All That's Left to Tell(64)

She glanced over at Genevieve again, and wanted to wake her. Amid another wave of fear, she looked back at the lit sign. Last Day of Classes: June 13th. Have a smart summer! It was difficult for her to imagine, as Genevieve had, the children pouring out of the doors. In an hour or two, she told herself, it would be a beautiful June morning. It had never rained. Beyond the creek she’d seen before they slept, she could now see a ball field cut into the rows of corn.

“Your crickets are back,” Genevieve said. Claire looked back at her, and she was up on an elbow. “And maybe before sunrise we’ll hear an owl, too. Remember how quiet it was last night?”

She listened to them, and watched the occasional firefly glow near the water. Beyond the field, another light came on in the farmhouse.

“Doesn’t this place seem familiar to you?” Genevieve asked. “Isn’t it kind of like where you grew up?”

But Claire couldn’t answer her.

“Something wrong, Claire?” Genevieve’s head was framed by the light that still seemed to glow beyond the ball field.

“Lie down next to me, please,” Claire said. They both lay back on the mattress so that they were shoulder to shoulder. Together, for several moments, they looked up at the sky.

“See anything heavenly up there?” Genevieve asked with a lilt, but when Claire didn’t respond, she asked again, “What’s wrong?”

“That kiss. The story you told about my father, when I was falling asleep. Joline kissing him with his eyes closed. The way he kissed me when I was fourteen. And Pakistan.”

Claire continued to watch the sky. Genevieve didn’t turn to look at her, but instead reached for her fingers, squeezed them, and then lay with her hand over Claire’s.

“How did you know my father, Genevieve? How could you know him? You said you were in Pakistan, but you would have barely been fifteen when he was there. And he was there for only a few weeks in a city with millions of people. And then the highway where you were hitchhiking. That’s worse. You couldn’t have known I was driving down that road.”

The trills of the crickets were muffling the trailing noise of one or two cars along the freeway. Now she faintly heard the water running in the creek, and Genevieve, for a few moments, seemed to be listening, too.

“I’ll tell you about that after you finish the rest of your story. In fact, you won’t even have to ask.”

“I want to know how you knew my father.”

“I’ll tell you. I swear, I’ll tell you. Afterward.”

But Claire was still fighting a sense of panic. The story she’d told about the time with Seth, now almost half her life ago, had made that memory vivid, had further pushed out the familiar rhythms of her life at the motel in California, already unmoored by the phone call about her father, by the road, and by Genevieve. She was remembering clearly those nights with Seth, was sensing again how night fell into night, one tipping forward into the other, like an end-to-end collapse of houses set closely together, and she knew what would happen in the last of that row. Having recalled for Genevieve how much desire she had felt for Seth, she was troubled, now, by how little she remembered of him.

She’d met his mother once—a woman who couldn’t have been more than fifty, but back then seemed too thin and stooped at the shoulders—who had said to her, “Well, aren’t you a pretty young thing. You should hear how he raves about you.” But what could he have told his mother about her, after all?

Claire imagined she was on another stretch of highway, back in Nevada, coming around a bend and seeing Seth with his thumb out. “What took you so long?” he said and smiled, after he jogged up to the truck; he was still twenty years old, but he slowly turned his face and showed her his knife wound, healed in the same rough way as her own.

“You won’t need to ask,” Genevieve said again. “I promise.”

“Why do you want to hear it so bad?”

“I told you. Because it’s the story you never tell.”

“But you don’t know all that much about me, and what stories I might tell.”

“Do you really believe that at this point?”

Claire was expecting the sky to lighten, but instead more stars had emerged. She heard the cars and trucks in the distance, their rushing past offering that heard sense of the wind. The sounds of the insects were syncopated by the twang of a frog.

“I like this place,” Claire said faintly.

“It’s a good place for you to finish your story. Better than the highway, you know? I mean, think of all those kids in that school over there, gathered during the winter months to hear their teachers read books to them. It’s a place where stories are told. And when you’re done, if you want me to, I’ll tell you the rest of the story about your father. And then we can head down the road, and before you drop me off in Chicago, we can talk about other things.”

“Okay, Genevieve.”

Claire closed her eyes, held a deep breath, and then released it.

“I wouldn’t say, the night after we took the walk to the bakery, or the days that followed it, and there weren’t that many, that things changed completely. But they were different. We still drank at night. We still ended the drinking with one of us pulling the other into the bedroom. And Seth still talked to me while we were making love, but he had pulled back some from the violence of the fantasy I told you about. When he’d come in from work, and I’d be standing in the kitchen, making some sort of simple meal for us, he’d come up behind me, breathe in the scent from my neck, and tell me he loved me. He’d keep his face buried in my hair until I said it back to him, as if he needed to hear it. Most times, I didn’t mind telling him that I did love him, though I knew I didn’t mean it anymore.