All That's Left to Tell(71)

“It is peaceful.”

“You used to come out here on the weekend to visit all by yourself. We bought you some ice skates one Christmas when you were only five or six, and I had to call you in those winter evenings or you’d have kept skating on into the dark.”

I smiled. “Is it nice in the winter?”

“It’s cold! But it’s beautiful after the water freezes over. The only time I saw the whole lake ice up at once was on one of those weekends you stayed over. It was right after the New Year, and we had a fresh snowfall. We were lying on the couch together, and you were asleep. You might’ve been in third grade back then. The lake was choppy, with little whitecaps everywhere, and they looked pretty because they matched the snow on the banks. I’d set aside the book I was reading to you, and kept glancing out the window, but fell asleep myself for a minute or two. Then I thought I heard someone walking in the front of the yard, and it woke me, and I sat up, and no one was there, but the wind had died, and I could see this perfectly clear skin of ice slowly spread itself over the water, from the banks to almost the middle of the lake.”

She looked up at me then, and smiled shyly, as though she’d revealed something about herself that she hadn’t intended.

“When you woke up, you asked to put your skates on first thing,” she said.

I gave her a hug, and told her I’d like to sit out near the lake for a few minutes by myself, like my father used to do, and she squeezed my hand and brought back a lawn chair for me before she went inside.

*

Can you grieve for someone you don’t remember? About whom you’ve only heard stories, even if those stories include a version of yourself you can’t recall? Or is it like waking in a theater at the end of a movie where everyone around you is crying?

I sat for a long while trying to recall my father, trying to imagine him as a boy swinging on the boughs of a willow tree, splashing his sisters in the water out at the end of the dock where my grandmother’s old boat was tied, and I imagined my father, too, pulling the oars that would lead the boat across the water, and I imagined I may have sat in the bow a time or two while he rowed across the lake.

I thought of him as a man visiting his mother, sitting where I was late on a summer evening, that time of night when the vacationers who filled the rented cottages would have doused their charcoal pits, and their kids would long since be out of the water and immersed in the deep slumber that comes from a day of play on the lake. There might be a few fireflies still lit along the banks, and the wind would have died down by then, and there would be only a faint lapping of invisible waves that he could hear against the black line of sand at the lake’s edge. A late-night fisherman might be rowing in, or someone in a canoe, maybe a couple of teenagers, or a newlywed couple, who had paddled to the other side of the lake to whisper to each other or exchange kisses.

My mother had told me a woman was somehow involved in my father’s kidnapping in Pakistan. I hadn’t searched very deeply to find out more about her; there didn’t seem to be much reason. They thought she may have been from upstate New York, but no one could find her mother or father. The photo they had online did what they always do, which was to make her look haunted, angry, and unattractive. As I looked out over the lake at a fisherman casting his line, I tried to imagine the woman in a room with my father, a room in a country he never had the chance to know, where at the end all he had was his memory to comfort him, the opposite of what I felt in those first mornings after I’d been attacked, waking in my bedroom where I grew up. I wondered if my father had said anything at all to the woman about me. I wondered what life he’d dreamed up for me when I was born, and what life, if any, he’d wanted for me before he died.

Sometimes, now, on the rare weekend when Jeremy’s daughter is visiting, while she lies sleeping between us and I’ve wakened early to watch the first morning light brighten the bed where she and Jeremy are curled in toward each other, I think I know what he might be dreaming of, even in his waking hours. That the two of us could marry. That we could raise his daughter in that hard-scrubbed landscape, that her eyes would take on the blue of the sky, and we would build a little home near a stand of pine trees where I’d hang clothes outside in the clean wind that rolls over the mountains, his little girl’s blue dress flapping in the breeze. I could go to college in Elko, learn a trade or have a career, and we could live a happy life carved out of the stark beauty of that land. Part of me wants that.

But during those nights his daughter visits, in the living stillness made by the knowledge that she is asleep between us, my own dreaming returns. At first come shadows, forgotten rooms, and then familiar faces, half sentences someone is speaking to me that I remember, but then dissolve when I open my eyes. I don’t know that these memories will continue to return, but I do know they are out there, along with all of the things I can’t remember. Even though I can’t name them, I think of them in the world, I think of them in the minds of other people, as if these others are the caretakers of my memories—for me, or for maybe everyone who has forgotten anything or has been forgotten—people living in different times, people in faraway lands.

It’s like waking to a life someone dreamed for you. Maybe, at some point, that’s partly true for everyone. I think of Jeremy opening his eyes in my bed, and, in the half second before he remembers me, seeing a woman in a strange kitchen making coffee. I think of my mother, waking to a morning when the man she’d loved, lived with, then left had been killed, his body never found; and, months later, on another morning, waking to a daughter who had disappeared.