All That's Left to Tell(40)
Genevieve stopped for a moment, and turned and looked at the passing landscape.
“What was your father’s name?”
“You asked me that already. It’s Marc.”
“That’s right. And what was the name of the woman who called you on the phone and told you your father was sick?”
“Kathleen.”
“Kathleen. She asks him out to coffee, which surprises him. She sits across from him at the small, round table, the late-winter sun streaming through a window, warming them. She does most of the talking, not because she’s particularly chatty, but because, during these years of solitude, he’s grown used to not talking to anyone, particularly women, other than his sisters.”
“He does have sisters,” Claire said. “Two of them.” She again had the sensation that, as they headed east, they were driving back through the past.
“He’s the kind of man who has sisters,” Genevieve said. “Kathleen can tell that, too. But your father’s unaware of it. He’s watching Kathleen’s face. He sees how she’s penciled over her eyebrows, blackening them to match her deep, dark eyes, and in the bright light, through her makeup, he sees the tiny fissures in her skin, around the corners of her mouth, beneath her eyelids, and he’s touched by her effort to conceal them. She has been married, she says, divorced now for five years, and he asks her why she still wears a ring on her left hand, and she tells him she got used to it, the weight of it on her hand, and when she takes it off, it feels like her finger will float away. ‘I guess it’s cost me a few dates,’ she says, and laughs. She has two children, both grown, both married, a son and a daughter, but no grandchildren yet. One lives in Detroit, the other in Pittsburgh, and she tells him she’s accustomed to seeing them only a few times a year. And then she asks Marc about his own kids.
“The question takes him by surprise. He realizes he hasn’t talked to anyone but longtime friends for several years, and they already knew the story of how Claire disappeared.”
Claire felt her skin flush hot. Genevieve hovered over those words for only a few seconds before going on.
“Your father only smiles, searching for a way to respond, and Kathleen says, ‘No children, then, Marc?’ And he coughs once, runs his hand through his hair, trying to figure out what to tell her. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he finally says. Kathleen laughs at this, and tells him if he didn’t know for sure, he must have been some kind of ladies’ man when he was young. He likes the lilt to her voice, its suggestive wink, and he likes its depth, which reveals her years. He says, ‘No, hardly. I don’t mean it like that at all.’ But Kathleen doesn’t pursue him on it. She says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re a very nice-looking man.’”
Claire pulled past a semi, and Genevieve stopped speaking as the roar of its engine poured through the windows. Claire’s throat was tight, and she had to remind herself that this was only Genevieve’s imagination working on her.
When they passed the truck, she asked, “You really think he wouldn’t even tell her about me? That I was never his child?”
But Genevieve wouldn’t look at her, and only put a finger to her lips as if to say “Shhhh.”
“So, they start seeing each other,” Genevieve continued. “And because they are older, because they both recognize the limits of love and its ultimately modest satisfactions, within a year they start living together, though they haven’t married. She sells her home in the little complex she always found somewhat sterile, and moves in with him in the lake house. It takes several months for Marc to remember what it’s like to habitually wake up next to another person, to feel the rhythms of her nighttime rituals, of her sleeping, how she brings a glass of water to her bedside and wakes each night to have a drink, how she shifts onto her back and sometimes something catches deep in her throat, and she coughs. He thinks of the woman he slept with after he first left your mother, and wonders how this is different. For one, he loves Kathleen, and for another, she’s sleeping in a place that has been his home for almost fifteen years. When he lies awake, listening to the sounds on the water—small waves rocking the boat along the dock, a distant splash when a fish jumps out of the lake—they’re deeply familiar, unlike Kathleen’s breathing. But he knows the chief difference between now and then is his age, and how each passing year of solitude has ebbed from an advancing need for company, in part to share a present with this woman he found charming and lovely, but mostly against the ravages of the years to come.”
Claire wondered at how Genevieve could speak so fluidly, and how the Wyoming landscape they were traveling through was piece by piece supplanted by her father’s house at the lake.
“After a couple of months, Kathleen’s daughter phones and tells her that she’s pregnant. The baby is born the following February in a winter that’s been even more brutally cold, the small lake frozen with a full foot of ice that the fishermen have to auger for several minutes before they can open up a hole they can drop their lines through. Each morning, before driving in-to town to the office, your father lights a fire in the small wood-burning stove to keep the house warm, and Kathleen has taken a few days off from work to prep the house for her granddaughter’s first visit, even though she’d flown out when the baby was born. Your father marvels at how she has made the house her own home. It’s early March, but still no sign of spring. On the morning before their arrival, a Saturday, he wakes with a start from a deep slumber before the sun has risen. He gets out of bed, pulls on socks that he’s left by his nightstand against the cold of the floor, and walks out to the stove and fills it with wood. As he strikes the match, he realizes that what has wakened him is the recognition that he will have to hold this infant girl in his arms, and it will be the first time he’s held a baby girl since Claire was born.”