All That's Left to Tell(45)
“I gathered they were pretty tight.”
“You gathered? Sometimes I don’t know where one begins and the other ends.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. You got sisters?”
“Two.”
“Close?”
“When we were children, sure.”
“This is a different story. She made it clear early and often who the principal man in her life was and would be. I got it. I can roll with it.”
Tom again looks up, and arches his back with his arms spread. He closes his eyes and smiles.
“What’s he like?” Marc asks. He is remembering Joline had said Marc had reminded her of her brother.
“Who, Jon? A little aloof, you know? Brooding. Not without a dark sense of humor. Good-looking, too, like every damn cousin twice removed in that family.”
A shadow passes over Tom’s face, and he opens his eyes. He straightens his back and looks at Marc with a thin smile.
“Thanks for walking me out here. It’s quite a place. A little center of the universe.”
“Thanks. I’ve always thought that myself.”
Tom stares back at the house where the windows are shining a deep yellow.
“Jesus, it looks like a Christmas card.”
He takes a single step toward it, and then turns back and looks at Marc.
“I don’t think I’m made for this,” he says.
“For what?”
“For fatherhood. You got no idea how it changes things.”
And then Tom walks back toward the house, trying to step lightly so his shoes won’t break through the crusted snow.
*
Marc’s unable to sleep. The nights he can’t aren’t unusual anymore, and have become more numerous since Kathleen has come to live with him, though he knows this one is not about the rhythms of growing older, but about Tom and Joline sleeping upstairs, the baby between them. And about Kathleen, who is walking the difficult balance of her sadness over her son and her joy over her granddaughter, two rooms that have opened inside her that she doesn’t yet know how to fill. And, if he’s honest with himself, it’s about Claire’s ghost, which he imagines with its face pressed to the house windows, outside in the cold, wanting in, wanting to hover over the infant girl and the sleeping mother and father.
He takes another sip from his cup of tea, lifting it to his lips with his left hand, and he sees the liquid in the cup tremble as if it’s frightened, a response to a slight tremor in his arm that he’s begun to feel over the past half year and about which he’s told no one. The heat from the wood-burning stove envelops his chair, but he knows the other rooms of the house are cooling, and he’s lived in them so long that he feels them as his own extremities. He remembers how, as a small boy, he would sometimes wake late in the evening, and walk into the living room where his father would be sitting on one end of the couch, smoking a pipe. Once, Marc had stood for what seemed a long time, watching his father take a pinch of tobacco from a pouch, and then tamp it into the pipe with his forefinger. He’d popped the cap of his metal lighter, and then worked the tiny wheel near the flint, slowly, as if he were contemplating it, and when he finally had flicked it to ignite the flame, he’d stared at the small fire for several seconds before bringing it to the tobacco in the pipe and the pipe to his mouth. He drew on it to make sure the tobacco burned, two spurts of smoke coming from the corner of his mouth, and then took the pipe from his mouth and turned his wrist to glance at his watch. Now, Marc glances at his own watch, and wishes he had the rituals of pipe smoking to fend off his loneliness, and he understands that his father had checked his watch not only because he was calculating how much sleep he was losing, but because he wished to wed his rituals to the increments of time passing, which, at an hour of desperation, were the only things that made it bearable.
He hears the slight creak of the floor upstairs, and, because he knows the house so well, figures that Joline has risen to change the baby’s diaper. But then she walks out of the room, and he hears, without turning his head, her descend each stair, and counts each till he knows she’s reached the bottom. He shifts in his chair and looks at her. She’s wearing a white gown with rows of some kind of floral pattern that is difficult to discern in the dim light, and she stands with the baby in one arm, turning at the hips to rock her though the baby seems sound asleep. She stares at him for a few moments, and he sees again the depth of her gray eyes, and then she walks over and sits down in the chair adjacent to him.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks. He reaches for the pipe, then, realizing how deep his reverie about his father had been, picks up the cup of tea instead.
“Not well,” she says.
He lifts the cup toward her and says, “I’d be happy to make you some tea.”
“No, thank you. Thanks for asking, though.”
He takes a sip and looks at her over the rim of the mug as she stares at him, sleepy-eyed, but levelly. He has to look away. She glances down at the sleeping baby, pulls a corner of her flannel blanket away from her mouth, and then looks up at him again.
“So I was up there sleeping. Dreaming,” she says.
He does not like to hear about people’s dreams, or interpret their subconscious stories from the fragments of memory and desire that arrange themselves according to a substructure that, to his mind, is no more illuminating than patterns of crystal in a stone. Kathleen loves to recount her dreams, and he is not surprised her daughter would, too. So he asks, “What was your dream?”