But Genevieve wouldn’t look at her, and only put a finger to her lips as if to say “Shhhh.”
“So, they start seeing each other,” Genevieve continued. “And because they are older, because they both recognize the limits of love and its ultimately modest satisfactions, within a year they start living together, though they haven’t married. She sells her home in the little complex she always found somewhat sterile, and moves in with him in the lake house. It takes several months for Marc to remember what it’s like to habitually wake up next to another person, to feel the rhythms of her nighttime rituals, of her sleeping, how she brings a glass of water to her bedside and wakes each night to have a drink, how she shifts onto her back and sometimes something catches deep in her throat, and she coughs. He thinks of the woman he slept with after he first left your mother, and wonders how this is different. For one, he loves Kathleen, and for another, she’s sleeping in a place that has been his home for almost fifteen years. When he lies awake, listening to the sounds on the water—small waves rocking the boat along the dock, a distant splash when a fish jumps out of the lake—they’re deeply familiar, unlike Kathleen’s breathing. But he knows the chief difference between now and then is his age, and how each passing year of solitude has ebbed from an advancing need for company, in part to share a present with this woman he found charming and lovely, but mostly against the ravages of the years to come.”
Claire wondered at how Genevieve could speak so fluidly, and how the Wyoming landscape they were traveling through was piece by piece supplanted by her father’s house at the lake.
“After a couple of months, Kathleen’s daughter phones and tells her that she’s pregnant. The baby is born the following February in a winter that’s been even more brutally cold, the small lake frozen with a full foot of ice that the fishermen have to auger for several minutes before they can open up a hole they can drop their lines through. Each morning, before driving in-to town to the office, your father lights a fire in the small wood-burning stove to keep the house warm, and Kathleen has taken a few days off from work to prep the house for her granddaughter’s first visit, even though she’d flown out when the baby was born. Your father marvels at how she has made the house her own home. It’s early March, but still no sign of spring. On the morning before their arrival, a Saturday, he wakes with a start from a deep slumber before the sun has risen. He gets out of bed, pulls on socks that he’s left by his nightstand against the cold of the floor, and walks out to the stove and fills it with wood. As he strikes the match, he realizes that what has wakened him is the recognition that he will have to hold this infant girl in his arms, and it will be the first time he’s held a baby girl since Claire was born.”
10
The wind through the flue of the chimney makes the flame flicker, but he has become an expert at lighting these simple fires, and a minute later the slivers of bark along the split wood are popping and crackling, sending shadows against the walls of the room because, after he woke, he’d turned on only the light above the kitchen stove, and he didn’t even need that to navigate the rooms. He closes the door of the already warming wood burner, stands and brushes the bits of bark from his hands, thinks about starting the coffee, but doesn’t want to make more noise that might wake Kathleen, since it’s still an hour before sunrise, and he wants to sit alone for a while with the memory of Claire as a small child that is visiting him more sharply than it has in years.