The Memory Keeper's Daughter

  “I’m doing just fine,” she said. “So. What do you figure now?”

  She hadn’t meant the words to come out as they did, so tough and harsh. There was a long silence before Al spoke again.

  “I guess I figure I was wrong about some things,” Al said. He shook his head. “I thought we hit it off, you and me.”

  “We did,” Caroline said. “I’m just shocked, that’s all. I thought I’d cut my ties.”

  He looked at her then; his brown eyes met hers.

  “It took me a full year,” he said. “If you’re worried about someone else tracking you down, remember that. And I knew where to start, and I had good luck. I started checking the motels I know, asking about a woman with a baby. Each time I went to a different place, and last week I hit pay dirt. The clerk at the place you stayed remembered you. She’s retiring next week, by the way.” He held his thumb and forefinger up, close together. “I came this close to missing you forever.”

  Caroline nodded, remembering the woman behind the desk with her white hair in a careful beehive, pearl earrings glimmering. The motel had been in her family for fifty years. The heat rattled all night, and the walls were constantly damp, peeling the paper. You never knew, anymore, the woman said, pushing a key across the counter, who was going to walk through the door.

  Al nodded at the powder-blue hood of the Fairlane.

  “I knew I’d found you the minute I saw that,” he said. “How’s your baby?”

  She remembered the empty parking lot, all the light that had spilled into the snow and faded, the way his hand had rested, so gently, on Phoebe’s tiny forehead.

  “Do you want to come in?” she heard herself ask. “I was just about to wake her. I’ll make you some tea.”

  Caroline took him down the narrow sidewalk and up the steps to the back porch. She left him in the living room and climbed the stairs, feeling giddy, unsteady, as if she’d suddenly become aware that the planet beneath her turned in space, shifting her world no matter how hard she tried to hold it still. She changed Phoebe and splashed water on her own face, trying to calm herself down.

  Al was sitting at the dining room table, looking out the window. When she came down the stairs he turned, his face breaking into a wide grin. He reached for Phoebe at once, exclaiming over how big she’d grown, how beautiful she was. Caroline felt a rush of pleasure, and Phoebe, delighted, laughed, her dark curls falling down around her cheeks. Al reached into his shirt and pulled out a medallion, clear plastic over gilded turquoise letters that said GRAND OLE OPRY. He’d gotten it in Nashville. Come with me, he had said to her, all those long months ago, joking and yet not joking.

  And here he was, having traveled all this way to find her.

  Phoebe was making soft sounds, reaching. Her hands were brushing against Al’s neck, his collarbone, his dark plaid shirt. At first, it didn’t register with Caroline, what was happening; then, suddenly, it did. Whatever Al was saying receded, merging with Leo’s footsteps upstairs and the rush of traffic outside, sounds that Caroline would forever afterward remember as being lucky.

  Phoebe was reaching for the medallion. Not batting at air, as she had this morning, but using Al’s chest for resistance, her small fingers scraping and scraping the medallion into her palm until she could close her fist around it. Rapt with success, she yanked the medallion hard on its string, making Al raise his hand to the chafing.

  Caroline touched her own neck too, feeling the quick burn of joy.

  Oh, yes, she thought. Grab it, my darling. Grab the world.

  May 1965

  NORAH WAS AHEAD OF HIM, MOVING LIKE LIGHT, FLASHES of white and denim amid the trees: there, and then gone. David followed, leaning down now and then to pick up stones. Rough-skinned geodes, fossils etched in shale. Once, an arrowhead. He held each of these for a moment, pleased by their weight and shape, by the coolness of the stones against his palm, before he slipped them into his pockets. As a boy, the shelves of his room had always been littered with stones, and to this day he couldn’t pass them up, their mysteries and possibilities, even though bending was awkward with Paul in a carrier against his chest and the camera scraping against his hip.

