicago, which no one expected. She called me the day the letter came, and after reading the first paragraph, she said, ‘So, Dad. Looks like I made the cut.’ And when I said something innocuous like, ‘That’s for sure,’ she said, ‘No, Dad, get it? I made the cut. I made the cut.’”
The woman laughed loudly at this. “That’s a good line,” she said. “She had a sense of humor.”
He nodded. “I suppose I don’t find it particularly funny right now. She dropped out of high school soon after that.”
He heard the door open, and Saabir came in and asked something in Urdu in a tone of insistence. She turned her head and explained it to him in firm, but patient, detail. He offered a curt sentence in return, and closed the door.
“He heard me laugh,” she said. “I have to go soon.”
“You’re not allowed to laugh?”
“We’re not supposed to be enjoying ourselves in here.”
“Little risk of that.”
She let out a long breath. Beneath her garments, she seemed to cross and uncross her legs.
“So Claire is thirty-two,” she said.
“What?”
“So Claire is thirty-two. Her birthday is in—?”