All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  “I was so in love with his father. The baby’s father. I was only twenty-three, and I know you’d probably laugh if I weren’t sitting right here in front of you when I say that I believed then that I knew all there was to know about love.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh.”

  “Well, I might. Not that loving Tom has deepened those waters. I guess it’s made them wider.”

  “I think I understand that.”

  “Yeah?” she asks, but isn’t waiting for an answer. “My brother didn’t like him. And that mattered to me, of course.”

  “Tom told me that your brother mattered to you more than anyone. More than any other man, anyway.”

  She looks away. “I guess that’s true. But he did not like him. He thought he was dangerous. Or reckless, I think, was the word he used. And that turned out to be true, you know, but I don’t mean because I became pregnant. Probably I wanted that. Secretly I wanted that. To secure some part of him. And I don’t mean to keep him in a place, or to keep him with me, because that was something I wouldn’t do. Or couldn’t do.”

  He watches her thinking about this for a few moments. It is strange that, while her bringing the baby into his home had brought Claire near, he was having a conversation unlike any he’d ever had with his daughter.

  “Did you give the baby up for adoption, Joline?”

  “Yes.” She turns toward him then, but seems to be looking past him back into the night. “It was a challenge to keep the pregnancy hidden from Kathleen. And Jon.”

  “That was something the father wanted, then.”

  “No. No, he didn’t want that.”

  “Well, then, did he run away?”

  “No. It’s funny. As reckless as he probably was, he didn’t know how to do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he was reckless, but not irresponsible. He took risks, but that was because he was young, and he believed in his—I don’t know what to call them. He believed in his little crusades. When he found out I was pregnant, he was overjoyed. I don’t think he’d once thought of being a father, but when I told him, and even I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the baby then, it’s like you could see his face fill with the possibility, like he was already pushing a five-year-old boy on his bicycle down the sidewalk, and telling him he was about to let go.”

  “So what happened? What do you mean by little crusades?”

  She shakes her head, and looks away, back toward the kitchen, and the way the remaining light strikes her face makes her look older.

  “I shouldn’t have used the word little. It just seems that way now, now that I’m, you know, living this suburban life with this husband and a newborn baby. It’s like that was something that was inevitable all along.”

  “It’s still not inevitable.”

  She gives a short laugh. “Now you sound like him.”

  “Who?”

  “My child’s father.”

  “What was his name?” But she shakes her head again.

  “That was one of his ‘go-to’ phrases. Nothing’s inevitable. And he meant the way people live as if tracks have been laid in themselves, or through them, is what he said, and so they have no choice but to follow them. But he meant it politically, you know. He was a Marxist. He believed revolution was possible. I think he missed the point.”

  Marc looks down at the baby again. Her eyes are open now, but she still seems to be sleeping, since they are the only parts of her moving. She is swaddled tightly.

  “So what was the point?” he asks.

  “I mean the way he believed tracks are laid in you. They’re not political, or they are only after the fact. I fell in love with him. And I was happy at the time, before I met him, you know, having graduated college, and getting a good job. But after I met him—on the street where he was wearing a dark wool jacket, and directing protesters who were staging a walkout for higher wages. I mean, to tell you the truth, I never thought twice about that. About the rights of workers, the rights of the poor. Just abstractly. And I wasn’t thinking about it when I stopped to watch for a second, and he turned, suddenly, as if he knew I was there, and when he saw me—he had this kind of scruffy beard, and curly hair, and an earnestness or resolve that slowly disappeared into this beautiful, warm smile, and he was only taking me in, you know? He was taking me in, and it wasn’t about me picking up a sign or chanting for a cause. He was seeing me. I thought he was seeing me.”

  She glances at the baby, and then pulls herself up in the chair and tucks her legs under her, so she is sitting higher, her back erect.

  “I miss that. I still miss that. That sense of being seen. By someone you hadn’t even come to know yet. I know it sounds naïve.”

  “Not really.”

