All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  The three of them—Marc, Saabir, and the woman—sat in silence then. A cooling breeze came up the hill and through the trees, and he remembered a time when he was young when he’d visited an old friend who lived in the mountains in Oregon, and how late at night the wind poured through the firs with a deep, sweeping whisper, and he’d thought if he could hear that sound long enough it would have scrubbed his soul clean.

  “I wonder if Saabir would be willing to share his cigarette,” he said.

  The woman spoke to him, and Saabir rose from his stone seat, his knee popping, and strode over and handed Marc the half-smoked cigarette. It tasted vaguely of Saabir’s mouth, some subtle, unknown spice, and reminded him he hadn’t eaten. Marc took a deep, long drag, and resisted the urge to cough. He hadn’t smoked in twenty years. He exhaled and handed the cigarette back to Saabir.

  “Thank you,” Marc said. Saabir moved a few steps away behind him, so for the first time, all he could see were the mountains and the valley.

  “You know, I’m sure it sounds like I told that story intentionally. Because we’re here, in these hills. I didn’t. Before the moment those words came out of my mouth, I wouldn’t have remembered what Claire said on the way home.”

  With neither Saabir nor the woman in sight, under the isolating sky, it felt as if he were talking to himself.

  “I don’t understand how she could feel so much despair at age sixteen.”

  Here, maybe, he thought, had she grown up in poverty, had she seen too much suffering, but not back home. She had been partly right about beautiful places. Sitting here, now, the sun beginning to emerge from behind the cliff face warming his back and brightening the horizon, he could see the beauty, he could observe it and remember how, a few minutes ago, his eyes filled with tears, but it didn’t penetrate, it didn’t fill spaces taken up by other things, even the memory of Claire, temporarily transfigured by beauty, bounding toward the car. She was sixteen. Why hadn’t she been living closer to her skin? Then at nineteen. He closed his eyes and shook the image of her away.

  He heard Josephine take a few steps toward him, and as the sun shone from behind the wall, he could see her shadow cast near his own. He could see its narrow shoulders and perhaps its cloaked head.

  “For the first few minutes Claire could think of very little to say to the woman, as she sat quietly beside her in the tiny truck,” Josephine said.

  Marc flinched at the mention of Claire’s name. Would Josephine take up her story even out here, standing behind him, with the low desert wind sighing through the mountains?

  7

  Claire was used to making small talk with the guests at the motel, but had been traveling alone on the highway for so many hours that any question or observation was eluding her. She kept stealing surreptitious glances at the woman, who was, she now realized, maybe older than she looked, maybe in her late twenties, lines at her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but her expression held a subtle sense of mischief that conferred a kind of boyishness. The woman—Genevieve, she reminded herself, an unusual name—picked up the scarf she’d worn over her head in the sun and wiped some road dust from her face, and then took a corner and rubbed it gently over each eye; Claire had never met someone whose eyes appeared so deeply gray, so impenetrable, and they were by far her prettiest feature.

  “So what’s in Chicago?” Claire finally asked her.

  “A boyfriend. An ex-boyfriend. He says it’s the best city in the world, and he wants to show it to me and have me live with him there for a while. Probably, he’s lonely. Or wants some company in his bed. But I’ve never been, and I’ll have a place to stay for a few months.”

  The woman smiled and shifted her gaze from the road to Claire’s face, and asked, “So who’s in Michigan?”

  “My father,” Claire said.

  The woman nodded and looked out the windshield, squinting. She pushed her sleeves up over her shoulders, and then ran a hand over each arm. The light hairs there were golden in the sun that came through the side window, and didn’t seem to match her raven head. Claire guessed the woman colored it.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s so good to feel the air coming through.”

  Claire smiled at her. “You could’ve gotten heatstroke.”

  “Well, I’m used to it. It’s always hot here.”

  “There’s an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove box, if you want.”

  “No, that’s okay. When I’m not driving, I like to see the world as it really is.”

  Reflexively, Claire looked out the top of her sunglasses. The sagebrush and distant plateaus were bleached pale in the sun.

  “Your father,” the woman said. “He’s probably sick, isn’t he?”

  Claire remembered the man at the sandwich shop in the national forest, and wondered if everyone along this highway was trained to read minds.

  “Yeah, he is,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “Well, you got a baby, too, right?” The woman leaned over and picked up a tiny rag doll that Lucy had tossed from the car seat weeks ago and had become a permanent feature of the floorboards.

  “Yep. A little girl. She just turned three.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy,” the woman repeated. “Like Lucille Ball. I Love Lucy. Or the woman in the country song who left her husband with the crops in the field.”

  Claire smiled. “I have to admit, when she was born, we never thought of that song. It’s my maternal grandmother’s name.”

  “It’s a nice old-fashioned name.”

  “Like Genevieve,” Claire said.

  “Yeah, I guess so.” The woman looked out the window and seemed to watch the barbed-wire fence line that went on forever.

