All That's Left to Tell(66)
“Any others?”
“I’m sure there are.” She thought about it for a few seconds. “I had a friend, too. Her name was Chloe. And I remember one of our rituals most summer afternoons was a long walk around a nearby lake to a candy store. We couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We’d get a dollar from our mothers and go out and buy some kind of treat; I think it gave our moms a break for the afternoon. One time when we were walking, we saw a dead squirrel on the street, and we felt sorry for it. We were both pretty squeamish about dead things, but I grabbed a long stick and pushed it into the high grass along the shoulder of that road. And when I was done, I started smelling my hand because I’d been pushing the squirrel’s little corpse, and Chloe said, ‘What’s the matter, Claire? You afraid your hand’s gonna smell like stick?’ And something about that struck us so funny, that we collapsed laughing, right along the side of the street.”
Genevieve laughed at this quietly, and then said, “That’s a nice memory.” Claire wasn’t certain, but this may have been the first time she heard her laugh. Neither of them said anything for a while. Something fluttered by the hood of the truck, an insect, but then flew off again.
“Anyway, while Seth was gone, I was thinking about how he had begun waiting for me to tell him I loved him, and that I didn’t know enough, anymore, to say that to him with any confidence. I never had a time like Joline, in your story, Gen, the way the father of her child saw her, when I felt like the way he looked at me was some kind of transformative moment. I loved learning his body, what a man’s body could do, and how it would respond. But during those days he was driving to Florida, after I left work, I spent hours walking around the city. I remember seeking out the abandoned buildings, the ones with shattered windows, and floors covered with paper and trash. I was seeing empty buildings, broken buildings, no lives being lived in them, no businesses working out of them anymore.
“And I was thinking they had pasts that weren’t difficult to imagine, people at desks or working on assembly lines, and I was thinking that wasn’t true about the apartment I had with Seth, where so many lives had been lived that you couldn’t imagine only one, and then I was thinking about the house I grew up in, where by this time my father and mother had separated, and how someone standing outside it would see a pretty home with a blossoming cherry tree, because it would have been blossoming by that time, and I wondered whether they could see, too, the tension of the lives being lived there, lives that were still going on. Whether they could see the house, and the beautiful tree, and see the beauty, but also feel the tension. Once a building was abandoned, like those I looked into on those long walks, I knew the imagined lives in them were over. And those two nights, coming home late to that empty apartment, I could tell that my life with Seth was over, too. Not because he was gone. Not because of what he was doing. It’s just that those tiny rooms already looked like a place someone had once lived in, long ago.”
She could hear Genevieve breathing in the foreground, the sounds of the insects behind her. She thought of the motel, and how far away it seemed, how Lucy and Jack were there, maybe Lucy lying on the couch next to Jack, who had fallen asleep while quietly turning the pages of a magazine in order not to wake her. But she was having trouble picturing them.
“He came back the evening of the third day. He’d called to tell me when he was arriving, and I’d made a good dinner for him. I wasn’t going to break up with him right away. Particularly because when he came through the door, he was so happy. He almost bounded in. I asked him how Florida was, and he said everything went fine, and that it was fun to drive into summer, and to see palm trees, which he’d never done before.
“But he didn’t say much of anything else. He kept telling me how delicious the meal was, which was just chicken and potatoes and green beans, and yet he was savoring each bite, looking into my eyes and smiling as he chewed. But I was already watching his jaw move, seeing the way he looked at his meal, then back up at me, and the way he pushed his food around on his plate—it was like a videotape that I was playing back, years from now, rewinding and playing back, in order to remember him, because I was already amazed at how faded this time of my life had become.
“We still drank together after that dinner. We still pulled each other to the bedroom afterward. He didn’t talk while we made love, and, instead of rolling off of me afterward, he fell asleep on top of me while I stroked the hair around his neck. So when the man broke through the apartment door, he was still there, his chest on mine, his knee thrown over my thighs.”
Claire wrapped her arms around herself. She closed her eyes in order to remember, to block out the simple, tame beauty of the early morning, the empty school, the dark ball field, and the starry sky, which was increasingly feeling like the only place in the world.
“What happened next wasn’t all that dramatic. I mean, it was so quick, when I think about it now. The man broke through the door and bellowed Seth’s last name. It wasn’t hard to find us, even though the lights were out. The place was so small. Seth had gotten to his feet, and was standing on the mattress, trying to keep his balance, and just as the man came through the doorway to the bedroom, I had pulled myself up, half-blinded by fear, and was reaching for Seth, reaching for him, but then I was overcome by some unexpected fury, and I turned toward the man and tried to hit him, and then fell toward him, and I have no idea whether he intended to hurt anyone or only terrorize Seth to get the money Seth had stolen, or hadn’t given to him, but I felt the knife enter at my shoulder, I felt it puncture my lung and go all the way through, and then the man pulled it out and I heard him say the first words of a sentence. ‘Fuck! I didn’t know—’ but then it was like he was speaking a different language, even though he couldn’t have been, and I heard Seth scream and dive forward, and he fell on top of me and I could hear the sound of someone running away. Seth was up on his arms, looking down, asking me a question, and I could feel droplets falling from his face, but it was still dark in the room, and I couldn’t tell what they were. He turned me over and was pushing on my chest, where the blade had come through, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He went away then, for what seemed a long time, and when he came back, I was cold, so cold, and shivering, and he covered me up and put his hand to my shoulder again. I could feel how wet the bed was around me, and he was pressing on my chest, but I could also hear him sobbing, his shoulders heaving, and he was repeating something over and over, but it was like I’d lost all capacity to understand language, and could only hear the words being made. I remember hearing sirens, though they were far off, and I was thinking of the Sirens of Greek mythology, and the way they would lure men toward their deaths. And I thought for a minute that I could be dying, and that Seth’s voice was the voice of a Siren. But then all I felt was the cold again, and I felt myself shaking, and Seth was gone, and I was alone in that room, and it was incredibly large and growing larger, with its receding walls, and I was alone, alone and—”