by Daniel Lowe
He stopped speaking, and then strained at the rope on his wrists to dispel the physical discomfort the memory had left. The rope was loose enough that he probably could have pulled out his hands with another minute or two of effort. Azhar was too kind with his knots.
“‘You shouldn’t have kissed me’?” the woman asked.
“Yes. That’s the last thing she said to me.” He was unable to add “ever,” but it hardly mattered. “That was like Claire ever since she was sixteen. You’d be having a talk with her about anything. It could have been about an accident on the freeway that held up traffic for an hour. And in the middle of the conversation she’d drop in some memory out of the blue that left you stunned.”
“‘I made the cut.’”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Why did she want you to stop kissing her?”
“It wasn’t like that. It was something else.”
He was resisting this image of Claire, but his mind finally focused on the one that flickered when she was fourteen and asleep on the couch. He wondered, briefly and wryly, if psychiatrists ever employed a blindfold and a gun. But he didn’t say this to the woman.
“She was thirteen, maybe fourteen. I want to think younger than that, but she probably wasn’t. One of those days in late August when it’s been hot and humid, but the day winds down into a cool evening that reminds you September is coming, then fall. I was sitting in an armchair in our living room with the newspaper, and Claire was reading a book on the couch. We didn’t have air-conditioning, but the ceiling fan was circling slowly above us. Claire had reached the age where it was pretty rare to have her home on any summer evening, since she was usually out with friends. Her skin shone in the lamplight where she was reading, and she kept pulling her hair behind her ear, since this was the time before she cut it short. I was watching her read. It seemed like she’d make it through a paragraph, and then she’d look at the fan slowly spinning, close her eyes for a few seconds, then go back to the book. I was trying to remember what it was like to be fourteen, for it to be August, and a few weeks, yet, before school started, but close enough that you savored the days because summer was no longer stretched out before you. And it was easier to remember those days while sitting in the living room watching Claire read—a memory that anyone would have—”
“Not anyone.”
“Okay, Josephine, maybe not anyone, but most of us who grew up there at that time. Driving to a lake after sunset with a six-pack of beer that you’d talked someone into buying for you, drinking that beer with your friends, girls in their bathing suits who you’d never touched slipping into the velvet water. Those nights that stirred together the familiar with some hoped-for possibility. And I was watching my daughter while remembering this, and she laid her book down on her chest then, and her eyes followed the slow circling of the fan until she closed them, opened them again, following the fan, and then closed them, and when I looked closely they still seemed to be tracing the fan’s path under her eyelids and lashes.
“She was so—pretty lying there. I could see her as my daughter, but also see her as someone who was almost a woman, young and beautiful, on the edge of this final wave of summer, stretching out over the shore as if the crest of the wave had hands with this infinite capacity for gentleness, and they would leave her nestled in the shimmering and soft sand without her so much as turning over in her sleep. And in the living room, I found myself standing next to her as she lay on the couch, then kneeling down, her eyes still moving under her lids, maybe following in a dream, now, the circling of a waterbird, and I leaned over and kissed her on the lips, leaving my own lips lingering there for probably several seconds.”
He stopped there, and knew the woman probably couldn’t see him wincing because he still recognized the source of the kiss while for another moment he held off the memory of its consequence.
“And then what happened?” the woman asked, a thickness in her voice.
“Her eyes snapped open, of course. She said, ‘Dad!’ My face must have seemed larger than the moon. I pulled away instantly, and she sat bolt upright. The book that had been on her chest fell to the floor. I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, Claire. I can’t believe I just did that.’ And she said, ‘It’s okay.’ And then, as if this would explain it, I said, ‘I’m just so proud of how beautiful you’ve become,’ which made it only worse, of course. Her eyes looked glassy, and then I sort of backed into my armchair, and she stood up and walked toward the stairs to go up to her room. I felt a moment of panic and said, ‘Your mother shouldn’t—’ but Claire stopped almost midstride and glared at me, and I didn’t finish my sentence, and then she went upstairs without looking back.”
He had never been a great storyteller, and now, telling this story, he wondered at how memory worked, his eyes closed, capturing images of Claire on the couch, on the stairs, but never in continuous motion, not like a film, but more like a flipbook where, when possible, someone paused while thumbing through to see how the illusion of motion was created. But it wasn’t always possible to linger like that, and the storytelling was fluid even if the memory was not, as if it had collected evidence and assembled its case.
They sat without speaking for a while, long enough that when the dog barked again, and roused him, he was sure minutes had passed.
“It’s getting late. I’ll have to go soon,” she said.
For the first time he had an unexpected impulse to ask her to stay.
“Okay,” he said weakly.
