“June.”
“June. And she’s thirty-two now, and she’s living far away from you. Far away from Lynne. In a small town out west, in Montana, maybe, or eastern California. It’s a town on a highway, not an interstate, but a state road. It’s traveled more heavily in the summertime because tourists pass through going from one place to another, but they do not come to this town to sightsee. There’s a range of mountains, and on clear days you can see one that’s snowcapped, but it’s too far away once you’ve lived in that town for a few years to think about driving there to cool off in the summer heat. Claire and her husband own a small motel where mostly truckers stay, and the people passing through who don’t want to spend the money on the Best Western a few miles farther up the road. There are twelve rooms all on one level, with paneling inside, and the musty smell of bedspreads Claire smilingly describes as ‘vintage’; they bought the motel over a year ago, and they talked about making improvements, but others in that town that too slowly warmed to them told them they loved the place as it was, and anyway, shortly after they’d bought it Claire had become pregnant, wasn’t particularly happy about it, and now the baby is three months old. She uses cloth diapers to save money, washing them in the big machine along with the soiled sheets of the guests of the motel. But the diapers she hangs on a clothesline behind the building because she thinks the sun and the wind coming down off the hills scent them in ways that a drier sheet never could. The clothesline is worn, and breaks on occasion, and money’s tight enough that she’s stubborn about buying a new one, and one day, while repairing it again, she’s pulling it so taut, anchoring it under her foot so she can draw it level with the sky, that it snaps on the other end, flies at her, and whips across her thigh just under the hem of her shorts, and leaves a long welt. She curses once, and rubs it, and sees it running almost parallel to an old threadlike scar. And she remembers then this girl she loved when she was a child who asked her to put it there, the first person she’d ever loved, a girl she had kissed so as to know what kissing was like. And then she smiles, looks down at the baby sleeping in her bassinet, and goes back to fixing the clothesline.”
After she stopped speaking, he was aware that he was clenching his eyes, not in pain, but out of the effort of trying to imagine Claire in this place. He was holding his mouth open, as if he could breathe in the possibility.
“I’ll be back later tonight,” the woman said. “Azhar will be here this afternoon.”
After she left, Saabir untied his hands and removed the blindfold, and for the remaining hours of the morning the walls felt so familiar that they were like a second skin.
4
Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Marc sat with Azhar in the rising heat; at times, Azhar dozed in his chair, his gun slipping down his shoulder to the floor, and it occurred to Marc that, in the right circumstance, it would have been relatively easy to slip out the door if he had any chance of knowing where he was once he got outside. He wasn’t sure what that circumstance would look like, but he imagined himself running down one of the narrow roads, taking hold of someone’s sleeve, and pleading into an impassive, uncomprehending face.
Azhar left the room frequently to bring in cups of water for both of them, along with plates of food in the early evening. Azhar ate quickly and then watched Marc carefully portion out on the plate each spoonful of grain. Toward nightfall, Azhar lit a lantern, and the light fell across his hands as he held his cup, and Marc saw a heavy scar between two of his knuckles and other places where there had been nicks or cuts that had healed. When Azhar saw him staring at them, he put his cup down and held his hands up for Marc to see, turning them at the wrist. The lines on his palms were long and dark.
“So you work as a butcher, Josephine says, and then you spend hours on end watching over me so you can catch up on your sleep.”
He wasn’t sure how much Azhar had understood, but Azhar nodded and smiled at him, and then pointed at the deepest scar. Then with his other hand he made chopping motions in the air, as if he were handling a meat cleaver, and brought the invisible cleaver down between his knuckles so that Marc would understand how the scar got there.
“Boy,” Azhar said. He pointed toward himself, and then laid his hand flat in the air several feet above the ground. “Boy,” he said again. Marc gathered that Azhar must have cut himself when he was a child and learning the trade.