All That's Left to Tell(56)

“Genevieve?”

“Yeah?” She was still staring up at the sky.

“In the story you told. About my father. And Kathleen and Tom and Joline. And the baby. When they were at the table eating lunch. How did you know my father was in Pakistan?”

Genevieve’s expression didn’t change, but she did close her eyes for a second or two before opening them again and staring upward.

“It was kind of a guess. But I’ll tell you how I guessed if you’ll tell me something.”

“How could you guess a place like Pakistan?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You wouldn’t believe me seems like a funny thing to say after everything you’ve described to me.”

“I was there for a while. Not for long. Six months or so.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you that story if you’ll tell one to me.”

“What story do you want to hear?”

Genevieve finally turned away from the sky, shifted onto her side, and looked back at the building. She said, “Can’t you just see all those kids running out of here on the last day of school, with their backpacks stuffed with pictures and projects they’d forgotten to bring home earlier in the year? My mother would take me and my friends out for ice cream, and she’d sort through my pack, admiring everything I’d done. I used to love that. What’s today, the sixteenth? It was only three days ago for these kids. They’re already becoming their endless summer selves.”

“Not endless,” Claire said.

“No, but it seemed like it back then, didn’t it?” Genevieve fell back against the thin mattress with her fingers crossed and under her chin. She looked like a child, and this didn’t suit her. “You probably already know what story. The one about this scar.” She reached over and found the place and touched Claire through her T-shirt. “Of the time you were attacked. How it happened. And who you were with. And who did it to you.”

“I really don’t want to tell that story. I don’t think I’ve ever told it to anyone. Even Jack.”

“I know. That’s why it’s the one I want to hear.”

Claire looked at Genevieve’s face. There was a slight smile on her full lips, and she was staring at her without blinking.

“Just tell me part of it,” she said. “The first part. Then I’ll tell you the rest of Marc’s story, and while we’re driving you can tell me the rest of yours. Do you think we’ll make Chicago by tomorrow night?”

“There’s a chance. It’s a long way. But maybe before midnight tomorrow.”

“So this could be our last night.”

“That’s right.”

“Then start telling me your story, Claire.”

Claire rolled over onto her back and looked at the dark sky. With Lucy and Jack seeming so far away, Genevieve was now the only one who stood between her and this reunion. She tried to imagine standing at her father’s bedside, his gray head on a pillow. Her mother’s aging face.

“I was living in a tiny apartment in the city,” she heard herself begin. “It wasn’t, you know, a nice place. If you turned the lights on in the middle of the night, you’d see roaches scurrying under the spoons or saucers you left out. And in January, the cold came through the cracks in the walls, and you had to walk around in sweaters with your shoulders wrapped in a blanket. I remember one cold snap where we brought in a thermometer, and the temperature inside read forty-nine degrees. We took a photo and sent it with the rent check to the landlord, but of course he never did anything. We didn’t expect him to. I don’t think we were even outraged. Spring was coming, after all.”

“Who’s we?” Genevieve asked.

“I’m getting to that. It’s my story, isn’t it?” She smiled, and glanced at Genevieve, who nodded her head and smiled back.

“But I loved that little place. It was the first apartment I ever had, the first time I’d ever lived away from my mother and father. It was in this anonymous, square, yellow-brick building. I guess you could call it university housing, or something like that, because it was near a college, but the people who lived there mostly weren’t college students. A man in his seventies lived in the apartment below me. He’d come up and knock on my door if I played music too loud, but never in a mean way. He called me Clairekins. He’d say, ‘Clairekins, your music isn’t so bad, but it’s so loud.’ He brought me a tin of cookies for Christmas. And there was a Vietnamese family who lived two doors down. They didn’t hang curtains over their windows, and when you came up the walk toward the building, sometimes you could see them eating dinner, with chopsticks and everything, through their front window. I remember thinking it was so much better than TV. And a woman who lived on the first floor who’d set up a small patio outside her kitchen window. Each afternoon I’d come in from work, she’d say, ‘Hello, beautiful!’ which, at that age, surprised me every time. One spring day she asked me to sit next to her in a lawn chair and have a glass of wine. She told me she was married once, and that she lived in the country with her husband. And she said the thing she missed most was hanging laundry on clotheslines. She loved to see the wind billowing her sheets and her husband’s white shirts, particularly when the sun was bright and they seemed to blaze like the robes of the holy. She used that exact phrase. The robes of the holy. I always remembered what she said about laundry. Did I tell you I used to hang my daughter’s diapers on a clothesline behind the hotel?”