Beneath the blindfold, he could see the two of them sitting at the concert with their heads lowered, but he still couldn’t imagine Josephine’s face, and for a moment he saw it as a featureless oval from which a voice emerged, and he tightened his eyes against its opacity.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess it’s because of the one time I heard her sing, and how she reminded me of that muezzin. She had a boyfriend who went to a different school. The same church, apparently. They were serious about it in the way only seventeen-year-olds can get. He’d given her a ring. Anyway, our last year of school together, we took a trip with the other kids from our class to an amusement park that was a few hours’ drive away, and we came back after nightfall. She was sitting with a boy who’d always liked her. I didn’t make anything of it. I slept most of the way back. But when we got off that bus, she asked if I could give her a ride home, and when I looked over at her after she pulled the car door shut, she was crying, and was pulling her knees up to her chest. She said, ‘I don’t think he’ll forgive me,’ and, given the way she sometimes talked, I thought she might have been talking about Jesus. Maybe she was. I asked her what had happened, but she only shook her head. I was surprised to see that sunny face so dark, and it’s possible part of me enjoyed that. She started rocking back and forth in the seat. I told her that whatever it was, she was taking it way too seriously. But she shook her head, and started humming. I didn’t recognize the tune, but assumed it was a hymn. And when she started singing the words, her voice changed. Since she was so small, when she spoke people compared it to a Munchkin’s. And her singing voice still had something of that quality. But it was overlaid with something mournful, something deeper, and resonant. She sang it all the way through, and when I pulled into her drive, I looked at her and said, ‘My God, that was beautiful.’ But she only nodded and wiped her eyes with her palm and said, ‘Thanks for the ride.’ She looked like an old woman when she walked hunched over into the porch light and pushed open the door to her house.”
After Josephine finished speaking, she let out a long sigh.
“Anyway, when I hear that muezzin, I think of that girl. He’s probably fifty years old, but his voice has the same quality. Of someone singing beautifully in the hope they’ll be forgiven.”
Her words hung in the air, and he cleared his throat.
“Or because they know they never will be,” he said.
“Maybe that, too.”
She stood up then, walked to the door, opened it, and said something to Saabir. He seemed to protest, but she insisted, and then pushed the door closed again.
“Saabir won’t be standing guard for a short time, just so you know. He understands more English than you probably realize.”
Marc heard her settle in the chair across from him.
“So I’ve been thinking about the stories you’ve told about Claire,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Well, almost every one you’ve told was when she was slightly older. At twelve when she cut herself. Fourteen when you kissed her. Sixteen when she stole and went camping. Every story a time when she was on the verge of something. Or you were.”
“Those are the stories you remember. Those are the ones that collide, like Genevieve said about her mom.” He caught himself thinking about Genevieve as a living, breathing person.
“I know,” she said. “I remember. But you’ve never described her as a small child.”
Reflexively, he tried to recall an image of her at that age, but most of what he remembered he knew were photographs that Lynne had stored in albums that, at various ages, he’d find Claire occasionally leafing through.
“She was—” But he stopped himself, since he was about to resort to the words anyone would use: beautiful, so bright, so sweet, precious, precocious, when in truth, more and more, what he understood was the slow, cold creep of the word was.
“This,” he started. “This story—” he said again, and swallowed down whatever was attempting to rise. “It’s more Lynne’s story than mine. I mean, she was the one who told it to me. About Claire. I’m not sure why it occurs to me, other than it’s partly about a woman who wanted a child. But maybe it’s because of the story of your friend. How it’s about something that happened, and after that how things never felt the same again.”