by Daniel Lowe
Because Marc had been sweating so profusely, and had been pushed down onto the half floor with the hard-packed dirt, his arms were streaked with it, and he imagined his face was the same. Saabir was looking down on him, but must have felt no threat, because the gun was on his back. When Marc sat up, Saabir walked over and took Marc’s bedroll from the corner, and laid it out along the wall where he usually slept.
Marc did not bother getting to his feet. His shoulder ached from the hard fall, and he crawled over to the mat and lay flat on his back. Saabir stood over and looked down on him. His expression was almost sad.
“No face,” he said. “No Josephine.”
And then he took the gun from his back and tapped the near wall with the barrel, and Marc knew he should turn to face it. Fortunately, the shoulder he lay on was the one that wasn’t aching. He was still trembling, and his body smelled foul after the struggle. He felt as if something had spilled out of him, that he’d lost blood. The run of memories seemed bled out of him, too, as if pooling somewhere, part of him, but somehow now apart from him.
He did not expect her knock on the door, and he flinched when he heard it. Saabir pulled the door open, and he heard them exchange words that were increasingly heated. He slammed it shut and strode over to the makeshift bathroom, and then walked back to Marc and said, “Sit.”
With difficulty, he pulled himself up, and Saabir stooped and handed him a cup of water and a damp cloth. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and he quickly drained the cup and took the cloth and wiped his face and hands. Saabir again took the gun from his shoulder, but this time held it in his hands for a moment. Then he tapped the wall three times. Marc turned toward it.
He heard Saabir step back to the door and let her in, and she pulled the chair close to his mat and sat down. The room was deeply quiet, with Saabir, he imagined, standing with his back erect at the door. Marc could hear her sitting nearby, hear her steady breathing before she began.
“That night, Claire was once again lying on the thin mattress of the truck bed next to Genevieve, staring at a starless sky.”
“Josephine,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”
She didn’t respond immediately, but didn’t go back to her story, either.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe not to you. But it matters to me. It matters to Claire.”
“Claire is dead.” Even saying that, there was still something hard in his throat he had to swallow back down.
“Marc, you could turn and look at me now. That would be the end, but our time will end soon, anyway. As soon as tomorrow. So you could turn and see my face.”
He thought to ask if she would be the one to kill him, but he didn’t.
“I don’t want to see your face.”
She shifted on the chair then. He imagined she was lowering her head.
“But you want to hear the story, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
12
Claire had found a place to sleep that she imagined was safer, the parking lot of a nearby elementary school that was hidden from the main road in a small western Nebraska town just over the border. She’d pulled in near a streetlamp, but she’d parked the car outside the circle of light it cast. Genevieve had been sleeping for the last hundred miles, through the dark, flat land where moths obliterated themselves in the headlights.
Her face had been turned toward Claire, since she slept curled up with her seat belt unfastened against the cool air that came through the windows. In the light of the dashboard, Claire couldn’t decide if, sleeping, Genevieve looked older or younger than she was. She decided older, and over the course of several miles, she glanced over at Genevieve’s full mouth, which she imagined again would be pleasing to kiss, and then at her ears, which were unmarked by any piercings. Her nose seemed delicate, almost like a child’s. But mostly she remembered her gray eyes, a match for that kind of August afternoon where, out of nowhere, a cool, windless day emerges and a heavy bank of clouds sinks low. She thinks it’s the kind of face that someone could look at for a long time. Not for minutes, or even days, but for weeks and years.
Now, after unrolling the mattress, as they lay again in the truck bed, staring at the blank sky, it occurred to Claire that the air was heavy with moisture.
“Do you think it might rain?” she asked Genevieve.
“I don’t know,” Genevieve said. “I guess we’ll be the first to know, won’t we?”
“I guess so.” Claire tilted her chin up, waiting for a drop to fall. It wasn’t surprising that she felt thick with a sense of expectation. The story Genevieve told about her father had carried to her a version of him that she couldn’t have imagined. While it was true that images of her mother and father crossed her mind on occasion over these years, she had tried to sweep them behind her. It would be easy to close her eyes now and see the interstate stretched out before her, and to envision her father or mother hitchhiking as Genevieve had, only she would not pull over, and she would see them as shrinking dolls drawn into her rearview mirror.
But the tale that Genevieve was telling was something else again. She wondered about Joline, and whether she might be someone Genevieve had once wanted to be. The immense stillness of those rooms in her story—and a winter landscape that Claire hadn’t seen in years—had expanded inside her as Genevieve spoke, and she felt the sad serenity her father had earned begin to peel away under Joline’s gaze. But the strangest thing was how Claire haunted him. How Genevieve described her as outside in that cold wind at the windows looking in, and how, as Claire listened while driving, she was inside that infant daughter gazing up at her father’s face.
