The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Page 33

  When she stepped back outside, blinking, into the sunlight, Paul was sitting on a stone in front of the wrought-iron fence.

  In the distance, Bree was walking through the grass, her shoes swinging.

  He nodded at the scattered stones of the cemetery. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for what I said. I didn’t mean it. I was trying to make Dad angry, so I could be.”

  “Don’t ever say it again,” Norah told him. “That your life’s not worth it. Don’t ever, ever let me hear that again. Don’t think it, either.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I know you’re angry,” Norah said. “You have a right to whatever life you want to live. But your father’s right too. There will be certain conditions. Break them, and you’re on your own.”

  She said all this without looking at him, and when she turned she was shocked to see his face working, tears on his cheeks. Oh, the boy he’d been was not so far away, after all. She hugged him as well as she could. He was so tall; her head only reached his chest.

  “Look, I love you,” she said into his smelly shirt. “I’m so glad you’re back. And you really, really stink,” she added, laughing, and he laughed too.

  She shaded her eyes, glancing across the field at Bree, closer now.

  “It’s not far,” Bree called. “Just down the road a bit. She says we can’t miss it.”

  They got back in the car and traveled once more along the narrow road, through the rolling hills. Within a few miles they began to glimpse white buildings through the cypress trees. Then suddenly the Abbey of Gethsemani stood revealed, magnificent and stark and simple against the rolling green landscape. Bree pulled into a parking lot beneath a row of rustling trees. As they got out of the car, bells began to ring, calling the monks to prayer. They stood listening, the clear sound fading into the clearer air, cows grazing in the near distance and clouds floating idly overhead.

  “It’s beautiful,” Bree said. “Thomas Merton used to live here, did you know that? He went to Tibet to meet the Dalai Lama. I love imagining that moment. I love imagining all the monks inside, doing the same things day after day.”

  Paul had taken off his sunglasses. His dark eyes were clear. He reached into his pocket and spread some small stones on the hood of the car.

  “Remember these?” he asked, as Norah picked one up, fingering the smooth white disk with a hole in the middle. “Crinoids. From sea lilies. Dad taught me about them, that day I broke my arm. I took a walk while you were in the church. They’re all over the place out here.”

  “I’d forgotten,” Norah said slowly, but then it came back in a rush: the necklace Paul had made, and how worried she’d been that he’d get caught in it and choke. The sound of bells faded in the clear air. The size of a shirt button, the fossil was light and warm in her hand. She remembered David lifting Paul and carrying him from the party, setting his broken arm. How hard David had worked to make things good for them all, to make things right, and yet somehow it had always been so difficult, for all of them, as if they were swimming the shallow sea that once had covered all this land.

  1988

  July 1988

  I

  DAVID HENRY SAT UPSTAIRS IN HIS HOME OFFICE. THROUGH the window, filmed with years of weather and faintly warped, the view of the street wavered, undulant and slightly distorted. He watched a squirrel retrieve a nut and run up the sycamore tree whose leaves pressed against the window. Rosemary was on her knees by the porch, her long hair swinging as she leaned to plant bulbs and annuals in the flower beds she had made. She had transformed the gardens, bringing daylilies from the gardens of friends, planting flax by the garage, where it bloomed, a profusion of pale blue, like mist. Jack sat near her, playing with a dump truck. He was a sturdy boy, five years old now, cheerful and good-natured, with dark brown eyes and traces of red in his blond hair. He had a stubborn streak. On the evenings when David watched him while Rosemary went to work, Jack insisted on doing everything by himself. I’m a big boy, he announced, several times a day, proud and important.

  David let him take on what he wanted, within the limits of safety and reason. The truth was, he loved to watch the boy. He loved to read Jack stories, feeling his weight and warmth, his head falling against his shoulder as he drifted nearly into sleep. He loved to hold his small trusting hand when they walked down the sidewalk to the store. It pained David that his memories of Paul at this age were so sparse, so fleeting. He had been establishing his career then, of course, busy with his clinic—and his photography too—but really it was his guilt that had kept him distant. The patterns of his life were painfully clear now. He had handed their daughter to Caroline Gill and the secret had taken root; it had grown and blossomed in the center of his family. For years he’d come home to watch Norah, mixing drinks or tying on an apron, and he’d think how lovely she was and how he hardly knew her.

