All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  She kept hearing drops of rain pelt the lot, but none had landed on her yet, and she couldn’t see them falling in the streetlight.

  “When we got home, and back up to the apartment, I stood at the window again, and I was nibbling at a crust of the bread. But I remember how it seemed, standing there, that by going back upstairs, I’d been removed from the day. And Seth came up from behind me again. And he wanted to make love, and of course we hadn’t been drinking, and if we had made love, maybe that would have been the first time without it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. He kept telling me he loved me, which he usually didn’t tell me in the daytime, in the morning, and I didn’t want to hear it. I kept thinking of the men in the fantasy he’d described the night before when we were drunk, and the boy with the soccer ball, and the baker and his springtime gift to us, and I kept wondering why Seth wanted to be bleeding in an alley while I was raped, and why this man would want to give us this bread, and how there could have been no baker without the men in the alley, how the boy couldn’t have kicked the ball without Seth being hit with the brick, and that wasn’t literally true, I knew, but it was in my head, and the rest of that day I wouldn’t let Seth come near me.”

  She stopped then, having slid into the space between remembering that time, remembering Seth, and the place she was now lying next to Genevieve. She thought of how, sometimes, when it rained, a breeze would come up with the first wave of raindrops, and she often wondered why that happened, why everything would seem still, and then when the breeze arrived, she wondered if it was being pulled by the rain or if the wind was carrying the rain over her. But this night was airless, and the few drops that had hit the ground had now passed. She wanted Lucy. She wanted to see her sleeping in her bed at home in order to dispel the closeness of the night.

  “So maybe you should stop right there,” Genevieve said. “And tell me the rest tomorrow in the car. It’s late, and we have a long drive.”

  “All right, Gen,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I’m a little homesick.”

  Genevieve reached out and took her hand and squeezed it.

  “I know,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like the road was made for it. Do you want to hear a little more of your father’s story?”

  “I don’t know, Gen. The closer we get, the less that seems to make sense. I’m going to see him for real in less than forty-eight hours.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what happened next?”

  She lay there, thinking about it. She had told Genevieve more than she’d ever intended. But she said, “I do. I do. I do want to hear what happened.”

  “The next stretch of highway is so plain,” Genevieve said. “So dull. I’ll tell you a little bit now, and I’ll wait to tell you the very last part till then. Maybe we’ll change the landscape some.”

  “Okay.”

  And then they lay quietly for a while. Genevieve had not let go of her hand. Claire was waiting for Genevieve to begin, but she could feel herself passing into the images that accompany first sleep, and she heard Genevieve humming a tune, like a lullaby. In the midst of that tune, Genevieve asked, “Did you lose track of Seth?” The question caught Claire off guard.

  “Yes. Of course I did.”

  “Why of course?”

  “Well, I lost track of almost everyone from that time. After I was—after I was hurt, I never heard from Seth again. It was strange, I suppose. My mother told me he had been cut, too, right along a cheekbone. I don’t imagine that had anything to do with him never even trying to call. What do you say after something like that happens and you’re twenty years old?”

  Genevieve nodded, and kept her eyes closed, and finished humming her tune.

  “What song is that?” Claire asked, but instead of answering, Genevieve shook her head and pulled back some strands of hair.

  “After Marc tells Kathleen about Claire,” Genevieve began, “filling in the details as honestly as he can, he and Kathleen sit quietly in the living room. He knows Kathleen feels in some way betrayed, though she didn’t shed any tears and hasn’t spoken of it. She has tried to read; she’s taken up her knitting again, but has stopped and is now staring absently out the window, her fingers covering her mouth. Marc wishes she would say something, and resists wondering if she might leave him. He doesn’t want to think about Claire. Instead, he steadies his mind on this enormous, new kind of quiet. And on this new kind of cold. Did the cold bring the quiet, or the quiet the cold?”

  “I was thinking about something like that just a few minutes ago,” Claire said.

  “Is that right?” Genevieve asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course it is the cold that brings the quiet. In the winter, things sleep. Hibernate. Most birds fly south. The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing. Marc doesn’t know where that line came from. Something he read in high school. But birds do gather at the feeder his neighbor puts out. He sees them in the morning sometimes pecking at seeds, sometimes driving other birds away. In winter, their calls seem more like claim than song. He hopes the cold that has descended on him and Kathleen isn’t permanent.

  “Yet, in a way, the quiet brings the cold, too. If it is a remote September day, a warm, last-of-summer day, and you are walking with some children along a lakeshore, and they’re chattering, playing, dodging the lapping waves, and a small flock of gulls lands a hundred feet up the beach, and the children take off after them, chasing them into the sky as they screech and fly away, their calls receding into the sound of the waves, and the children are struck dumb as they watch what they accomplished, and everything is muted for a few seconds, so quiet, and then comes a chill—finger-light—running along your spine: then the quiet brings the cold. And reminds you of—what? Of the coming autumn? Of death? He’d read that some say when they’re about to die, that what they want is more light, and some say they want more warmth.

