All That's Left to Tell(23)

“This exercise—” He looked out again over the hills. “Inside that tiny room, it almost makes sense. There’s nothing else to see, to think of. But out here, it seems ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that I don’t turn around and look at the person I’m talking to. It’s what anyone would do.”

“Tell me a story about Claire.”

“What if I lie to you? What if I make one up?”

“That’s fine, too.”

Marc laughed at this. He wished he could ask Saabir for a cigarette, who had lit another, and was watching him thoughtfully, as if he, too, were waiting for Marc’s story.

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

“No,” she said. She said something to Saabir, who nodded. “I’m leaning against the wall behind you.”

He imagined the figure of a woman with the petroglyph near her head, as if posed for a photograph. He knelt and folded his knees. Nearer the ground, the air was slightly cooler and smelled of some kind of exotic herb. He breathed the scent in.

“I told you a lie already,” he said. “At least partly. It’s true that Claire was terrified of the bugs at that camp. But later—it’s not that she changed her mind, exactly. Around the time she turned sixteen, well, that was when she started getting into trouble. She began stealing things. Things of no worth, you know? A plastic gold bracelet. A pair of canvas loafers that she wore out of the shoe store. Nothing that would have cost her more than five or ten bucks, and she had a job working at an ice cream shop. And we’d have given her money for anything she’d asked for. When she was caught, she told us that stealing these things was symbolic. She said she never stole anything of value because that might hurt people, and someone might lose their job. She told that to the judge, too, and said, when she took things, she imagined the hands of a poor kid in Vietnam running a scarf through a sewing machine in some dimly lit warehouse where he could never hope for better. And she stole the scarf so Americans couldn’t profit from that poor kid’s work. A girl after your own heart, I guess.”

“Ha. You think you know my heart?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Would it matter if you knew Claire’s?”

He wanted to say, At one time I did, but instead he shook his head and waved the thought away.

“Anyway, it was petty theft, and the judge sentenced her to this kind of weekend excursion for wayward kids. She had to go on a three-day canoe trip down a river up north, you know, buildings fires, pitching tents with others, steering the canoe through some pretty substantial rapids, making meals at night. No cell phones. No technology. It was autumn, I remember, and the leaves had turned. It was a cold weekend, but it was supposed to be brilliantly clear. She hardly spoke to us in the two-hour trip to the campground, and when she got out of the car she walked away without saying good-bye. We had to register her without her help, and the camp counselor patted Lynne’s shoulder and told her that it wasn’t all that unusual for the kids who had no choice.”

He stopped for a moment, and looked down at the base of the hills. “I’m guessing streams run through these mountains in the rainy season. There, along the deepest valley.” But the woman didn’t respond to this, and it seemed as if he were speaking only to Saabir.

“When we picked her up on Sunday afternoon, a perfect day, really, a sky deeper and bluer than this one, the red maples the color of apples the way they get up north, she literally bounded to the car. Skipping almost, like she hadn’t since she was a little girl. She jumped into the backseat, and the first thing she said was, ‘Mom and Dad, it snowed! Last night at the campfire. We were sitting around, and the counselor was trying to tell this pretty lame ghost story, and then these snowflakes started to fall from the sky! Not like a lot of them, or anything. But for a few minutes. We all put our faces up, and let the snow fall on them. They melted right away because we were warm from the fire. One kid, Jesse, grabbed the bag of marshmallows and made a little snowman out of them. He used M&Ms for eyes. It was amazing, because you could see the underside of the leaves in the light from the fire and these dark flakes falling down.’”

He stopped there. His chest had tightened when he’d approximated her words and voice, and the tone of both was for a moment suspended in the air.

“Her cheeks were flushed,” he continued. “I mean, like in a kid’s book, apple-red like the leaves. She smelled—a little like this place. Like dry leaves and a campfire. And for the first half hour of the ride back, she sat up on the backseat and told us about the trip down the river, told us how one kid had fallen in and she was the one to extend the paddle and help pull him back into the canoe. How afterward, all the kids were brave and funny. One boy had stood up in the back of the canoe after riding the rapids, ripped his shirt off, and did a hula dance. One of the girls had stepped out of the canoe and rock-hopped to where a blue plastic bag was snagged on a fallen limb, and stuffed the bag into her pocket, and said, ‘Too pretty for that here.’ And then Claire told us, ‘We sang songs. We sang songs, and actually meant it. I mean we wanted to. A counselor had a guitar, and, like, we sang hippie songs like one by Joni Mitchell called “Circle Game.”’”

Now, a lyric of it spun through his head. He could barely remember the tune.

“For a minute, I thought she’d actually sing it. But of course she didn’t. And of course, Lynne and I were silently delighted, and I was already composing in my head the grateful letter I would write to the judge. After a while, Claire settled back into the seat. I thought she might fall asleep like she had when she was little, but she kept her eyes on the passing landscape.”