“I guess so.” Claire tilted her chin up, waiting for a drop to fall. It wasn’t surprising that she felt thick with a sense of expectation. The story Genevieve told about her father had carried to her a version of him that she couldn’t have imagined. While it was true that images of her mother and father crossed her mind on occasion over these years, she had tried to sweep them behind her. It would be easy to close her eyes now and see the interstate stretched out before her, and to envision her father or mother hitchhiking as Genevieve had, only she would not pull over, and she would see them as shrinking dolls drawn into her rearview mirror.
But the tale that Genevieve was telling was something else again. She wondered about Joline, and whether she might be someone Genevieve had once wanted to be. The immense stillness of those rooms in her story—and a winter landscape that Claire hadn’t seen in years—had expanded inside her as Genevieve spoke, and she felt the sad serenity her father had earned begin to peel away under Joline’s gaze. But the strangest thing was how Claire haunted him. How Genevieve described her as outside in that cold wind at the windows looking in, and how, as Claire listened while driving, she was inside that infant daughter gazing up at her father’s face.
Everyone she’d ever loved had formed stories of her they had translated as the truth, but she knew they were only founded in those parts of her that she chose to reveal. But this was different. None of this had happened; all of it was Genevieve’s invention, but because of this, she felt her presence in her father’s rooms, in Joline’s baby, not as something to remind her father of his past, but as someone who was waiting, just as he was, for a revelation that might never come. It was not a story that you could outrun, like you could a person, or a memory of someone you once loved. If Genevieve disappeared tonight—if, while Claire was sleeping, she climbed out of the truck bed undetected and slipped down the highway—she thought the story would be like a thick haze through which only slowly the other things of her life would emerge, and the memory of the haze would cling to those things for a long, long time.
She had called home too late to talk to Lucy. Even though they’d eaten at a diner with a pay phone, and even though Genevieve had long before that set aside telling the story of her father, Lucy had slipped her mind, while instead, she was thinking of the baby that Joline, in Genevieve’s story, had given away. She’d promised she’d talk to Lucy each night she was gone, and she’d told Lucy that when she arrived in Michigan she might even get to speak for the first time with her other grandmother. But sitting across from Genevieve, who was describing the life she imagined she’d have in Chicago, she’d lost track of time. When she did call, and talked to Jack, Lucy was long asleep, and she explained to him, lying, that she had forgotten to anticipate the differences in time zones. “Well, it’s later where you are,” Jack had said, and Claire felt her face go hot. “But she’s fine,” Jack reassured her, though with perhaps an edge to his voice. “She fell asleep on my mother’s lap practically in the middle of a sentence.” Claire asked, “Does she miss me?” She heard Jack sigh into the phone. “Of course she does. She can’t go ten minutes without saying, ‘Mommy does it this way; Mommy does it that.’ But she hasn’t shed any tears yet.”
That “yet” lingered with her as she walked back toward the booth, where Genevieve was pushing a french fry through the ketchup she’d poured onto her plate. Claire had thought fleetingly that this was a little like falling in love, how, those few times she’d experienced it, the people and habits in her life that had before seemed essential and stabilizing were now in the way, and she wanted to cast them aside to get a lasting and unobstructed view of the only one she loved.
Now Genevieve shifted in the truck bed, turning from her back to her side, and Claire felt the edge of her hand on her right shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You know you can.”
“When was the last time you saw your father?”
Claire thought about it.
“Well, of course, I saw him when he’d come and take care of me. When my mother couldn’t. Before I moved away. But there was another time, before I was—”
She found herself staring at the streetlight where moths were fluttering about, and she could hear them lightly bumping on the bulb; it was strange that that was the only sound she could hear—no crickets, no bullfrogs, though a creek ran through a dim wooded area behind the school—other than Genevieve’s breathing.