  “Anyway,” she said, her voice vibrating like a fan blade before she turned back toward Claire. “I figured you wouldn’t be driving all this way without your baby or husband if you were just going to spend some time with your dad.”

  “He’s in the hospital,” Claire said. “Congestive heart failure. I guess he’s had it for a while.”

  The woman nodded. “So how many years has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  Claire couldn’t help but cast a look at her.

  “You said I guess. That means you didn’t know about his illness before he called you on the phone.”

  “He wasn’t the one who called,” Claire said. “It was a woman I never met. My parents are divorced.”

  “I see. He must be pretty sick.”

  “I think he is. But to answer your question, I haven’t spoken to him in around fifteen years.”

  The woman nodded and looked out the windshield. She pulled a strand of hair that was blowing around her face back behind her ear, and then suddenly pointed at a telephone pole. “Look, a hawk! It’s perched right on top there.” It lifted into the sky just as they passed.

  “That’s a long time,” the woman continued. “My own father died a few years back. A stroke. He was still pretty young. I didn’t have to drive across the country to see him, but I still didn’t make it in time. I mean, he was still alive when I got there. But I don’t think he recognized me. He only had one eye. I mean, after the stroke, he had one that still worked. It just sort of kept moving back and forth across my face, searching for something. I was holding his hand when he died. I’d never seen a person die before.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. It struck her that she had never seen someone die, either, and that of the people she had known, except for a boy from high school she’d heard was killed in a car crash, she had come closer to dying than anyone.

  “It’s something you’re not ready for. I mean, it happens in its own time, out of your control. All the things I remembered about him. They didn’t crowd in till afterward. I wanted to say, ‘No, wait, Dad! I’m not ready.’ But I don’t imagine he was ready, either. It was just his body. His body didn’t leave him any choice.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Sixty-seve
n. He and my mom had me when he was older. The last of three kids. Two brothers and me.”

  “Do you miss him?” Claire was surprised at her own directness, but the woman seemed so unselfconscious.

  Genevieve shifted her eyes to Claire’s face. Claire felt the awkwardness of being looked at while she had to keep her own eyes on the road. Finally, Genevieve said, “Not much more now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive. My mother was the one who raised me. Raised us. My father worked hard as a salesman. It’s not that he was mean or stern. He was just away. The strange thing is—”

  She stopped and looked out the window at the road.

  “So we’re on Interstate 80, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m hoping to make Salt Lake City by tonight.”

  “That’s a long haul, but I bet we can get there. Like I said, I’ll be happy to drive.”

  Already the woman was saying we. They were headed around a bend with a high, bald hill and a few clumps of bushes toward the top.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” Claire said. “So you were saying?”

  “So I mean, we’re going to take this trip together. All these hours here in this little truck. Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa. The landscape is pretty sometimes, but it’s mostly bleak. And there will be long stretches of miles and miles that neither of us will remember. But some things will happen along the way, and we’ll talk sometimes like we’re talking now. And then you’ll drop me off in Chicago, and we will probably never see each other again. But when you look back, you’ll remember those things that happened and these conversations separated by all the quiet highway hours.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So when someone dies … So when my father died, what happens is like you have Interstate 80 stretched out over a lifetime. But all those hours, all those weeks and months where nothing was happening, where you were living your life without even thinking about him, those spaces fall away, and the memories you do have slam into each other, one after another, and they’re moving too fast to stop. It’s one thing if you’re someone like me. I mean, it’s true that even thinking back to your father asleep in his chair can hurt a little once he’s gone. But I didn’t have that many memories of him. A time we played catch because I wanted to make the softball team. Or the time my mother was in the hospital and one morning he had to brush out my hair before I went to school. You remember how sometimes he pulled too hard, and your eyes watered, and your scalp stung, but it was your father brushing out your hair, which never happened before, so you didn’t say anything. But, like I said, there weren’t that many things I remembered, so they didn’t pile up. But my poor mother. She got through the funeral okay, with all the people I hadn’t seen for years, or had never seen, taking her hand and telling some little story of her husband. I wish they hadn’t put him in a casket for everyone to see. But afterward, when the people left, and we went home, and I was standing in the kitchen with her. I was saying something about how nice everything had gone, and when I turned to look at her she was standing at the sink, clutching the edge of the counter. She had her eyes closed tight, and she was saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ Just like that. All the empty hours and the stretches of loneliness she used to confide in me about, they all fell away, and everything else was slamming into each other. And she kept saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ I could see how they were banging into her rib cage from the inside, and there was nothing I could do but wait till they stopped.”

  They had rounded the long bend, and now the Nevada desert lay out flat again. Claire saw how she was gripping the steering wheel tightly, and then releasing the grip, a rhythm she realized had persisted through the woman’s story. The woman had turned away and was looking out the passenger window.

  “That’s so sad,” Claire said.

  The woman shrugged her shoulders, and when she spoke her voice was again buffeted by the air streaming in.

  “It is, I guess. But that’s the way it works. I don’t know how it will be for you, with all of these years passed.”

