All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  Claire wondered at how Genevieve could speak so fluidly, and how the Wyoming landscape they were traveling through was piece by piece supplanted by her father’s house at the lake.

  “After a couple of months, Kathleen’s daughter phones and tells her that she’s pregnant. The baby is born the following February in a winter that’s been even more brutally cold, the small lake frozen with a full foot of ice that the fishermen have to auger for several minutes before they can open up a hole they can drop their lines through. Each morning, before driving in-to town to the office, your father lights a fire in the small wood-burning stove to keep the house warm, and Kathleen has taken a few days off from work to prep the house for her granddaughter’s first visit, even though she’d flown out when the baby was born. Your father marvels at how she has made the house her own home. It’s early March, but still no sign of spring. On the morning before their arrival, a Saturday, he wakes with a start from a deep slumber before the sun has risen. He gets out of bed, pulls on socks that he’s left by his nightstand against the cold of the floor, and walks out to the stove and fills it with wood. As he strikes the match, he realizes that what has wakened him is the recognition that he will have to hold this infant girl in his arms, and it will be the first time he’s held a baby girl since Claire was born.”

  10

  The wind through the flue of the chimney makes the flame flicker, but he has become an expert at lighting these simple fires, and a minute later the slivers of bark along the split wood are popping and crackling, sending shadows against the walls of the room because, after he woke, he’d turned on only the light above the kitchen stove, and he didn’t even need that to navigate the rooms. He closes the door of the already warming wood burner, stands and brushes the bits of bark from his hands, thinks about starting the coffee, but doesn’t want to make more noise that might wake Kathleen, since it’s still an hour before sunrise, and he wants to sit alone for a while with the memory of Claire as a small child that is visiting him more sharply than it has in years.

  He had been delighted when he’d learned of Kathleen’s daughter’s pregnancy, and Kathleen had been effervescent, and inclusive, saying, “Ready or not, Marc, you’re gonna be a grandpa.” He had sidestepped the impact of that claim, had still not told Kathleen about Claire, which had never been his intention. But if he did not intend it, then what was the reason for keeping it secret? His sisters, along with the few friends he still had from his marriage to Lynne, showed discretion on the rare occasions where they were in Kathleen’s company, though he was sure they assumed Kathleen knew about his daughter.

  The rooms in the house are warming, and he pulls off the blanket he is using and sits back against the chair. In the year he’s been living with Kathleen, he’s grown heavier, surrendering his morning rows across the water last summer and fall so he could lie next to her in the early-morning hours. And for the most part, it’s been too cold to go out and run in the winter months; he’s grateful that it’s March, even if the wind over the ice didn’t feel like spring; there was more daylight now, and by late April he was hoping to see expanses of open water across the lake. He remembers how one spring he took the boat out and navigated the remaining patches of ice, how he’d managed to wedge it between two miniature icebergs, and had to climb out of the boat to free it, his weight on the ice letting the water rise to his knees, and he’d lost his balance and was lucky to tumble back into the boat without risking hypothermia.

  Has he stopped missing Claire? He remembers how, at a year and a half, she used to reach for things, a wooden block, a leaf, and turn it in her hand while she gazed. He remembers her wide eyes when she was born. But when he thinks of her now, it is less about memory, less about the recollections of her childhood—he had almost no artifacts from that time, because Lynne had claimed them, no crayon drawings, no school pictures, no ribbons or gold-starred schoolwork—than it is about wonder over who she’d become; the bitterness he used to feel about her willingness to cut him out of her life so completely is replaced by additional wonder over her capacity to do it.

  Outside, some light has returned to the sky, and the lake ice reflects it dully. There will be no visible sunrise: another gray winter day. As the room warms further, the smell of furniture oil deepens, since Kathleen had rubbed each piece yesterday evening, the finishing touches before her daughter’s arrival. She phoned her once a week, usually Sunday mornings, followed by a shorter phone call to her son. He can see she carries them with her like charms, particularly those evenings when her work as a real estate agent has left her rattled, or those mornings when she wakes up and her joints ache, or the time she said to the mirror, My face is gray. Her family is a lean-to against what she worries are her growing limitations, and at last a solace against finality.

  He wonders if he should have searched for Claire further. From time to time, in those first years of her absence, he’d track down a phone number or an address, but he wouldn’t have described it as a relief to hear her greet him anonymously over voice mail. He remembered how he’d called Claire by mistake the night she was attacked, how Lynne had left a voice mail on his hotel phone after those weeks he’d fled to Pakistan, of all places, and when he’d pushed the number for speed dial, after the phone rang, it was Claire’s voice that said Hello, and for a split second the nightmare of Lynne’s message had lifted before Claire said, You have reached … After that, after she was out of danger, it had been okay for a few months while Claire healed. Then she’d disappeared. Those times he was able to track down her number, he tried not to sound despairing in the messages he left: “Claire, I’m not asking to know where you are. I’m not even asking to talk to you. But please, let me know that you’re safe. Even if it’s a one-line postcard. Here’s my address at the lake…”

  But after five years, he’d stopped trying at all. He assumed, if she’d died, news would have ultimately traveled back to him. He knew she was living somewhere, and in the long years when he would row the boat across the lake, particularly the cool September mornings when a mist hovered over the water, he’d imagine that with each stroke of the oars he was pushing into the fog where Claire lived. As the director of a homeless shelter, maybe, ladling soup into bowls held by children whose mothers had fled a dangerous home, or as a mother herself of three children, packing lunches in the early morning because she couldn’t bear the food they were served at school, or as an expatriate, sipping coffee in a European café while she thumbed the edges of an underground newspaper for whose revolutionary whims she could no long muster enthusiasm.

