by Daniel Lowe
“We thought this was most anywhere,” Claire said, but he ignored her.
“It’s pretty unusual, too, to find two women sleeping in the back of that truck. Nice-looking women. Don’t know where you’re heading to, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it again out along these roads.”
“I see,” Genevieve said. “What year is this?”
The man shook his head. His face was round and heavy. Claire could see him better now in the starlight—middle aged, fat, like the bad-guy sheriff in an old movie.
“If you lived in this area long as I have, you know the year it is don’t matter much. At least not out here in the wilds. Not for two women alone.”
Genevieve snorted at this. “This isn’t the wilds. You’re ten miles from the city.”
“You’d be surprised, miss.”
“This isn’t the wilds,” she said again. “I know them better than you do.”
He stood staring at them for a few seconds longer before he smiled, said, “Good night, ladies,” and walked off toward his camper. Claire hadn’t seen the dim light coming from its curtained windows till now. The dog followed him into the back.
“Aren’t you the bold woman?” she whispered to Genevieve. “Taking hold of his hand like that and sticking it back in his pocket. Calling him on his little story.”
“I hate bullshit,” Genevieve said, without whispering.
Genevieve tilted her head up to the sky, sighed heavily, and then lay back down with her shoulder turned away from her. The night was rapidly getting colder, and the warmth from Genevieve’s body was comforting. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten why she was out here—this journey to visit her father who might very well be dying—as if the trip had emerged whole cloth from some other realm, and Genevieve was her best friend on some unplanned adventure. She was sleepy. She resettled herself on the mattress.
“It’s weird,” Genevieve said.
“What is?”
“That dog. I had a dog when I was a kid that looked like that one.”
“Yeah? Nicer than this guy’s?”
“No, not really. We were out living in the country, and my dad wanted a farm dog, even though we weren’t on a farm. She was a black Lab, about the same size as the one that peed on your tire. She liked to chase birds, and you could hardly blame her, since she was bred to do it. My dad insisted on keeping her unchained to roam the yard and ward off strangers, and she’d catch a crow or starling from time to time, and my dad would stroke her head afterward and tell her she was a good girl. Then one day she got out of the yard and into a neighbor’s chicken shed, and killed something like forty laying hens. That was the end of the dog.”
Claire felt something run through her, as if this were a parable she should remember, but she couldn’t name it.
“I always wondered,” Genevieve continued. “Killing forty hens like that. Would you call that violence? When the dog goes after that many chickens? Or was it violent when my dad left the dog unleashed when he knew that dog killed birds?”
Claire was trying to figure out how they’d gotten here.
Nearby, there were the sudden ticking wings of an insect, and the dog barked once.
“That was supposed to be funny.”
“You’re a very strange person, Genevieve. I mean that affectionately.”
“Sure you do,” she said.
* * *
In the morning, Claire was wakened by the man in the camper pulling away from his site and out onto the road, and once she could no longer hear his truck, she climbed out of the bed and pulled on fresh clothes under the still-rising sun. She glanced over at the tent pitched a few yards away, but it now appeared that no one was in it. Once she was dressed, she tugged on the blanket that Genevieve had pulled up to her nose and said, “We should hit the road.”
She sat up and stretched, and then held a hand over her eyes. “Look, you can see the lake.”
“Yeah,” Claire said. “It looks pretty bleak out there.”
“We should go for a swim.”
Claire glanced out toward the water.
“I don’t know, Genevieve. I was hoping to make Nebraska today.”
“We can,” she said. “No problem. But when are you gonna have another chance to swim in the Great Salt Lake?”
Claire looked at her and smiled. “You got a swimsuit in that tiny backpack of yours?”
“No, but I have a change of clothes. I can swim in these.”
When they pulled into the parking lot outside the swimming beach, the stench of the lake was powerful, a briny odor overlaid with the smell of sulfur and something rotting, briefly reminiscent of family visits to Lake Michigan when Claire was a child, and she’d find a narrow piece of driftwood to poke at the remains of an alewife. Worse, when they stepped outside the cab, they were set upon by flies. The lake itself seemed flatter than any she’d ever seen, with the distant mountains and the expanses of bleached salt.
