A truck roared past her, the first she’d seen in a while, and pushed her closer to a sign along the highway that read, Fire Danger Today. Extreme. The dry air that blew in through the open windows felt like someone lightly sanding her lips. She could travel these endless Western roads for a long time and see few other cars, a half hour, an hour on the same stretch, her mind swept elsewhere, away, absent, a dream of a mind. But then a tractor-trailer approached, or she’d see a dead animal in the road, and she’d have to steer around it, and once she was alert again it seemed as if an invisible hand had lowered her from the enormous sky onto this highway while a mouth whispered to her through the hum of the tires, “Your father is dying.”
She was entering a national forest, it hadn’t rained in weeks, though it was still only late June—an intermittent years-long drought—and they were worried any careless spark might set everything ablaze. She realized she was hungry. Hadn’t eaten before she’d left. She and Jack had made the quick decision for her to drive rather than pay for a last-minute airfare that they would be months paying off, since her father, hospitalized with heart problems, though gravely ill, would likely live a few more weeks. A three-day drive like she hadn’t taken in years, since she and Jack had come west, in fact, and it had been many more years since she had seen her father.
She pulled off the highway into a town that had been carved out of the forest; it had a couple of streets with run-down homes set back from the main road where there was a small grocery store, and next door, for some reason, what looked to be a onetime antiques shop with a small trailer out front and a sign that read Ed’s Deli. Three picnic tables were set out in the dirt parking lot, and an older man and woman were sitting at one of them under a canopy that shielded them from the heavy sun. When she pulled into the lot in the tiny used pickup truck she and Jack had purchased to move supplies to and from the motel, she raised a cloud of dust, and was grateful that the slight breeze carried it away from the man and woman.
When she stepped out of the truck, the couple looked her over, smiling. They were sitting at the table with no food, but just outside the front stoop of the trailer was a gas grill where burgers were cooking. Inside she could see the shadow of someone moving back and forth in front of the window. There were signs in marker on whiteboards that listed the sandwiches and beverages, and in quotation marks below the phrase “All ingredients fresh from next door,” and then a red-markered arrow pointing to the small grocery store.
The man at the picnic table watched her looking at the menu and then said, “Everything’s good!”
She smiled at him and said, “Is that so? Any recommendations?”
“The burgers are great. That’s what we’re waiting on,” he said. “So’s the turkey. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“No.”
“Good thing, because you’d be out of luck.”
The man who must have been Ed stepped out of the small screen door in his trailer. He was younger, with a blue T-shirt that read, I may be unemployed, out of shape, short on cash, and drunk, but I sure am fun! He nodded at her as he looked her over, lifted the cover of the grill and flipped the burgers, and then turned back to her and said, “Happy to help you now.” He took out a pad of paper and a pen, and she ordered a turkey sandwich.
The man at the table said, “Hell, Ed, it’s not like you got a line of folks here. Can’t you remember a simple turkey sandwich?” Ed didn’t smile, but instead gave a half salute without looking, and walked back into the trailer.
She waited at a separate table in the sun. She was unused to having nothing to do with her hands, since at the motel she was either changing sheets, sweeping floors, attending to guests, or playing games with Lucy, her daughter, who stood at the knees of the truckers and campers while they were checking in at the desk, and often asked, “You stayin’ at my house?” At the end of the day, when she and Jack lay back in bed, usually with Lucy asleep between them, she would sometimes say, “Mercy,” which was a word her grandmother had used to express surprise, but, in Claire’s case, she thought of the work at the motel, loving Lucy, attending to Jack, as a form of mercy that framed her life in ways she had, before this, never found imaginable.
“Where you coming from?” the man at the table asked.
“A little town just south of Merced.”
“And where you heading to?”
“Michigan.”
“No kidding?” He looked from her to the truck and back to her. Ed came out of the trailer with two prepared buns alongside chips, and flipped the burgers off the grill and closed up the sandwiches. When he slid them in front of the man and woman, he saluted again, and said, “Turkey sandwich is coming up.”
“It can take a while,” the man said after Ed had gone back in. “Sometimes you’d swear he’d wandered off into the woods to hunt the bird.”
The man and woman began eating their burgers. It struck her that the woman had yet to say a word. Claire looked directly at her and asked, “Do you live here in town?”
