All That's Left to Tell(28)

Genevieve pulled off the scarf and stared at her.

“I’m going to return it.”

“I know. I know.”

“So what was it? A Christian camp? Did they talk about the Ten Commandments?”

“Ha. No, nothing like that. My father wouldn’t have gone in for that. It was one of those team-building camps. For kids who were troubled. We canoed down a river in Northern Michigan. It was so cold it snowed that night when we were sitting around the fire. I loved that little campground. And being on the river with those other kids.”

“It sounds so nice.”

“It was just the one weekend. Then back to real life.”

Genevieve nodded and then asked, “Mind if I ask you a question?”

“What, are you kidding? You already know more about me than almost anyone I’ve met since Jack and I moved out here.”

“Not this place, though, right? You never told me where you were driving from.”

“No, California. Not far from the eastern border.”

Genevieve nodded again, and seemed to be thinking about this. It struck Claire that what she’d said was true: for three years they’d been running the motel, and they were on a first-name basis with half the population of the small town. But maybe because it mostly lay on either side of a highway where almost everyone was passing through, no one asked about anything other than what was happening in the present. “That little Lucy,” Joan, the woman who stocked the produce section at the grocery store, would say. “Look how she’s motoring around. She’s got her dad’s sturdy legs.” Or Larry, the manager at the Shell station, would stop by and say, “Noticed the r was out on your Shadyrest sign. Now it says Shadyest. Might want to get Jack up a ladder to fix that.” But after the first few months, no one asked about where they came from or why they were there.

“It’s pretty out that way,” Genevieve said.

“It can be. Not so much on our stretch of road.”

“So how old are you, anyway, Claire?”

“Almost thirty-five now. Is that the question you wanted to ask?”

“No. Or partly, I guess. So you were sixteen when you went to that campground. And now you’re thirty-four. So you said it was fifteen years since you talked to your father, which means you were eighteen or nineteen the last time. Only three years after the time on the river with those other kids.”

“That’s right. Nineteen. Good math.” She was amazed, a little, at Genevieve’s quick and extraordinary grasp of detail.

“So what happened between nineteen and thirty-four? I mean, I know you had Lucy. What’s your husband’s name?”

“Jack.”

“And you married Jack. But he probably came later, right?”

“I was in Nebraska when I met him. We had Lucy just a year later.”

“Okay, so how’d you get to Nebraska? What happened between nineteen and Nebraska?”

“I—” She realized she was about to say “I don’t know,” which seemed somehow accurate, given how out of the habit she was of thinking of those years.

“Because if you stopped talking to your mom and dad for all that time, it must have been something interesting.”

“I didn’t tell you I stopped talking to my mom.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

Anyone she ever told about it found this least forgivable. She’d stopped speaking of it entirely, and when a motel guest saw Lucy come around the front desk, and said something like, “What a doll! Her grandma must be tickled,” Claire would nod and say, “She is.”

For a few seconds, she let the sound of the tires on the highway become her answer.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Genevieve said.

“I don’t know. That’s not what most people think.” The words came tumbling out. “You asked me what I was doing before Jack. Well, I had a few problems. The biggest one was drinking. But I don’t want you to think”—she wasn’t sure why she suddenly cared what this woman thought of her—“that the drinking was the reason I stopped talking to my mother and father. It wasn’t like that. God, I remember one night waking up next to a man. I lifted my head off the pillow, you know, and I didn’t know where I was, and I had to stare at his face for, like, a full minute while he slept before I could vaguely remember him from the night before. He had his shirt off, and I could see the tracks in his arms. Say what you want, but I never did heroin. Maybe everything else, but not that. He woke up while I was looking at him, and he sat up in bed right away, with his back to me. It was obvious he didn’t remember me, either. The first thing he said was, ‘Better call Mom to pick you up.’ Maybe he thought I was under eighteen, and that’s why he wouldn’t look at me. So I said to him, probably because I was angry, ‘I haven’t spoken to my mother in five years.’ And that’s when he turns and looks over his shoulder. Gives me what amounted to a long glance. And he says, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ He’s sitting there with tracks in his arms next to a hungover girl he can barely recognize from the night before, and he’s asking me that.”

In the middle of her story, Genevieve had turned her gray eyes on her.

“So don’t tell me it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Claire said. “The whole fucking world thinks it is.”