“Boy, can’t wait to take a dip in that fresh water,” Claire said.
Genevieve smiled. “Once in a lifetime, Claire. Someday you can tell Lucy about it.” She slapped at the back of her neck and took her hand away, and in the center of her palm was a dead fly. Claire was waving others from her hair.
“This must be what gets people in the water,” she said, and started running toward the beach, Genevieve following.
“Those clothes will be caked in salt!” Genevieve called after her.
“So will yours!”
The water was cooler than she’d anticipated, and so shallow that she stopped running after she was no more than knee-deep. Genevieve caught up to her. There were others at the lake, some walking the edge of the water, a few children scattered among the stones and salt-sand, picking through tiny objects they’d found. Farther out, here and there across the water, people were lying on their backs without swimming, testing the claims they’d heard in elementary school geography. Off to their left, a big man was floating with his belly above the surface.
“Check it out!” Genevieve said.
She was already lying on her back, her clothes loose and floating away from her skin so Claire could see the outline of her body underneath, and it seemed to shift dimensions in the light breeze. She was smiling, and under the sun her teeth looked thin and translucent. Claire sank into the water, the deep cool immediately exhilarating, and before the water reached her chin she could taste its salinity. She lay back and floated with her body parallel to Genevieve’s, the water gently lapping along her legs and arms. She spread them out like she was making a snow angel.
“This is amazing,” Claire said.
She tilted her head up. Mostly submerged as she was, the lake now looked beautiful. There was a rocky island not far off that seemed tinted with rust in the still-early-morning sun, and beyond it were two boats with bright red sails. Away from the flies, the mountains looked bluer and cooler.
“I bet it’s incredible in the winter,” Genevieve said. “There’d be snow on the mountains, and the sky would be deeper blue. And no bugs. Except of course you couldn’t swim.”
As they lay back, a waterbird flew directly over them, its thin, bent legs trailing the slow beating of its wings. Claire followed it on an imaginary line that split the sky as it moved toward some distant clouds in the west already piled high. They seemed suddenly ominous, and a fear took hold of her, and she stood up.
“Gonna get out already?” Genevieve asked.
The big man who had been floating with his belly above the water was wading toward them.
“It’s the guy from the campground,” Claire said.
Genevieve slapped the water as she got to her feet and stood next to her. Their clothes clung to their skin, and Claire could see Genevieve’s narrow hips and small breasts. She knew she was similarly exposed. But as the man walked up to them, he was averting his eyes. His own belly was thrust well over his low-slung swim trunks where a tightly drawn string was digging into the flesh at his sides. He stopped about ten fe
et away and looked toward the beach.
“Morning, ladies,” he said. “I just wanna say I’m sorry about last night. I shouldn’t’ve come over after dark asking for a fee.”
“Thank you for the apology,” Genevieve said flatly.
The man nodded and still wouldn’t look at them. He turned sideways to face the shore.
“I come out here most every morning in the summer and fall,” he said. “You see folks like you, visitors, you know, floating on the water. Me, I come out because it’s the only time a man my size feels light, you know? Buoyant. That’s the word I mean.”
He cleared his throat and licked some of the salt from his lips.
“You ladies have a safe trip, wherever you’re headin’.” He walked away without looking at them, and when he’d moved off a good distance, he slid into the water again, his face turned up to the sky and his eyes closed.
Genevieve touched Claire’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”
* * *
They had driven into Wyoming by noon, stopping for coffee and blueberry muffins in one of the small towns. Claire had knotted their wet clothes to a rope she’d strung behind the cab of the truck, and so far none had flown away. Mostly, they hadn’t talked, but as they entered the tunnels outside Green River, Claire yanked off her sunglasses.
“Wow. Can’t see a damn thing,” she said.
Out of the hot sun, the tunnel cooled the inside of the cab and filled it with exhaust fumes, and they both rolled up their windows. When they emerged, Genevieve was squinting in the bright light.
