He swallows hard, and his voice sounds outside of him. “I don’t know, Joline. I don’t think so. But I don’t know for certain.”
He expects her to ask why, but she doesn’t just yet, and only nods, staring at the floor, her eyes glassy. She remembers the baby, and blows very gently into her face.
“I don’t want her to get too warm.” His own hands are cold.
“How did you know?” he asks her.
“Well, the dream,” she says. “But when I first came in. And I handed Laura to you. You didn’t hesitate. And—well, there’s something you can see when a man holds a baby. Or at least I can see. It’s like the light in the room changes if he’s had a child of his own, like it’s, I guess, refracted by his memory as it gets close to his skin. Some men look happy, some look sad, depending on their experience since the time their kids were babies.”
“How did I look?”
She has been gazing at the baby’s face while speaking, but now she looks up at him and seems to be taking him in.
“Like you do now,” she says. “Like a hostage. How old is Claire?”
“She’d be almost thirty-five.”
“And how long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
“Fifteen years.”
She shifts forward in her chair then, and holds the baby to her chest and rises to her feet; she takes the few steps over to him noiselessly, and when she stands over him, her hair frames her face in the darkness so he can’t see it, and she lowers the baby into his arms. He takes the baby as she wakes and turns her head, opens her eyes, and briefly looks into his own, and then closes them and settles in. He feels her warmth at his chest. Joline walks back to the chair and sits down.
“I can see it again. Even with the lights out. You’re captive.”
He shuts his eyes against the emotion.
“Why haven’t you told my mother?”
“I don’t know why, Joline. I really don’t.”
“How close were you and Claire?”
He thinks about it, thinks through the images of her he can hold in his mind; he can no longer discern how the edge of a memory is altered by the time since. He loved her curiosity when she was only three, and she’d be running down a sidewalk when a bird lit on a wire overhead, and she’d stop almost midstride to look, her straw hair falling to one shoulder as she cocked her head sideways, her lips parted in thought, and the color in her cheeks rising with interest.
“You have so much to look forward to,” he says to her, and coughs to keep something from rising in his throat.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean yes, we were close, when she was still small.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was injured. Hurt. She’d been stabbed, and we thought she’d die. But she recovered. It took months, but she did get well. And then she left a little note for her mother and me, and disappeared.”
He can smell the sweet, slightly musky scent of the baby again, and reflexively starts to raise her to his face, but he resists. Joline has been sitting with an arm on each rest of the chair, as if she were piloting something, but now she crosses her arms over her chest.
“You can have her back if you’re getting cold,” he says, but she only shakes her head. She takes in a slight breath, as if she’s about to say something, and then decides against it. But the air between them, if possible, has gone even more still.
“I have another child,” she says. “Fathered by a different man.”
She turns her head and looks into his face, her eyes dark.
“How old are you, Joline?”
She smiles slightly. “What a strange question to ask. I’m twenty-nine.”
“I’m sorry. You just seem so young.”
“Only a few years younger than your daughter.”
“Does Tom know?”
“He’s not the kind of man who would want to.”
“And your mother?”
She shakes her head.
“Why are you telling me?”
“I’d think that’d be obvious.”
He looks down at the baby again. “What happened?”
She watches him holding the baby, and he realizes that unwittingly, he’s been rocking her slightly.
“I was so in love with his father. The baby’s father. I was only twenty-three, and I know you’d probably laugh if I weren’t sitting right here in front of you when I say that I believed then that I knew all there was to know about love.”
“I wouldn’t laugh.”
“Well, I might. Not that loving Tom has deepened those waters. I guess it’s made them wider.”
“I think I understand that.”
“Yeah?” she asks, but isn’t waiting for an answer. “My brother didn’t like him. And that mattered to me, of course.”
“Tom told me that your brother mattered to you more than anyone. More than any other man, anyway.”