She would be thirty-five years old in July.
The sky is brighter, and he can see smoke rising from the chimneys of the few houses on the lake where people live year-round. Kathleen is beginning to turn over in bed, slowly waking, and he pushes himself out of the chair and makes coffee. Claire, how could you? He’s not thought that in months. Often, after she left, it had become a reflexive rhetorical flourish, usually unassociated with his memory of her. If he had a flat tire on his way to an important business meeting, he’d say through his teeth, Claire, how could you? If the Tigers lost in the bottom of the ninth, he’d holler at the television, Claire, how could you? Another bombing in Afghanistan. Claire, how could you? He’d caught himself saying it aloud only once in Kathleen’s presence, and when she’d asked, “Who’s Claire?” he’d told her one of his colleagues who had screwed up a proposal. She’d walked over then and rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Let’s not start railing against ghosts just yet, okay, sweetie?” That moment was the closest he’d come to telling her the truth.
The smell of coffee invades the air. Outside, he hears his neighbor’s feet crunching in the snow, and then the rattle of a trash can. From the bedroom, he hears Kathleen move again in the sheets. She’s in that space between sleeping and waking where images of a dream collide with the coming demands of the day. She’s yet to remember her daughter is visiting. Then she does, and he hears her pull the blanket away. He still loves the sound of her feet on the cool wooden floor.
*
“Well, look at you,” Kathleen’s daughter, Joline, says to Marc. “You’re a regular Dr. Spock.”
“A Vulcan?” her husband, Tom, says.
Kathleen laughs, and Joline punches Tom lightly on the shoulder.
“Doctor, not mister, sci-fi boy.”
Marc had taken their coats when they came in, though everyone is still standing near the entrance of the house. He had met them both on only one other occasion, and that was in Pittsburgh, where Kathleen’s entire family had gathered, so there had been opportunity only for small talk. Joline had been unselfconscious about the baby from the moment she stepped through the door, extending her arms to her mother with the swaddled little girl balanced in both hands, as if she were a nurse. When Kathleen hesitated for just a moment, Joline had said, “C’mon, Ma. You know you want it.”
Now it is Marc’s turn. He is surprised at how easily he has settled the baby into the nook of his arm, using his free hand to support her tiny head. He peers into the baby’s face; her skin has patches of red, probably from exposure to the cold, and her eyes and nose and mouth are scrunched together in what appears to be a concerted effort at sleep. “Well, hello there, little Lulu,” he says to her, hearing his voice crack.
Joline says, “Little Lulu. I like that. I mean, I love the name Laura and all, but it’s a woman’s name, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a nickname. I don’t like Laurie. Or Lor-lor. Or the Lorax. Lulu might just work.”
Joline is watching Marc closely, less, it seems, because she doesn’t trust him with her child, but for another reason he can’t discern. Perhaps, for her mother’s benefit, she is trying to know who he is. Partly because he feels the weight of her stare, and partly because he wants to, he raises the baby toward his face and breathes in her scent: milky, sweetly animal, with a faint, underlying pungency. Claire, how could you? he thinks reflexively, but a current runs through his heart, and he pushes the words away.
“Don’t tell me she’s loaded up her drawers already,” Joline says. She is still watching him. He’s struck, then, by how pretty Joline is, despite their long drive, despite the trappings of motherhood, a bag slung over her shoulder, a loose blouse that can be unsnapped for breast-feeding. She has a narrow, pale face, and her hair, which she must have brushed out before they came in, hangs to her shoulders, and her large gray eyes are full of something under that wit she seems to use to meet the world.
“No, no, not at all. It’s just—well, there’s nothing like the smell of a newborn baby.”
She smiles at him then and turns her head slightly. Tom has edged away toward the kitchen, and is peering in where Kathleen has already set a beautiful table: four Wedgwood plates that she’d brought when she moved in, polished silverware, and a spring bouquet of tulips and hyacinths that seem to almost pulse with color, surrounded as it is by the winter landscape.
“I’ll tell you something that comes close,” Tom says. “The smell of whatever you got cooking in here.”
“Oh, those are meatballs,” Kathleen says. “Turkey meatballs. We’re trying to watch our calories here.”