All That's Left to Tell(61)
“Are you okay?”
“I think I’m a little homesick.”
Genevieve reached out and took her hand and squeezed it.
“I know,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like the road was made for it. Do you want to hear a little more of your father’s story?”
“I don’t know, Gen. The closer we get, the less that seems to make sense. I’m going to see him for real in less than forty-eight hours.”
“Don’t you want to hear what happened next?”
She lay there, thinking about it. She had told Genevieve more than she’d ever intended. But she said, “I do. I do. I do want to hear what happened.”
“The next stretch of highway is so plain,” Genevieve said. “So dull. I’ll tell you a little bit now, and I’ll wait to tell you the very last part till then. Maybe we’ll change the landscape some.”
“Okay.”
And then they lay quietly for a while. Genevieve had not let go of her hand. Claire was waiting for Genevieve to begin, but she could feel herself passing into the images that accompany first sleep, and she heard Genevieve humming a tune, like a lullaby. In the midst of that tune, Genevieve asked, “Did you lose track of Seth?” The question caught Claire off guard.
“Yes. Of course I did.”
“Why of course?”
“Well, I lost track of almost everyone from that time. After I was—after I was hurt, I never heard from Seth again. It was strange, I suppose. My mother told me he had been cut, too, right along a cheekbone. I don’t imagine that had anything to do with him never even trying to call. What do you say after something like that happens and you’re twenty years old?”
Genevieve nodded, and kept her eyes closed, and finished humming her tune.
“What song is that?” Claire asked, but instead of answering, Genevieve shook her head and pulled back some strands of hair.
“After Marc tells Kathleen about Claire,” Genevieve began, “filling in the details as honestly as he can, he and Kathleen sit quietly in the living room. He knows Kathleen feels in some way betrayed, though she didn’t shed any tears and hasn’t spoken of it. She has tried to read; she’s taken up her knitting again, but has stopped and is now staring absently out the window, her fingers covering her mouth. Marc wishes she would say something, and resists wondering if she might leave him. He doesn’t want to think about Claire. Instead, he steadies his mind on this enormous, new kind of quiet. And on this new kind of cold. Did the cold bring the quiet, or the quiet the cold?”
“I was thinking about something like that just a few minutes ago,” Claire said.
“Is that right?” Genevieve asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course it is the cold that brings the quiet. In the winter, things sleep. Hibernate. Most birds fly south. The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Marc doesn’t know where that line came from. Something he read in high school. But birds do gather at the feeder his neighbor puts out. He sees them in the morning sometimes pecking at seeds, sometimes driving other birds away. In winter, their calls seem more like claim than song. He hopes the cold that has descended on him and Kathleen isn’t permanent.
“Yet, in a way, the quiet brings the cold, too. If it is a remote September day, a warm, last-of-summer day, and you are walking with some children along a lakeshore, and they’re chattering, playing, dodging the lapping waves, and a small flock of gulls lands a hundred feet up the beach, and the children take off after them, chasing them into the sky as they screech and fly away, their calls receding into the sound of the waves, and the children are struck dumb as they watch what they accomplished, and everything is muted for a few seconds, so quiet, and then comes a chill—finger-light—running along your spine: then the quiet brings the cold. And reminds you of—what? Of the coming autumn? Of death? He’d read that some say when they’re about to die, that what they want is more light, and some say they want more warmth.
“And then, despite himself, Marc remembers again the warmth of Joline’s kiss. The way she’d told him to keep his eyes closed.”
Genevieve stopped there and seemed to be listening to something in the night.
“Are you still awake, Claire?”
13
When he woke in the early morning before dawn, still facing the wall, his arms and legs aching, his shoulder throbbing, his first thought was, Please don’t let her die. He had not recoiled from the story Claire had told—Josephine had told—about Claire’s lover and his fantasy, though he recognized the destination for Claire was not Chicago, not Michigan, but telling the story of the moment of her death. And he was unsure whether he’d be able to bear hearing it, or, even more terribly, not hearing it. He was unable to measure Genevieve’s intentions any more than he could measure Josephine’s, as if they were somehow distinct, which Josephine had insisted. And how would it end, anyway? How could it, since Josephine had said their own time together would be ending soon? Anyway, Claire was dead. His memory of his collapse the night before pulled at the corner of his eyes. I want to see your face.
The room was already too warm. Slowly, he began to make the painful shift onto his back.
“Marc, I’m still here. Saabir’s outside the door.”
Rather than roll over onto his back, Marc slowly stretched his legs. She had not given him the invitation again, but he could easily have turned toward her and looked at her fully.