The man turned, and pointed toward the houses that lay along two stretches of road above the highway. “The blue one there. We walk up most afternoons to have lunch here with Ed.”
Finally, the woman spoke. “Michigan? That’s a long way to drive all on your own.”
“It is,” she said. “But I really didn’t have much choice.”
“Visiting family?” the woman asked.
“You could say that, I guess.”
The woman was wearing a hat with a large white brim. Claire began to feel her own scalp prickle with the heat.
“Could you say otherwise?” the man asked.
“My father’s ill,” she said. “Congestive heart failure. He’s in the hospital. So I’m going back to see him.”
The man looked down at his sandwich, and his face darkened, as if this revelation was something he didn’t want to witness. The woman said, “I’m so sorry.”
Inexplicably, Claire felt compelled to add, “The woman who called and told me he was in the hospital—I didn’t even recognize her name. I haven’t seen him in years. I haven’t even spoken to him, and I don’t even know if he knows he has a granddaughter.”
The man looked up at her again, started chewing with some speed, swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Why the hell not?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, why the hell not? How can it happen that a man has a granddaughter and doesn’t even know it?”
“Charlie, that’s not our business,” the woman said.
“The man has a granddaughter, Maeve. Child of his only child. And she never even told him.”
Claire watched him go back to his burger and take an oversized bite.
“How do you know that?” she asked. “How do you know I’m his only child?”
He waved his hand at her; through his teeth as he chewed, he said, “It’s written all over your face. All over your face. I’ve seen a thing or two in my time. What a shame.”
At that point Ed banged through the screen door with her sandwich in a paper bag, and walked it over to her and took her money. “Threw in a pickle and chips no charge,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Never mind him,” and he jerked his head toward the man at the table. He’d clearly overheard the conversation. “Figures he’s the local savant. Retired from the railroad, and he sits here every afternoon and guesses about the people come through. Last week he guessed someone was a circus clown. Turned out he’d done a stint as a rodeo clown, and the guy was amazed. Charlie here said he could tell by the way he walked.”
She thanked him and then climbed back into her truck, and when she came around the woman raised her hand and said, “Have a safe trip to Michigan,” but the man wouldn’t look up and just shook his head.
* * *
Back out on the highway, the wind streaming through—the air-conditioning barely worked, and in the high sun she was better off with the windows down—she thought about it. She had never planned on not speaking with her father. With her mother, either. After she’d nearly been killed, they had taken good care of her, one or the other of them in the hospital until she was released, and then through the long months that her back and shoulder healed. Sometimes when her mother was at work, or was out with her new boyfriend, her father, who had flown home the day he’d heard of the attack, would come by and spend time with her; they’d play Scrabble, or watch daytime TV, or sometimes she would put on music and they would listen together. But he would never ask where she’d been when she’d been stabbed, why she was there, and what it meant that she’d never heard from the man she said she’d loved after the night she was hurt.
One afternoon, when she was strong enough and angry enough at her confinement, and neither of them was at home, she’d packed a suitcase and left a note thanking them for everything. She’d told them she’d be in touch. And then she never was.
Occasionally, a postcard or letter would catch up with her, an e-mail after which she’d change her address, and once or twice a phone call, but when she heard either of them on voice mail, she’d shut down the message after listening to a few words. Claire, please, if you get this … If you only knew how much … I wonder what I’ve done … They’d done nothing, really, to deserve it, and eventually the messages stopped coming.
Now, two birds were circling high in the heat, taking updrafts that pushed them above what had once been a huge lake, but now was mostly dried lake bed with edges where grass grew and cows grazed. She did not like to think about those years, did not want to remember them, that purposeless rage that drove her from town to town, and she could remember them less and less as Lucy grew and even her own childhood seemed dimmed by her daughter’s—her sweetness, her milky breath when she fell asleep in her arms, the coins and gum wrappers and occasional key she’d find in the motel rooms while Claire cleaned that she would later offer to Claire like treasures. All spring, she’d been fascinated by the swallows that were nesting under the eaves of the motel.
She liked to think of her life beginning at the moment she met Jack. She thought everyone would be better off if they could make that choice, to cancel out what had happened before, even if it were a matter of looking back, of negotiating with God, if there was one, and saying, “All right, I was thirty-one. I was working as a waitress outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, and a man walked in. It was like a country-western song. I want my life to begin with that song. I’ll give up the final ten years of my life if you cancel out everything before that and it begins with that song.”