  He had never been able to tell her the truth, knowing he would lose her entirely—and perhaps Paul too—if he did. So he had devoted himself to his work and, in those areas of his life he could control, had been very successful. But, sadly, from those years of Paul’s childhood he remembered only a few moments in brief isolation, with the clarity of photos: Paul asleep on the sofa, one hand falling into the air, his dark hair tousled. Paul standing in the surf, shouting with fear and delight as the waves rushed around his knees. Paul sitting at the little table in the playroom, coloring seriously, so absorbed in his task that he did not notice David standing in the doorway, watching. Paul, casting a line out onto the quiet waters, holding still, hardly breathing, while they waited in the dusk for a bite.

  Brief memories, almost unbearably beautiful. And then there were the years of adolescence, when Paul had traveled a distance greater even than Norah’s, shaking the house with his music and his anger.

  David tapped on the window and waved to Jack and Rosemary. He’d bought this house, a duplex, in such haste, looking at it only once and then going home to pack while Norah was at work. It was an old two-story house, split almost exactly in half, with thin partitions dividing what had been expansive rooms; even the stairway, once wide and elegant, had been cut in half. David had taken the larger apartment and given Rosemary the keys to the other; for the last six years they had lived side by side, separated by thin walls but seeing each other every day. Rosemary had tried to pay rent from time to time, but David had refused, telling her to go back to school and get a degree; she could pay him back later. He knew that his motives weren’t entirely altruistic, yet he couldn’t explain even to himself why she mattered so much to him. I fill up that place left by the daughter you gave away, she said once. He’d nodded, thinking it over, but that wasn’t it either, not exactly. It was more, he suspected, that Rosemary knew his secret. He’d poured his story out to her in such a rush, the first and last time he had ever told it, and she had listened without judging him. There was freedom in that; David could be completely himself with Rosemary, who had listened to what he’d done without rejecting him and without telling anyone, either. Strangely, over the years Rosemary and Paul had established a friendship, grudging at first, then later a kind of earnest ongoing argument about issues that mattered to them both—politics and music and social justice—arguments that started over dinner during Paul’s rare visits and lasted into the night.

  Sometimes, David suspected that this was Paul’s way of keeping a distance from him, a way of being in the house without having to talk about anything deeply personal. Now and then David made overtures, but Paul always chose that moment to leave, pushing back his chair and yawning, suddenly tired.

  Now Rosemary looked up, brushing a wisp of hair from her cheek with her wrist, and waved back. David saved his files and walked down the narrow hallway. On the way he passed the door that opened into Jack’s room. It was supposed to have been sealed when the house was converted to a duplex, but one evening David had, on an impulse, tried the handle and found that it was not. Now, quietly, he pushed the door o
pen. Rosemary had painted the walls of Jack’s room light blue, the bed and the dresser, found discarded on the curb, clean white. A whole series of scherenschnitte, intricate paper cuttings of mothers with children, of children playing beneath shady trees, delicate and full of motion, were mounted against midnight blue, framed and hung on the far wall. Rosemary had displayed these pieces in an art show a year ago, and to her surprise, orders had begun to come in, one after another. Nights, she often sat at her kitchen table, beneath a bright light, cutting one scene after another, each one different from any other. She couldn’t promise people what she’d make; she refused to be tied down to any set of images. Because it was already there, she explained, hidden in the paper and the movements of her hands, and it could never be the same image twice.

