All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  “He knows how much you like Diane. And he hasn’t even told her about this yet.”

  “Is it because they can’t have kids?”

  “Christ, no. Jesus. I don’t think they ever wanted any kids, anyway.”

  In the ensuing silence, Tom slides the half meatball into his mouth and chews noiselessly. The fork makes no sound when he lays it on the tablecloth.

  “This,” he says, “might be a good opportunity for me to check the Michigan game. Care to join me, Marc?”

  Marc watches him stand and smile, and then Joline says, “No, you stay,” and he thinks she means Tom, but when he turns to her she’s looking directly in his eyes. “Tom can tell you the halftime score.”

  * * *

  Later, he wonders why she asked him to sit and listen as she and Kathleen talked it through. He’d contributed nothing to the conversation, had absorbed the occasional glances that Kathleen gave him, who seemed to search his face for understanding of her son. Joline was sure that her brother and his wife were heading for divorce.

  When Kathleen asked her why, she said, “I don’t know, Ma. Once you walk down that path, I think it’s hard to walk it back. Some people can have affairs, and then just accept them as part of the long journey to the grave, maybe even a kind of protest against it, and forgive themselves. Not Jon. I feel sorry for him. And Diane. But I’m gonna support him. He’s not Dad. He’s not only like Dad. He’s like you, too.”

  After that, the baby had woken, and before lifting her out of the bassinet, Joline had unabashedly unsnapped her blouse and her nursing bra and exposed her breast. With the baby latched on, Kathleen stood to clear the dishes, her face pale.

  Now, Joline says, “Thanks for staying,” while Kathleen loads the dishwasher in the kitchen.

  “Why’d you ask me to?” Marc says, though in truth she hadn’t asked.

  “She needed you here, I think. She’s told you about my father?”

  “Some.”

  She nods. “You remind me of Jon a little.”

  “Why?”

  She pulls the baby off her breast, re-snaps her blouse, and then switches her to the other side. “There you go, little one,” she coos, and she closes her eyes and hums a few bars of a song. “Because you know what it’s like to hide a secret sadness.”

  Then Tom comes in from the living room and says, “Indiana thirty-seven, Michigan thirty-four at the half.”

  * * *

  Toward evening, as he’d predicted, the wind dies down, and Tom wants to take a walk out onto the ice. The wind has formed a frozen crust over the top of the snow, and when they step across the yard toward the willow tree, Tom’s shoe catches the edge of one of his footsteps, and he stumbles, and Marc has to grab hold of him. He tweaks something in his shoulder breaking Tom’s fall, and while Tom brushes the snow from his knees, Marc works his arm to loosen the muscle. The pain lingers in his chest.

  “You all right?” Tom asks.

  “No problem. The old shoulder socket isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Sorry about that. How the hell do people walk across this stuff, anyway?”

  “Snowshoes. Cross-country skis. Or you get used to it. It’ll be easier out on the ice. The wind helps keep the snow levels low, and the lake has more exposure to the sun.”

  Marc lets Tom lead the way. He walks well out toward the middle so they’re standing under the dark-blue dome of the sky, the clouds filtering the remaining light after sunset. Marc realizes he hasn’t come out this far all winter. Tom holds his arms out and spins in a circle, and it’s easy to see the kid in him.

  “This is kind of amazing,” Tom says. “It’s like you’re at the bottom of a huge crater.”

  “That’s true especially this time of the day.”

  With the wind down, there’s a dampness in the air that smells like spring.

  Tom asks, “So, uh, how was the table talk earlier?”

  “Not particularly pleasant.”

  “Yeah, I figured that was the way it would go. Sorry you missed the game.”

  “I admit, I was surprised Joline asked me to stay.”

  “She’s that way sometimes. I don’t understand it, and I don’t try to explain it. She probably thought you being there would soften the blow.”

  “Probably.”

  The air is damp enough that he can briefly see the mist from Tom’s mouth when he laughs.

  “You know, even Kathleen will get nowhere with Joline if she sticks up for Diane at Jon’s expense. She takes no prisoners when it comes to shielding him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Diane’s a fine woman. You met her?”

  “Just the one time in Pittsburgh.”

  “That’s right. Then you know. She’s beautiful. Not hard at all to stand on the beach with her in her bikini during family vacations. Sorry, but true. Otherwise pleasantly, smartly suburban. Content, I think. This will rattle her, but I doubt it will tear her apart.”

  “Yeah? Be best if it worked out that way. Wasn’t so lucky myself.”

  “That right?” Tom looks up at the sky and spins in a circle again. “But you say a word against Jon in Joline’s earshot, that March wind you had wailing out here this afternoon? Be like a June breeze.”

  “I gathered they were pretty tight.”

  “You gathered? Sometimes I don’t know where one begins and the other ends.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. You got sisters?”

  “Two.”

  “Close?”

  “When we were children, sure.”

  “This is a different story. She made it clear early and often who the principal man in her life was and would be. I got it. I can roll with it.”

  Tom again looks up, and arches his back with his arms spread. He closes his eyes and smiles.

