by Daniel Lowe
“No, you didn’t. Were you married?”
“Yeah, for a year or so. But that was long enough. It’s not like it was a bad scene. I was just never home. Couldn’t blame her for divorcing me, really.”
“Boy or girl?”
“A little girl. Miss her bad, and see her maybe six times a year. It’s not like I don’t want to miss her, but it hurts, you know? Some days I’d like not to have to remember all of that.”
He thought about this and looked over at me again, and then closed his eyes. Something pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“I guess that’s not true. I’m sorry. It’s gotta be hard. Must be like waking up to a life someone else dreamed up for you.”
My skin flushed warm after he said this. I pushed myself up on my forearms and kissed him lightly.
He opened his eyes and said, “What was that for?”
“It is that way sometimes.”
He was looking at my face, and ran his hand through my hair, and then tucked a strand behind my ear.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, because you don’t usually see a pretty girl behind the wheel of a beat-up Taurus with a Drink Pepsi bumper sticker. Is that your daddy’s car you drive around in?”
I said that it was, but we left it at that, because I had to go downstairs to work. When she told me about my father, that summer afternoon in her living room while I watched the ceiling fan spin, my mother said he’d left me some money through an insurance policy, and I asked her to hold it for me for some time when I needed it. But I did take his car. It was ten years old, a Ford, and smelled of spilled coffee and rust and perhaps sweat, or some other distant smell that had come from the hours and hours he’d spent driving it, and the seat was slightly squashed from the weight of his body. I liked thinking that I was peering through the windshield as he had, heading toward an as yet never-seen destination. My mother told me he’d loved to travel, that once he’d driven all the way to New Jersey with me in the backseat of that car when it was still new because I’d wanted to see the ocean. While I couldn’t remember that ten-year-old girl, it was still possible, glancing in the rearview mirror, to imagine her sitting there.
* * *
It had been well into August before I’d learned that my father had been killed. My mother’s explanation for not telling me, she said, was to protect me while I healed, but she had left my father in the months before he went to Pakistan, and I think that complicated her reasons for keeping his death a secret. When I asked about him, she told me his mother, my grandmother, was still alive, still living in the place my father had grown up.
We drove out to her lake house the following Saturday, on one of those late August days when the humidity is high and not a leaf moves in the warm, heavy air. My grandmother cried when she saw me, her dog hunkered down next to her knees. I didn’t recognize the white-haired woman in front of me, and she glanced for a moment at the place on my skull where hair was still growing in, and then pressed me close to her chest, and said, “If I’d lost both of you … If I’d lost both of you.” She took me around the small house, and showed me the room my father had slept in when he was a boy, but she’d remodeled it long ago, and there were no signs of his time there except for a wooden candy dish she told me he’d made in shop class in eighth grade that she kept on an end table and filled with peppermints. She showed me photograph albums that we looked through while sitting next to each other on her floral-patterned couch that had the faint smell of mildew. I liked the pictures of my father as a boy, sitting next to his sisters, holding two fingers behind one of their heads in a gesture I recognized from my own childhood. And I could recognize myself in the photographs my grandmother had of me, and I could see myself in the child sitting on her father’s lap with her hands raised in the air, and in the photograph of my unhappy face when I was older while I stood next to him in front of a Christmas tree. I thought I could see that he loved me.
When we had lunch, my grandmother served us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with potato chips and sliced apples, and then apologized for the simple meal, but she said these were his favorite foods when he was a boy. We sat at the round wooden table, but really, there was nothing much to talk about. I watched the lake out the window while she and my mother talked, and when we finished eating, I asked my grandmother to take me outside while my mother cleaned up the dishes.
The lawn that led to the lake was small, and her dog, a springer spaniel named Penny, loped down to the water in front of us and started sniffing among the lily pads for small fish and minnows. The lake was mostly calm at midday, the cottages that circled the front half of it slightly hazy and quiet with the occasional exception of a slamming screen door. The children who would normally be outside playing had likely gone home for the start of the school year. The land on the opposite side was undeveloped, and there were trees along the bank, and some farmland on one end where, tucked away from the lake’s edge, you could see a corner of a field of corn.
