by Daniel Lowe
She wanted Lucy. She wanted to talk to Jack. She wished she had a cell phone. The corner of her mouth was quivering as Genevieve slept.
She thought to herself, You are a mother. Of a beautiful blue-eyed girl. You own a motel in California. You’re married to a good and decent man whom you look after, and who looks after you. You met him in Nebraska. This morning, you’ll drive through Lincoln, where you lived for a while. And you’re on your way to Michigan to visit your mother and father.
She repeated these sentences, and tried to calm herself. She dug into her pocket for her keys, and held them up to the streetlight so she could see a tiny photo of Lucy that dangled from the keychain, and she reached for it and let it rest in her fingertips. Lucy with a wand blowing a huge bubble. But because her hands were unsteady, the keys slipped from her fingers, and she tried to catch them with her free hand, and missed. Her sudden movement didn’t rouse Genevieve, who continued to sleep.
Set into the starlight she could now see vast expanses of farmland, rows of corn now several feet high, but not yet tasseling, and farther away a farmhouse with one lit window. She thought she caught the faint scent of someone cooking an early breakfast. She ran her hand along the edge of the truck bed, where the man who’d said buoyant had rested his, and with her fingers she took up a few drops of dew that had settled there as she slept.
She glanced over at Genevieve again, and wanted to wake her. Amid another wave of fear, she looked back at the lit sign. Last Day of Classes: June 13th. Have a smart summer! It was difficult for her to imagine, as Genevieve had, the children pouring out of the doors. In an hour or two, she told herself, it would be a beautiful June morning. It had never rained. Beyond the creek she’d seen before they slept, she could now see a ball field cut into the rows of corn.
“Your crickets are back,” Genevieve said. Claire looked back at her, and she was up on an elbow. “And maybe before sunrise we’ll hear an owl, too. Remember how quiet it was last night?”
She listened to them, and watched the occasional firefly glow near the water. Beyond the field, another light came on in the farmhouse.
“Doesn’t this place seem familiar to you?” Genevieve asked. “Isn’t it kind of like where you grew up?”
But Claire couldn’t answer her.
“Something wrong, Claire?” Genevieve’s head was framed by the light that still seemed to glow beyond the ball field.
“Lie down next to me, please,” Claire said. They both lay back on the mattress so that they were shoulder to shoulder. Together, for several moments, they looked up at the sky.
“See anything heavenly up there?” Genevieve asked with a lilt, but when Claire didn’t respond, she asked again, “What’s wrong?”
“That kiss. The story you told about my father, when I was falling asleep. Joline kissing him with his eyes closed. The way he kissed me when I was fourteen. And Pakistan.”
Claire continued to watch the sky. Genevieve didn’t turn to look at her, but instead reached for her fingers, squeezed them, and then lay with her hand over Claire’s.
“How did you know my father, Genevieve? How could you know him? You said you were in Pakistan, but you would have barely been fifteen when he was there. And he was there for only a few weeks in a city with millions of people. And then the highway where you were hitchhiking. That’s worse. You couldn’t have known I was driving down that road.”
The trills of the crickets were muffling the trailing noise of one or two cars along the freeway. Now she faintly heard the water running in the creek, and Genevieve, for a few moments, seemed to be listening, too.
“I’ll tell you about that after you finish the rest of your story. In fact, you won’t even have to ask.”
“I want to know how you knew my father.”
“I’ll tell you. I swear, I’ll tell you. Afterward.”
But Claire was still fighting a sense of panic. The story she’d told about the time with Seth, now almost half her life ago, had made that memory vivid, had further pushed out the familiar rhythms of her life at the motel in California, already unmoored by the phone call about her father, by the road, and by Genevieve. She was remembering clearly those nights with Seth, was sensing again how night fell into night, one tipping forward into the other, like an end-to-end collapse of houses set closely together, and she knew what would happen in the last of that row. Having recalled for Genevieve how much desire she had felt for Seth, she was troubled, now, by how little she remembered of him.
She’d met his mother once—a woman who couldn’t have been more than fifty, but back then seemed too thin and stooped at the shoulders—who had said to her, “Well, aren’t you a pretty young thing. You should hear how he raves about you.” But what could he have told his mother about her, after all?
