All That's Left to Tell(41)
10
The wind through the flue of the chimney makes the flame flicker, but he has become an expert at lighting these simple fires, and a minute later the slivers of bark along the split wood are popping and crackling, sending shadows against the walls of the room because, after he woke, he’d turned on only the light above the kitchen stove, and he didn’t even need that to navigate the rooms. He closes the door of the already warming wood burner, stands and brushes the bits of bark from his hands, thinks about starting the coffee, but doesn’t want to make more noise that might wake Kathleen, since it’s still an hour before sunrise, and he wants to sit alone for a while with the memory of Claire as a small child that is visiting him more sharply than it has in years.
He had been delighted when he’d learned of Kathleen’s daughter’s pregnancy, and Kathleen had been effervescent, and inclusive, saying, “Ready or not, Marc, you’re gonna be a grandpa.” He had sidestepped the impact of that claim, had still not told Kathleen about Claire, which had never been his intention. But if he did not intend it, then what was the reason for keeping it secret? His sisters, along with the few friends he still had from his marriage to Lynne, showed discretion on the rare occasions where they were in Kathleen’s company, though he was sure they assumed Kathleen knew about his daughter.
The rooms in the house are warming, and he pulls off the blanket he is using and sits back against the chair. In the year he’s been living with Kathleen, he’s grown heavier, surrendering his morning rows across the water last summer and fall so he could lie next to her in the early-morning hours. And for the most part, it’s been too cold to go out and run in the winter months; he’s grateful that it’s March, even if the wind over the ice didn’t feel like spring; there was more daylight now, and by late April he was hoping to see expanses of open water across the lake. He remembers how one spring he took the boat out and navigated the remaining patches of ice, how he’d managed to wedge it between two miniature icebergs, and had to climb out of the boat to free it, his weight on the ice letting the water rise to his knees, and he’d lost his balance and was lucky to tumble back into the boat without risking hypothermia.
Has he stopped missing Claire? He remembers how, at a year and a half, she used to reach for things, a wooden block, a leaf, and turn it in her hand while she gazed. He remembers her wide eyes when she was born. But when he thinks of her now, it is less about memory, less about the recollections of her childhood—he had almost no artifacts from that time, because Lynne had claimed them, no crayon drawings, no school pictures, no ribbons or gold-starred schoolwork—than it is about wonder over who she’d become; the bitterness he used to feel about her willingness to cut him out of her life so completely is replaced by additional wonder over her capacity to do it.
Outside, some light has returned to the sky, and the lake ice reflects it dully. There will be no visible sunrise: another gray winter day. As the room warms further, the smell of furniture oil deepens, since Kathleen had rubbed each piece yesterday evening, the finishing touches before her daughter’s arrival. She phoned her once a week, usually Sunday mornings, followed by a shorter phone call to her son. He can see she carries them with her like charms, particularly those evenings when her work as a real estate agent has left her rattled, or those mornings when she wakes up and her joints ache, or the time she said to the mirror, My face is gray. Her family is a lean-to against what she worries are her growing limitations, and at last a solace against finality.
He wonders if he should have searched for Claire further. From time to time, in those first years of her absence, he’d track down a phone number or an address, but he wouldn’t have described it as a relief to hear her greet him anonymously over voice mail. He remembered how he’d called Claire by mistake the night she was attacked, how Lynne had left a voice mail on his hotel phone after those weeks he’d fled to Pakistan, of all places, and when he’d pushed the number for speed dial, after the phone rang, it was Claire’s voice that said Hello, and for a split second the nightmare of Lynne’s message had lifted before Claire said, You have reached … After that, after she was out of danger, it had been okay for a few months while Claire healed. Then she’d disappeared. Those times he was able to track down her number, he tried not to sound despairing in the messages he left: “Claire, I’m not asking to know where you are. I’m not even asking to talk to you. But please, let me know that you’re safe. Even if it’s a oneline postcard. Here’s my address at the lake…”
But after five years, he’d stopped trying at all. He assumed, if she’d died, news would have ultimately traveled back to him. He knew she was living somewhere, and in the long years when he would row the boat across the lake, particularly the cool September mornings when a mist hovered over the water, he’d imagine that with each stroke of the oars he was pushing into the fog where Claire lived. As the director of a homeless shelter, maybe, ladling soup into bowls held by children whose mothers had fled a dangerous home, or as a mother herself of three children, packing lunches in the early morning because she couldn’t bear the food they were served at school, or as an expatriate, sipping coffee in a European café while she thumbed the edges of an underground newspaper for whose revolutionary whims she could no long muster enthusiasm.
She would be thirty-five years old in July.