by Daniel Lowe
Genevieve gave her a slight smile. “You sound so maternal,” she said.
Despite herself, she chuckled at this. “That might be the first time I ever heard that.”
“It’s not a criticism. It kind of suits you. But you don’t need to worry about me. Look, I took down the address, see?” She pulled a slip of paper out of her pocket and showed her. “The gas at that place comes from Exxon. And if it was one of the little links in their giant chain, I’d say screw them, they can spare the cash. But that old guy was an independent operator. He’s probably had that little station for years. I’ll send him the money when I get to Chicago.”
“All right,” Claire said. She sighed heavily, and relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. “Let’s see if we can make Salt Lake City.”
Claire handed Genevieve a packet of crackers, and she opened it and handed one to Claire.
“You ever swim in it?”
“What?”
“The Great Salt Lake. You ever swim in it?”
“No, I’ve never been there at all.”
“You can float in it without moving. Just like the Dead Sea.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that. You’ve been to the Dead Sea?”
“Oh, no. But that’s what they compare it to.”
The woman finished her crackers and laid her head back against the seat. After a while, she hummed a tune intermittently; Claire smiled, and then leaned forward, as if this would get them into Utah faster. She would have liked to call Jack and ask him what he thought of her new companion. Years running a motel had made him less wholesome, but he still had the farm-boy honesty that wouldn’t allow him to take a cent without returning it sometime. He’d get irate when a towel came up missing after a guest had checked out. “Like no one has enough towels at home, especially the raggedy ones we give ’em at this place? That’s stealing just to steal.”
Genevieve was right about the view from the road as they moved through Nevada. These desolate landscapes could be beautiful, but not at the peak of the day. She looked over at her. Genevieve’s eyes were closed, and she seemed to be dozing lightly. The sunburn had started to show on her high cheekbones. A strong face, she thought, but fair eyelashes that looked much longer now that she was asleep. A few beads of sweat showed on her upper lip. Her mouth was full, kissable like a starlet’s, and it didn’t fit her other features.
She may have felt her looking at her, and she opened her eyes and sat up quickly.
“Sorry. Must have been more tired than I thought.”
“No rule against taking a nap.”
“I’m supposed to be your shotgun.”
“Out here, there’s not much to be afraid of. Maybe an animal crossing the road.”
Genevieve nodded, and rested her head and squinted into the bright light that poured through the windshield when they took a curve. She pulled the scarf back out of her pocket and wrapped it around her eyes.
“Better than sunglasses,” she said, and Claire smiled. After a minute, she started humming a song quietly, the notes bounced around by the wind.
“The radio’s broken, or I’d turn it on,” Claire told her.
“That’s okay.” Genevieve licked her lips, and, as if in response, started humming again.
“What song is that?” Claire asked.
“It’s an old Joni Mitchell tune. I mean, maybe sixty years old now.”
“‘Circle Game’?”
“That’s right!” Genevieve said. “My mother used to play that song on the CD player when I was little. I’d sing it sometimes when we were alone on the playground. It was perfect for the merry-go-round. I think she thought I knew what the lyrics meant, but I was just singing the words.”
“It’s funny.”
It was odd to talk with her with the scarf wrapped around her eyes.
“What?”
“I learned that song at a campground when I was maybe sixteen years old.”
“Why’s that funny?”
Claire laughed uneasily and ran her hand through her damp hair. “I was at that camp because I stole something.”
“Really? So they sent you to sing-along camp when you did something wrong?”
Claire laughed at this. “Yeah, something like that. I was stealing things because I was angry at the way the world operates. Useless things like a cheap bracelet or a hair ribbon. Stuff made in China because of the kids working in factories over there. But it’s weird that you’d sing that song right after you took the money.”
Genevieve pulled off the scarf and stared at her.
“I’m going to return it.”
“I know. I know.”
“So what was it? A Christian camp? Did they talk about the Ten Commandments?”
“Ha. No, nothing like that. My father wouldn’t have gone in for that. It was one of those team-building camps. For kids who were troubled. We canoed down a river in Northern Michigan. It was so cold it snowed that night when we were sitting around the fire. I loved that little campground. And being on the river with those other kids.”
“It sounds so nice.”
“It was just the one weekend. Then back to real life.”
Genevieve nodded and then asked, “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“What, are you kidding? You already know more about me than almost anyone I’ve met since Jack and I moved out here.”
“Not this place, though, right? You never told me where you were driving from.”
“No, California. Not far from the eastern border.”
Genevieve nodded again, and seemed to be thinking about this. It struck Claire that what she’d said was true: for three years they’d been running the motel, and they were on a first-name basis with half the population of the small town. But maybe because it mostly lay on either side of a highway where almost everyone was passing through, no one asked about anything other than what was happening in the present. “That little Lucy,” Joan, the woman who stocked the produce section at the grocery store, would say. “Look how she’s motoring around. She’s got her dad’s sturdy legs.” Or Larry, the manager at the Shell station, would stop by and say, “Noticed the r was out on your Shadyrest sign. Now it says Shadyest. Might want to get Jack up a ladder to fix that.” But after the first few months, no one asked about where they came from or why they were there.