  David stood, listening to the sounds of the house: faint water dripping, and the hum of the old refrigerator. The smell of perfume and baby powder was strong; a slip was draped off the chair in the corner. He breathed in the scent of her, of Jack, and then he pulled the door firmly shut and carried on down the narrow hall. He’d never told Rosemary about the unsealed door, but he’d never walked through it either. It was a point of honor with him that, despite the scandal, he had never taken advantage of her, had never trespassed into her personal life.

  Still, he liked knowing that the door was there.

  There was more paperwork to do, but David went downstairs. His running shoes were on the back porch. He put them on, tying the laces tightly, and walked around to the front. Jack was standing by the trellis, pulling blossoms off the roses. David squatted down and pulled him close, feeling his soft weight, his steady breathing. Jack had been born in September, early in the evening, just as dusk began to settle. David had driven Rosemary to the hospital, and he sat with her during the first six hours of labor, playing chess and bringing her ice chips. Unlike Norah, Rosemary had no interest in a natural birth; as soon as she could, she had an epidural, and when the labor slowed, she had Pitocin to speed things along. David held her hand as the contractions grew strong, but when they took her to the delivery room he stayed behind. It was too private, not his place. Still, he’d been the first one after Rosemary to hold Jack, and he’d come to love the boy like his own.

  “You smell funny,” Jack said now, pushing at David’s chest.

  “It’s my old stinky shirt,” David said.

  “Going running?” Rosemary asked. She sat back on her heels, brushing dirt from her hands. She was lean these days, almost bony, and he worried about the pace she kept, how hard she pushed herself at school and at her job. She wiped a fine sweat from her forehead with her wrist, leaving a streak of dirt.

  “I am. I can’t look at those insurance files another minute.”

  “I thought you hired someone.”

  “I did. She’ll be good, I think, but she can’t start until next week.”

  Rosemary nodded, pensive. Her pale eyelashes caught the light. She was young, just twenty-two, but she was tough and focused, carrying herself with the assurance of a woman years older.

  “Class tonight?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “My last one ever. July twelfth.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  He nodded, feeling vaguely guilty, troubled by the date. July twelfth; it was hard to understand how time passed so quickly. Rosemary had gone back to school after Jack was born, the same dusky January in which he had left his former practice because a man who’d been his patient for twenty years had been turned away at the door for lack of health insurance. He’d started his own practice, and he took anyone who showed up, insurance or no. He wasn’t in it for the money anymore. Paul was through college, and his own debts were long since paid off; he could do as he liked. These days, like old-time doctors, he was sometimes paid in produce, or yard work, or whatever anyone could offer. He imagined that he’d continue this way for another decade or so, seeing patients every day but gradually cutting back, until the parameter of his physical life was no larger than this house, this garden, the trips he would make to the grocer and the barber. Norah might still be winging around the globe like a dragonfly, but such a life was not for him. He was putting down roots; they were traveling deep.

  “I have a chemistry final today,” Rosemary said, pulling off her gloves, “and then, hooray, I’m done.” Bees hummed in the honeysuckle. “There’s something else I need to tell you,” she said, tugging at her shorts and sitting next to him on the warm concrete steps.

  “Sounds serious.”

  She nodded. “It is. I was offered a job yesterday. A good one.”

  “Here?”

  She shook her head, smiling and waving to Jack as he tried to do a cartwheel and landed, sprawling, on the lawn. “That’s the thing. It’s in Harrisburg.”

  “Near your mother,” he said, his heart sinking. He knew she’d been looking, and he’d been hoping she’d stay nearby. But moving had always been a very real possibility. Two years ago, after her father died quite suddenly, Rosemary had reconciled with her mother and her older sister, and they were anxious for her to come home and raise Jack nearby.

  “That’s right. It’s the perfect job for me: four ten-hour days a week. They’ll pay for me to go on to school too. I could work on getting my physical therapy degree. But mostly I’d have more time with Jack.”

  “And help,” he said. “Your mother would help. And your sister.”

  “Yes. That would be really nice. And as much as I love Kentucky, it’s never been home to me, not really.”

