Page 60 of Exit Party

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.

“I think he’s going to die soon,” Samir said.

“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Of course she knew. Who else was reporting to her? The doctor? The nurse? The gardener? All of them? What no one tells you about life in a surveillance state is that it’s exhausting.

“Samir, are you still there?”

“Something’s wrong with Marlowe,” Samir said. “She’s jumpy. She seems confused.”

“It’s PTSD,” Detective Waker said. “She told you that herself, didn’t she? A while ago?”

“I don’t think I fully grasped what she was saying.” Samir felt that he’d failed Marlowe in some complicated way. He’d been so distracted.

“Well, she’s lucky to have you.”