* * *
From his booth seat, that first evening he had come in, Jack said, “Jesus, maybe I should find another diner.” He looked like many men who ate there, a brown face and brown arms, hair lightened by the sun, handsome in a wholesome sort of way.
“Good luck with that,” she said. “You’ll have to drive into Lincoln.”
“Well, the food sucks here.”
“Is that why you stopped by?”
“First time I’ve been here in my life.”
“So how do you know the food is terrible?”
“Looking at you. You sure aren’t eating it. Take a look at this.” He grabbed hold of her wrist and his thumb and forefinger met around its circumference. “Pretty eyes, though.”
“I take it you like corn-fed Nebraska girls.”
“I like most kinds of girls, but you’re not from Nebraska.”
He’d stayed late, and she’d gone out with him after her shift. What drew her was the ease with which he told the stories of his life, far more easily than most men, especially those from farm country in the Midwest, and it occurred to her then that someone might supplant the stories from her own life with those of another, especially if she could make herself fall in love with that other. She thought she knew even at that moment she probably could never love this man the way she wanted, but she invited him back to her room, anyway. He seemed surprised.
“You move pretty fast, Miss Claire,” he said.
“At this point in life, if you don’t move fast, you spend more time being lonely.”
“You spend a lot of time being lonely?”
“Everyone does. You do, too.”
Their first night together was like first nights with other men, not that those were frequent anymore, now that she was thirty-one, and the fevered ache of her appetites had been curbed by years and experience. He had good hands, calloused palms just below the fingers, and fingertips worn hard by work, but smooth like sanded wood, and he moved them along her thighs and belly unhurriedly, knowing the right places to touch, but wanting to be certain.
After the second time, they lay back in her bed and watched the ceiling fan spin, cooling their bodies.
“I like the way you smell,” she said to him.
He laughed lightly and said, “Gotta admit I haven’t heard that one all that often.”
“I’m serious. I do. You smell sweet. Like alfalfa. Or corn silk.”
“Got me pegged for a farmer, do you?”
“It’s not a hard guess out here. Look at your arms, your face.” His forearms to his biceps were deep brown, but his chest and shoulders were pale, his skin almost translucent.
“My dad was a farmer. Corn and soybeans on a hundred acres. A few head of dairy cows,” he said.
“My aunt lives on a farm. Or at least she used to. She leased the land for others to plow and plant.”
“What do you mean at least she used to?” he asked. “Does she now, or doesn’t she?”
“I don’t know. We’re out of touch.”
He nodded but didn’t pursue this. He rested his arm over his forehead and watched the ceiling fan.
“Dad couldn’t make a go of it. The farm had been in the family for two or three generations, but he couldn’t compete with the mega-farms, and he eventually sold out. I work on the equipment. A man’s tractor or combine breaks down in the field, they don’t always have time to haul it in for service. So I’ll drive out to his land and fix it if I can right out in the sun. That explains the farmer tan. And maybe the smell of hay.”
She turned over on her side and laid her hand lightly on his chest, and he flinched.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she said.
“Does it show that much?”
“Not in the way—I mean, believe me, you made me feel good. But it seems like you’re not used to being touched.”
He smiled slightly, but didn’t say anything.
“When was the last time?”
He put two fingers to his lips and patted them twice, as if he were used to smoking.
“Over a year ago.” He paused. “We hadn’t talked about getting married, or anything.”
“But otherwise it was pretty serious?”
He propped up on his elbow and looked at her. “You really want to hear this?”
“Sure.”
He fell back and lay flat again, staring at the ceiling.
“She was a veterinarian.”
“What was her name?”
“Emily. Of course she loved animals. Adored them, really. And she had a small ranch house with a tiny office where she’d see local dogs, you know, the occasional little girl coming in with a cat that got nicked by a car, or kicked by some bent neighbor kid. But mostly it was farm animals. A cow having some trouble calving, or a goat that got its head tangled in a line of barbed wire. Thing I admired about her was that she didn’t get sentimental about it. Didn’t try to save an animal that had only a ten percent chance of making it. She’d take care of it quickly with a needle. She couldn’t stand pain. Pain of any kind. And she said the hard thing was to measure the chances of taking the pain away and for the animal to get better, against the chance of the pain never going away, and making the animal suffer for no good reason.”