  “No? I’m not so sure, Marc. Something primitive led me there. Something that happened before I could find the words to describe it.”

  “Why didn’t he want the baby?”

  “I told you, he did. It was me that didn’t want him. He was killed. By an angry union worker in a truck. Manslaughter. He wasn’t trying to hit him, just get him to move. And he wouldn’t.”

  “I’m so sorry, Joline.”

  “It’s not about his death, Marc. It’s not about his death. He doesn’t matter anymore, except in memory. It’s about what became of me. It’s about what became of that little boy, who would be six now. It’s about Laura, who has a brother she may never know.”

  She pushes herself up from the chair then, and walks over to him, and he lifts the baby, who has fallen asleep again, toward her arms, but she shakes her head and stands next to the chair, looking down on him, her face obscured again by her hair. He feels a tightness in his chest, like his heart is catching on a rib, as she places the palms of her hands over his eyes.

  “Keep them closed,” she says.

  She pulls her hands away and places them on the arms of the chair, and even with his eyes closed he can sense her shadow over him as she lowers her head toward his. When she kisses him, his head moves slightly, involuntarily, and she brings her hand to the side of his face, but the kiss itself is gentle, lingering, her lips warm, tasting of something both of them had eaten earlier in the day.

  Then she says, “What do you think happened to Claire?”

  He is still absorbing her kiss.

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought of a thousand things. Why did you kiss me like that?”

  But she smiles and shakes her head, and then takes the baby from him.

  “Good night, Marc.”

  * * *

  The next morning, she is again the young woman who first came through the door, and he has slept later than he usually does, and she and Tom and Kathleen are finishing their coffee and English muffins when he walks into the dining room, the suitcases already sitting at the front door.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” Joline says, her eyes bright. “Up late?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  Tom says, “I took the liberty of starting a fire. Hope I didn’t overheat the place.”

  “It feels nice and warm,” Marc says.

  Kathleen’s expression is difficult to read.

  “They have to leave a little earlier than planned,” she says. “Tom has to work on a project for tomorrow morning.”

  “A call came in before you woke up,” he said. “Not the big deal they’re making it, but gotta put a little Sunday-evening time in.”

  They sit with Marc at the table for maybe fifteen minutes out of politeness. The baby is awake, and her occasional coos, her wide-eyed accidental smiles, her clutching of Kathleen’s pinkie finger, occupy both Kathleen and Joline, and neither gives him much more than a glance. Tom has pushed his chair away from the table and leans back and watches with an expression of halfhearted amusement. It gets better, kid, Marc wants to say to him, but doesn’t.

  At the back door, while Tom brushes away the snow blown onto the windshield, Marc stands with Joline and Kathleen while they say good-bye. Kathleen gives her a long hug, a
nd Joline lets her mother hold the baby one more time.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be back before you know it. Or come down and visit us before the real estate business cranks up.”

  They chat a bit more while Marc carries the suitcases to the car. Tom lifts them into the trunk but leaves the lid up and glances at Marc with a half smile.

  “So I understand you and Joline had a little late-night conversation.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “No. I woke up and saw she’d taken Laura down with her.”

  “Yeah. She let me hold her for a while.”

  “She likes it here. The baby, I mean. Joline, too. It’s peaceful. We’re in an apartment on a busy street. Weekends get pretty rowdy with the college kids. We’ll have to move once Laura starts walking.”

  Tom lifts his hand to the lid of the trunk.

  “So Joline tell you her life story?”

  Marc glances into his eyes, and then shakes his head and looks down at the ground.

  “No? Well, she’s pretty free with it. I know more of it than you probably think.”

  Tom slams the lid of the trunk, and then puts an arm around Marc and gives him a fast hug.

  “Thanks for having us out. I’d like to come out again soon.”

  “You’re welcome anytime.”