Everyone she’d ever loved had formed stories of her they had translated as the truth, but she knew they were only founded in those parts of her that she chose to reveal. But this was different. None of this had happened; all of it was Genevieve’s invention, but because of this, she felt her presence in her father’s rooms, in Joline’s baby, not as something to remind her father of his past, but as someone who was waiting, just as he was, for a revelation that might never come. It was not a story that you could outrun, like you could a person, or a memory of someone you once loved. If Genevieve disappeared tonight—if, while Claire was sleeping, she climbed out of the truck bed undetected and slipped down the highway—she thought the story would be like a thick haze through which only slowly the other things of her life would emerge, and the memory of the haze would cling to those things for a long, long time.
She had called home too late to talk to Lucy. Even though they’d eaten at a diner with a pay phone, and even though Genevieve had long before that set aside telling the story of her father, Lucy had slipped her mind, while instead, she was thinking of the baby that Joline, in Genevieve’s story, had given away. She’d promised she’d talk to Lucy each night she was gone, and she’d told Lucy that when she arrived in Michigan she might even get to speak for the first time with her other grandmother. But sitting across from Genevieve, who was describing the life she imagined she’d have in Chicago, she’d lost track of time. When she did call, and talked to Jack, Lucy was long asleep, and she explained to him, lying, that she had forgotten to anticipate the differences in time zones. “Well, it’s later where you are,” Jack had said, and Claire felt her face go hot. “But she’s fine,” Jack reassured her, though with perhaps an edge to his voice. “She fell asleep on my mother’s lap practically in the middle of a sentence.” Claire asked, “Does she miss me?” She heard Jack sigh into the phone. “Of course she does. She can’t go ten minutes without saying, ‘Mommy does it this way; Mommy does it that.’ But she hasn’t shed any tears yet.”
That “yet” lingered with her as she walked back toward the booth, where Genevieve was pushing a french fry through the ketchup she’d poured onto her plate. Claire had thought fleetingly that this was a little like falling in love, how, those few times she’d experienced it, the people and habits in her life that had before seemed essential and st
abilizing were now in the way, and she wanted to cast them aside to get a lasting and unobstructed view of the only one she loved.
Now Genevieve shifted in the truck bed, turning from her back to her side, and Claire felt the edge of her hand on her right shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You know you can.”
“When was the last time you saw your father?”
Claire thought about it.
“Well, of course, I saw him when he’d come and take care of me. When my mother couldn’t. Before I moved away. But there was another time, before I was—”
She found herself staring at the streetlight where moths were fluttering about, and she could hear them lightly bumping on the bulb; it was strange that that was the only sound she could hear—no crickets, no bullfrogs, though a creek ran through a dim wooded area behind the school—other than Genevieve’s breathing.
“This isn’t something I’m proud of. It was right before that awful year when I was hurt. I saw him on the street around Christmastime. I was on my way to meet my boyfriend. It was so cold, and I was underdressed, and walking fast. I’d talked to my mother a few days earlier after ignoring her calls, but there were so many of them I finally picked up, and she’d told me she’d left my father. I had a moment where I felt like I was falling. It was as if you went out for a bike ride and when you came home you saw that all the windows of your house were rearranged. But I shrugged that off. I wasn’t thinking of either of them at that time. I thought I was headlong into my own life, and I didn’t care then that I was a little out of control. I liked it.
“Anyway, I’d gone around a block and was heading down another. I heard a man shout my name, and I turned in his direction. There were a lot of people along the street, and cars passing, but I could see it was my father. He caught my eyes for a split second, or at least I think he did. It was hard to tell from that distance. But I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to talk to him. He always seemed wounded to me in some small way, and now, after my mother had just left him—besides, I wanted to get to my boyfriend.”
Genevieve’s face was bathed in the amber light from the streetlamp. There was a lit sign in front of the school that read, Last Day of Classes: June 13th. Have a smart summer! The parking lot was empty and the building dark.
“I spoke to him one more time before I was hurt. But the time I was—well, when I was attacked—that was when he was in—” She felt an icy realization pass through her.
“Genevieve?”
“Yeah?” She was still staring up at the sky.
“In the story you told. About my father. And Kathleen and Tom and Joline. And the baby. When they were at the table eating lunch. How did you know my father was in Pakistan?”
Genevieve’s expression didn’t change, but she did close her eyes for a second or two before opening them again and staring upward.
“It was kind of a guess. But I’ll tell you how I guessed if you’ll tell me something.”
“How could you guess a place like Pakistan?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You wouldn’t believe me seems like a funny thing to say after everything you’ve described to me.”
“I was there for a while. Not for long. Six months or so.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you that story if you’ll tell one to me.”
“What story do you want to hear?”
Genevieve finally turned away from the sky, shifted onto her side, and looked back at the building. She said, “Can’t you just see all those kids running out of here on the last day of school, with their backpacks stuffed with pictures and projects they’d forgotten to bring home earlier in the year? My mother would take me and my friends out for ice cream, and she’d sort through my pack, admiring everything I’d done. I used to love that. What’s today, the sixteenth? It was only three days ago for these kids. They’re already becoming their endless summer selves.”
“Not endless,” Claire said.