She shuffled her feet on the dirt floor, and then stood up and quietly opened the door. He thought she was gone, but then she said a few words to Azhar, and came back in and closed it, and he listened to her sweep away the image of the cow that Azhar had drawn earlier. She set the broom against the wall, and then he heard her walk back to the window, and when she spoke he was sure she was turned away from him.
“Claire,” she said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Claire is driving east. She’s left her husband to attend to the motel while she’s gone, and their daughter is three years old now, old enough to be without her mother for a few weeks, though Claire worries about this, and she comforts herself by knowing that her husband’s mother—the kind of grandmother that children dream of living in a gingerbread house—will be there to help.”
“Despite everything,” he interrupted, “the thing about the run-down motel and cleaning other people’s sheets. And hanging diapers on the clothesline. I would have hoped for more for Claire.”
She walked back from the window then, and pulled the chair closer than it had been and sat back down.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “Why would you think this has anything to do with what you had hoped?”
5
A truck roared past her, the first she’d seen in a while, and pushed her closer to a sign along the highway that read, Fire Danger Today. Extreme. The dry air that blew in through the open windows felt like someone lightly sanding her lips. She could travel these endless Western roads for a long time and see few other cars, a half hour, an hour on the same stretch, her mind swept elsewhere, away, absent, a dream of a mind. But then a tractor-trailer approached, or she’d see a dead animal in the road, and she’d have to steer around it, and once she was alert again it seemed as if an invisible hand had lowered her from the enormous sky onto this highway while a mouth whispered to her through the hum of the tires, “Your father is dying.”
She was entering a national forest, it hadn’t rained in weeks, though it was still only late June—an intermittent years-long drought—and they were worried any careless spark might set everything ablaze. She realized she was hungry. Hadn’t eaten before she’d left. She and Jack had made the quick decision for her to drive rather than pay for a last-minute airfare that they would be months paying off, since her father, hospitalized with heart problems, though gravely ill, would likely live a few more weeks. A three-day drive like she hadn’t taken in years, since she and Jack had come west, in fact, and it
had been many more years since she had seen her father.
She pulled off the highway into a town that had been carved out of the forest; it had a couple of streets with run-down homes set back from the main road where there was a small grocery store, and next door, for some reason, what looked to be a onetime antiques shop with a small trailer out front and a sign that read Ed’s Deli. Three picnic tables were set out in the dirt parking lot, and an older man and woman were sitting at one of them under a canopy that shielded them from the heavy sun. When she pulled into the lot in the tiny used pickup truck she and Jack had purchased to move supplies to and from the motel, she raised a cloud of dust, and was grateful that the slight breeze carried it away from the man and woman.
When she stepped out of the truck, the couple looked her over, smiling. They were sitting at the table with no food, but just outside the front stoop of the trailer was a gas grill where burgers were cooking. Inside she could see the shadow of someone moving back and forth in front of the window. There were signs in marker on whiteboards that listed the sandwiches and beverages, and in quotation marks below the phrase “All ingredients fresh from next door,” and then a red-markered arrow pointing to the small grocery store.
The man at the picnic table watched her looking at the menu and then said, “Everything’s good!”
She smiled at him and said, “Is that so? Any recommendations?”
“The burgers are great. That’s what we’re waiting on,” he said. “So’s the turkey. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“No.”
“Good thing, because you’d be out of luck.”
The man who must have been Ed stepped out of the small screen door in his trailer. He was younger, with a blue T-shirt that read, I may be unemployed, out of shape, short on cash, and drunk, but I sure am fun! He nodded at her as he looked her over, lifted the cover of the grill and flipped the burgers, and then turned back to her and said, “Happy to help you now.” He took out a pad of paper and a pen, and she ordered a turkey sandwich.
The man at the table said, “Hell, Ed, it’s not like you got a line of folks here. Can’t you remember a simple turkey sandwich?” Ed didn’t smile, but instead gave a half salute without looking, and walked back into the trailer.
She waited at a separate table in the sun. She was unused to having nothing to do with her hands, since at the motel she was either changing sheets, sweeping floors, attending to guests, or playing games with Lucy, her daughter, who stood at the knees of the truckers and campers while they were checking in at the desk, and often asked, “You stayin’ at my house?” At the end of the day, when she and Jack lay back in bed, usually with Lucy asleep between them, she would sometimes say, “Mercy,” which was a word her grandmother had used to express surprise, but, in Claire’s case, she thought of the work at the motel, loving Lucy, attending to Jack, as a form of mercy that framed her life in ways she had, before this, never found imaginable.
“Where you coming from?” the man at the table asked.