  “Well, he hasn’t died yet,” she said. “How’s your mom now?”

  But the woman didn’t answer this question. She was resting her chin on her hand, her elbow propped into the empty space of the window. Her eyes were closed.

  Claire thought about her own father. She was now as close to his age at the time she last saw him as she was to nineteen. Closer. When she’d left, she’d taken no photographs, no images stored on smartphones, and so her memory of him—sandy-headed, a wide, lopsided smile that warmed when he saw her, his waist thickening in the middle after too many corporate lunches—faded as soon as she conjured it like the flash of a camera after you close your eyes. For some reason, she could remember her mother more clearly, probably because to Claire she had always been so beautiful. Thin, pale, taut skin. Ageless. She’d still looked like a girl when she braided her hair some summer mornings because she wanted to keep the back of her neck cool. But her father. Jack had asked about him, and no, she never had told him about the kiss, but she did tell him about some of the things she remembered. How sometimes he had a temper, and once smashed the picture window in their house with a hammer because his paint job had sealed it closed and he couldn’t get it open to let the air in. Or how he could be kind, and took in two stray cats that had begun to beg for food, even though because of allergies he had to drink Benadryl almost every day to keep from sneezing. Once, when she was maybe eight years old, he’d taken her to the circus, and she hadn’t wanted to go because a friend had told her circuses were for little kids, and besides, she felt sorry for the elephants, but they had gone anyway, and she’d liked the tightrope act, and afterward she let her father carry her on his shoulders as he hadn’t probably for over a year. He’d found a long, painted line in the parking lot, and started walking across it like a tightrope, wobbling as he tried to keep his balance, and she was laughing over the thrill of possibly falling, and she’d slapped her hands over his eyes once when he’d lurched slightly out of control, and he’d said, “Marc the Magnificent, who can walk the high wire even with a blindfold!” And she’d kept his eyes covered, and he’d laughed, and started taking baby steps so she wouldn’t fall.

  When she’d told Jack that story, he’d said, “So how can you go fifteen years without seeing the guy? I mean, my old man is as poker-faced as they come; I don’t think I heard him laugh more than a half-dozen times growing up, but if a few months pass and I haven’t heard from him, I’m picking up the phone.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, if that makes sense,” she’d told him. “I don’t think I was being deliberate.”

  None of the years since she’d last seen him had been easy, and yet, as they accumulated, and the gulf between her and her father and mother widened and deepened, she felt less tethered. No, her life hadn’t begun the moment she met Jack, but those other voices over a gulf were muted, no matter how beseeching, and that was somehow comforting.

  The thought of this made her ease back on the accelerator pedal, and brought the woman out of her daydream.

  “Can we stop soon?” the woman asked. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Sure. There was a sign a couple of miles back. We could use some gas, anyway. Maybe a snack.”

  The woman volunteered to pump the gas while Claire went in and paid and bought a couple of packages of peanut butter crackers that were on sale two for a dollar. She was still conscientious about every penny spent. Gas and tolls would be bad enough, and she’d told herself she’d sleep in the bed of the truck on a rolled mattress if she could pull off in safe places. That might be more complicated with the woman hitching a ride. She walked back out to the truck and waited for Genevieve to use the bathroom. She stayed standing alongside the pump and stretched her legs. It was midafternoon and the sun fully overhead, making the tiny gas station and the shimmering landscape shadowless. When the woman climbed back into the cab, and Claire pulled onto the freeway, she saw that she had several twenties folded into her palm. She
peeled off one and handed it to Claire.

  “Here’s for my share of the gas and snacks.”

  Claire glanced at her. “You don’t look like someone traveling with that much cash.”

  “I’m not. I mean, I wasn’t. The man left the cash register open when he turned away to give me the bathroom key, so I took it when he wasn’t looking.”

  Claire laughed and said, “Right.”

  “You don’t believe me?” She was staring at her with those gray eyes.

  “What the fuck, Genevieve. Are you serious?”

  “I didn’t take it all. Just eighty dollars.”

  “How do you know he didn’t get our license plate?”

  “He didn’t see me take it. He won’t find out till later when he counts up the drawer, and even then he might not figure it out.”

  “I can’t afford to end up in the county jail!”

  “You wouldn’t have. I’d have told them the truth if he caught me. You picked me up on the highway, and we’ve only known each other for a couple of hours. Hey, it was the only way I could help with gas and food.”

  “I would’ve covered you, for God’s sake.”

  “That wouldn’t have been fair. You don’t have much money yourself, or you wouldn’t be driving all the way to Michigan in this old truck. You’ve got a little kid back home still in diapers.”

  Claire checked in her rearview mirror for a cop car.

  “If you want me to get out, I will.”

  “Out here, you’d fry inside half an hour.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Claire shook her head. “Look. No more stealing stuff, okay? We’re gonna sleep in the back of the truck unless it rains, so you don’t have to worry about hotels. We’re making this trip on the cheap, okay?”