“What song is that?” Claire asked, but instead of answering, Genevieve shook her head and pulled back some strands of hair.
“After Marc tells Kathleen about Claire,” Genevieve began, “filling in the details as honestly as he can, he and Kathleen sit quietly in the living room. He knows Kathleen feels in some way betrayed, though she didn’t shed any tears and hasn’t spoken of it. She has tried to read; she’s taken up her knitting again, but has stopped and is now staring absently out the window, her fingers covering her mouth. Marc wishes she would say something, and resists wondering if she might leave him. He doesn’t want to think about Claire. Instead, he steadies his mind on this enormous, new kind of quiet. And on this new kind of cold. Did the cold bring the quiet, or the quiet the cold?”
“I was thinking about something like that just a few minutes ago,” Claire said.
“Is that right?” Genevieve asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course it is the cold that brings the quiet. In the winter, things sleep. Hibernate. Most birds fly south. The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Marc doesn’t know where that line came from. Something he read in high school. But birds do gather at the feeder his neighbor puts out. He sees them in the morning sometimes pecking at seeds, sometimes driving other birds away. In winter, their calls seem more like claim than song. He hopes the cold that has descended on him and Kathleen isn’t permanent.
“Yet, in a way, the quiet brings the cold, too. If it is a remote September day, a warm, last-of-summer day, and you are walking with some children along a lakeshore, and they’re chattering, playing, dodging the lapping waves, and a small flock of gulls lands a hundred feet up the beach, and the children take off after them, chasing them into the sky as they screech and fly away, their calls receding into the sound of the waves, and the children are struck dumb as they watch what they accomplished, and everything is muted for a few seconds, so quiet, and then comes a chill—finger-light—running along your spine: then the quiet brings the cold. And reminds you of—what? Of the coming autumn? Of death? He’d read that some say when they’re about to die, that what they want is more light, and some say they want more warmth.
“And then, despite himself, Marc remembers again the warmth of Joline’s kiss. The way she’d told him to keep his eyes closed.”
Genevieve stopped there and seemed to be listening to something in the night.
“Are you still awake, Claire?”
13
When he woke in the early morning before dawn, still facing the wall, his arms and legs aching, his shoulder throbbing, his first thought was, Please don’t let her die. He had not recoiled from the story Claire had told—Josephine had told—about Claire’s lover and his fantasy, though he recognized the destination for Claire was not Chicago, not Michigan, but telling the story of the moment of her death. And he was unsure whether he’d be able to bear hearing it, or, even more terribly, not hearing it. He was unable to measure Genevieve’s intentions any more than he could measure Josephine’s, as if they were somehow distinct, which Josephine had insisted. And how would it end, anyway? How could it, since Josephine had said their own time together would be ending soon? Anyway, Claire was dead. His memory of his collapse the night before pulled at the corner of his eyes. I want to see your face.
The room was already too warm. Slowly, he began to make the painful shift onto his back.
“Marc, I’m still here. Saabir’s outside the door.”
Rather than roll over onto his back, Marc slowly stretched his legs. She had not given him the invitation again, but he could easily have turned toward her and looked at her fully.
“Did you sleep at all, Josephine?”
“Not tonight, no.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Sitting here thinking about our story, mostly. Watching you sleep.”
She was speaking nearly in a whisper, most likely in order not to wake Saabir, though he supposed that’s what people do anyway when they speak to each other in the middle of the night. Facing the wall, he could not discern whether light was beginning to come through the window. He closed his eyes, and recognized the comfort in having her nearby when he was unable to see.
“I smell bad,” he said.
He heard her uncross her legs and shift on the chair, and he listened to the familiar resettling of her garments.
“It’s something you get used to.”
“I don’t think I could ever get used to this place. This room. Pakistan. This world.”
“Do you think, if you went home now, you’d get used to that place again, given all that’s happened?”
“Part of me—” But he didn’t finish the sentence, since he didn’t want to tell her that he would be willing to stay here if Claire could go on living, even if it were only in Josephine’s story. “I think it would take many, many days.”
They were quiet for a minute or so.
“You know this is our last day, Marc.”
He resisted the ache in his chest. “Where are they taking me?”