Page 58 of Exit Party

Nico was Marlowe and Samir’s mother, but she’d disappeared when they were very small, and Marlowe had no clear memories now. The bronze version of her mother was stern, eyes set on the horizon. A plaque noted the significance of Nico and Saraya’s disappearance: following the disastrous experiment in which they’d vanished, the State had taken control of every university, thus saving countless lives and helping to ensure a harmonious society.

Now, as always, Marlowe looked at her mother’s bronze face and tried to force it somehow, by sheer will, to produce memories of the woman herself. Marlowe’s lost mother was a void, a space, a ghost in the shadows behind her thoughts; the void, she thought, was part of the reason why she’d been so susceptible to her ex-husband’s machinations. The story that underpinned her life was Once I had a mother who disappeared, but her mother was so distant now that the line was like something from a fairy tale.

Her father’s house had been built over a century earlier. There had been other houses like it when Marlowe was a child, but now his was the last of its kind on the street. Towers had sprung up on three sides. The towers made the house look tiny. She raised her hand for the gate code, but the gate was unlocked. She slipped in and closed it behind her, then paused for a moment, disoriented. Her father preferred wild gardens to orderly ones, which meant that on every visit since she left for college, Marlowe had encountered the garden in a state of ever-increasing disarray, tangled vines moving through the glossy dark leaves of overgrown bushes, masses of exuberant flowers. But now, time seemed to have reversed. The grass was as smooth as a golf course. The birdbath had been scrubbed down—she’d forgotten that its stone had originally been white—and the bushes had been shaped into a double row of giant eggs lining the path to the door. The flowers were in orderly patches for the first time in thirty years.

A man was kneeling some distance away, tending to a flower bed. For a soaring moment she imagined he was her father, but of course that wasn’t possible now. Where had the gardener come from? She pulled her suitcase down the walkway to the house. The door was unlocked, and the interior replicated the baffling order of the outdoors. Her father had taken a casual approach to housework, but now the entry hall was immaculate. She left her suitcase there and followed the sound of a distant voice down the corridor, to her father’s bedroom.

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.”