All That's Left to Tell(47)

He thinks about it, thinks through the images of her he can hold in his mind; he can no longer discern how the edge of a memory is altered by the time since. He loved her curiosity when she was only three, and she’d be running down a sidewalk when a bird lit on a wire overhead, and she’d stop almost midstride to look, her straw hair falling to one shoulder as she cocked her head sideways, her lips parted in thought, and the color in her cheeks rising with interest.

“You have so much to look forward to,” he says to her, and coughs to keep something from rising in his throat.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean yes, we were close, when she was still small.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was injured. Hurt. She’d been stabbed, and we thought she’d die. But she recovered. It took months, but she did get well. And then she left a little note for her mother and me, and disappeared.”

He can smell the sweet, slightly musky scent of the baby again, and reflexively starts to raise her to his face, but he resists. Joline has been sitting with an arm on each rest of the chair, as if she were piloting something, but now she crosses her arms over her chest.

“You can have her back if you’re getting cold,” he says, but she only shakes her head. She takes in a slight breath, as if she’s about to say something, and then decides against it. But the air between them, if possible, has gone even more still.

“I have another child,” she says. “Fathered by a different man.”

She turns her head and looks into his face, her eyes dark.

“How old are you, Joline?”

She smiles slightly. “What a strange question to ask. I’m twenty-nine.”

“I’m sorry. You just seem so young.”

“Only a few years younger than your daughter.”

“Does Tom know?”

“He’s not the kind of man who would want to.”

“And your mother?”

She shakes her head.

“Why are you telling me?”

“I’d think that’d be obvious.”

He looks down at the baby again. “What happened?”

She watches him holding the baby, and he realizes that unwittingly, he’s been rocking her slightly.

“I was so in love with his father. The baby’s father. I was only twenty-three, and I know you’d probably laugh if I weren’t sitting right here in front of you when I say that I believed then that I knew all there was to know about love.”

“I wouldn’t laugh.”

“Well, I might. Not that loving Tom has deepened those waters. I guess it’s made them wider.”

“I think I understand that.”

“Yeah?” she asks, but isn’t waiting for an answer. “My brother didn’t like him. And that mattered to me, of course.”

“Tom told me that your brother mattered to you more than anyone. More than any other man, anyway.”

She looks away. “I guess that’s true. But he did not like him. He thought he was dangerous. Or reckless, I think, was the word he used. And that turned out to be true, you know, but I don’t mean because I became pregnant. Probably I wanted that. Secretly I wanted that. To secure some part of him. And I don’t mean to keep him in a place, or to keep him with me, because that was something I wouldn’t do. Or couldn’t do.”

He watches her thinking about this for a few moments. It is strange that, while her bringing the baby into his home had brought Claire near, he was having a conversation unlike any he’d ever had with his daughter.

“Did you give the baby up for adoption, Joline?”

“Yes.” She turns toward him then, but seems to be looking past him back into the night. “It was a challenge to keep the pregnancy hidden from Kathleen. And Jon.”

“That was something the father wanted, then.”

“No. No, he didn’t want that.”

“Well, then, did he run away?”

“No. It’s funny. As reckless as he probably was, he didn’t know how to do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he was reckless, but not irresponsible. He took risks, but that was because he was young, and he believed in his—I don’t know what to call them. He believed in his little crusades. When he found out I was pregnant, he was overjoyed. I don’t think he’d once thought of being a father, but when I told him, and even I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby then, it’s like you could see his face fill with the possibility, like he was already pushing a five-year-old boy on his bicycle down the sidewalk, and telling him he was about to let go.”

“So what happened? What do you mean by little crusades?”

She shakes her head, and looks away, back toward the kitchen, and the way the remaining light strikes her face makes her look older.

“I shouldn’t have used the word little. It just seems that way now, now that I’m, you know, living this suburban life with this husband and a newborn baby. It’s like that was something that was inevitable all along.”

“It’s still not inevitable.”

She gives a short laugh. “Now you sound like him.”

“Who?”

“My child’s father.”

“What was his name?” But she shakes her head again.