1 #4
Her father was lying in a hospital bed. He was improbably thin, that was the first thing she noticed.
His eyes were closed and sunken into his skull.
A nurse in a white uniform leaned over him, dabbing his lips with some moisturizing agent.
“Here we are,” she was saying softly, “that’s nice, isn’t it?
” Marlowe froze in the doorway. Her father looked dead, but then his chest moved. His breaths were too far apart.
The nurse looked up. “You must be Kareem’s daughter,” she said. “Hello.” She was an older woman, perhaps in her seventies, with PREMIUM HOME CARE embroidered on her shirt.
“Hi.” Marlowe came into the room and sank into the chair beside the bed, lightheaded.
She thought she might faint. Her father’s thinness made him look taller than she remembered.
This strange long man, his proportions unnatural.
She should have asked the nurse’s name, she realized belatedly, but the truth was she didn’t particularly care.
Her father was going to die soon and nothing else mattered.
His skin had a greyish cast. She wasn’t sure how long she stared, dazed and mesmerized by his proximity to death, until finally some movement the nurse made caught her attention.
“Can he hear me?” Marlowe asked.
“I can hear you,” her father whispered. He opened his eyes, and she flinched from the intensity of his gaze. Burning was the word that came to mind.
“How are you feeling?” Marlowe asked, and immediately felt like an idiot. “Are you in pain?”
“Not just now,” he said. “There are some things I need to tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I saw your mother,” he said. “Afterward.”
“What do you mean, afterward? After what?”
“I’m very tired,” he said. His eyes fluttered closed.
“Do you mean after she disappeared?” Marlowe asked, a little desperate. But Kareem seemed to have fallen asleep again. The stillness in the room was absolute.
There was a sound behind her. The nurse was reentering the room, although Marlowe hadn’t noticed her leaving.
“You heard that too, right?” Marlowe was desperate for a witness.
“It seemed like a private matter,” the nurse said. She had a gentle voice that Marlowe liked. “Did he tell you something important?”
“I don’t know what’s real.” Marlowe wasn’t sure if she meant the thing he’d just said or literally everything, all of reality, the relentless doubt that she’d carried out of her marriage like a contagion.
“He’s on heavy painkillers,” the nurse said. “It’s possible that fiction and fact could blur a little.”
Marlowe decided to change the subject. “Are you with a private agency?”
“Yes,” the nurse said. “Premium Home Care.” It was kind of Samir to pay for all this. When had she last spoken with her brother? It had been a very long time.
“You have his eyes,” the nurse said.
She heard footsteps, and then Samir walked in.
“You made it,” he said.
“You look like hell,” she said, and then froze up inside because she’d said exactly the wrong thing.
Samir was saying something else now, but she couldn’t hear him, because she was involved in a complicated flashback in which her ex-husband was berating her for saying the wrong thing.
Her ex-husband moved through life in search of offence, and was therefore extremely easy to offend.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when she realized Samir was staring at her. “What did you say?”
“I was sorry to hear about your divorce,” Samir said.
“You shouldn’t be. It’s the best thing I ever did.”
She had his attention now. His eyes widened involuntarily. “Ending your marriage was the best thing you ever did?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, Marlowe. That’s fucking dark.”
“No, it was dark before I ended it.”
But Samir was staring at the bed. “Dad?”
Kareem was waking again. One of those skeletal hands was shifting back and forth, as if fumbling for something lost in the blankets.
“Hello, Kareem,” the nurse said, very loudly. “Your children are here.”
Their father’s eyes opened. He looked at Marlowe, and then Samir. His gaze was accusatory, like he’d just been rudely jolted from an interesting dream. Then he seemed to recover himself, and blinked.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was weaker than it had been.
“Dad,” Samir said. “Dad, can you hear me?”
“Let me just adjust those pillows for you,” the nurse said, and fussed about by their father’s head.
“There were days of interrogation, after the accident,” Kareem murmured. His eyes were focused behind Marlowe now. She turned, but there was no one behind her, only the blank wall of his bedroom.
“What?” Samir asked. “What accident?”
“Interrogation and testing,” Kareem said. “I want you to know, Ibari’s the one who made this all possible.”
“Would we like to try some chamomile tea this evening, Kareem?” the nurse asked.
Marlowe saw that Samir had gone very still. “Ibari,” he said carefully, “as in your friend Ibari Waker?”