We stood silently for a while near a willow tree that grew just short of the bank. I finally asked my grandmother, “Did my dad like coming out here to visit?”
“He did, I think. As much as any grown man enjoys visiting his mother. I don’t think he ever came out here without saying something about how small the place seemed compared to when he was little, when he could still swing out over the bank on these willow branches. Some afternoons, he’d pull a lawn chair out to the edge of the lake and sit there for an hour or so. Just looking out over the water. I wish I could tell you what he was thinking about, but he seemed to find it peaceful.”
“It is peaceful.”
“You used to come out here on the weekend to visit all by yourself. We bought you some ice skates one Christmas when you were only five or six, and I had to call you in those winter evenings or you’d have kept skating on into the dark.”
I smiled. “Is it nice in the winter?”
“It’s cold! But it’s beautiful after the water freezes over. The only time I saw the whole lake ice up at once was on one of those weekends you stayed over. It was right after the New Year, and we had a fresh snowfall. We were lying on the couch together, and you were asleep. You might’ve been in third grade back then. The lake was choppy, with little whitecaps everywhere, and they looked pretty because they matched the snow on the banks. I’d set aside the book I was reading to you, and kept glancing out the window, but fell asleep myself for a minute or two. Then I thought I heard someone walking in the front of the yard, and it woke me, and I sat up, and no one was there, but the wind had died, and I could see this perfectly clear skin of ice slowly spread itself over the water, from the banks to almost the middle of the lake.”
She looked up at me then, and smiled shyly, as though she’d revealed something about herself that she hadn’t intended.
“When you woke up, you asked to put your skates on first thing,” she said.
I gave her a hug, and told her I’d like to sit out near the lake for a few minutes by myself, like my father used to do, and she squeezed my hand and brought back a lawn chair for me before she went inside.
* * *
Can you grieve for someone you don’t remember? About whom you’ve only heard stories, even if those stories include a version of yourself you can’t recall? Or is it like waking in a theater at the end of a movie where everyone around you is crying?
I sat for a long while trying to recall my father, trying to imagine him as a boy swinging on the boughs of a willow tree, splashing his sisters in the water out at the end of the dock where my grandmother’s old boat was tied, and I imagined my father, too, pulling the oars that would lead the boat across the water, and I imagined I may have sat in the bow a time or two while he rowed across the lake.
I thought of him as a man visiting his mother, sitting where I was late on a summer evening, that time of night when the vacationers who filled the rented cottages would have doused their charcoal pits, and their kids would long since be out of the water and
immersed in the deep slumber that comes from a day of play on the lake. There might be a few fireflies still lit along the banks, and the wind would have died down by then, and there would be only a faint lapping of invisible waves that he could hear against the black line of sand at the lake’s edge. A late-night fisherman might be rowing in, or someone in a canoe, maybe a couple of teenagers, or a newlywed couple, who had paddled to the other side of the lake to whisper to each other or exchange kisses.
My mother had told me a woman was somehow involved in my father’s kidnapping in Pakistan. I hadn’t searched very deeply to find out more about her; there didn’t seem to be much reason. They thought she may have been from upstate New York, but no one could find her mother or father. The photo they had online did what they always do, which was to make her look haunted, angry, and unattractive. As I looked out over the lake at a fisherman casting his line, I tried to imagine the woman in a room with my father, a room in a country he never had the chance to know, where at the end all he had was his memory to comfort him, the opposite of what I felt in those first mornings after I’d been attacked, waking in my bedroom where I grew up. I wondered if my father had said anything at all to the woman about me. I wondered what life he’d dreamed up for me when I was born, and what life, if any, he’d wanted for me before he died.
Sometimes, now, on the rare weekend when Jeremy’s daughter is visiting, while she lies sleeping between us and I’ve wakened early to watch the first morning light brighten the bed where she and Jeremy are curled in toward each other, I think I know what he might be dreaming of, even in his waking hours. That the two of us could marry. That we could raise his daughter in that hard-scrubbed landscape, that her eyes would take on the blue of the sky, and we would build a little home near a stand of pine trees where I’d hang clothes outside in the clean wind that rolls over the mountains, his little girl’s blue dress flapping in the breeze. I could go to college in Elko, learn a trade or have a career, and we could live a happy life carved out of the stark beauty of that land. Part of me wants that.