Claire imagined she was on another stretch of highway, back in Nevada, coming around a bend and seeing Seth with his thumb out. “What took you so long?” he said and smiled, after he jogged up to the truck; he was still twenty years old, but he slowly turned his face and showed her his knife wound, healed in the same rough way as her own.
“You won’t need to ask,” Genevieve said again. “I promise.”
“Why do you want to hear it so bad?”
“I told you. Because it’s the story you never tell.”
“But you don’t know all that much about me, and what stories I might tell.”
“Do you really believe that at this point?”
Claire was expecting the sky to lighten, but instead more stars had emerged. She heard the cars and trucks in the distance, their rushing past offering that heard sense of the wind. The sounds of the insects were syncopated by the twang of a frog.
“I like this place,” Claire said faintly.
“It’s a good place for you to finish your story. Better than the highway, you know? I mean, think of all those kids in that school over there, gathered during the winter months to hear their teachers read books to them. It’s a place where stories are told. And when you’re done, if you want me to, I’ll tell you the rest of the story about your father. And then we can head down the road, and before you drop me off in Chicago, we can talk about other things.”
“Okay, Genevieve.”
Claire closed her eyes, held a deep breath, and then released it.
“I wouldn’t say, the night after we took the walk to the bakery, or the days that followed it, and there weren’t that many, that things changed completely. But they were different. We still drank at night. We still ended the drinking with one of us pulling the other into the bedroom. And Seth still talked to me while we were making love, but he had pulled back some from the violence of the fantasy I told you about. When he’d come in from work, and I’d be standing in the kitchen, making some sort of simple meal for us, he’d come up behind me, breathe in the scent from my neck, and tell me he loved me. He’d keep his face buried in my hair until I said it back to him, as if he needed to hear it. Most times, I didn’t mind telling him that I did love him, though I knew I didn’t mean it anymore.
“For a while, I wondered if he could tell, and was looking for reassurance, but one afternoon, when I’d come back from the sandwich shop, and I was vacuuming the floor—I guess I liked our little domestic arrangement, the sense that I was taking care of a home—I didn’t hear him come in, and when I didn’t, he pulled the vacuum cord from the outlet, and he gave me sort of a half smile and sat down on the stool near the door where we usually threw our coats. But by then it was late March, and spring had come early, and I’d bundled up our coats in a plastic bag, and stored them in the back of our one closet. I remember thinking that was a hopeful thing, because it meant that come October or November, I’d be taking them out again.
“I was waiting for Seth to say something, but he just sat on the stool, with the end of the vacuum cord in his hand, rolling it over in his fingers so the plug looked like the moving head of a small animal. Finally, I said, ‘What? You got something against a clean floor?’ a
nd tried a smile, but he shook his head. Then he said, ‘I lost my job.’ I knew that soon April rent would be due, and my check might cover it, but how we’d eat next month I didn’t know, and those were the first thoughts that crossed my mind. I asked him what happened, and he told me, ‘I’m really sorry, Claire. They laid me off three weeks ago. I should’ve told you. I didn’t tell you because I was trying to find work. I figured if I had a new job, what would it matter if pay was minimum wage, anyway, but no one seems to be hiring.’ He was still rolling the cord between his fingers, only now he was looking at the plug itself instead of me.”
Claire thought she had never in her life lain looking at the sky as the stars faded into dawn, and she was still waiting. “Do the cars on the highway sound like wind to you?” she asked.
“Yeah. They always have, when there’re a lot of them. But I like it best when I hear a lone car traveling late at night on the freeway. I think of the person in there as someone going on a long, long trip, like you’ve been, or someone who has just said good-bye, or someone going home after a long time away.”
Claire wondered if Genevieve was thinking all three were true of her, but she didn’t ask.
“It’s funny, you know,” Claire continued. “I know how things are always changing under the surface, and just because you don’t observe them doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. But when I saw Seth turning that cord over and over, and the head of it bobbing like he had a mouse in his hand, I knew then that period of my life was over. I wondered if he was fired, but I didn’t ask. Finally, he said to me, ‘I’ve found a way to make some money. But it isn’t, you know, exactly legal.’ ‘What do you mean by exactly?’ I asked him. It turns out he was running drugs for a man he knew who had offered him several hundred dollars to take a bundle of marijuana to Florida. He would borrow the man’s car and run it down there, and then bring back the cash. This didn’t necessarily alarm me at the time. I remember thinking it wasn’t cocaine, or heroin, only weed, and that he’d be back in three days. Seth told me he would be leaving the next morning.
