All That's Left to Tell(69)

“Yes, sweetheart. I’m right here.”

My eyes were still closed, following the fan blades.

“What happened to my father?”

*

After I moved west, it was the sense of this, the way everything at my mother’s house in those months seemed both sudden and familiar, even the apparition of my father, emerging in parts from my mother’s description of him as I watched the ceiling fan, that I described to Jeremy as he lay next to me in my bed in the apartment above the little diner where I wait tables in this tiny Nevada town. I’d met him when he’d stopped to eat one evening on his way home from the mines. He was older than I was by maybe ten years, and his face was rough-cut out of that dry land, and permanently red from working on it, his eyes brilliantly blue. He was kind and quiet. When we started seeing each other, he didn’t ask many questions about me, though this seemed to come from a well of respect for my privacy rather than disinterest. The first few times we went out, we would go for long drives in his truck, because no place you’d want to visit during a cold November in northern Nevada is close to anyplace else. During those drives, we were mostly silent, other than the country music on the radio. Once he turned to me as we headed down another empty stretch of road, and said, “You know, most women aren’t content to sit quiet like this.”

I smiled at him. “Maybe most women from around here.”

“I always thought back-east women could talk a mile a minute.”

“Michigan isn’t what I’d call back east, Jeremy.”

He gave me his strong smile, his teeth bright in his red face.

“East of here, Miss Claire.”

I’d told him about my home, about my mother, who hadn’t wanted me to leave, and how my father was killed in Pakistan, but for a while I didn’t want to tell him how I lost my memory. He seemed content to wait for me, in the way that a good man who gets used to the desolation of that land—the rocks stacked on rocks, the outcroppings of wind-beaten pines, the mountains on the far horizon that always make me feel lonely when I take a few moments to look at them—knows that it yields its stories warily.

On an evening when he’d taken me to a movie in Elko, after holding my hand for the half-hour drive back to the diner, I was ready to have him come up to my room. That first night, he didn’t ask about the heavy purple scars on my back and chest. I could tell, for him, it had been a long time since he’d slept with anyone, and he felt as much relief as desire at lying naked together, and when he was inside me, I felt how some of the isolation that my loss of memory caused was driven out of me for a while.

Next morning, when we woke up together, he watched from the bed as I made coffee in the kitchen, and when I walked over to hand him his mug, my robe fell open, and I saw him glance at the scars.

“That must’ve hurt,” he said. It was a cold morning, with a winter storm moving in, and his skin was run over with goose bumps, but he was used to it and didn’t cover his bare chest with the blanket.

“I don’t really remember,” I said, after setting my own cup of coffee on the nightstand and crawling back into bed beside him.

“Seems like it’d be a hard thing to forget.”

He was looking at my face, and in his eyes I could see concern and perhaps the first glimmer of love. So I told him what I knew about what happened to me, the things my mother said, the details I’d sought from the brief articles on the Internet, how they’d not caught the man who’d stabbed me or found the man who’d lived with me. But mostly I described what it was like to wake each morning in my mother’s house and recognize everything but remember none of it.

He listened very carefully, glancing occasionally out the window as the panes rattled in the wind, and a few flakes of snow were whipped about. Finally, he said, “So for all you can tell, last night might have been your first time with a man.”

“No, no. I’m sure it wasn’t,” I told him.

“How do you know?” he said, smiling. “You’re young.”

I smiled back at him. “Did it feel to you like it was my first time?”

He looked away from me and lay back against the pillow.

“No, I got to admit, it didn’t.”

“My body can remember other men. My body does. It’s only my brain that doesn’t.”

He thought about this for a while, running his hand over his whiskered face. I liked the way the winter light made the pale skin glow on his arms and chest, and his muscles underneath reminded me of fish just under the surface of the water.

“What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m trying to figure out if I envy you. I mean it’s an awful thing to be attacked like that. But I’m talking about losing your memory. On one hand, it would be terrible to not be able to remember anybody. Your friends. Your family. Gotta be hard on your mom and … sorry.”

He glanced at me, but when I said nothing, he looked out the window where the wind was howling.

“On the other hand, maybe it’s better not to remember being hurt. And it’s kind of like a fresh start. Not obliged to anybody. Nobody bothering about who missed you at Christmastime when you didn’t show up.” He looked back at me. “I didn’t tell you I got a kid.”

“No, you didn’t. Were you married?”