“It’s pretty out that way,” Genevieve said.
“It can be. Not so much on our stretch of road.”
“So how old are you, anyway, Claire?”
“Almost thirty-five now. Is that the question you wanted to ask?”
“No. Or partly, I guess. So you were sixteen when you went to that campground. And now you’re thirty-four. So you said it was fifteen years since you talked to your father, which means you were eighteen or nineteen the last time. Only three years after the time on the river with those other kids.”
“That’s right. Nineteen. Good math.” She was amazed, a little, at Genevieve’s quick and extraordinary grasp of detail.
“So what happened between nineteen and thirty-four? I mean, I know you had Lucy. What’s your husband’s name?”
“Jack.”
“And you married Jack. But he probably came later, right?”
“I was in Nebraska when I met him. We had Lucy just a year later.”
“Okay, so how’d you get to Nebraska? What happened between nineteen and Nebraska?”
“I—” She realized she was about to say “I don’t know,” which seemed somehow accurate, given how out of the habit she was of thinking of those years.
“Because if you stopped talking to your mom and dad for all that time, it must have been something interesting.”
“I didn’t tell you I stopped talking to my mom.”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
Anyone she ever told about it found this least forgivable. She’d stopped speaking of it entirely, and when a motel guest saw Lucy come around the front desk, and said something like, “What a doll! Her grandma must b
e tickled,” Claire would nod and say, “She is.”
For a few seconds, she let the sound of the tires on the highway become her answer.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Genevieve said.
“I don’t know. That’s not what most people think.” The words came tumbling out. “You asked me what I was doing before Jack. Well, I had a few problems. The biggest one was drinking. But I don’t want you to think”—she wasn’t sure why she suddenly cared what this woman thought of her—“that the drinking was the reason I stopped talking to my mother and father. It wasn’t like that. God, I remember one night waking up next to a man. I lifted my head off the pillow, you know, and I didn’t know where I was, and I had to stare at his face for, like, a full minute while he slept before I could vaguely remember him from the night before. He had his shirt off, and I could see the tracks in his arms. Say what you want, but I never did heroin. Maybe everything else, but not that. He woke up while I was looking at him, and he sat up in bed right away, with his back to me. It was obvious he didn’t remember me, either. The first thing he said was, ‘Better call Mom to pick you up.’ Maybe he thought I was under eighteen, and that’s why he wouldn’t look at me. So I said to him, probably because I was angry, ‘I haven’t spoken to my mother in five years.’ And that’s when he turns and looks over his shoulder. Gives me what amounted to a long glance. And he says, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ He’s sitting there with tracks in his arms next to a hungover girl he can barely recognize from the night before, and he’s asking me that.”
In the middle of her story, Genevieve had turned her gray eyes on her.
“So don’t tell me it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Claire said. “The whole fucking world thinks it is.”
She was surprised at her anger and the tightening of her throat.
“If Lucy ever did that to me—” But she stopped there.
The right tire caught the shoulder, and she steered back toward the centerline.
“Sorry,” Claire said.
“But you said you named Lucy after your mom’s mother.”
“I did. I know I did.”
“So you’ll be seeing your mother for the first time in fifteen years, too?”
“I was almost killed,” Claire said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Yes, fifteen years. But I talked to her on the phone before I left California. She bawled her head off. But she was still proud.”
“Proud of what? Being abandoned?”
She looked over at Genevieve, and then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Yeah. I guess that’s a good way to put it.”
“It’s a deeper kind of pride than if she came out here and glowed while she watched Lucy stacking blocks.”
“Why do you think that?”
But this, Genevieve didn’t answer. Ahead in the road, emerging from the illusion of reflection on the pavement, was a crow perched over some carrion. It flew up and cawed as they approached. The woman was strange, and maybe fascinating. Claire reminded herself that she’d robbed the gas station.
“Do you think your father will be proud, too, in that way, when he sees you?” Genevieve asked.
“I don’t know. If he’s conscious, maybe. I doubt it.”
“He probably fell in love.”
She shook her head and smiled.
“Genevieve, how would you know that?”
“The woman who called you. I bet that’s his wife. Or his longtime lover. Did she say anything?”
“Not about that. But she obviously knew him well. And she’d obviously worked hard to track me down.”
“He fell in love with her. Maybe a few years ago. I can’t say that your mom was probably as lucky, judging from her pride.”
“You know, there’s no way you could know that. There’s no way I could.”
“I’m sorry, Claire. I’m not trying to offend you. I just like stories. I like thinking about stories. And yours is pretty interesting, you have to admit. I like thinking about what happens to people.”
“I’m not offended. It’s just a little weird that your guesses seem on target.”
“I’m just observant. I get it wrong every now and then, but most of the time I’m right. You think about most people’s lives. They aren’t that different from each other, even though people think they are.”