“Nice while it lasted,” Claire said, and cracked the window again. The bluffs and rocks along the highway were dramatic, but bled of color in the middle of the day.
“Getting closer to getting there, aren’t we?” said Genevieve.
“Still a long way yet.”
“Nebraska will seem closer. Flat. More like home for you.”
“I guess that’s true. It was my home for a while.”
“It’s funny. You leave on a trip like this only with your destination in mind, and only thinking about getting there, and what it will be like, and then along the way you start enjoying the road, and you wish you had another day or two of solitude with nothing to do but drive.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Claire said. She had made it through the morning mostly without thinking of her mother and father.
“You think I’m being impulsive?” Genevieve asked. “Moving to Chicago like this with a guy I haven’t seen in a year?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like you’re trailing a moving truck behind you. It’d be pretty easy to change your mind.”
“He’s lonely,” she said. “All those people in Chicago to remind him.”
“Seems like all those people would make it a little less lonely.”
Genevieve looked at her and smiled.
“Maybe,” she said. “But not when he stops to watch couples walking along the lakeshore holding hands.” She still hadn’t rolled her window all the way back down, and she leaned her head against the glass pane. “I wonder,” she said. “The guy back at the campsite. He was kind of lonely, too.”
“I don’t know about that, Genevieve.”
“No, seriously. I have some sympathy for him now. Going down to the lake every morning. Floating on the water like that. Wanting to feel buoyant, like he said. I think he meant boy-ant. B-o-y. Like he felt when he was a boy.”
“That doesn’t make him lonely.”
“No, I know. I bet if two women pulled into his little campground tonight, and slept in the bed of their truck, he’d walk over and then do the same thing. Maybe loneliness becomes something else once night falls. Or after you’ve been lonely for a long time.”
“I don’t know, Genevieve. He seemed a little creepy.”
“Maybe he was a little desperate,” she said.
“You can be both.”
“I’m not trying to excuse him. I’m trying to explain him. Loneliness can be a pathology.”
“All right, Professor.” Claire realized Genevieve had two ways of speaking—one when she talked about herself, and another when she talked about others. But Genevieve smiled at this, took her head from the glass pane, and rolled down the window. She sat up straight.
“But it wasn’t that kind of loneliness for your father, I don’t think.”
“Genevieve, we don’t need to—”
“It’s a long drive,” she interrupted.
Claire tightened her hands on the steering wheel. They were passing a small lake where a deer was wading among the reeds in the water, and Claire glanced over as it lifted its head.
“Okay. All right.”
“Do you think it’s different, falling in love when you’re older?”
“It was different when I fell in love with Jack.”
“I don’t mean that. You’re still young. Your dad’s over sixty. He falls in love with a woman he meets in the supermarket.”
“That’s certainly romantic.”
“It’s because he isn’t looking, Claire. He only goes there once every two weeks because he doesn’t need much. And on the lake where he lives is a little store that sells bait, some lettuce and tomatoes in the summer months, and some canned goods. More expensive, but he feels a loyalty to the old man or the local kids he hires who are usually behind the cash register. The woman at the supermarket is standing in the self-checkout lane, and he is waiting to go next, since he always checks his own groceries through because of his impatience with the cashiers and baggers who sometimes chat distractedly while scanning things.”
“I remember that about him,” Claire said. “His impatience.”
“Is that right?” Genevieve said, and smiled. She sat back and let the wind through the car windows blow the hair away from her long neck. Claire already felt completely pulled in.
“She is staring at the checkout computer, holding a plastic bag of yellow delicious apples in her hand, trying to figure out how to scan it through. She’s aware of your father’s impatience, and smiles apologetically at him, and she tells him that she never buys apples, she just needs something that reminds her of summer. She’s wearing a full-length wool coat, since it’s a cold February in a cold winter, and she is pretty, maybe a few years younger than he is, her eyes made up, her hair cut short but over her collar, her earrings silver, catching light as they dangle alongside her neck. He tells her you have to punch in the code, that it’s on the little stickers. 4-0-2-0. ‘What, are you the store manager or something?’ she says, smiling. He laughs lightly at this and tells her, ‘I’ve been through this checkout line a few times.’”
