“How long had it been since she’d called?” the woman asked. It struck him that, in the blindfold, it was easy to imagine he was still sitting in that apartment.
“I don’t know. A long time. Weeks. Maybe two months. I had to ask Lynne if Claire even knew we were separated. She wasn’t exactly calling Lynne for a daily mother-daughter chat, either. But that night, when I answered the phone, the first thing she said was ‘Daddy.’ Which she hadn’t called me since she was probably nine. I suppose I spoke her name like it was something holy. She didn’t say anything in response, so I said, which is what I asked anytime she called, ‘Where are you?’ She said, ‘You always ask that, Dad. I’m sorry I’m calling so late.’ As if we’d talked just yesterday. ‘So late, Claire?’ I said. ‘Are you kidding?’ She was quiet for a few seconds, and then she said, ‘I’m calling to say I’m sorry about you and Mom. It must be hard for you, living away from that house.’ Which struck me as an odd thing to say. ‘The house? I don’t miss the house.’ ‘Yes you do,’ she said. ‘You worked hard on that house. Painting and fixing things. And now there’s another man sleeping in it.’ My heart turned over, and I asked, ‘Who?’ but she didn’t answer. I heard someone on her end, and she turned away from her phone and quietly said, ‘No. Shh.’ I hadn’t overheard the question. She seemed to be walking somewhere, because her voice kept changing modulations. ‘Are you coming home sometime?’ I asked. ‘Sometime, Dad.’ And then I felt a wave—I guess I don’t know how to describe it other than to say I felt sorry for myself down to the base of my spine. My wife fucking another man. My daughter maybe in some unnamed city instead of coming by to visit and hold my hand and tell me I’d be okay. So I said, ‘I don’t understand any of this, Claire. Any of it. Your mother. You. Why you’ve both abandoned me like this. I have nothing now. Nothing.’ She continued to hold the phone to her mouth. She was walking. Maybe uphill. I could hear her breathing. And then she said, ‘You shouldn’t have kissed me.’ And then she hung up.”
He stopped speaking, and then strained at the rope on his wrists to dispel the physical discomfort the memory had left. The rope was loose enough that he probably could have pulled out his hands with another minute or two of effort. Azhar was too kind with his knots.
“‘You shouldn’t have kissed me’?” the woman asked.
“Yes. That’s the last thing she said to me.” He was unable to add “ever,” but it hardly mattered. “That was like Claire ever since she was sixteen. You’d be having a talk with her about anything. It could have been about an accident on the freeway that held up traffic for an hour. And in the middle of the conversation she’d drop in some memory out of the blue that left you stunned.”
“‘I made the cut.’”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Why did she want you to stop kissing her?”
“It wasn’t like that. It was something else.”
He was resisting this image of Claire, but his mind finally focused on the one that flickered when she was fourteen and asleep on the couch. He wondered, briefly and wryly, if psychiatrists ever employed a blindfold and a gun. But he didn’t say this to the woman.
“She was thirteen, maybe fourteen. I want to think younger than that, but she probably wasn’t. One of those days in late August when it’s been hot and humid, but the day winds down into a cool evening that reminds you September is coming, then fall. I was sitting in an armchair in our living room with the newspaper, and Claire was reading a book on the couch. We didn’t have air-conditioning, but the ceiling fan was circling slowly above us. Claire had reached the age where it was pretty rare to have her home on any summer evening, since she was usually out with friends. Her skin shone in the lamplight where she was reading, and she kept pulling her hair behind her ear, since this was the time before she cut it short. I was watching her read. It seemed like she’d make it through a paragraph, and then she’d look at the fan slowly spinning, close her eyes for a few seconds, then go back to the book. I was trying to remember what it was like to be fourteen, for it to be August, and a few weeks, yet, before school started, but close enough that you savored the days because summer was no longer stretched out before you. And it was easier to remember those days while sitting in the living room watching Claire read—a memory that anyone would have—”