  Far ahead, Norah paused to wave, then seemed to vanish straight into a wall of smooth gray stone. Several other people, wearing matching blue baseball caps, spilled suddenly, one by one, from this same gray wall. As David drew closer he realized that the stairway leading to the natural stone bridge rose up there, just out of sight. Better watch your step, a woman, descending, warned him. It’s steep like you wouldn’t believe. Slippery too. Breathless, she paused and held her hand on her heart.

  David, noting her paleness, her shortness of breath, paused. “Ma’am? I’m a doctor. Are you all right?”

  “Palpitations,” she said, waving her free hand. “I’ve had them all my life.”

  He took her plump wrist and felt her pulse, swift but steady, slowing as he counted. Palpitations: people used the term freely, to talk about any quickening of the heart, but he could tell at once that the woman was in no real distress. Not like his sister, who had grown breathless and dizzy and was forced to sit anytime she so much as ran across the room. Heart trouble, the doctor in Morgantown had said, shaking his head. He had not been more specific, and it had not mattered; there was nothing he could do. Years later, in medical school, David had remembered her symptoms and read late into the night to make his own diagnosis: a narrowing of the aorta, or maybe an abnormality of the heart valve. Either way, June had moved slowly and fought to breathe, her condition worsening as the years passed, her skin pale and faintly blue in the months before she died. She had loved butterflies, and standing with her face turned to the sun, eyes closed, and eating homemade jelly on the thin saltines his mother bought in town. She was always singing, made-up tunes she hummed softly to herself, and her hair was pale, almost white, the color of buttermilk. For months after she died he had woken in the night, thinking he heard her small voice, singing like the wind in the pines.

  “You say you’ve had this all your life?” he asked the woman gravely, releasing her hand.

  “Oh, always,” she said. “The doctors tell me it’s not serious. Just annoying.”

  “Well, I think you’ll be fine,” he said. “But don’t push yourself too hard.”

  She thanked him, touched Paul’s head and said, You watch out for that little one now. David nodded and moved off, protecting Paul’s head with his free hand as he climbed between the damp stone walls. He was pleased—it was good to be able to help people in need, to offer healing—something he could not seem to do for those he loved the most. Paul patted softly at his chest, grabbing at the envelope he’d stuffed in his pocket: a letter from Caroline Gill, delivered that morning to his office. He had read it only once, swiftly, putting it away as Norah came in, trying to conceal his agitation. We are well, Phoebe and I, it had said. So far, she does not have any problems with her heart.

  Now he caught Paul’s small fingers in his own, gently. His son looked up, wide-eyed, curious, and he felt a deep swift rush of love.

  “Hey,” David said, smiling. “I love you, little guy. But don’t eat that, okay?”

  Paul studied him with wide dark eyes, then turned his head and rested his cheek against David’s chest, radiating warmth. He wore a white hat with yellow ducks that Norah had embroidered in the quiet, watchful days after her accident. With the emergence of each duck, David had breathed a little easier. He had seen her grief, the space it had left in her heart, when he’d developed the spent roll of film in his new camera: room after empty room in their old house, close-ups of window frames, the stark shadows of the stair rail, the floor tiles, skewed and crooked. And Norah’s footprints, those erratic, bloody trails. He’d thrown the photos out, negatives and all, but still they haunted him. He was afraid they always would. He had lied, after all; he had given away their daughter. That terrible consequences would follow seemed both inevitable and just. But days had passed, now nearly three month
s, and Norah seemed to be herself again. She worked in the garden, or laughed on the telephone with friends, or lifted Paul from his playpen with her lean, graceful arms.

  David, watching, told himself she was happy.

  Now the ducks bounced cheerfully with every step, catching the light as David emerged from the narrow stairs onto the natural stone bridge spanning the gorge. Norah, wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless white blouse, stood in the center of the bridge, the toes of her white sneakers flush with the rocky edge. Slowly, with a dancer’s grace, Norah opened her arms and arched her back, eyes closed, as if offering herself to the sky.