He stopped there, reached up to scratch his knee, and let his fingers trail up his thigh.
“It’s funny, talking about it. I don’t want to make it sound like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was in love with her, you know? We had a good year together, a little more. We traveled for a couple of weeks in August up to the Porcupine Mountains—easier to get away for a while before harvest. In the upper peninsula of Michigan there, a place called Lake of the Clouds.”
“That’s where I’m from,” she said.
“Lake of the Clouds?”
“No, Michigan. But the lower peninsula.”
“Yeah? It’s beautiful up there. Cool in August, at least that August. Some of the leaves even starting to turn. We camped up there next to that lake, and then spent a few days in a run-down cottage right off Lake Superior. That lake was cold, I’m telling you. Freezing. I mean when it was almost sundown, people would be lighting fires on the beach just to keep warm. But Emily insisted on swimming. One of those few nights when the big lake was dead calm, and she’s out there maybe seventy feet off the shore, doing the backstroke into the setting sun. That woman was strong. Blue when she got out of the water, but strong. I wrapped her up in a blanket, and we sat by the fire while she shivered, and one of the others on the beach walked up in a parka and asked, ‘Are you an Olympian?’ and Emily just laughed through chattering teeth. ‘No, I’m cold,’ she said.”
Claire continued to listen through closed eyes, imagining the woman in the lake.
“I remember thinking even at the time if we could just stay there … You know, you have those days in your life, and mostly it’s when you’re looking back. But every now and then, even at the time you’re living it, living in that minute, you say to yourself, ‘Well, I’ll just stay right here. We’ll stay right here. No sense in going home. We’ll open up our own little cottages or hotel on the lake, and we’ll deal with the hard winters, and learn to love them for the beautiful summers.’ Of course it never works out that way.”
He was quiet for a while, and she listened to the ceiling fan spin.
“You still awake?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. What else?”
“Well, there isn’t a lot more. Of course we went home to Nebraska, and we made it through Christmas. But after that, she started pulling away. It wasn’t because of anything I’d done, which she told me over and over. Sometimes I think you can’t love animals like she did and love people, too. Or it’s harder that way. You love something who can’t tell you why it hurts, it’s harder to love someone who can tell you why it does. And what I meant earlier was, I think she could see the pain it was causing me, that distance of hers. Causing her, too, I guess. And she judged after a while that there was maybe a ten percent chance of saving the thing, and it wasn’t worth the suffering, so she put an end to it.”
After that he stopped talking for what seemed a long time, and she had a light dream of him as a sleek, brown dog, wagging his tail as he searched in the shallows of a lake for small fish.
Then she felt his lips on her mouth, lingering there, and she sat bolt upright.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t ever do that.”
“I was just kissing you.”
“I know. Just—not that way. Not when I’m not expecting it.”
“Sorry. Most of the time I tend to forget I’m a stranger.”
“It’s not that. It’s not that you’re strange.”
“Well, maybe. I guess it’s an intimate thing to be kissed when you’re sleeping. More intimate than sex, in some ways.”
“It’s not that, either.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
She turned over on her side with her back facing him.
“I’d rather hear your stories. You’re better at telling them,” she said, though she’d always thought she might have many she would tell if she had found the right listener.
And then she felt his sanded fingertip, cool and light, along the length of the scar where the knife had entered. She let out a slight gasp.
“There’s a story here, too, isn’t there?”
Her skin tingled along the length of her spine.
“Did you notice it right off? Most men do, but pretend they don’t.”
“I noticed it. It’s not something you ask about right off the bat. But it doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“No, not at all.”
“You seem more ashamed about the kiss.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything,” she said.
Her back still facing him, she felt him lean close, and he exhaled deliberately with his mouth inches from her spine, and then with closed lips moved his mouth over the scar, stopping every quarter inch to leave a light kiss. Finally, she moaned, and he reached around her shoulder and pulled her back to the bed, and then kissed in the same way the slightly shorter scar that rose above her left breast. She felt a current run through her, and she arched her feet.
“God, it must have hurt,” he said, but she was still feeling her body respond to him.
“Did you fight back?” he asked.
“Of course I did,” she said, her breath thick. For a moment, that other dark room loomed, and she swept the image away. “Why would you think I wouldn’t?”
“I don’t think that,” he said. “I can tell by the way kissing it brings you alive.”