  “What’s he like?” Marc asks. He is remembering Joline had said Marc had reminded her of her brother.

  “Who, Jon? A little aloof, you know? Brooding. Not without a dark sense of humor. Good-looking, too, like every damn cousin twice removed in that family.”

  A shadow passes over Tom’s face, and he opens his eyes. He straightens his back and looks at Marc with a thin smile.

  “Thanks for walking me out here. It’s quite a place. A little center of the universe.”

  “Thanks. I’ve always thought that myself.”

  Tom stares back at the house where the windows are shining a deep yellow.

  “Jesus, it looks like a Christmas card.”

  He takes a single step toward it, and then turns back and looks at Marc.

  “I don’t think I’m made for this,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “For fatherhood. You got no idea how it changes things.”

  And then Tom walks back toward the house, trying to step lightly so his shoes won’t break through the crusted snow.

  * * *

  Marc’s unable to sleep. The nights he can’t aren’t unusual anymore, and have become more numerous since Kathleen has come to live with him, though he knows this one is not about the rhythms of growing older, but about Tom and Joline sleeping upstairs, the baby between them. And about Kathleen, who is walking the difficult balance of her sadness over her son and her joy over her granddaughter, two rooms that have opened inside her that she doesn’t yet know how to fill. And, if he’s honest with himself, it’s about Claire’s ghost, which he imagines with its face pressed to the house windows, outside in the cold, wanting in, wanting to hover over the infant girl and the sleeping mother and father.

  He takes another sip from his cup of tea, lifting it to his lips with his left hand, and he sees the liquid in the cup tremble as if it’s frightened, a response to a slight tremor in his arm that he’s begun to feel over the past half year and about which he’s told no one. The heat from the wood-burning stove envelops his chair, but he knows the other rooms of the house are cooling, and he’s lived in them so long that he feels them as his own extr
emities. He remembers how, as a small boy, he would sometimes wake late in the evening, and walk into the living room where his father would be sitting on one end of the couch, smoking a pipe. Once, Marc had stood for what seemed a long time, watching his father take a pinch of tobacco from a pouch, and then tamp it into the pipe with his forefinger. He’d popped the cap of his metal lighter, and then worked the tiny wheel near the flint, slowly, as if he were contemplating it, and when he finally had flicked it to ignite the flame, he’d stared at the small fire for several seconds before bringing it to the tobacco in the pipe and the pipe to his mouth. He drew on it to make sure the tobacco burned, two spurts of smoke coming from the corner of his mouth, and then took the pipe from his mouth and turned his wrist to glance at his watch. Now, Marc glances at his own watch, and wishes he had the rituals of pipe smoking to fend off his loneliness, and he understands that his father had checked his watch not only because he was calculating how much sleep he was losing, but because he wished to wed his rituals to the increments of time passing, which, at an hour of desperation, were the only things that made it bearable.

  He hears the slight creak of the floor upstairs, and, because he knows the house so well, figures that Joline has risen to change the baby’s diaper. But then she walks out of the room, and he hears, without turning his head, her descend each stair, and counts each till he knows she’s reached the bottom. He shifts in his chair and looks at her. She’s wearing a white gown with rows of some kind of floral pattern that is difficult to discern in the dim light, and she stands with the baby in one arm, turning at the hips to rock her though the baby seems sound asleep. She stares at him for a few moments, and he sees again the depth of her gray eyes, and then she walks over and sits down in the chair adjacent to him.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he asks. He reaches for the pipe, then, realizing how deep his reverie about his father had been, picks up the cup of tea instead.

  “Not well,” she says.

  He lifts the cup toward her and says, “I’d be happy to make you some tea.”

  “No, thank you. Thanks for asking, though.”

  He takes a sip and looks at her over the rim of the mug as she stares at him, sleepy-eyed, but levelly. He has to look away. She glances down at the sleeping baby, pulls a corner of her flannel blanket away from her mouth, and then looks up at him again.

  “So I was up there sleeping. Dreaming,” she says.

  He does not like to hear about people’s dreams, or interpret their subconscious stories from the fragments of memory and desire that arrange themselves according to a substructure that, to his mind, is no more illuminating than patterns of crystal in a stone. Kathleen loves to recount her dreams, and he is not surprised her daughter would, too. So he asks, “What was your dream?”

  She looks once at the woodstove, where only an ember or two still burn visibly through the small door, then out through the front window into a starless night where the whiteness of the snow has always seemed to capture some light from a source he could never discern.

  “You were in it,” she says, and waits to observe the effect of that statement on him. “But a lot like you are now, how you were all afternoon and evening, really. Passive. A bystander. A man standing in a bus shelter overhearing an argument between lovers.”

  “I don’t know you,” he says. “I don’t know your family’s history. It’s not my place to offer insight or advice when there’s trouble for your brother, who I’ve barely met.”

  “What about Kathleen?” He is surprised she uses her mother’s name.

  “She and I will talk later, I suppose. Tomorrow, after you leave.”

  She nods, looks down at the baby, and rocks her once or twice on her arm.