Claire nodded. She felt a kind of heat generating from high in her stomach, and it worked its way into her face.
“I have to admit, I like the thought of my father falling in love.”
“He was alone for a long time.”
“Genevieve.”
“But he was. Your wife leaves you. Your daughter disappears. For a few months, right after that, he fell into a woman’s arms who thought he was charming and funny. She lived in an older suburban neighborhood where there were high oak trees, and maybe sometimes he spent the evening there and they watched a movie with her little boy. But at night, while she lay sleeping next to him, after autumn came, the wind would blow the acorns down from those high oaks, and he would lie with his head propped up on his elbow, listening to them hit the sidewalk and the road, everyone’s cars parked in their garages, the wind in those drying leaves, and the unrhythmic, hollow plunk of the acorns, and they would remind him, then, of you disappearing, of the loss, and how he never predicted it, and he knew that he couldn’t go on sleeping in that neighborhood or with that kind woman, where the truest thing that ever happened was at night when those acorns fell randomly from the trees.”
Claire looked over at her. Genevieve’s voice was hypnotic. She remembered being a small girl and wondering what her father was thinking when he lay in the mornings with his shoulders turned away, seemingly looking out the window.
“You make it sound like that’s what actually happened,” she said. “It’s funny, because when I was a kid, he did lie in bed with his head propped up like that.”
“Most men do,” Genevieve said. “Doesn’t Jack?”
Claire nodded. “You make him sound so lonely. My father, I mean.”
“Maybe. But maybe he’s just thoughtful, you know? And he knows the difference between being lonely and alone. But he is alone a long time after he breaks it off with the woman. Many years. Don’t get the impression this is because you never called or tried to see him. I’m not saying there isn’t a hollow in his heart where his memory of you is nestled like a sleeping rabbit. He knows you’re out there. But he’s bought a house on a lake a few miles out of town.”
Claire almost said, “Which one?” before remembering this was Genevieve’s story, and she’d probably never been to Michigan.
“It’s a tiny house. A small screened porch facing the water, a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom, a spare room upstairs, but a big garage, where he can work on projects for remaking the house to his own tastes. There are other cottages on the lake, some owned by people who only use them in the summertime, and in the evening, during those summer evenings, your father props up a lawn chair and sits where the edge of the grass meets the water, just in front of a large willow tree, and he watches some of the children from these vacation homes go tearing down a long pier, and leap into the water.”
“You know, his mom lived on a lake like that. My grandma.”
“Did she? Anyway, he’s friendly with his neighbors without making friends. They’ll ask him to watch the dog when they are away, and he’ll amble along the lane that circles the lake, keeping the dog leashed until they get to the small public access with the tall reeds—the lake isn’t large enough to allow anything other than small fishing boats—and then he’ll let the dog hunt minnows in the shallows, or he’ll toss a tennis ball into the water and watch the dog’s dark head pursue it out past the lily pads. Winters, the lake freezes over, and he’s one of the few people who continue to live there, and Saturday mornings he watches the ice fishermen trudge out through the snow, and hears the sharp thrust of their augers as they chip away at the ice com
e across the lake with the rays of the winter sun.”
The thought of ice and snow briefly cooled the inside of the cab. Claire felt herself being pulled into the story.
“And that’s how his days go. For most of those years you were gone. I mean, if you think about it, Claire. These years raising your baby. It’s not all that often—maybe Christmas, maybe the Fourth of July—you sit back and embrace everything that’s happened. But most of the time it’s day upon day, like it is for everyone, like it is for your father. What’s his name?”
“Marc.”
They were coming upon the Nevada/Utah border, and a town called West Wendover. Past the buildings, there was a vast stretch of flat white land, then a distant range of mountains.
“So one summer,” Genevieve continued, “Marc lays a wooden floor because he thinks maple boards will warm his house in the winter months. And another year, he tears down the wall that separates the little kitchen from the living area, so that when he turns away from the stove he can look directly out onto the lake. He’ll have a friend over every now and then to admire his handiwork, but his friends are as plunged into their own lives as he is into his, and so this happens less and less often. In the summer, early mornings before going to work, when the lake is so calm that the clouds are perfectly reflected, and the houses along the shore offer perfect versions of themselves in the water, he begins the habit of taking a small rowboat across the lake, all the way to the opposite edge where the remnants of an old farm still stand, and where an old-timer who had a cottage on the lake for forty years tells a story of hoisting his daughter onto a grazing horse, bareback. So he thinks of you. He thinks of your mother. After the lake freezes, when the cold is tolerable and the roads clear, he takes slow runs around the lake. He loses weight. For an older man, he’s strong. He realizes he’s trying to make himself strong, and all these years seem like a preparation. He is aware he is preparing. For the onslaught of old age? he wonders. Something else, maybe. Maybe something that will never come. He loves his little house, where now he’s planted a small vegetable garden. He bears his isolation.”