His own eyes closed, as if he were still blindfolded; he was seeing her.
“She had—she had this smile on her face. A closed-mouth smile, you know, her cheeks and throat pink from running around that oak grove. This blissful look. And I can’t tell you where I was standing now. I don’t remember standing anywhere. I was close enough to see her expression, see her posed there so still, so still, as if she’d cast her own statue. But I remember, too, wondering how she looked through the binoculars Chloe was holding backward. I was seeing how she looked from where I was standing. That face flushed with color. I was wondering how she would look from far away.”
Far away. He was holding still himself, still curled on the mat, but returning to the room.
“I don’t remember going home. I don’t remember walking back inside after that evening. I doubt Claire remembered it at all.”
He rolled over onto his back.
“What’s going to happen, Josephine?”
She didn’t answer, but he heard her let out a long breath, and rise to her feet. She walked over to the door, and he guessed she was listening, and then he heard her move over to the window.
“It’s likely they will come for you at first light,” she said.
He nodded again, and then she walked back to the chair, her steps sounding amplified in the silence of early morning.
“Why wait till first light? I never understood the tradition of waiting for dawn for an execution. Another night for the condemned to suffer his long thoughts.”
She said nothing to this. He thought he heard her raise her arms and lower them again, for reasons he couldn’t determine, but the same fragrance he’d occasionally smelled on her returned.
“Under that deep Nebraska sky, the moths still bumping the streetlight, while waiting for Genevieve to continue her story, Claire had fallen asleep. Now she turned over in the truck bed, her mind surfacing to the sounds of crickets.”
“Josephine,” Marc said.
“Shh. Listen,” Josephine said. “It’s all that’s left to tell.” And then she continued.
14
Claire sat straight up in the truck bed, and her sudden movement woke Genevieve. The sky had cleared utterly, and now was flooded with morning stars, and Claire looked east, the direction they would be heading, and checked the horizon for the first sign of dawn, but as yet there was none. Along the highway, the sound of the engine of a lone truck whined into the distance. She looked back toward Genevieve.
“Claire, you okay?” she asked. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“No. I’m okay.”
“Did my story about your dad upset you?”
“No, Genevieve. I fell asleep.”
Genevieve nodded, and lay back in the truck bed and closed her eyes. Only then did Claire look at her face, glancing from it back to the school beyond the lot where they had parked the truck, and she saw Genevieve’s mouth open slightly, could see her eyes moving under her eyelids, and Claire knew she was sleeping.
If they didn’t get started soon, they would need to stop before Chicago, probably just outside Iowa City, and she would have to lie for one more night next to Genevieve, who would by then know the rest of her story about Seth and the night she was attacked. And she wanted to tell Genevieve the story, could feel it welling up inside her, and yet was afraid to, and as Genevieve slept, Claire could feel herself trembling, though the June morning was still warm.
Because Genevieve must have known about her father’s kiss. The time he’d kissed Claire when she was fourteen. In Genevieve’s story, Joline had kissed Marc after asking him to close his eyes. And twice, in that story, he’d thought about the kiss, and seemed to savor it. Had Genevieve wanted Claire to recognize it? And she knew Genevieve couldn’t have guessed it, knew that, because Genevieve had also known about Pakistan, it couldn’t have been a coincidence, and her mind raced. Could this woman have met her father in Pakistan, in the month he was there before Claire was injured? But that was fifteen years ago, and Genevieve would have been barely fourteen herself then. And she’d picked her up hitchhiking on the highway, and she couldn’t have known Claire was driving, couldn’t have known she’d be out on that long stretch of hot, empty road.
She wanted Lucy. She wanted to talk to Jack. She wished she had a cell phone. The corner of her mouth was quivering as Genevieve slept.