  Joline walks with Kathleen out to the car. For the first time that morning, Joline looks fully into his face, and then she reaches for him and gives him a tight hug, the warmth of her body coming through even her winter coat. She pulls away slightly, with her hands still at his waist, looks at him, and then hugs him again.

  She turns away for the baby without saying anything to him, and then gives her mother a kiss on the cheek and one final good-bye before walking to the car, settling the baby in her car seat, and joining Tom inside. They wave as they pull away.

  Back indoors, the day brightening the rooms with a pale March sun as they both clear the dishes from the table, Kathleen says to him, “I guess it was a nice visit. Yesterday was a little hard.”

  “It was good to have them here,” he says. He knows they will speak about it later, and perhaps Kathleen will call her son, Jon, and tell him about her conversation with Joline and ask about his marriage. And then afterward, Kathleen will come out of the bedroom and sit in the chair where Joline sat last night, and they’ll talk it over for a while. “She’s an interesting young woman,” he says.

  “Interesting?” Kathleen lifts an eyebrow and gives him a half-cocked smile.

  “Yeah, interesting. There’s a lot to her. She’s her mother’s daughter, isn’t she?”

  Kathleen waves her hand at him and goes on loading the dishwasher. And after that, they are quiet for a long while, returning to the rhythms of their winter Sundays on the lake. They read the newspaper and drink coffee. Kathleen watches a gardening show while knitting, the quiet tapping of her knitting needles a comfort that Marc recognizes stretches back into childhood, when his own mother used to knit Christmas scarves for him and his sisters. Marc looks through a magazine for a new boat he might buy when the lake thaws, makes a soup for them that afternoon, and splits a little wood for exercise, though they have plenty to last them through the cool nights of spring, and he stops anyway after fifteen minutes because of the ache in his shoulder. He watches the birds at the feeder, and again thinks about taking up sketching, especially for the stark contrasts of the whites and blues and blacks of trees and houses and ice in the winter. The later afternoon feels warmer, damp, and still, and he thinks for a while that Claire’s presence has gone away with Joline and the baby, but as the sky dims with sunset he feels that chill again.

  Because of his restlessness, he tells Kathleen, “I’m going for a little walk out on the ice.”

  “Wow. Twice in two days. I don’t think you were out there at all before this weekend.”

  “You might be right.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “No, that’s okay. You look comfortable where you are.” She is sitting in her chair with a book, her legs folded up in a way that makes her look young.

  “It seems like it’s nicer out there today.”

  “Yep. Warmer. Spring’s almost here.”

  His footprints from yesterday alongside Tom’s have deepened with the slight melting that had occurred in the afternoon, though the thin crust of brittle snow has returned now that it is almost nightfall and colder. He listens to the pleasant and familiar crunch of his boots on the ice as he makes his way to the place he and Tom had stood. His conversation with Tom at the car had unsettled him—he wondered what Tom may have overheard last night. Marc looks up at the sky, and it is the same cobalt blue as yesterday, though lingering from the sunset is a shade of warm orange. He glances back at his home and sees the windows lit. He touches his fingers to his lips and remembers Joline’s kiss. Her mouth had been so warm. He still can’t understand why she’d given it to him.

  He remembers a time, years ago, when he’d walked out onto the ice to watch the sunset. He’d learned from all his seasons here to watch for cloud formations that would lead to bright colors, and that evening the sun had turned the sky a brilliant blood orange, and the ice and the snow and even the cottages along the shoreline were drenched in it. Alone out on the lake, he’d wanted to call out to someone to come and look, come and see, but the only other person on the ice was a fisherman at least fifty yards away, and they’d given each other a brief, awestruck wave and together watched the sun descend. At the time, he had seen the orange sky as perhaps a sign, construed for him alone, and he’d remembered Claire, thought then that soon he might hear from her. But he’d been wrong.

  This time of the evening, it’s easy to imagine the lake before any home had been built on it, and he squints so as to obscure the cottages with the trees. Now he stretches his arms out and spins once as Tom had last night. Even that single circle makes him slightly dizzy, and he has to catch himself with a half step to stay on his feet.