  “And then, despite himself, Marc remembers again the warmth of Joline’s kiss. The way she’d told him to keep his eyes closed.”

  Genevieve stopped there and seemed to be listening to something in the night.

  “Are you still awake, Claire?”

  13

  When he woke in the early morning before dawn, still facing the wall, his arms and legs aching, his shoulder throbbing, his first thought was, Please don’t let her die. He had not recoiled from the story Claire had told—Josephine had told—about Claire’s lover and his fantasy, though he recognized the destination for Claire was not Chicago, not Michigan, but telling the story of the moment of her death. And he was unsure whether he’d be able to bear hearing it, or, even more terribly, not hearing it. He was unable to measure Genevieve’s intentions any more than he could measure Josephine’s, as if they were somehow distinct, which Josephine had insisted. And how would it end, anyway? How could it, since Josephine had said their own time together would be ending soon? Anyway, Claire was dead. His memory of his collapse the night before pulled at the corner of his eyes. I want to see your face.

  The room was already too warm. Slowly, he began to make the painful shift onto his back.

  “Marc, I’m still here. Saabir’s outside the door.”

  Rather than roll over onto his back, Marc slowly stretched his legs. She had not given him the invitation again, but he could easily have turned toward her and looked at her fully.

  “Did you sleep at all, Josephine?”

  “Not tonight, no.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Sitting here thinking about our story, mostly. Watching you sleep.”

  She was speaking nearly in a whisper, most likely in order not to wake Saabir, though he supposed that’s what people do anyway when they speak to each other in the middle of the night. Facing the wall, he could not discern whether light was beginning to come through the window. He closed his eyes, and recognized the comfort in having her nearby when he was unable to see.

  “I smell bad,” he said.

 
He heard her uncross her legs and shift on the chair, and he listened to the familiar resettling of her garments.

  “It’s something you get used to.”

  “I don’t think I could ever get used to this place. This room. Pakistan. This world.”

  “Do you think, if you went home now, you’d get used to that place again, given all that’s happened?”

  “Part of me—” But he didn’t finish the sentence, since he didn’t want to tell her that he would be willing to stay here if Claire could go on living, even if it were only in Josephine’s story. “I think it would take many, many days.”

  They were quiet for a minute or so.

  “You know this is our last day, Marc.”

  He resisted the ache in his chest. “Where are they taking me?”

  “I couldn’t tell you if I knew. You understand that.”

  He nodded again. “Is it dawn yet?” he asked.

  “Not for another hour or so.”

  He lay on his side, waiting. “What happens after today?” he asked. “To these stories we’ve told? What will happen to Claire then? And Genevieve? All of this for what, finally?”

  “I don’t know, Marc.”

  “All of this was your idea. You suggested at least twice that there was some purpose.”

  She cleared her throat. “I was sitting here thinking while you slept. Most every story you’ve told about Claire was an attempt to explain who she became, and what happened. Is there a story you can tell where you remember her as happy?”

  He turned his shoulder toward her, because he realized this was likely the last story he’d ever tell of Claire, and he felt suddenly catapulted through the roof of the room, and he was looking down on the two of them from above with a dispassionate eye at the odd mechanics of the history of their conversation set in an inconsequential hovel on a street diminished by a sprawling city where millions breathed the heavy, foul air of the day.

  “Are you going to kill me, Josephine?”

  She didn’t answer that question, either. He was warm and damp, and his clothes clung to him. She was waiting for his story, but it didn’t seem impatiently.

  He said, “Happy.” And then he began.

  “She was ten or eleven years old. I don’t know why I remember this, particularly. I want to say we were in our backyard, but it couldn’t have been, because I remember trees, oaks, a number of them, and our yard wasn’t large. Claire had a friend over, her best friend at the time.”

  “Was this before the day she cut herself on the leg?”

  He blinked twice at how much she’d come to know about Claire.

  “Yes. Before that day. It seems a long time before, but it couldn’t have been. She and her friend”—he hesitated trying to remember—“I think her name was Chloe. It was something close to that, anyway. She and Chloe had taken a sudden and passionate interest in birds. I don’t think it lasted more than the day or so, the way it does for kids, who seem to wake up every morning as if someone thrust a new map in their hands. But this was the day for birds. They had one set of binoculars between them, and when one of them spotted what they thought was a blue jay or a cardinal in the higher limbs, the other would say, ‘Let me see the binocs!’

  “It was humid and warm, one of those late May evenings when the leaves had recently broadened into bright green blades, and the wind was blowing lightly, and the girls kept mistaking the movement of the leaves for the movement of birds. Whoever wasn’t carrying the binoculars around her neck was writing down the names of the birds in a tiny notebook. They were running from tree to tree, their shushing loud enough to chase away any animal, but the birds in that woods were used to children. Claire’s hair was cut short at the time, and she could have passed for a boy, the way strands of it were damp with sweat at her temples and her eyebrows.

