I thought of him as a man visiting his mother, sitting where I was late on a summer evening, that time of night when the vacationers who filled the rented cottages would have doused their charcoal pits, and their kids would long since be out of the water and immersed in the deep slumber that comes from a day of play on the lake. There might be a few fireflies still lit along the banks, and the wind would have died down by then, and there would be only a faint lapping of invisible waves that he could hear against the black line of sand at the lake’s edge. A late-night fisherman might be rowing in, or someone in a canoe, maybe a couple of teenagers, or a newlywed couple, who had paddled to the other side of the lake to whisper to each other or exchange kisses.
My mother had told me a woman was somehow involved in my father’s kidnapping in Pakistan. I hadn’t searched very deeply to find out more about her; there didn’t seem to be much reason. They thought she may have been from upstate New York, but no one could find her mother or father. The photo they had online did what they always do, which was to make her look haunted, angry, and unattractive. As I looked out over the lake at a fisherman casting his line, I tried to imagine the woman in a room with my father, a room in a country he never had the chance to know, where at the end all he had was his memory to comfort him, the opposite of what I felt in those first mornings after I’d been attacked, waking in my bedroom where I grew up. I wondered if my father had said anything at all to the woman about me. I wondered what life he’d dreamed up for me when I was born, and what life, if any, he’d wanted for me before he died.
Sometimes, now, on the rare weekend when Jeremy’s daughter is visiting, while she lies sleeping between us and I’ve wakened early to watch the first morning light brighten the bed where she and Jeremy are curled in toward each other, I think I know what he might be dreaming of, even in his waking hours. That the two of us could marry. That we could raise his daughter in that hard-scrubbed landscape, that her eyes would take on the blue of the sky, and we would build a little home near a stand of pine trees where I’d hang clothes outside in the clean wind that rolls over the mountains, his little girl’s blue dress flapping in the breeze. I could go to college in Elko, learn a trade or have a career, and we could live a happy life carved out of the stark beauty of that land. Part of me wants that.
But during those nights his daughter visits, in the living stillness made by the knowledge that she is asleep between us, my own dreaming returns. At first come shadows, forgotten rooms, and then familiar faces, half sentences someone is speaking to me that I remember, but then dissolve when I open my eyes. I don’t know that these memories will continue to return, but I do know they are out there, along with all of the things I can’t remember. Even though I can’t name them, I think of them in the world, I think of them in the minds of other people, as if these others are the caretakers of my memories—for me, or for maybe everyone who has forgotten anything or has been forgotten—people living in different times, people in faraway lands.
It’s like waking to a life someone dreamed for you. Maybe, at some point, that’s partly true for everyone. I think of Jeremy opening his eyes in my bed, and, in the half second before he remembers me, seeing a woman in a strange kitchen making coffee. I think of my mother, waking to a morning when the man she’d loved, lived with, then left had been killed, his body never found; and, months later, on another morning, waking to a daughter who had disappeared.
And then, one early morning, when Jeremy has gone to work and left his little girl sleeping beside me, I dream of a man who says he is my father. He is sitting with me in a café in Karachi, where my mother told me my father was killed. We sit sipping from cups of tea in the bright late-afternoon sun, neither of us speaking, as women pass by in hijabs, men in suits, my father wearing a jacket and tie and set back in his chair, his legs crossed. I feel his eyes on my face, but when I turn toward him he is always looking elsewhere, at a boy waving to someone from a window, and then at a limping man pushing a cart down the street.
“How’s your mother?” he asks me, and loops his finger into his teacup.
“You know I haven’t seen her in months.”
My father still won’t look in my eyes, but he nods. He turns his hand up and studies his fingernails. A waiter comes by and puts the check on the table, and my father looks up at him and gives him his good smile.
After the waiter walks away, my father says, “I suppose you’re in love with this Jeremy.” Now he’s looking out over the roofs of low buildings, their shadows advancing in the low sun.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember what that’s like.”
He nods again, looks down at his watch, and then reaches in his pocket and pulls out a coin and places it on the check. He stares at it as if he wonders if it will be enough, and then begins to glance through the crowd of people moving past. Finally, he finds a mother walking through the marketplace holding the hand of her daughter, and he says, “Back when you were that little girl’s age—”
But I say, “Don’t.”
Then he finds a young woman without a head scarf, and says, “Of course, by then you were—”
And I say, “Stop.”
At last, he looks at me. He lightly touches his fingers to his face as if he needs to make certain it’s his. The sun has dipped behind the buildings, and we’re in shade.