  He nodded, glad for her, not trusting himself to speak. He had sometimes imagined, theoretically, the possibility of having the house to himself: walls that might come down, space opening up, this duplex reverting in slow stages to the elegant single-family home it had once been. But all his conjectures had been about space and air, easily put aside for the pleasures of hearing her footsteps and soft movements next door, of waking in the night to Jack’s distant cry.

  There were tears in his eyes. He laughed.

  “Well,” he said, taking off his glasses, “I guess this was bound to happen. Congratulations, of course.”

  “We’ll visit,” she said. “You’ll visit us.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other.”

  “We will.” She put her hand on his knee. “Look, I know we never talk about it. I don’t even know how to bring it up, really. But what it meant to me—how you helped me—I’m so grateful. I will be forever.”

  “I’ve been accused of trying too hard to rescue people,” he said.

  She shook her head. “In many ways, you saved my life.”

  “Well. If that’s true, I’m glad. God knows I’ve done enough damage elsewhere. I never could seem to do Norah much good.”

  There was a silence between them, the distant drone of a lawn mower.

  “You ought to tell her,” Rosemary said softly. “Paul too. You really must.” Jack was squatting on the walkway now, making little piles of gravel, letting stones sift and cascade from his fingers. “It’s not my place to say anything, I know that. But Norah ought to know about Phoebe. It isn’t right, that she doesn’t. It isn’t right, what she’s had to believe about us all this time, either.”

  “I told her the truth. That we’re friends.”

  “Yes. And we are. But how could she believe it?”

  David shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

  “Not the whole truth. David, in some weird way we’re connected, you and I, because of Phoebe. Because I know that secret. The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It’s a kind of power, isn’t it, knowing a secret? But lately I don’t like it so much, knowing this. It’s not really mine to know, is it?”

  “No.” David picked up a lump of dirt and crumbled it between his fingers. He thought of Caroline’s letters, which he’d carefully burned when he moved into this house. “I suppose i
t’s not.”

  “So. You see? You will? Tell her, I mean.”

  “I don’t know, Rosemary. I can’t promise that.”

  They sat quietly in the sun for a few minutes, watching Jack try again to turn cartwheels on the grass. He was a towhead, agile, naturally athletic, a boy who liked to run and climb. David had come back from West Virginia set free from the grief and loss he’d locked away all those years. When June died he’d had no way to give voice to what had been lost, no real way to move on. It was unseemly, even, to speak of the dead in those days, so they had not. They had left all this grieving unfinished. Somehow, going back had allowed him to settle it. He had come home to Lexington drained, yes, but also calm and sure. After all these years, he’d finally had the strength to give Norah the freedom to remake her life.

  • • •

  When Jack was born, David set up an account for him in Rosemary’s name, and one for Phoebe, in Caroline’s name. It was easy enough; he’d always had Caroline’s social security number, and he had her address too. It had taken a private investigator less than a week to find Caroline and Phoebe, living in Pittsburgh, in a tall narrow house near the freeway. David had driven there and parked on the street, meaning to go up the steps and knock on the door. What he wanted was to tell Norah what had happened, and he couldn’t do that without telling her where Phoebe was. Norah would want to see their daughter, he was sure, so it wasn’t only his own life he might change, or Norah’s or Paul’s. He had come here to tell Caroline what he was hoping to do.

  Was it the right thing? He didn’t know. He sat in the car. It was dusk, and headlights flashed off the sycamore leaves. Phoebe had grown up here, the street so familiar she took it for granted, this sidewalk pushed up by the roots of a tree, the caution sign quivering slightly in the wind, the rush of traffic—all of these would be, for his daughter, emblems of home. A couple pushing a baby in a stroller walked by, and then a light went on in the living room of Caroline’s house. David got out of the car and stood at the bus stop, trying to look inconspicuous even as he gazed across the darkening lawn at the window. Inside, moving in the square of light, Caroline picked up the living room, gathering newspapers and folding up a blanket. She wore an apron. Her movements were deft and focused. She stood and stretched, looked over her shoulder, and spoke.