“After a while, maybe we’ll see.”
He felt the familiar tightening of his grief in his larynx but forced it down.
“So, Marc, you had a wife.”
“Yes, I had a wife. Did you find out her name on the Internet?”
“We did. Lynne. Lynne Laurent. Why do so many people seem to choose to marry for the musicality of their new name?”
“It’s as good a reason as any.”
“That may be true. Did she take you for everything you had?”
“No. She didn’t take me for anything.” Which had ultimately proven true in other ways. But in the isolation and confinement of these last six days, the gilded edges of his early memories of her—that morning when, from the porch of their first home together, she turned back to smile at him as he left and her robe slipped from her shoulder, or the time she’d cut her forearm so badly that it had to be stitched, and she’d winced when he gripped his homemade tourniquet with his hand, and later he’d contemplated her dried blood on his fingers in ways that had unsettled him—had begun to glow with increasing heat.
“No affection for you at all?”
“I’m not saying that. But she’s not going to fund-raise for the cause, if that’s what you’re thinking. I haven’t spoken to her since I arrived here.” Which was true but for the two voice messages she’d left. “What you’ll get for your phone call is maybe a measure of concern. Maybe.”
“No brothers? No sisters?”
“Two sisters. One lives on a farm in Indiana in a little ranch home on sixty acres they rent to local corn growers in order to make ends meet. The other lives in a tiny apartment in Chicago where she’s trying to patch her life back together after bouts of alcoholism. She borrows money from me.”
“No children?” she asked.
At this he felt his eyes tighten under the blindfold and sting at the corners.
“No children,” he said.
He heard her stand up then; her garments rustled, as if she were resettling them, and then she took a quiet step or two, and he felt her shadow as she stood over him; he heard her exhale in his ear.
“Marc,” she said. “Your only daughter was murdered a month ago. She was nineteen. You know this. And you didn’t even go home for the funeral.”
She breathed again in his ear and then pulled away, dragged her chair back over to the far wall, opened the door, and closed it behind her.
2
When Azhar came in with the plate that evening, his gun slung over his shoulder, for the first time there was a serving of meat cut into small pieces. After Azhar handed him the plate, Marc lifted a bite with his spoon and looked up to where Azhar stood by the door.
“Lamb,” Azhar said. “For muscle.”
He flexed his arm and showed his lean biceps.
“Strength for the long haul?” Marc asked, though he knew Azhar wouldn’t understand. Azhar smiled at him. His eyes were large and wet, almost pretty. He had a beard that he occasionally stroked thoughtfully, and when he was sitting watching over Marc for long stretches of time, he tended to stare up and out the window, as if something other than dust or a few feet of the nearest building might become visible. It occurred to Marc that sitting and guarding someone who posed no threat and with whom you shared no language must lead to almost depthless boredom.
Azhar stood and watched him eat. Marc had developed the habit through the days of his capture of separating out each spoonful of grain in order to extend the meal.
“You should bring a plate of your own next time. I don’t much like eating alone.” He lifted his fork toward him.
“Lamb,” Azhar said, and then a sentence in Urdu.
The room where Marc was kept had a crude toilet that sometimes managed to flush. A bucket in which to wash that either Azhar or Saabir emptied each morning. The room was part of a small house or building, and he occasionally heard muffled thumps or a muted voice at night when he was sleeping on his thin mat. Whichever man had the night shift slept in front of the threshold of the door.