“No, but it seemed like it back then, didn’t it?” Genevieve fell back against the thin mattress with her fingers crossed and under her chin. She looked like a child, and this didn’t suit her. “You probably already know what story. The one about this scar.” She reached over and found the place and touched Claire through her T-shirt. “Of the time you were attacked. How it happened. And who you were with. And who did it to you.”
“I really don’t want to tell that story. I don’t think I’ve ever told it to anyone. Even Jack.”
“I know. That’s why it’s the one I want to hear.”
Claire looked at Genevieve’s face. There was a slight smile on her full lips, and she was staring at her without blinking.
“Just tell me part of it,” she said. “The first part. Then I’ll tell you the rest of Marc’s story, and while we’re driving you can tell me the rest of yours. Do you think we’ll make Chicago by tomorrow night?”
“There’s a chance. It’s a long way. But maybe before midnight tomorrow.”
“So this could be our last night.”
“That’s right.”
“Then start telling me your story, Claire.”
Claire rolled over onto her back and looked at the dark sky. With Lucy and Jack seeming so far away, Genevieve was now the only one who stood between her and this reunion. She tried to imagine standing at her father’s bedside, his gray head on a pillow. Her mother’s aging face.
“I was living in a tiny apartment in the city,” she heard herself begin. “It wasn’t, you know, a nice place. If you turned the lights on in the middle of the night, you’d see roaches scurrying under the spoons or saucers you left out. And in January, the cold came through the cracks in the walls, and you had to walk around in sweaters with your shoulders wrapped in a blanket. I remember one cold snap where we brought in a thermometer, and the temperature inside read forty-nine degrees. We took a photo and sent it with the rent check to the landlord, but of course he never did anything. We didn’t expect him to. I don’t think we were even outraged. Spring was coming, after all.”
“Who’s we?” Genevieve asked.
“I’m getting to that. It’s my story, isn’t it?” She smiled, and glanced at Genevieve, who nodded her head and smiled back.
“But I loved that little place. It was the first apartment I ever had, the first time I’d ever lived away from my mother and father. It was in this anonymous, square, yellow-brick building. I guess you could call it university housing, or something like that, because it was near a college, but the people who lived there mostly weren’t college students. A man in his seventies lived in the apartment below me. He’d come up and knock on my door if I played music too loud, but never in a mean way. He called me Clairekins. He’d say, ‘Clairekins, your music isn’t so bad, but it’s so loud.’ He brought me a tin of cookies for Christmas. And there was a Vietnamese family who lived two doors down. They didn’t hang curtains over their windows, and when you came up the walk toward the building, sometimes you could see them eating dinner, with chopsticks and everything, through their front window. I remember thinking it was so much better than TV. And a woman who lived on the first floor who’d set up a small patio outside her kitchen window. Each afternoon I’d come in from work, she’d say, ‘Hello, beautiful!’ which, at that age, surprised me every time. One spring day she asked me to sit next to her in a lawn chair and have a glass of wine. She told me she was married once, and that she lived in the country with her husband. And she said the thing she missed most was hanging laundry on clotheslines. She loved to see the wind billowing her sheets and her husband’s white shirts, particularly when the sun was bright and they seemed to blaze like the robes of the holy. She used that exact phrase. The robes of the holy. I always remembered what she said about laundry. Did I tell you I used to hang my daughter’s diapers on a clothesline behind the hotel?”
“Yeah, you did.”
She thought about it. She realized she
had her eyes closed. “Are you sure I told you that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, my neighbor and I had our glass of wine. And that was a time I was drinking a lot. With the man I was living with. I couldn’t tell you why now. It’s not like I was trying to numb myself. Or somehow overthrowing the memories of a painful childhood. It tasted good, then. And at night, you know? It made it easier. I was only nineteen. I was still used to thinking of my body as a child’s in some way. I remember how we’d sit across from each other almost every night. At this small dining room table we’d dragged home from Goodwill. It had metal legs that someone had painted with a thick, green paint, and this Formica top that was supposed to look like wood, and two matching metal chairs. It was probably patio furniture, but that never occurred to me then. We had a bottle of whiskey on the table between us, and two shot glasses we’d found at Goodwill, too, mine with Betty Boop and his with a hunter’s hat. Who would make a shot glass with a hunter’s hat?
“Anyway, he started calling me Betty, and I started calling him Hunter, which I think he liked. His real name was Seth. He was young, too, twenty at the time, and not much more worldly than I was. So we’d sit across from each other, and our first shot glass we’d sip. We’d talk about our days, the silly details. At the time, he was working unloading trucks in the market district, and he’d tell me how he was shifting crates of lettuce when a chicken came from behind one of them, and his boss ordered him to capture it. Then he’d describe in great detail how he had to chase it around the back of the truck, and how they had to close the door behind him so he could corner it. Those silly kinds of stories. I don’t know if they were even true. I was working in an Asian market that sold sandwiches to college students, and I was in charge of making them. I don’t think my boss understood half of what I said, but he always smiled at me, and he paid me well, under the table.”