  “I always wanted a sister,” she says. “And in the dream I had one. An older sister. And it was strange, because I had memories of our childhood. I could remember in the dream how she would want to dress me up as her own daughter, and she’d have me sit at a tiny table where only I could fit, and she would make in her toy oven, you know, a small tea cake that she’d sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve to me on a plate like she was a waitress at a fancy restaurant. Then she’d pour a mug of warm water from a little teapot that she said was very hot, and tell me to be careful.”

  She looks up at him, and then out toward the lake again.

  “It’s so dark out there. You’d think it would make it easier to sleep,” she says. “Anyway, in the dream, I had that memory, and others, but I also knew I’d never met my sister. And then the little room where she was giving me a tea cake transformed, and we were here, only the lake wasn’t frozen, or pretty and small like this one, but a kind of ocean or sea, except you could see to the other side, like a lake, and you were sitting in your chair here and my sister came in right through that front door.”

  She points toward it, but he doesn’t need to turn his head to look.

  “And then she walked right up to where I was standing, like where I was standing when we were looking out at the wind blowing the snow off the trees this afternoon. She was taller than I was, and she didn’t say anything until she took my hands. Then she only said, ‘Joline, I’ve missed you so much.’ And she squeezed my fingers and pulled me closer to her, and lowered her head and kissed me on the mouth. She let her kiss linger there, and when she pulled away I saw you watching us, only you were crying.”

  She looks over at him, but he’s unable to meet her eyes.

  “I woke up then, and knew you were down here, sitting up.”

  He stares into his cup, and catches a slim reflection of his glasses on the liquid surface.

  “Marc. What was your daughter’s name? She was your daughter, wasn’t she? Not a son?”

  He feels his face go hot, and his eyes water. But he manages. “Yes.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Claire.”

  “Claire,” she repeats. “That’s a pretty name. Is she dead? I’m sorry. I mean, did she die?”

  He swallows hard, and his voice sounds outside of him. “I don’t know, Joline. I don’t think so. But I don’t know for certain.”

  He expects her to ask why, but she doesn’t just yet, and only nods, staring at the floor, her eyes glassy. She remembers the baby, and blows very gently into her face.

  “I don’t want her to get too warm.” His own hands are cold.

  “How did you know?” he asks her.

  “Well, the dream,” she says. “But when I first came in. And I handed Laura to you. You didn’t hesitate. And—well, there’s something you can see when a man holds a baby. Or at least I can see. It’s like the light in the room changes if he’s had a child of his own, like it’s, I guess, refracted by his memory as it gets close to his skin. Some men look happy, some look sad, depending on their experience since the time their kids were babies.”

  “How did I look?”

  She has been gazing at the baby’s face while speaking, but now she looks up at him and seems to be taking him in.

  “Like you do now,” she says. “Like a hostage. How old is Claire?”

  “She’d be almost thirty-five.”

  “And how long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  She shifts forward in her chair then, and holds the baby to her chest and rises to her feet; she takes the few steps over to him noiselessly, and when she stands over him, her hair frames her face in the darkness so he can’t see it, and she lowers the baby into his arms. He takes the baby as she wakes and turns her head, opens her eyes, and briefly looks into his own, and then closes them and settles in. He feels her warmth at his chest. Joline walks back to the chair and sits down.

  “I can see it again. Even with the lights out. You’re captive.”

  He shuts his eyes against the emotion.

  “Why haven’t you told my mother?”

  “I don’t know why, Joline. I really don’t.”

  “How close were you and Claire?”

  He thinks
about it, thinks through the images of her he can hold in his mind; he can no longer discern how the edge of a memory is altered by the time since. He loved her curiosity when she was only three, and she’d be running down a sidewalk when a bird lit on a wire overhead, and she’d stop almost midstride to look, her straw hair falling to one shoulder as she cocked her head sideways, her lips parted in thought, and the color in her cheeks rising with interest.

  “You have so much to look forward to,” he says to her, and coughs to keep something from rising in his throat.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean yes, we were close, when she was still small.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was injured. Hurt. She’d been stabbed, and we thought she’d die. But she recovered. It took months, but she did get well. And then she left a little note for her mother and me, and disappeared.”

  He can smell the sweet, slightly musky scent of the baby again, and reflexively starts to raise her to his face, but he resists. Joline has been sitting with an arm on each rest of the chair, as if she were piloting something, but now she crosses her arms over her chest.

  “You can have her back if you’re getting cold,” he says, but she only shakes her head. She takes in a slight breath, as if she’s about to say something, and then decides against it. But the air between them, if possible, has gone even more still.

  “I have another child,” she says. “Fathered by a different man.”

  She turns her head and looks into his face, her eyes dark.

  “How old are you, Joline?”

  She smiles slightly. “What a strange question to ask. I’m twenty-nine.”

  “I’m sorry. You just seem so young.”

  “Only a few years younger than your daughter.”

  “Does Tom know?”

  “He’s not the kind of man who would want to.”

  “And your mother?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “I’d think that’d be obvious.”

  He looks down at the baby again. “What happened?”

  She watches him holding the baby, and he realizes that unwittingly, he’s been rocking her slightly.