“You’re not going to leave her there, are you?” he heard himself say. “Alone and dying in that room?”
“Marc, it’s dawn. It’s all we have time for.”
“I don’t hear anyone.”
“They’re coming.”
“I don’t hear anyone yet. How can you leave her alone like that, after everything?”
“It’s her story to tell. And she’s not alone. She’s with Genevieve.”
As she said the name, he heard the car quietly pull up outside the door. He felt himself break into a sudden sweat.
“Turn and look at me, Marc.”
He heard a car door thump, then another.
“Turn and look at me.”
He knew he had only the moment, and something like panic filled him, as if this opportunity to see her face were his last line to the world, and he ignored the sharp pain in his shoulder as he rolled over, and the two men came through the door where Saabir stood guard.
She sat with her large hands in her lap, looking down at him, her hair covered by a deep-blue hijab, her mouth drawn into the slightest smile, her lips full. The bones of her face were slightly masculine, her skin so pale in the light of early dawn that she looked luminous, though plain, her eyes decidedly gray. She held his gaze as the men pulled him up to his knees, her expression almost serene, and then one of the men yanked a black sack over his head.
“For whatever it may mean, Claire wants to hear the rest of your story, too.”
This was the last thing she said as the men lifted him to his feet and led him through the door to the car. But her face seemed imprinted on the black cloth, if not onto his own face, and cloaked an image of Claire’s that he couldn’t reach. He thought it was the kind of face that someone could look at for a long time, not for minutes or days, but for weeks and years. And as the men pushed him into the backseat of the car for what he knew would be a short drive, it struck him that it was the last face he would ever see.
Epilogue
For a long while I thought, Now, the sunrise. Now, a woman at my bedside who says she’s my mother. Now, a morning cup of coffee. Don’t misunderstand me. I knew the way to pull the sheet under my chin, knew to loop my finger around the handle of the coffee mug, knew what a mother was and believed the woman when she said she was mine. And in a few months, as I healed, I saw the emerging pattern of the days, and I remembered to expect the rising heat of a July morning, expect—as I made my way down to the porch, and spent long afternoons in a rocking chair, my strength slowly returning, my hair growing in—the slow turning of the heads of the flowers toward the summer sun, wildflowers that my mother had planted, plants that I could name—cosmos, daisies, black-eyed Susans—but could not tell you where I learned to name them, and couldn’t tell you how I arrived at expectation at all. It was some kind of underweaving that had preserved language and the naming of things that weren’t people, weren’t the ones that I loved, or that I had once loved. I couldn’t remember loving anyone.
Or, more accurately, I could remember the capacity to love, but could remember no one at all. For two weeks, my mother wouldn’t even speak to me about the attack, and then she wouldn’t tell me how it happened, and she never did tell me why it happened, since she said she didn’t know, and I believe she is being honest about that. She told me, once I was released from the hospital to come to her house, that I was twenty years old, and, when I stood and could bear to see my reflection in the mirror, my hair covering the scar on my scalp, a T-shirt over the bandage over the wound where someone drove the knife through, I did look young, but for what it’s worth, for whatever it may mean, I felt years and years older.