But during those nights his daughter visits, in the living stillness made by the knowledge that she is asleep between us, my own dreaming returns. At first come shadows, forgotten rooms, and then familiar faces, half sentences someone is speaking to me that I remember, but then dissolve when I open my eyes. I don’t know that these memories will continue to return, but I do know they are out there, along with all of the things I can’t remember. Even though I can’t name them, I think of them in the world, I think of them in the minds of other people, as if these others are the caretakers of my memories—for me, or for maybe everyone who has forgotten anything or has been forgotten—people living in different times, people in faraway lands.
It’s like waking to a life someone dreamed for you. Maybe, at some point, that’s partly true for everyone. I think of Jeremy opening his eyes in my bed, and, in the half second before he remembers me, seeing a woman in a strange kitchen making coffee. I think of my mother, waking to a morning when the man she’d loved, lived with, then left had been killed, his body never found; and, months later, on another morning, waking to a daughter who had disappeared.
And then, one early morning, when Jeremy has gone to work and left his little girl sleeping beside me, I dream of a man who says he is my father. He is sitting with me in a café in Karachi, where my mother told me my father was killed. We sit sipping from cups of tea in the bright late-afternoon sun, neither of us speaking, as women pass by in hijabs, men in suits, my father wearing a jacket and tie and set back in his chair, his legs crossed. I feel his eyes on my face, but when I turn toward him he is always looking elsewhere, at a boy waving to someone from a window, and then at a limping man pushing a cart down the street.
“How’s your mother?” he asks me, and loops his finger into his teacup.
“You know I haven’t seen her in months.”
My father still won’t look in my eyes, but he nods. He turns his hand up and studies his fingernails. A waiter comes by and puts the check on the table, and my father looks up at him and gives him his good smile.
After the waiter walks away, my father says, “I suppose you’re in love with this Jeremy.” Now he’s looking out over the roofs of low buildings, their shadows advancing in the low sun.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember what that’s like.”
He nods again, looks down at his watch, and then reaches in his pocket and pulls out a coin and places it on the check. He stares at it as if he wonders if it will be enough, and then begins to glance through the crowd of people moving past. Finally, he finds a mother walking through the marketplace holding the hand of her daughter, and he says, “Back when you were that little girl’s age—”
But I say, “Don’t.”
Then he finds a young woman without a head scarf, and says, “Of course, by then you were—”
And I say, “Stop.”
At last, he looks at me. He lightly touches his fingers to his face as if he needs to make certain it’s his. The sun has dipped behind the buildings, and we’re in shade.
“Claire, don’t you want to remember?”
I nod my head, because I do. I do want to remember. But I’m in that space between sleeping and waking where images of a dream collide with the coming demands of the day, and I want to go on dreaming.
So instead, I say to him, “Tell me a story.”
Acknowledgments
For their unflinching support and friendship, thanks to Claude Hurlbert, A. D. Feys, Tim Johnson, Dave Martin, Mark L. Shelton, Tom Sweterlitsch, and Jay Letto. With admiration, thank you to Stewart O’Nan, Laila Lalami, and Christopher Scotton. For their dedication to good books, thank you to my astute and extraordinary editors, Amy Einhorn and Caroline Bleeke, and to all the fine people at Flatiron. At the Gernert Company, thank you to Flora Hackett, Anna Worrall, and especially my agent, Andy Kifer, whose brilliance lit the lantern for my manuscript and guided it down every right path. And to depths I can’t express, thank you to Erin Cawley, who through draft after draft of this book turned over each word with intelligence, acuity, and devotion.
Recommend All That’s Left to Tell for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at www.readinggroupgold.com
About the Author
Daniel Lowe teaches writing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. All That’s Left to Tell is his debut. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALL THAT’S LEFT TO TELL. Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Lowe. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Cover design by Kathleen M. Lynch
Cover photo by Marc Atkins
ISBN 978-1-250-08555-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-08554-2 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250085542
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First Edition: February 2017