“You seemed transported this morning.”
“I wouldn’t say transported. It feels good in the way a dose of morphine does, in that it makes the pain go away for a while.”
“Was she an affectionate little girl?”
“I—” he started to protest. “All little girls are affectionate.”
“That’s not true, you know.”
“Well, were you?”
“I could be. I liked exploring. Finding things. Presenting them to my mother.”
“I assume you loved her?”
But she ignored this question. “She kept many of them. We lived near a school with a playground, and some nights, when the other children had been called in or had gone home, I’d go out and sit in one of the swings, kick myself high, and survey the playground for anything they had left. It was about what you’d expect. A Popsicle stick. The missing limb of a doll. Kite string. If it interested me, I’d jump off the swing and pick it up and bring it back to my mother, who would arrange them into some kind of display that she’d place for the evening on the windowsill. So if I was lucky enough to find the cracked eggshell of a killdeer, and, say, a gum wrapper and a ribbon, she’d wind the ribbon into a kind of crude nest, place the broken shell in it, and cut out of the wrapper a small chick that she’d place in the shell. Next morning, when I got up, it would always be gone.”
“This was in upstate New York?” But it was another question she ignored.
“One time I was looking through the attic of her house, and opened a small box that had my name on it. And there they were, a tangle of these things I’d brought to her from that time. An assortment of junk, really. A dirty flip-flop. A mitten. Two or three toy cars. But what was strange was how few there actually were, and it seemed she’d saved them all, without storing them carefully, or anything like that. The eggshell was in bits. But I thought I’d done this a hundred times, and there were maybe two dozen items in that box. Not much larger than a shoebox, to tell you the truth.”
“Did you hold on to it?”
“No. Hardly. All those things were so plain or broken or torn. You can’t reinfuse them with how you marveled at them as a child. If I marveled at them at all. I picked them up because they seemed to please my mother.”
Behind the blindfold, he saw a fleeting image of a girl hanging from her knees on a bar, reaching for a coin she saw on the ground.
“So would you describe that as affectionate?” she asked, but he didn’t answer her. “Anyway, so you see how this works, Marc? Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire this morning—”
“You dreamed up.”
“No, we dreamed up. Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire today is a girl, and that there’s a school in that highway town out west where her mother and father live, and that she’ll wander around the dirty playground and pick up bits and pieces of refuse left by other children and bring them home to her mother and present them as a prize?”
“I can’t imagine you as a little girl. I’m sorry. I’ve never even seen your face.”
“You don’t have to imagine me as a little girl. You have to imagine Claire as having one. And you have to stop trying not to remember her. Why did you refuse to fly back home when you heard she was killed?”
In the blindfold, he felt the question was as confining as the walls of the room, and as ever present.
“It wouldn’t have brought her back.”
She laughed.
“That’s not the answer. That’s the answer anyone would give.”
He was sweating now, and couldn’t wipe it from the back of his neck.
“I couldn’t face it. Please. I was a coward. I am a coward. Like all Americans.”
“Stop that crap,” she said, so sharply there was a faint echo off the walls. “You may be a coward. But you can’t keep me away with this one-dimensional sarcasm.” He heard her stand up, and he could feel her shadow near him. Was she going to slap him? Then her hand was on his forehead, or rather some edge of her gown wiping away the perspiration, and then her fingers themselves on the back of his neck, and he flinched at their light, calloused touch. She sat back down.
“Why are you sweating so much? It’s a cooler night than that,” she said quietly. No one had touched him with anything approaching tenderness in months. Then she said, “I think we both know the reason why you didn’t go back home, but it’s such a sentimental illusion.”