He takes another sip from his cup of tea, lifting it to his lips with his left hand, and he sees the liquid in the cup tremble as if it’s frightened, a response to a slight tremor in his arm that he’s begun to feel over the past half year and about which he’s told no one. The heat from the wood-burning stove envelops his chair, but he knows the other rooms of the house are cooling, and he’s lived in them so long that he feels them as his own extremities. He remembers how, as a small boy, he would sometimes wake late in the evening, and walk into the living room where his father would be sitting on one end of the couch, smoking a pipe. Once, Marc had stood for what seemed a long time, watching his father take a pinch of tobacco from a pouch, and then tamp it into the pipe with his forefinger. He’d popped the cap of his metal lighter, and then worked the tiny wheel near the flint, slowly, as if he were contemplating it, and when he finally had flicked it to ignite the flame, he’d stared at the small fire for several seconds before bringing it to the tobacco in the pipe and the pipe to his mouth. He drew on it to make sure the tobacco burned, two spurts of smoke coming from the corner of his mouth, and then took the pipe from his mouth and turned his wrist to glance at his watch. Now, Marc glances at his own watch, and wishes he had the rituals of pipe smoking to fend off his loneliness, and he understands that his father had checked his watch not only because he was calculating how much sleep he was losing, but because he wished to wed his rituals to the increments of time passing, which, at an hour of desperation, were the only things that made it bearable.
He hears the slight creak of the floor upstairs, and, because he knows the house so well, figures that Joline has risen to change the baby’s diaper. But then she walks out of the room, and he hears, without turning his head, her descend each stair, and counts each till he knows she’s reached the bottom. He shifts in his chair and looks at her. She’s wearing a white gown with rows of some kind of floral pattern that is difficult to discern in the dim light, and she stands with the baby in one arm, turning at the hips to rock her though the baby seems sound asleep. She stares at him for a few moments, and he sees again the depth of her gray eyes, and then she walks over and sits down in the chair adjacent to him.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks. He reaches for the pipe, then, realizing how deep his reverie about his father had been, picks up the cup of tea instead.
“Not well,” she says.
He lifts the cup toward her and says, “I’d be happy to make you some tea.”
“No, thank you. Thanks for asking, though.”
He takes a sip and looks at her over the rim of the mug as she stares at him, sleepy-eyed, but levelly. He has to look away. She glances down at the sleeping baby, pulls a corner of her flannel blanket away from her mouth, and then looks up at him again.
“So I was up there sleeping. Dreaming,” she says.
He does not like to hear about people’s dreams, or interpret their subconscious stories from the fragments of memory and desire that arrange themselves according to a substructure that, to his mind, is no more illuminating than patterns of crystal in a stone. Kathleen loves to recount her dreams, and he is not surprised her daughter would, too. So he asks, “What was your dream?”
She looks once at the woodstove, where only an ember or two still burn visibly through the small door, then out through the front window into a starless night where the whiteness of the snow has always seemed to capture some light from a source he could never discern.
“You were in it,” she says, and waits to observe the effect of that statement on him. “But a lot like you are now, how you were all afternoon and evening, really. Passive. A bystander. A man standing in a bus shelter overhearing an argument between lovers.”
“I don’t know you,” he says. “I don’t know your family’s history. It’s not my place to offer insight or advice when there’s trouble for your brother, who I’ve barely met.”
“What about Kathleen?” He is surprised she uses her mother’s name.
“She and I will talk later, I suppose. Tomorrow, after you leave.”
She nods, looks down at the baby, and rocks her once or twice on her arm.
“I always wanted a sister,” she says. “And in the dream I had one. An older sister. And it was strange, because I had memories of our childhood. I could remember in the dream how she would want to dress me up as her own daughter, and she’d have me sit at a tiny table where only I could fit, and she would make in her toy oven, you know, a small tea cake that she’d sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve to me on a plate like she was a waitress at a fancy restaurant. Then she’d pour a mug of warm water from a little teapot that she said was very hot, and tell me to be careful.”
She looks up at him, and then out toward the lake again.
“It’s so dark out there. You’d think it would make it easier to sleep,” she says. “Anyway, in the dream, I had that memory, and others, but I also knew I’d never met my sister. And then the little room where she was giving me a tea cake transformed, and we were here, only the lake wasn’t frozen, or pretty and small like this one, but a kind of ocean or sea, except you could see to the other side, like a lake, and you were sitting in your chair here and my sister came in right through that front door.”
She points toward it, but he doesn’t need to turn his head to look.
“And then she walked right up to where I was standing, like where I was standing when we were looking out at the wind blowing the snow off the trees this afternoon. She was taller than I was, and she didn’t say anything until she took my hands. Then she only said, ‘Joline, I’ve missed you so much.’ And she squeezed my fingers and pulled me closer to her, and lowered her head and kissed me on the mouth. She let her kiss linger there, and when she pulled away I saw you watching us, only you were crying.”
She looks over at him, but he’s unable to meet her eyes.
“I woke up then, and knew you were down here, sitting up.”
He stares into his cup, and catches a slim reflection of his glasses on the liquid surface.
“Marc. What was your daughter’s name? She was your daughter, wasn’t she? Not a son?”
He feels his face go hot, and his eyes water. But he manages. “Yes.”
“What was her name?”
“Claire.”
“Claire,” she repeats. “That’s a pretty name. Is she dead? I’m sorry. I mean, did she die?”