“When he did, I went to work at the store and made sandwiches, just like every other day, but I remember how that afternoon even the store and the Korean man who owned it seemed changed. I noticed for the first time how boxes of condiments in the storeroom were covered with dust, and that someone had drawn into the dust a word in Korean script. They’d been sitting there a long, long time. And toward three o’clock, when people stopped coming in for lunch, and I was only doing the next day’s prep work, a man came in and spoke to my boss a single sentence in a whisper, and then the man handed him a playing card that was cut in the corner. I figured it had something to do with gambling, and I knew not to say anything. But it helped me recognize that after Seth had gone, whatever could have been described as the innocence of that period of my life had passed.
“Those nights I missed Seth. But I was also thinking how little I knew about him. I’m not saying he deliberately kept things from me, because I don’t think he did. But I realized that our time was about learning what our bodies liked, and drinking enough that our memories of what brought us to each other receded. When he was gone, I could remember only one story he’d told me about his childhood, a time when he went fishing with his grandfather, and how he’d hooked a big bluegill and got so excited that he stood up in the boat and went over the side, and when his grandfather pulled him out of the water he was still gripping the pole in his free hand, and the fish was still on the line.”
She stopped for a few moments, and Genevieve asked, “Why do you think he told you that story?”
“I don’t know, Genevieve. I think it was one of those days for him that seemed perfect in some way.”
Genevieve shifted onto her elbow, her face dim in the starlight.
“When I was a kid, I had a friend, and one spring day we hid in the woods and pretended we were both Snow White, and we held out our fingers for the birds to light on them like they did in the cartoon. And one actually flapped about a foot away from my finger before it realized I wasn’t a tree. That was a great day. Do you have any favorites?”
Despite herself, Claire smiled. “You like birds, don’t you, Genevieve?”
“Well, they can fly,” she said.
She laughed at this. “Yes, I suppose they can. But I already told you about that time in northern Michigan, on that river, when I was sixteen. Those were perfect days.”
“Any others?”
“I’m sure there are.” She thought about it for a few seconds. “I had a friend, too. Her name was Chloe. And I remember one of our rituals most summer afternoons was a long walk around a nearby lake to a candy store. We couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We’d get a dollar from our mothers and go out and buy some kind of treat; I think it gave our moms a break for the afternoon. One time when we were walking, we saw a dead squirrel on the street, and we felt sorry for it. We were both pretty squeamish about dead things, but I grabbed a long stick and pushed it into the high grass along the shoulder of that road. And when I was done, I started smelling my hand because I’d been pushing the squirrel’s little corpse, and Chloe said, ‘What’s the matter, Claire? You afraid your hand’s gonna smell like stick?’ And something about that struck us so funny, that we collapsed laughing, right along the side of the street.”
Genevieve laughed at this quietly, and then said, “That’s a nice memory.” Claire wasn’t certain, but this may have been the first time she heard her laugh. Neither of them said anything for a while. Something fluttered by the hood of the truck, an insect, but then flew off again.
“Anyway, while Seth was gone, I was thinking about how he had begun waiting for me to tell him I loved him, and that I didn’t know enough, anymore, to say that to him with any confidence. I never had a time like Joline, in your story, Gen, the way the father of her child saw her, when I felt like the way he looked at me was some kind of transformative moment. I loved learning his body, what a man’s body could do, and how it would respond. But during those days he was driving to Florida, after I left work, I spent hours walking around the city. I remember seeking out the abandoned buildings, the ones with shattered windows, and floors covered with paper and trash. I was seeing empty buildings, broken buildings, no lives being lived in them, no businesses working out of them anymore.
