“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.”