  She would be thirty-five years old in July.

  The sky is brighter, and he can see smoke rising from the chimneys of the few houses on the lake where people live year-round. Kathleen is beginning to turn over in bed, slowly waking, and he pushes himself out of the chair and makes coffee. Claire, how could you? He’s not thought that in months. Often, after she left, it had become a reflexive rhetorical flourish, usually unassociated with his memory of her. If he had a flat tire on his way to an important business meeting, he’d say through his teeth, Claire, how could you? If the Tigers lost in the bottom of the ninth, he’d holler at the television, Claire, how could you? Another bombing in Afghanistan. Claire, how could you? He’d caught himself saying it aloud only once in Kathleen’s presence, and when she’d asked, “Who’s Claire?” he’d told her one of his colleagues who had screwed up a proposal. She’d walked over then and rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Let’s not start railing against ghosts just yet, okay, sweetie?” That moment was the closest he’d come to telling her the truth.

  The smell of coffee invades the air. Outside, he hears his neighbor’s feet crunching in the snow, and then the rattle of a trash can. From the bedroom, he hears Kathleen move again in the sheets. She’s in that space between sleeping and waking where images of a dream collide with the coming demands of the day. She’s yet to remember her daughter is visiting. Then she does, and he hears her pull the blanket away. He st
ill loves the sound of her feet on the cool wooden floor.

  * * *

  “Well, look at you,” Kathleen’s daughter, Joline, says to Marc. “You’re a regular Dr. Spock.”

  “A Vulcan?” her husband, Tom, says.

  Kathleen laughs, and Joline punches Tom lightly on the shoulder.

  “Doctor, not mister, sci-fi boy.”

  Marc had taken their coats when they came in, though everyone is still standing near the entrance of the house. He had met them both on only one other occasion, and that was in Pittsburgh, where Kathleen’s entire family had gathered, so there had been opportunity only for small talk. Joline had been unselfconscious about the baby from the moment she stepped through the door, extending her arms to her mother with the swaddled little girl balanced in both hands, as if she were a nurse. When Kathleen hesitated for just a moment, Joline had said, “C’mon, Ma. You know you want it.”

  Now it is Marc’s turn. He is surprised at how easily he has settled the baby into the nook of his arm, using his free hand to support her tiny head. He peers into the baby’s face; her skin has patches of red, probably from exposure to the cold, and her eyes and nose and mouth are scrunched together in what appears to be a concerted effort at sleep. “Well, hello there, little Lulu,” he says to her, hearing his voice crack.

  Joline says, “Little Lulu. I like that. I mean, I love the name Laura and all, but it’s a woman’s name, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a nickname. I don’t like Laurie. Or Lor-lor. Or the Lorax. Lulu might just work.”

  Joline is watching Marc closely, less, it seems, because she doesn’t trust him with her child, but for another reason he can’t discern. Perhaps, for her mother’s benefit, she is trying to know who he is. Partly because he feels the weight of her stare, and partly because he wants to, he raises the baby toward his face and breathes in her scent: milky, sweetly animal, with a faint, underlying pungency. Claire, how could you? he thinks reflexively, but a current runs through his heart, and he pushes the words away.

  “Don’t tell me she’s loaded up her drawers already,” Joline says. She is still watching him. He’s struck, then, by how pretty Joline is, despite their long drive, despite the trappings of motherhood, a bag slung over her shoulder, a loose blouse that can be unsnapped for breast-feeding. She has a narrow, pale face, and her hair, which she must have brushed out before they came in, hangs to her shoulders, and her large gray eyes are full of something under that wit she seems to use to meet the world.

  “No, no, not at all. It’s just—well, there’s nothing like the smell of a newborn baby.”

  She smiles at him then and turns her head slightly. Tom has edged away toward the kitchen, and is peering in where Kathleen has already set a beautiful table: four Wedgwood plates that she’d brought when she moved in, polished silverware, and a spring bouquet of tulips and hyacinths that seem to almost pulse with color, surrounded as it is by the winter landscape.

  “I’ll tell you something that comes close,” Tom says. “The smell of whatever you got cooking in here.”

  “Oh, those are meatballs,” Kathleen says. “Turkey meatballs. We’re trying to watch our calories here.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Tom says. “I go by the smell, not the kind of meat.” He laughs to himself. “Sorry. That sounded kind of crude, didn’t it?”