“And I was thinking they had pasts that weren’t difficult to imagine, people at desks or working on assembly lines, and I was thinking that wasn’t true about the apartment I had with Seth, where so many lives had been lived that you couldn’t imagine only one, and then I was thinking about the house I grew up in, where by this time my father and mother had separated, and how someone standing outside it would see a pretty home with a blossoming cherry tree, because it would have been blossoming by that time, and I wondered whether they could see, too, the tension of the lives being lived there, lives that were still going on. Whether they could see the house, and the beautiful tree, and see the beauty, but also feel the tension. Once a building was abandoned, like those I looked into on those long walks, I knew the imagined lives in them were over. And those two nights, coming home late to that empty apartment, I could tell that my life with Seth was over, too. Not because he was gone. Not because of what he was doing. It’s just that those tiny rooms already looked like a place someone had once lived in, long ago.”
She could hear Genevieve breathing in the foreground, the sounds of the insects behind her. She thought of the motel, and how far away it seemed, how Lucy and Jack were there, maybe Lucy lying on the couch next to Jack, who had fallen asleep while quietly turning the pages of a magazine in order not to wake her. But she was having trouble picturing them.
“He came back the evening of the third day. He’d called to tell me when he was arriving, and I’d made a good dinner for him. I wasn’t going to break up with him right away. Particularly because when he came through the door, he was so happy. He almost bounded in. I asked him how Florida was, and he said everythin
g went fine, and that it was fun to drive into summer, and to see palm trees, which he’d never done before.
“But he didn’t say much of anything else. He kept telling me how delicious the meal was, which was just chicken and potatoes and green beans, and yet he was savoring each bite, looking into my eyes and smiling as he chewed. But I was already watching his jaw move, seeing the way he looked at his meal, then back up at me, and the way he pushed his food around on his plate—it was like a videotape that I was playing back, years from now, rewinding and playing back, in order to remember him, because I was already amazed at how faded this time of my life had become.
“We still drank together after that dinner. We still pulled each other to the bedroom afterward. He didn’t talk while we made love, and, instead of rolling off of me afterward, he fell asleep on top of me while I stroked the hair around his neck. So when the man broke through the apartment door, he was still there, his chest on mine, his knee thrown over my thighs.”
Claire wrapped her arms around herself. She closed her eyes in order to remember, to block out the simple, tame beauty of the early morning, the empty school, the dark ball field, and the starry sky, which was increasingly feeling like the only place in the world.
“What happened next wasn’t all that dramatic. I mean, it was so quick, when I think about it now. The man broke through the door and bellowed Seth’s last name. It wasn’t hard to find us, even though the lights were out. The place was so small. Seth had gotten to his feet, and was standing on the mattress, trying to keep his balance, and just as the man came through the doorway to the bedroom, I had pulled myself up, half-blinded by fear, and was reaching for Seth, reaching for him, but then I was overcome by some unexpected fury, and I turned toward the man and tried to hit him, and then fell toward him, and I have no idea whether he intended to hurt anyone or only terrorize Seth to get the money Seth had stolen, or hadn’t given to him, but I felt the knife enter at my shoulder, I felt it puncture my lung and go all the way through, and then the man pulled it out and I heard him say the first words of a sentence. ‘Fuck! I didn’t know—’ but then it was like he was speaking a different language, even though he couldn’t have been, and I heard Seth scream and dive forward, and he fell on top of me and I could hear the sound of someone running away. Seth was up on his arms, looking down, asking me a question, and I could feel droplets falling from his face, but it was still dark in the room, and I couldn’t tell what they were. He turned me over and was pushing on my chest, where the blade had come through, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He went away then, for what seemed a long time, and when he came back, I was cold, so cold, and shivering, and he covered me up and put his hand to my shoulder again. I could feel how wet the bed was around me, and he was pressing on my chest, but I could also hear him sobbing, his shoulders heaving, and he was repeating something over and over, but it was like I’d lost all capacity to understand language, and could only hear the words being made. I remember hearing sirens, though they were far off, and I was thinking of the Sirens of Greek mythology, and the way they would lure men toward their deaths. And I thought for a minute that I could be dying, and that Seth’s voice was the voice of a Siren. But then all I felt was the cold again, and I felt myself shaking, and Seth was gone, and I was alone in that room, and it was incredibly large and growing larger, with its receding walls, and I was alone, alone and—”