Genevieve stopped for a moment, and turned and looked at the passing landscape.
“What was your father’s name?”
“You asked me that already. It’s Marc.”
“That’s right. And what was the name of the woman who called you on the phone and told you your father was sick?”
“Kathleen.”
“Kathleen. She asks him out to coffee, which surprises him. She sits across from him at the small, round table, the late-winter sun streaming through a window, warming them. She does most of the talking, not because she’s particularly chatty, but because, during these years of solitude, he’s grown used to not talking to anyone, particularly women, other than his sisters.”
“He does have sisters,” Claire said. “Two of them.” She again had the sensation that, as they headed east, they were driving back through the past.
“He’s the kind of man who has sisters,” Genevieve said. “Kathleen can tell that, too. But your father’s unaware of it. He’s watching Kathleen’s face. He sees how she’s penciled over her eyebrows, blackening them to match her deep, dark eyes, and in the bright light, through her makeup, he sees the tiny fissures in her skin, around the corners of her mouth, beneath her eyelids, and he’s touched by her effort to conceal them. She has been married, she says, divorced now for five years, and he asks her why she still we
ars a ring on her left hand, and she tells him she got used to it, the weight of it on her hand, and when she takes it off, it feels like her finger will float away. ‘I guess it’s cost me a few dates,’ she says, and laughs. She has two children, both grown, both married, a son and a daughter, but no grandchildren yet. One lives in Detroit, the other in Pittsburgh, and she tells him she’s accustomed to seeing them only a few times a year. And then she asks Marc about his own kids.
“The question takes him by surprise. He realizes he hasn’t talked to anyone but longtime friends for several years, and they already knew the story of how Claire disappeared.”
Claire felt her skin flush hot. Genevieve hovered over those words for only a few seconds before going on.
“Your father only smiles, searching for a way to respond, and Kathleen says, ‘No children, then, Marc?’ And he coughs once, runs his hand through his hair, trying to figure out what to tell her. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he finally says. Kathleen laughs at this, and tells him if he didn’t know for sure, he must have been some kind of ladies’ man when he was young. He likes the lilt to her voice, its suggestive wink, and he likes its depth, which reveals her years. He says, ‘No, hardly. I don’t mean it like that at all.’ But Kathleen doesn’t pursue him on it. She says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re a very nice-looking man.’”
Claire pulled past a semi, and Genevieve stopped speaking as the roar of its engine poured through the windows. Claire’s throat was tight, and she had to remind herself that this was only Genevieve’s imagination working on her.
When they passed the truck, she asked, “You really think he wouldn’t even tell her about me? That I was never his child?”
But Genevieve wouldn’t look at her, and only put a finger to her lips as if to say “Shhhh.”
“So, they start seeing each other,” Genevieve continued. “And because they are older, because they both recognize the limits of love and its ultimately modest satisfactions, within a year they start living together, though they haven’t married. She sells her home in the little complex she always found somewhat sterile, and moves in with him in the lake house. It takes several months for Marc to remember what it’s like to habitually wake up next to another person, to feel the rhythms of her nighttime rituals, of her sleeping, how she brings a glass of water to her bedside and wakes each night to have a drink, how she shifts onto her back and sometimes something catches deep in her throat, and she coughs. He thinks of the woman he slept with after he first left your mother, and wonders how this is different. For one, he loves Kathleen, and for another, she’s sleeping in a place that has been his home for almost fifteen years. When he lies awake, listening to the sounds on the water—small waves rocking the boat along the dock, a distant splash when a fish jumps out of the lake—they’re deeply familiar, unlike Kathleen’s breathing. But he knows the chief difference between now and then is his age, and how each passing year of solitude has ebbed from an advancing need for company, in part to share a present with this woman he found charming and lovely, but mostly against the ravages of the years to come.”