And at this she pushed him away, pushed his chest hard so he lay flat and so she could mount him, and even with him deep inside her she still could see his eyes moving over her body, fixed briefly on the scar, and then trailing down over her breasts and belly, as if it ran the whole length.
Afterward, she collapsed onto him, her head on his shoulder, and with the same measured, light pressure, he touched each vertebra in her backbone as her breathing eased.
She put her mouth to his ear, flicked her tongue at the peak of it, and whispered, “Do you still dream of opening a little hotel someplace where we can love the beautiful summers?”
He shifted away from her to get a better look at her face.
“We’ve had just this one night.”
“So?”
* * *
She had passed into Nevada, remembering. They hadn’t moved from Nebraska as quickly as she wanted; she’d had to work double shifts at the diner to raise the money, and he was reluctant to leave home, to shake the hands of friends and farmers whom he’d known most of his life who wouldn’t say so, but thought he was crazy. And then they’d driven this very highway west, and they’d stayed in the motel they eventually bought because the proprietor had said to them at the front desk, “You just made it under the wire. We’re closing next week,” and they’d decided the coincidence was too profound, and why not here, anyway, though there was no beautiful lake or even mountains closer than half a day’s drive away. And then she’d become a manager, an accountant, and a maid; she was nothing she had ever been, and was grateful. And Jack had become a handyman who repaired the motel’s plumbing and tacked up new paneling and worked odd jobs in the evening to make ends meet. And then she’d become a mother, and Lucy looked like Jack, she had to admit, even those mornings when they sat in the little kitchen closed off from the motel lobby and drank coffee, and she thought sometimes that she loved Jack like a brother, which was good enough, and at other times she’d stare at him and think, I hardly know you. Why am I running this dilapidated dump with you? After everything, you’re still a stranger to me who is not at all strange, by which she realized she meant uninteresting.
But that was unkind, and Jack was never unkind. She had never told him about her father’s kiss. And, like most other elements of her past, it wasn’t a memory that lingered. Neither she nor her father had mentioned it again, except for one phone call, in that dark time. She had never probed the meaning, but the kiss had marked the end of her perception of him as her father first, and a man second. At the time, he had said something about her beauty, that that was somehow a reason, and even though she hadn’t felt at all beautiful, she knew that her father, who was almost forty, was looking at her as a woman rather than his daughter, that a forty-year-old man kissing a sleeping fourteen-year-old was an amplification of the scope and depth of men in the world that she did not want to meet. And yet, after that was precisely when she had begun to meet them.
Now she was heading east, back home, and it was as if the horizon itself were narrowing its length, the opposite sensation of heading west, and all the promise and possibility that she still felt during their once-a-year trips to the Pacific were being funneled away toward a father who might very well be dying and a mother who had told her when she called that she had never stopped marking the passing of the seasons with Claire’s unnatural silence.
Ahead now, out of the shimmer of the highway and against a backdrop of gray mountains, she saw a figure rise out of the shoulder of the road, and turn toward her and extend an arm. She rarely picked up hitchhikers, and never had while driving alone, but she was surprised to see this was a woman, in shorts and a shirt tied in back, carrying a small backpack, and with a scarf pulled over her head to protect it from the sun. She was hitchhiking alone. Claire steered the car over to the shoulder, and in the rearview mirror watched the woman turn and jog up to the passenger door. When she pulled it open, Claire had a moment when she thought the woman was a man, but the woman undid the scarf and revealed a head of black hair that hung to her shoulders, and said in a light voice, “Thanks so much for stopping. It’s unbearable out there.”
“No problem at all,” she said. “How long were you waiting?”
“God, I don’t know. Fifty cars must have passed before you stopped.”
“Jesus. Everyone’s so cautious nowadays. Where you heading?”
“If I can get there, Chicago.”
“No kidding?” Claire asked. “I’m heading to Michigan.”
“Really? Can you stand the company for a couple of nights? I’ll pay for gas.”
The woman’s cheeks were tanned from the sun, and her eyes were dark gray, almost depthless. She was smiling hopefully.
Claire extended her hand and said, “My name’s Claire.”
“Genevieve,” she said. “I’m so grateful to you. I’ll be happy to drive some if you want.”
The woman’s hand was warm and damp with sweat, and she held her fingers for a moment before letting them go.