“How do I know that Saabir didn’t make those himself?”
Every time they said his name, Saabir, who had sat back down on the stone, glanced over at them.
“We need to stop mentioning him,” she said. “Why would you want to believe that, anyway? We could have hidden in a Lyari slum. Instead, we took you to this beautiful place with this ancient art. Maybe it should mean something to you.”
“Pardon me if I’m not grateful.”
“You may never see anything like this again.”
On the distant hills, clouds cast shadows that mottled the land, and seemed to slide into and emerge from the stony valleys.
“It’s hot.”
“A cool day for this time of year. We’ll need to leave before midafternoon. Claire would have loved it here,” she said.
He shook his head. “Claire lived her entire life in the city. We sent her away to an expensive sleepaway camp when she was a kid, and she had a counselor call us within a day because she was terrified of the bugs.”
“I’m not talking about Claire, the child. I mean Claire, the woman. She would have stood here like her father, with her eyes wet.”
“You can’t see my eyes because I can’t see you.”
“But you can see Claire now. And this place is closer to the one she imagined when she first dreamed of opening the hotel. With Jack.”
“This exercise—” He looked out again over the hills. “Inside that tiny room, it almost makes sense. There’s nothing else to see, to think of. But out here, it seems ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that I don’t turn around and look at the person I’m talking to. It’s what anyone would do.”
“Tell me a story about Claire.”
“What if I lie to you? What if I make one up?”
“That’s fine, too.”
Marc laughed at this. He wished he could ask Saabir for a cigarette, who had lit another, and was watching him thoughtfully, as if he, too, were waiting for Marc’s story.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“No,” she said. She said something to Saabir, who nodded. “I’m leaning against the wall behind you.”
He imagined the figure of a woman with the petroglyph near her head, as if posed for a photograph. He knelt and folded his knees. Nearer the ground, the air was slightly cooler and smelled of some kind of exotic herb. He breathed the scent in.
“I told you a lie already,” he said. “At least partly. It’s true that Claire was terrified of the bugs at that camp. But later—it’s not that she changed her mind, exactly. Around the time she turned sixteen, well, that was when she started getting into trouble. She began stealing things. Things of no worth, you know? A plastic gold bracelet. A pair of canvas loafers that she wore out of the shoe store. Nothing that would have cost her more than five or ten bucks, and she had a job working at an ice cream shop. And we’d have given her money for anything she’d asked for. When she was caught, she told us that stealing these things was symbolic. She said she never stole anything of value because that might hurt people, and someone might lose their job. She told that to the judge, too, and said, when she took things, she imagined the hands of a poor kid in Vietnam running a scarf through a sewing machine in some dimly lit warehouse where he could never hope for better. And she stole the scarf so Americans couldn’t profit from that poor kid’s work. A girl after your own heart, I guess.”
“Ha. You think you know my heart?”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Would it matter if you knew Claire’s?”
He wanted to say, At one time I did, but instead he shook his head and waved the thought away.
“Anyway, it was petty theft, and the judge sentenced her to this kind of weekend excursion for wayward kids. She had to go on a three-day canoe trip down a river up north, you know, buildings fires, pitching tents with others, steering the canoe through some pretty substantial rapids, making meals at night. No cell phones. No technology. It was autumn, I remember, and the leaves had turned. It was a cold weekend, but it was supposed to be brilliantly clear. She hardly spoke to us in the two-hour trip to the campground, and when she got out of the car she walked away without saying good-bye. We had to register her without her help, and the camp counselor patted Lynne’s shoulder and told her that it wasn’t all that unusual for the kids who had no choice.”