‘I understand entirely,’ Clare said, opening the door.
It was time for him to go.
Clare
I wake in this hotel in the middle of a night that is never quite night, the old green streetlights flickering outside my window, students shouting below on the street, crying out in ecstasy and relief and yearning, and even here you come to me, Laura, at the foot of my bed, waking this old woman who might as well be dead, my hair grown iron-strong and stringy, eyes dropping into the sinkholes of my skull. You fondle my feet and tickle my toes, the cold burn of your spirit raising welts on my soles. What must I do to make you leave me alone?
I take myself back to that day, to the porch and the men and the boy before me. What sign did you give that I should know Sam’s importance? I remember chiefly my terror of the men. It was obvious to me, thinking back on it, that they could not have been strangers you met on the road. They could only be your associates. I knew you would never have consigned your notebooks to people you were not certain you could trust. And I knew the type: the frozen eyes, the determined watchfulness, alert and jackal-wary, lion-fierce. I knew they came with news of you, and if not with news then in search of you — that was my fear, what they might do to find you, the measures they might take to extract information from me, alone in the house, interrupted and surprised and caught with my guard down. They would take what they wanted, take me as well, to find you. Now I know these fears were unfounded, or if not baseless then perhaps exaggerated, heightened beyond reason.
But not only that, I feared those men might not be what they claimed to be, that it was all a ruse to get themselves inside, to take what was not theirs, that they were no friends of yours. I feared petty criminals, robbers, and invaders. I feared violation. I feared my sister’s adopted family, feared that these men had come to visit revenge upon me for the crime I committed in my own younger days. At least that fear was not misplaced, I have to believe, only premature. They would come later, with greater stealth and silent menace.
I wish you could have appreciated how alike we were.
Understand that you were the braver. I always knew this was so.
Your colleagues, from whom I had nothing to fear, presented you to me in text and image, in the form of notebooks and your final letter, and the photographs they had taken, as if to prove their intimacy with you, and you with the boy. I imagined you had slept with the men, perhaps all three of you together, crammed into tight beds, flung out across the floor, rolling round campfires in the bush. A mother will imagine this despite herself, the complications of her children’s lives, the constellations of their bodies, fear for their safety and their hearts and the wounds they will bear. I feared you had not been a willing partner, but could only choose to succumb to them, to be a trapdoor in the night into which they crawled, battering you open but leaving you half-intact, frame splintered and hinges sprung, but recognizable for all that. I feared what they could do to me, these associates of yours who might batter in the night. At first I believed I could smell you on the notebooks, feel your sweat and secretions through the bindings, taste your breath in the odours that came off the men. When they left I pressed your letter to my nose and searched for you there.
After presenting your texts, the only thing that now remains of you, they pushed the boy forward, assuming he was mine, and in that movement of two small feet it all became more complicated. Logic said I had no responsibility. No one could make him mine but you, and you were there only on the page, elusive and indirect. You did not tell me to take him, and if you did not tell me, there was no way for me to know your wishes. I needed you to say, ‘Take this child, Mother, and keep him close.’ I needed direction. I waited for command.
I know that waiting is a form of cowardice.
Understand that I did not know, did not allow myself to know. I was too scared and too selfish to know what to do, and to make myself see what should have been obvious, to piece together the picture you presented, in the smell of connection that remained on those pages.
I can only ask you to forgive me. I have asked you countless times and will ask you again. Tell me what I must do, the penance I must offer. Show me how to make you go away.
In the weeks and months after you left the Record, smaller units of time that stretched to larger ones until years passed, our infrequent meetings became ever more rare. And when you did condescend to visit us at the old house on Canigou Avenue, you almost never spoke to me. I would find you in the garden with your father, and as I approached, a tray of drinks in hand, you would fall silent. After such meetings I would ask William what you said, and he always replied, ‘Next to nothing. I did all the talking, asking questions, imploring her to be careful. She didn’t ask for money but I gave her some anyway. You don’t mind?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know I don’t mind,’ I would say, wishing you’d had the courage and grace to ask me, or to ask both of us together. I would have given it then, given whatever you asked. If we did not know with certainty what you were doing then we suspected. The law-abiding are not so cagy, so circumspect. We imagined the danger you must have been in and the imagining drove us mad, until, tormented by our worries about you we would find ourselves lying together at night, both awake, unable to sleep because every slipping into unconsciousness was a fall into nightmare visions of you come to grief. What did I fail to do to make you understand that I loved you more than anyone else, would have done anything for you? Why did you set me up as your adversary when all I ever wanted was to be your champion?
Looking at your other notebooks for that period, I see now that your entries become ever more cryptic. On the rare occasions when you record what people say in conversation, you no longer provide named attribution. In place of names are, at first, single initial letters. Later, in the absence of initials there are different colours of ink: red, black, blue, green — a code legible only to you, for which you alone held the key, now lost. Who was black? Who green? Were you yourself red, the most prominent colour, a blaze running across the field of white pages?
In the end even snatches of conversation go. In their place are only dates and times, written in one colour or another. Instead of people, the colours seem to represent locations. It is only in the final notebook that you return to the fluidity of prose, telling the story of your last days, knowing, I now feel certain, that you were not walking merely to some indistinct sense of your own fate. You knew you were crossing the frontier — not to freedom, but to your death.
1999
As the holidays approached, Sam knew that Sarah would want to be with her parents. You don’t have to stay, he said. You should go home now. I’ll come back as soon as I can.
He promised he would see her again in January, and everything would go on as before. He asked Sarah if he could send a few boxes of Ellen’s things to her apartment — photographs and mementoes, the books by Clare Wald that had given him a map to his own self as a boy, all the things he wanted to keep. Ellen’s house was already on the market, the furniture would be sold or donated, the life he had known dispersed once again.
You don’t have to ask, Sarah said, send anything you want to keep.
He knew what this meant, that everything he owned in the world would be with Sarah, in a country that was not his own.
The police continued to assure Sam they were following up leads and would notify him if there were any developments. They promised they were doing all they could. They suggested there was no reason for him to delay his return to New York since he had not been present at the crime and therefore could provide no evidence that might help their investigation.