  When he walks back into the house, he hears Kathleen in the next room on the phone. He assumes she’s talking to Joline, or perhaps she’d called her son, Jon. Marc settles into his chair, and warms his hands by the stove. He’s reading a book when Kathleen’s phone call abruptly ends, and she comes into the living room and stands in front of him.

  “What is it?” he asks. She doesn’t look angry, but her eyes are narrowed, as if she’s trying to see into him.

  “Joline told me she kissed you last night. On the mouth.”

  He feels his stomach drop.

  “She did. She kissed me. She asked me to close my eyes.”

  He has no idea why he offers that detail, but he can’t bear Kathleen’s gaze.

  “She told me you have a daughter.”

  For a moment, he’s petrified.

  “Marc, look at me. She said her name is Claire.”

  11

  When Marc woke, he first remembered Josephine’s story of Claire and Genevieve driving down the highway, and asked himself, Did that happen? The phrase returned to him when he lifted his head and watched Saabir rise from his mat over the threshold of the door. Did that happen? Much as the phrase Claire, how could you? returned to the version of Marc in the story that Genevieve told. That Josephine told, though he knew her name wasn’t Josephine. He found himself wondering again if she was a woman at all.

  He laid his head back down, and Saabir glanced over at him and said, “Up. Time to eat.” Saabir finished rolling his mat, set it neatly in a corner of the room, and opened the door and walked out to get the food.

  Did that happen? Marc with an imagined live-in lover who had discovered he had an estranged daughter. It was the blindfold he had to wear as Josephine spoke, he thought, as much as anything. As a boy, he had played the game with other children that began with the question, “If you had to choose, would you rather be blind or deaf?” and he’d chosen blind because he couldn’t imagine not hearing his mother’s voice when he asked her a simple question, su
ch as “What are we having for dinner tonight?” But now he wondered how reality was shaped for those who couldn’t see, who had to trust those who could for the naming of things, for the laying out of the world. An image returned to him of Joline holding the baby that late winter night, an image that was not real, and how the baby, too, would have to trust others for the naming of things, no less helpless, ultimately, than any child. Than he was himself when blindfolded. Than Claire had been. Had been, because she was dead. She was killed. Yet those words, even as he almost whispered them to himself, still seemed unreal, more inverted because of the stories Josephine had told, and suddenly he saw Claire at age six, playing with magnetized letters on a metal board, creating random arrangements of imagined words—czelim, erintel—until she turned the board toward him and the letters read She is dead. She is killed, and he woke again with such a start that he immediately sat up on the mat.

  And yet, still, in the imagined house on the frozen lake, he held to the mystery of her disappearance, to Kathleen, who may share in that mystery, and the possibility Claire was out there; he thought he would have given his life, here, in Pakistan, so that she and Genevieve could go on driving east.

  He felt cold, felt he wanted to hold Joline’s baby to warm himself. He tried to stand up, and had to catch himself against the wall because he was suddenly light-headed. The walks around the perimeter of the building had done little to maintain what he considered the already waning strength of his limbs. His head cleared as he heard the muezzin call for the morning prayer; he remembered the story Josephine had told about the girl in high school.

  When Saabir came back through the door, his gun strapped to his shoulder, he brought a bowl of mashed fruit and cereal, and then motioned to the chair. Marc walked over and sat down; Saabir cupped his hand under the bottom of the bowl without holding the rim as he held it out to Marc, as if it were a kind of offering, and along the edge of his forefinger Marc saw a faint spattering of dark fluid.

  “Azhar,” Marc said, looking up at Saabir, who was still standing in front of him. He remembered Azhar’s despair the night before as he rested the barrel of his gun against the back of Marc’s neck, but, likely because of the storytelling, last night seemed a week past. Saabir was smiling, his mouth slightly open, his eyes in the rising morning light dark and beautiful.