  “Norah!” he called out, appalled. “That’s dangerous!”

  Paul pushed his small hands against David’s chest. Doo, he echoed, when he heard David say dangerous, a baby word applied to electrical outlets, stairs, fireplaces, chairs, and now to this sheer drop to the earth so far below his mother.

  “It’s spectacular!” Norah called back, letting her arms fall. She turned, causing pebbles to skid beneath her feet and slide over the edge. “Come see!”

  Cautiously, he walked out onto the bridge and went to stand beside her at the edge. Tiny figures moved slowly on the path far below, where an ancient river had once rushed. Now hills rolled away into lush spring, a hundred different shades of green against the clear blue sky. He took a deep breath, fighting a wave of vertigo, afraid even to glance at Norah. He had wanted to spare her, to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past. When he imagined the daughter he’d given away, it was his sister’s face he saw, her pale hair, her serious smile.

  “Let me get a picture,” he said, taking one slow step back, then another. “Come over to the middle of the bridge. The light’s better.”

  “In a minute,” she said, her hands on hips. “It’s just so beautiful.”

  “Norah,” he said. “You are really making me nervous.”

  “Oh, David,” she said, tossing her head without looking at him. “Why are you so worried all the time? I’m fine.”

  He didn’t answer, conscious of his lungs moving, the deep unsteadiness of his breathing. He’d had this same feeling when he opened Caroline’s letter, addressed to his old office in her scraggy hand, half covered with a forwarding stamp. It was postmarked Toledo, Ohio. She had included three pictures of Phoebe, an infant in a pink dress. The return address was to a PO box, not in Toledo but in Cleveland. Cleveland, a place he had never been, a place where Caroline Gill was apparently living with his daughter.

  “Let’s move away from here,” he said again, at last. “Let me take your picture.”

  She nodded, but when he reached the safe center of the bridge and turned, Norah was still near the edge, facing him, arms folded, smiling.

  “Take it right here,” she said. “Make it look like I’m walking on air.”

  David squatted, fiddling with the camera dials, heat radiating up from the bare golden rocks. Paul squirmed against him and started to fuss. David would remember all this—which went unseen and unrecorded—when the image rose up later in the developing fluid, taking slow shape. He framed Norah in the viewfinder, wind moving in her hair, her skin tan and healthy, wondering at all she kept from him.

  The spring air was warm, softly fragrant. They hiked back down, passing cave entrances and sprays of purple rhododendron and mountain laurel. Norah led them off the main path and through the trees, following a creek, until they emerged in a sun-struck place she remembered for its wild strawberries. Wind moved lightly in the long grass, and the dark green leaves of the strawberry plants shimmered low against the earth. The air was full of sweetness, the hum of insects, heat.

  They spread out their picnic: cheese and crackers and clusters of grapes. David sat down on the blanket, cradling Paul’s head against his chest as he undid the baby carrier, thinking idly of his own father, stocky and strong, with skilled blunt fingers that covered David’s hands as he taught him to heft an ax or milk the cow or pound a nail through the cedar shingles. His father, who smelled of sweat and resin and the dark hidden earth of the mines where he worked in the winter. Even when David was a teenager, boarding in town all week so he could go to high school, he had loved walking home on the weekend and finding his father there, smoking his pipe on the porch.

  Doo, Paul said. Free, he immediately pulled off one shoe. He studied it intently, then dropped it almost at once and crawled off toward the grassy world beyond the blanket. David watched him yank a fistful of weeds and put them in his mouth, a look of surprise flashing across his small features at the texture. He wished, suddenly, fiercely, that his parents were alive to meet his son.

  “Awful stuff, isn’t it?” he said softly, wiping grassy drool from Paul’s chin. Norah moved beside him, quietly, efficiently, taking out silverware and napkins. He kept his face turned; he didn’t want her to see him so stirred by emotion. He took a geode from his pocket and Paul grasped it in both hands, turning it over.