“A little town just south of Merced.”
“And where you heading to?”
“Michigan.”
“No kidding?” He looked from her to the truck and back to her. Ed came out of the trailer with two prepared buns alongside chips, and flipped the burgers off the grill and closed up the sandwiches. When he slid them in front of the man and woman, he saluted again, and said, “Turkey sandwich is coming up.”
“It can take a while,” the man said after Ed had gone back in. “Sometimes you’d swear he’d wandered off into the woods to hunt the bird.”
The man and woman began eating their burgers. It struck her that the woman had yet to say a word. Claire looked directly at her and asked, “Do you live here in town?”
The man turned, and pointed toward the houses that lay along two stretches of road above the highway. “The blue one there. We walk up most afternoons to have lunch here with Ed.”
Finally, the woman spoke. “Michigan? That’s a long way to drive all on your own.”
“It is,” she said. “But I really didn’t have much choice.”
“Visiting family?” the woman asked.
“You could say that, I guess.”
The woman was wearing a hat with a large white brim. Claire began to feel her own scalp prickle with the heat.
“Could you say otherwise?” the man asked.
“My father’s ill,” she said. “Congestive heart failure. He’s in the hospital. So I’m going back to see him.”
The man looked down at his sandwich, and his face darkened, as if this revelation was something he didn’t want to witness. The woman said, “I’m so sorry.”
Inexplicably, Claire felt compelled to add, “The woman who called and told me he was in the hospital—I didn’t even recognize her name. I haven’t seen him in years. I haven’t even spoken to him, and I don’t even know if he knows he has a granddaughter.”
The man looked up at her again, started chewing with some speed, swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Why the hell not?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, why the hell not? How can it happen that a man has a granddaughter and doesn’t even know it?”
“Charlie, that’s not our business,” the woman said.
“The man has a granddaughter, Maeve. Child of his only child. And she never even told him.”
Claire watched him go back to his burger and take an oversized bite.
“How do you know that?” she asked. “How do you know I’m his only child?”
He waved his hand at her; through his teeth as he chewed, he said, “It’s written all over your face. All over your face. I’ve seen a thing or two in my time. What a shame.”
At that point Ed banged through the screen door with her sandwich in a paper bag, and walked it over to her and took her money. “Threw in a pickle and chips no charge,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Never mind him,” and he jerked his head toward the man at the table. He’d clearly overheard the conversation. “Figures he’s the local savant. Retired from the railroad, and he sits here every afternoon and guesses about the people come through. Last week he guessed someone was a circus clown. Turned out he’d done a stint as a rodeo clown, and the guy was amazed. Charlie here said he could tell by the way he walked.”
She thanked him and then climbed back into her truck, and when she came around the woman raised her hand and said, “Have a safe trip to Michigan,” but the man wouldn’t look up and just shook his head.
* * *
Back out on the highway, the wind streaming through—the air-conditioning barely worked, and in the high sun she was better off with the windows down—she thought about it. She had never planned on not speaking with her father. With her mother, either. After she’d nearly been killed, they had taken good care of her, one or the other of them in the hospital until she was released, and then through the long months that her back and shoulder healed. Sometimes when her mother was at work, or was out with her new boyfriend, her father, who had flown home the day he’d heard of the attack, would come by and spend time with her; they’d play Scrabble, or watch daytime TV, or sometimes she would put on music and they would listen together. But he would never ask where she’d been when she’d been stabbed, why she was there, and what it meant that she’d never heard from the man she said she’d loved after the night she was hurt.
One afternoon, when she was strong enough and angry enough at her confinement, and neither of them was at home, she’d packed a suitcase and left a note thanking them for everything. She’d told them she’d be in touch. And then she never was.
Occasionally, a postcard or letter would catch up with her, an e-mail after which she’d change her address, and once or twice a phone call, but when she heard either of them on voice mail, she’d shut down the message after listening to a few words. Claire, please, if you get this … If you only knew how much … I wonder what I’ve done … They’d done nothing, really, to deserve it, and
eventually the messages stopped coming.
Now, two birds were circling high in the heat, taking updrafts that pushed them above what had once been a huge lake, but now was mostly dried lake bed with edges where grass grew and cows grazed. She did not like to think about those years, did not want to remember them, that purposeless rage that drove her from town to town, and she could remember them less and less as Lucy grew and even her own childhood seemed dimmed by her daughter’s—her sweetness, her milky breath when she fell asleep in her arms, the coins and gum wrappers and occasional key she’d find in the motel rooms while Claire cleaned that she would later offer to Claire like treasures. All spring, she’d been fascinated by the swallows that were nesting under the eaves of the motel.