The Submission - Amy Waldman [102]
He spoke with earnestness, even desperation.
“Your support needs to be unconditional. There’s more, much more, at stake here than a memorial—don’t you see that? I know you’ve had so much of your own pain to deal with, maybe it’s been hard to follow what’s been happening in this country. The attack made everyone afraid of appearing unpatriotic, of questioning government, leaders. Fear has justified war, torture, secrecy, all kinds of violations of rights and liberties. Don’t let it justify taking the memorial away from Khan. Everything these past couple of years has been about abdications. Don’t succumb to the fear; don’t mistake the absolutism of Khan’s opponents for morality …”
Somehow he managed to say all this and more while polishing off his lamb, a feat of ingestion given that he did not talk with his mouth full and Claire had said barely a word. Her grilled fish, in contrast, sat almost untouched on her plate, its taste lost to disappointment. Here was what she had wanted—someone reaching out to her, offering reinforcement for her stand—but it did not have the desired effect. How foolish she felt, and how crestfallen, to have dressed for a date and gotten a lecture instead.
Wanting the last word, or the last something, she suggested a nightcap back at the house, saying she had promised to be home by eleven to relieve the babysitter, hoping this would imply that she had anticipated nothing beyond a cordial catching up. He followed her home, his headlights bobbing in the dark, the beams signaling lighthouse comfort one moment and ominous chase the next, like a dream that blurred rescue and pursuit. As her car crested the top of the driveway, the automatic lights around the house came on, bleaching the front yard.
“Nice house,” Jack said, coming up behind her as she opened the glass front door. Madison was curled up with a book on the sofa. As they watched, she stretched with feline indifference, her rising T-shirt revealing a band of tanned stomach and a navel piercing. “You’re home early,” she said. Claire hurried her out and poured two cognacs. They sat in the living room, a polite distance between them on the couch. Claire could hear, within herself, fury’s low thrum.
“Let me try to explain about the Garden,” she said. Her doubts, she told him, were not about Khan but about what the design symbolized.
“That’s bullshit, Claire. It’s all a question of trust. Do you take what he says at face value? Or do you look for something hidden and duplicitous because he’s Muslim?”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Then what?”
“You don’t think it’s a problem if Cal’s memorial is a paradise for Islamic martyrs?”
“That’s the same mistrust,” he said. “The same fear. A garden’s just a garden until you decide to plant suspicion there. Has he said it’s a paradise garden?”
“That’s just it—he won’t say—”
“Why should he?”
“It’s not the same as mistrusting him,” she said. “It’s not.”
They sat in silence.
“There are things you don’t know,” she told him. She considered telling him about Alyssa’s information but knew he would be even more skeptical than she had been. “That Post column—that I’m sleeping with the enemy? Some of the other family members came to my house to protest. I got threatening, hateful calls. I had to unlist our phone. All those lights outside—they’re new.”
“I’m sure that must have been terrifying,” he said, with a reasonable approximation of sympathy. “But isn’t that more of a reason, not less, to defend Khan? I was cheering you on when I read that column.”
But he had only bothered to