1 #7
“Okay,” she said. “Well.” A certain awkwardness had descended on the scene. For a moment neither of them knew what to say.
“Thank you for your service,” Haruki said finally.
9
“I can’t go home,” Samir said. He was sitting with Marlowe on the porch in the first light of morning, watching the coroner’s van pull away from the curb. All of the Premium Home Care people had gone.
“Why not?” Marlowe had a dazed, faraway look about her.
“I saw something last night,” Samir said. “I mean met someone. I can’t . . . there just isn’t a way that I can return to my normal life.”
“I think I saw something too,” Marlowe said.
“Tell me.”
“How can I be sure that I saw it?” Marlowe turned to him, and he saw the panic in her eyes. She was certain of absolutely nothing.
“Why don’t you tell me what you saw,” Samir said, “and then I’ll tell you what I saw, and then we can decide if we’re both crazy.”
10
Marlowe had gone to bed with no expectation that she’d get much sleep.
She fell asleep immediately, as always, but then she was awake in the darkness and her thoughts were in motion.
She knew before she looked that it was two thirty in the morning.
She’d been dreaming. She’d been running through a darkened garden at midnight.
It was her father’s garden, but wild and strange.
The lights of the towers shone down on a jungle, leaves in her face and grass that whipped around her knees, animals stalking in the dark.
There were three birdbaths instead of one, standing in a row, and spiderwebs between them.
She was being pursued, and then something pulled her out of sleep.
Marlowe lay in bed for a moment, a little breathless, thinking of her father.
She thought, He’s gone. She rose and moved down the hallway.
The door to her father’s room was ajar. She pushed it open, and blinked at an impossible vision: her father was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face clearly illuminated by the nightlight.
“Dad,” she said.
He had changed miraculously. He looked healthy, although there was a bruise on his forehead, and was at least thirty pounds heavier than the last time she’d seen him.
But something was wrong. He was staring at her with a look of alarm, and then he’d jumped to his feet and was moving quickly to the open window.
He was gone almost instantly, climbing over the sill and dropping to the grass on the other side.
She followed him, stunned, and watched him run away across the garden and out through the gate.
Never in her life had she been more confused, and something was terribly, nightmarishly wrong: as she stood there, with her back to the bed, she gradually became aware that someone was in the bed behind her.
She turned around quickly, to get it over with, and her father—the too-thin, too-frail version, the version that was going to die soon—was lying very still with his eyes closed.
She would have been frightened, but he was so diminished.
She switched on the bedside light and sat beside him, and it was extremely possible to convince herself that she hadn’t just seen what she’d seen, that some other instance of her father hadn’t just arisen from the bed, climbed out the window, and run away, because after all none of that made sense.
She’d had years of training in not believing herself.
(“You’re not the most reliable narrator,” her husband said, in some recess of memory, and lifted her off her feet.)
“Dad,” she whispered. He stirred, just slightly, and she saw movements behind his eyelids. He was dreaming. “Dad, can you hear me?”
Marlowe sat by the bed, waiting, but he didn’t wake. Still, his eyes kept moving. She couldn’t reach him anymore in the waking world, but it was nice to think that she was part of his dream.
“It’s been a bad time,” she told him. “Something was done to me. I wish I’d told you sooner. I didn’t understand how much trouble I was in. I know you would’ve wanted to help.”
He said nothing, of course, but his dream continued.
There wasn’t really more that Marlowe wanted to say, when she thought about it.
She wanted him to be alive in the world, but words seemed extraneous now.
It seemed to her that what mattered was presence, just being here with him at the end.
She took his hand, cool and dry and too thin, but holding it was awkward—she hadn’t held his hand since she was, what, nine?
—so she placed his hand gently under the covers, leaned back in the chair, and closed her eyes.
She slipped back into her dream of running through the garden, but it wasn’t frightening anymore.
There was true exhilaration in running through the dark.
She was sleeping in the chair when it happened, and she knew what she was going to see before she opened her eyes.
In that last moment before Marlowe looked at Kareem, before she saw that he was no longer breathing, she had a sense of departure, of her father having slipped away. Death is transport.