  “I remember how it started growing darker under those trees, and when they were about to give up the search, a crow descended into one of the lower limbs, and gave out three loud caws. Claire had the binoculars, and she immediately trained them on the crow, but Chloe was so excited, she screamed, ‘Look! Look! It’s gonna caw again!’ and it lifted off into the sky, calling as it flew away. And Claire said, ‘Aw, Chloe. You scared it. You scared it away. You scarecrow.’ They both laughed at this, but before their laughter could end in the usual fit of giggling, Chloe struck a pose she likely stole from The Wizard of Oz, crossing her arms and pointing in opposite directions, her back stiff as if her shirt was run through with a pole. I could see Chloe’s shoulders shaking with muted laughter, and Claire flipped the binoculars so Chloe would seem tiny.

  “Claire looked through them and said, ‘That’s a good Mr. Scarecrow. You keep those nasty crows away from your corn way out in your field.’ Chloe laughed, fell out of her pose, and said, ‘Now you try. Let me see you,’ and Claire ran over and handed her the binoculars, then walked backward away from her, taking slow, long steps. Claire always had an amazing sense of balance when she was young that she was eager to show off. We thought for a while she might become a gymnast. So she stood about ten yards away from Chloe, and drew one foot up and pressed the arch to the side of the knee of the leg she’d planted on the ground. Then she held her arms out on either side at full length, tilted her chin up slightly, and for a few seconds, while Chloe peered through the binoculars, she closed her eyes.”

  His own eyes closed, as if he were still blindfolded; he was seeing her.

  “She had—she had this smile on her face. A closed-mouth smile, you know, her cheeks and throat pink from running around that oak grove. This blissful look. And I can’t tell you where I was standing now. I don’t remember standing anywhere. I was close enough to see her expression, see her posed there so still, so still, as if she’d cast her own statue. But I remember, too, wondering how she looked through the binoculars Chloe was holding backward. I was seeing how she looked from where I was standing. That face flushed with color. I was wondering how she would look from far away.”

  Far away. He was holding still himself, still curled on the mat, but returning to the room.

  “I don’t remember going home. I don’t remember walking back inside after that evening. I doubt Claire remembered it at all.”

  He rolled over onto his back.

  “What’s going to happen, Josephine?”

  She didn’t answer, but he heard her let out a long breath, and rise to her feet. She walked over to the door, and he guessed she was listening, and then he heard her move over to the window.

  “It’s likely they will come for you at first light,” she said.

  He nodded again, and then she walked back to the chair, her steps sounding amplified in the silence of early morning.

  “Why wait till first light? I never understood the tradition of waiting for dawn for an execution. Another night for the condemned to suffer his long thoughts.”

  She said nothing to this. He thought he heard her raise her arms and lower them again, for reasons he couldn’t determine, but the same fragrance he’d occasionally smelled on her returned.

  “Under that deep Nebraska sky, the moths still bumping the streetlight, while waiting for Genevieve to continue her story, Claire had fallen asleep. Now she turned over in the truck bed, her mind surfacing to the sounds of crickets.”

  “Josephine,” Marc said.

  “Shh. Listen,” Josephine said. “It’s all that’s left to tell.” And then she continued.

  14

  Claire sat straight up in the truck bed, and her sudden movement woke Genevieve. The sky had cleared utterly, and now was flooded with morning stars, and Claire looked east, the direction they would be heading, and checked the horizon for the first sign of dawn, but as yet there was none. Along the highway, the sound of the engine of a lone truck whined into the distance. She looked back toward Genevieve.

  “Claire, you okay?” she asked. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  “Did my story about your dad upset you
?”

  “No, Genevieve. I fell asleep.”

  Genevieve nodded, and lay back in the truck bed and closed her eyes. Only then did Claire look at her face, glancing from it back to the school beyond the lot where they had parked the truck, and she saw Genevieve’s mouth open slightly, could see her eyes moving under her eyelids, and Claire knew she was sleeping.

  If they didn’t get started soon, they would need to stop before Chicago, probably just outside Iowa City, and she would have to lie for one more night next to Genevieve, who would by then know the rest of her story about Seth and the night she was attacked. And she wanted to tell Genevieve the story, could feel it welling up inside her, and yet was afraid to, and as Genevieve slept, Claire could feel herself trembling, though the June morning was still warm.

  Because Genevieve must have known about her father’s kiss. The time he’d kissed Claire when she was fourteen. In Genevieve’s story, Joline had kissed Marc after asking him to close his eyes. And twice, in that story, he’d thought about the kiss, and seemed to savor it. Had Genevieve wanted Claire to recognize it? And she knew Genevieve couldn’t have guessed it, knew that, because Genevieve had also known about Pakistan, it couldn’t have been a coincidence, and her mind raced. Could this woman have met her father in Pakistan, in the month he was there before Claire was injured? But that was fifteen years ago, and Genevieve would have been barely fourteen herself then. And she’d picked her up hitchhiking on the highway, and she couldn’t have known Claire was driving, couldn’t have known she’d be out on that long stretch of hot, empty road.