“No face,” he said. “No Josephine.”
And then he took the gun from his back and tapped the near wall with the barrel, and Marc knew he should turn to face it. Fortunately, the shoulder he lay on was the one that wasn’t aching. He was still trembling, and his body smelled foul after the struggle. He felt as if something had spilled out of him, that he’d lost blood. The run of memories seemed bled out of him, too, as if pooling somewhere, part of him, but somehow now apart from him.
He did not expect her knock on the door, and he flinched when he heard it. Saabir pulled the door open, and he heard them exchange words that were increasingly heated. He slammed it shut and strode over to the makeshift bathroom, and then walked back to Marc and said, “Sit.”
With difficulty, he pulled himself up, and Saabir stooped and handed him a cup of water and a damp cloth. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and he quickly drained the cup and took the cloth and wiped his face and hands. Saabir again took the gun from his shoulder, but this time held it in his hands for a moment. Then he tapped the wall three times. Marc turned toward it.
He heard Saabir step back to the door and let her in, and she pulled the chair close to his mat and sat down. The room was deeply quiet, with Saabir, he imagined, standing with his back erect at the door. Marc could hear her sitting nearby, hear her steady breathing before she began.
“That night, Claire was once again lying on the thin mattress of the truck bed next to Genevieve, staring at a starless sky.”
“Josephine,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”
She didn’t respond immediately, but didn’t go back to her story, either.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe not to you. But it matters to me. It matters to Claire.”
“Claire is dead.” Even saying that, there was still something hard in his throat he had to swallow back down.
“Marc, you could turn and look at me now. That would be the end, but our time will end soon, anyway. As soon as tomorrow. So you could turn and see my face.”
He thought to ask if she would be the one to kill him, but he didn’t.
“I don’t want to see your face.”
She shifted on the chair then. He imagined she was lowering her head.
“But you want to hear the story, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
12
Claire had found a place to sleep that she imagined was safer, the parking lot of a nearby elementary school that was hidden from the main road in a small western Nebraska town just over the border. She’d pulled in near a streetlamp, but she’d parked the car outside the circle of light it cast. Genevieve had been sleeping for the last hundred miles, through the dark, flat land where moths obliterated themselves in the headlights.
Her face had been turned toward Claire, since she slept curled up with her seat belt unfastened against the cool air that came through the windows. In the light of the dashboard, Claire couldn’t decide if, sleeping, Genevieve looked older or younger than she was. She decided older, and over the course of several miles, she glanced over at Genevieve’s full mouth, which she imagined again would be pleasing to kiss, and then at her ears, which were unmarked by any piercings. Her nose seemed delicate, almost like a child’s. But mostly she remembered her gray eyes, a match for that kind of August afternoon where, out of nowhere, a cool, windless day emerges and a heavy bank of clouds sinks low. She thinks it’s the kind of face that someone could look at for a long time. Not for minutes, or even days, but for weeks and years.
Now, after unrolling the mattress, as they lay again in the truck bed, staring at the blank sky, it occurred to Claire that the air was heavy with moisture.
“Do you think it might rain?” she asked Genevieve.
“I don’t know,” Genevieve said. “I guess we’ll be the first to know, won’t we?”