  “Should he have that in his mouth?” Norah asked, settling down beside him, so close he could feel her warmth, her scent of sweat and soap filling the air.

  “Probably not,” he said, retrieving the stone and giving Paul a cracker instead. The geode was warm and damp. He gave it a sharp crack on the rock, splitting it open to reveal its crystalline purple heart.

  “So beautiful,” Norah murmured, turning it in her hand.

  “Ancient seas,” David said. “The water got trapped inside and crystallized, over centuries.”

  They ate lazily, then picked ripe strawberries, sun-warmed and tender. Paul ate them by fistfuls, juice running down his wrists. Two hawks circled lazily in the deep blue sky. Didi, Paul said, lifting a chubby arm to point. Later, when he fell asleep, Norah settled him on a blanket in the grassy shade.

  “This is nice,” Norah observed, settling with her back against a boulder. “Just the three of us, sitting in the sun.”

  Her feet were bare and he took them in his hands, massaging them, delicate bones hidden beneath the flesh.

  “Oh,” she said, closing her eyes, “that’s really nice. You’ll put me to sleep.”

  “Stay awake,” he said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I don’t know. I was just remembering this little field by the sheep farm. When Bree and I were little we used to wait for our father there. We gathered huge bunches of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. The sun felt just like this—like an embrace. Our mother put the flowers in vases all over the house.”

  “That’s nice too,” David said, releasing one of her feet and attending to the other. He ran his thumb, lightly, over the thin white scar the broken flashbulb had left. “I like thinking of you there.” Norah’s skin was soft. He remembered sunny days from his own childhood, before June got so sick, when the family had gone hunting for ginseng, a fragile plant hidden in the dusky light amid the trees. His parents had met on such a search. He had their wedding photo, and on the day of their own marriage Norah had presented it to him in a handsome oak frame. His mother, with clear skin and wavy hair, a narrow waist, a faint, knowing smile. His father, bearded, standing behind her, his cap in his hand. They had left the courthouse after the wedding and moved into the cabin his father had built on the mountainside overlooking their fields. “My parents loved being outside,” he added. “My mother planted flowers everywhere. There was a cluster of jack-in-the-pulpit by the stream up from our house.”

  “I’m sorry I never met them. They must have been so proud of you.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. They were glad my life was easier.”

  “Glad,” she agreed slowly, opening her eyes and glancing at Paul, who slept peacefully, dappled light falling on his face. “But maybe a little sorry too? I would be, if Paul grew up and moved away.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “That’s true. They were proud and
sorry both. They didn’t like the city. They only visited me once in Pittsburgh.” He remembered them sitting awkwardly in his single student room, his mother starting every time a train whistle sounded. June was dead by then, and as they sat sipping weak coffee at his rickety student table, he remembered thinking bitterly that they did not know what to do with themselves without June to care for. She had been the center of all their lives for so long. “They only stayed with me for one night. After my father died, my mother went to live with her sister in Michigan. She wouldn’t fly, and she never learned to drive. I only saw her once, after that.”

  “That’s too sad,” Norah said, rubbing away a smear of dirt on her calf.

  “Yes,” David said. “Too sad indeed.” He thought of June, the way her hair got so blond in the sun each summer, the scent of her skin— soap and warmth and something metallic, like a coin—filling the air when they squatted side by side, digging up the ground with sticks. He had loved her so much, her sweet laughter. And he had hated coming home to find her lying on a pallet on the porch on sunny days, his mother’s face drawn with concern as she sat beside her daughter’s limp form, singing softly, husking corn or shelling peas.

  David looked at Paul, sleeping so deeply on the blanket with his head turned to the side, his long hair curling against his damp neck. His son, at least, he had sheltered from grief. Paul would not grow up, as David had, suffering the loss of his sister. He would not be forced to fend for himself because his sister couldn’t.