“I’m going to just change your IV,” the nurse said. “You’re going to feel a little pull as I take this tape off.”
“I’ve been so lucky,” Kareem said. “I was so lucky to come here.”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “but there’s going to be a little pinch. If you’d take a deep breath for me, I’m just going to—”
“I’ve loved being your father,” Kareem said. He smiled at them. His eyelids were heavy. “This is such a hard place. This State. But I’ve loved being here with you.”
“Dad,” Samir said, very quietly.
“I’ll get tea sent in,” the nurse said, and retreated. Marlowe was aware now of passing time, twilight subsiding into darkness through the open window. The slightest breeze moved through the room. Marlowe and Samir glanced at one another, and waited.
“Dad,” Samir said, “what did Ibari make possible? What did you mean by that?”
Kareem was lying with his eyes closed, seemingly sleeping. They sat with him for a while, watching his face, and then at last he opened his eyes again, and smiled at them.
“I learned something important once,” he said. His voice was a little stronger now.
Samir leaned forward. “What’s that, Dad? What did you learn?”
“Countries don’t last forever,” Kareem said.
“I like that idea,” Marlowe said.
“Careful,” Samir murmured. “We don’t know who’s listening.
” She stared flatly at him until he looked away.
When they looked back at their father, he’d fallen asleep again, and he didn’t stir when they touched his hand.
Marlowe studied her father’s face. His eyes were moving again behind closed eyelids.
What was it like to be Kareem at this moment?
Sometimes when Marlowe was falling asleep, there was an in-between state wherein she was conscious but could not move.
She imagined her father wandering through a dark forest, hearing voices to which he couldn’t respond.
“Let’s go out to the hallway,” Samir said. “We could use a break.”
7
In the hallway, Marlowe closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. She looked utterly exhausted.
“How does he even have cancer?” Marlowe’s voice was low and tired. “We’re all immunized against cancer in infancy. I asked his doctor about it on the phone last week and he said no one could explain it.”
“It must not be a hundred percent effective,” Samir said. “The vaccine, I mean.”
“Have you ever known anyone else who had it?”
“No,” he said. “I’d thought cancer was ancient history.”
“He said something before you came in,” Marlowe said, “and no one heard it.”
“But you heard it,” Samir said.
“I think so, but how can I be sure?”
“How can you . . . why aren’t you sure?” He felt a little lost.
“It’s hard to be certain of things,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“That he saw Mom. I think he said he saw her afterward,” Marlowe said.
“After what?”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought he might mean after she disappeared.” Her gaze was shifting around in a furtive way.
“He said that?”
“I’m not sure,” Marlowe said. “What time is it?”
“About twenty-one hundred hours,” Samir said. “Maybe twenty-one fifteen.”
“I think I need to go to bed. I haven’t been sleeping much. I’m sorry, I know you just got here, I just, I can’t stay awake.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll catch up tomorrow.”
Her smile was shaky. “Good night,” she said. He watched her disappear into her childhood bedroom, then went to the kitchen and poured himself water from a pitcher in the fridge.
The fridge door was topographical, a mess of overlapping photos and notes.
In the oldest of the fridge photos, the three of them—Samir, Marlowe, Kareem—were beaming with ice cream cones in the park.
A card on the fridge read Happy Birthday, the letters rendered in a gorgeous calligraphy.
Samir pulled it off, idly, and flipped it open.
Dad: Thanks for always being there for us.
We couldn’t ask for a better father. M. He agreed with the sentiment but reading it felt like trespassing.
He magnetted the card back to the fridge and took his glass of water outside to the garden, to his favourite place out here—a line of jasmine vines that grew alongside a wall—which was also, he calculated, the furthest possible point from Marlowe’s bedroom window.
He should call his husband, who’d left a voicemail earlier, or his boss, who’d messaged him twice. Instead, he called Detective Waker.
“Samir,” she said. That warm voice, a constant over decades.
She must be in her seventies now, he realized, around the same age as his father, but he hadn’t seen her in so long that she was frozen at some indeterminate point in the far past. In his earliest memories of her, he and his sister were very small and she was the dark-haired woman with a pretty smile who drank hot chocolate with them in his father’s kitchen when they got home from school.
She’d asked him to start reporting to her about Marlowe when he was eleven.
Why was he reporting on Marlowe? Did that imply that Marlowe was reporting on him?
This was how Service operated, she’d told him.
People reported on one another. His situation was not unusual.