  “Lunch will be ready in about ten minutes,” Kathleen says. “Tom, if you want to take your suitcases upstairs to the spare room, feel free. We set up a little space heater. It can get cold up there at night.”

  Marc is still holding the baby, bouncing her on his arm slightly. She stirs, pushes her hand outside the blanket, and opens her eyes once, then closes them. Joline walks toward him, and he lifts the baby to her because he assumes she wants her back, but Joline brushes by him and strides into the living room. He follows her in. She’s looking out the front windows.

  “God, this is so beautiful,” she says. “So desolate.”

  Because of the wind, or the lateness of the season, no one is out on the ice. At its edge, the branches of the willow tree are waving wildly; most everything else seems brittle. Occasional gusts of snow move over the lake. A small bird careens between branches and finally takes shelter in a low, leafless bush.

  “It is,” he says. “And cold. Maybe all of us should be bundled up like this little one.”

  “Little Lulu?” she asks.

  He laughs and says, “That’s right. Little Lulu.”

  She looks out the front window again.

  “The light’s brighter now,” he says. “Even on days like this, you can usually see the sun through the clouds. It’ll melt the snow off the branches, and you can watch it fall away in chunks.”

  She smiles back at him. “Why did you decide to move here?”

  The question surprises him. Not when, which he would have expected, but why. When he doesn’t respond right away, she turns back toward him, and he looks down at the baby. She is awake, and her dark eyes are slowly taking in his face.

  “I’m not sure, really. It was the end of a difficult time. And I spent a number of years on a lake when I was a kid. It’s peaceful here. If you came back six weeks from now and looked out this front window, you’d hardly recognize the place.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll do that,” she says, grinning, it seems, almost flirtatiously, and she walks toward him and holds her hands out for the baby. He stands close to her and transfers the child to her arm. She exhales as she takes her, and he thinks her breath has the same scent as the baby.

  “Where did you learn to hold these little runts? You’re such a natural.”

  “My sisters’ boys.”

  “I see,” she says. “The doting uncle.”

  Kathleen calls them in to lunch.

  * * *

  “These meatballs are amazing, Kathleen,” Tom is saying. “They taste almost like falafel.”

  “That’s high praise, Ma,” Joline says. “Tom considers himself the Sultan of Seasoning when it comes to Mediterranean food.” The baby is asleep again in a portable bassinet near her feet. Marc has put on some Miles Davis that plays quietly under their conversation.

  “You need those spices when it’s just turkey,” she says. “Marc loves this dish, so we have it pretty often. He lived in the Middle East for a while.”

  Tom says mid-chew, “Really? Which country?”

  “Pakistan.”

  “Whoa. No kidding? What was in Pakistan?”

  Marc says, “I’d say lived there is something of an overstatement. I was there a little over a month around fifteen years ago. On business, mostly.”

  “What business?”

  Kathleen says, “Marc worked for Pepsi back then. They have corporate offices in Karachi.”

  “In Pakistan? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “A lot of American companies there,” Marc says. “Even more today.”

  “Still not a top vacation spot, though,” Tom says.

  “Not for Americans, no.”

  “Only a month?” Joline asks.

  “Well, it was supposed to be for half a year.”

  “Really? Why’d you come home so early?” Joline is looking at him with the same tilt of her head and slight smile.

  “Homesickness,” he says. And Kathleen reaches under the table and squeezes his knee, since he’d told her the reason he’d returned was because he couldn’t bear the weight of his separation from Lynne in such a strange land. She tries to shift the focus of the conversation.

  “I wish Jonathan and Diane could’ve come.” Kathleen’s son and his wife. “He hasn’t even met little Laura yet. I guess it’s a lot to ask to drive that far through the snow for just a night or two.”

  Tom and Joline exchange a glance. Joline pokes a fork at a few grains of the rice dish left on her plate.

  “Ma, there’s trouble in paradise for Jon and Diane right now.”

  “What do you mean ‘trouble in paradise’?”

  “Jon’
s a bit restless. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a seven-year-itch kind of thing.”

  “He’s having an affair?”

  Miles Davis chooses then to stop playing, and Marc stands up to put something else on.

  “Where are you going?” Kathleen asks. Tom slices another meatball in half, and outside another gust of wind fills in the suspended moment.

  “Just going to put on more music.”

  “Why? We don’t need a soundtrack for this conversation.” He’s rarely heard her tone sound so arch.

  “Ma, let him. Put on something with words, Marc.”

  He walks over to the console and chooses some old Dylan as Joline says, “I don’t know that he’s having an affair, but let’s just say he’s distracted by someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, Ma. Someone he kept seeing at a coffee shop.”

  Dylan croons, Mama, you’ve been on my mind, as Marc sits back down. Joline directs her eyes at him for a half second, and mostly under her breath says, “Jesus. Great choice.”

  “Why hasn’t he called me?” she asks.