He stopped for a moment, and looked down at the base of the hills. “I’m guessing streams run through these mountains in the rainy season. There, along the deepest valley.” But the woman didn’t respond to this, and it seemed as if he were speaking only to Saabir.
“When we picked her up on Sunday afternoon, a perfect day, really, a sky deeper and bluer than this one, the red maples the color of apples the way they get up north, she literally bounded to the car. Skipping almost, like she hadn’t since she was a little girl. She jumped into the backseat, and the first thing she said was, ‘Mom and Dad, it snowed! Last night at the campfire. We were sitting around, and the counselor was trying to tell this pretty lame ghost story, and then these snowflakes started to fall from the sky! Not like a lot of them, or anything. But for a few minutes. We all put our faces up, and let the snow fall on them. They melted right away because we were warm from the fire. One kid, Jesse, grabbed the bag of marshmallows and made a little snowman out of them. He used M&Ms for eyes. It was amazing, because you could see the underside of the leaves in the light from the fire and these dark flakes falling down.’”
He stopped there. His chest had tightened when he’d approximated her words and voice, and the tone of both was for a moment suspended in the air.
“Her cheeks were flushed,” he continued. “I mean, like in a kid’s book, apple-red like the leaves. She smelled—a little like this place. Like dry leaves and a campfire. And for the first half hour of the ride back, she sat up on the backseat and told us about the trip down the river, told us how one kid had fallen in and she was the one to extend the paddle and help pull him back into the canoe. How afterward, all the kids were brave and funny. One boy had stood up in the back of the canoe after riding the rapids, ripped his shirt off, and did a hula dance. One of the girls had stepped out of the canoe and rock-hopped to where a blue plastic bag was snagged on a fallen limb, and stuffed the bag into her pocket, and said, ‘Too pretty for that here.’ And then Claire told us, ‘We sang songs. We sang songs, and actually meant it. I mean we wanted to. A counselor had a guitar, and, like, we sang hippie songs like one by Joni Mitchell called “Circle Game.”’”
Now, a lyric of it spun through his head. He could barely remember the tune.
“For a minute, I thought she’d actually sing it. But of course she didn’t. And of course, Lynne and I were silently delighted, and I was already composing in my head the grateful letter I would write to the judge. After a while, Claire settled back into the seat. I thought she might fall asleep like she had when she was little, but she kept her eyes on the passing landscape.”
Near his knee was a small stone, and he picked it up and gave it a short toss. Saabir watched it slide under a shrub.
“And then, closer to home, when it was almost sunset, we were still outside of town, and we were passing a farm where a line of cows was headed back to the barn. It was idyllic, really. A Norman Rockwell painting of goodness. I looked into the backseat, and I could see Claire’s face. And she was staring at the cows, and then when they were gone, she stared into a dried cornfield that hadn’t yet been harvested. And her eyes were narrowed, and I was astonished to see her crying. And then she said, ‘But that was bullshit. None of it was real. None of it. I can’t believe the things a beautiful place can make you believe.’”
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.