The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Page 39

  Paul, but not Phoebe.

  Norah might have wept. She longed suddenly to talk with David. All these years, he’d missed her too. All these photographs, all this silent, secret longing. She went through the images once more, studying Paul as a boy: catching a baseball, playing the piano, striking a goofy pose under the tree in the backyard. All these memories he’d collected, moments Norah had never seen. She studied them again and then again, trying to imagine herself in the world David had experienced, into his mind’s eye.

  Two hours passed. She was aware of being hungry, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave or even to rise from her place on the floor. So many photos, all these pictures of Paul, all these anonymous girls and women, mirroring his age. Always, all these years, she had felt her daughter’s presence, a shadow, standing just beyond every photo that was taken. Phoebe, lost at birth, lingered just out of sight, as if she had risen moments earlier and left the room, as if her scent, the brush of air from her passing, still moved in the spaces she’d left. Norah had kept this feeling to herself, fearing that anyone who heard her would think her sentimental, even crazy. It astonished her now, it brought tears to her eyes, to realize how deeply David, too, had felt their daughter’s absence. He had looked for her everywhere, it seemed—in every girl, in each young woman—and had never found her.

  Finally, into the expanding rings of silence in which she sat, gravel popped faintly: a car in the driveway. Someone was arriving. Distantly she heard a slammed door, footsteps, the doorbell ringing in the house. She shook her head and swallowed, but she did not get up. Whoever it was would go away and come back later, or not. She was wiping tears from her eyes; whoever wanted her could wait. But no. The furniture appraiser had promised to stop by this afternoon. So Norah pressed her hands across her cheeks and entered the house from the back, pausing to splash water, on her face and run a comb through her hair. “I’m coming,” she called over the rush of water when the doorbell rang again. She walked through the rooms, the furniture all clustered into the center and covered with tarps: the painters were coming tomorrow. She calculated the days left, wondering if she could possibly get everything done. Remembering, for an instant, those evenings in Châteauneuf, where it seemed possible her life would always be serene, expanding into calm like a flower budding into air.

  She opened the door, still drying off her hands.

  The woman on the porch was vaguely familiar. She was dressed practically, in crisp dark-blue pants. She wore a white cotton sweater with short sleeves, and her thick hair was gray and cut very short. Even at first glance she gave the impression of being organized, efficient, the sort of person who wouldn’t stand for any sort of nonsense, the sort of person who took charge of the world and got things done. She didn’t speak, however. She seemed startled to see Norah, taking her in so intently that Norah folded her arms defensively, aware suddenly of her dust-streaked shorts, her sweat-damp T-shirt. She glanced across the street, then looked back at the woman on her porch. She caught the woman’s gaze and focused on her wide-set eyes, so blue, and then she knew.

  Her breath snagged. “Caroline? Caroline Gill?”

  The woman nodded, her blue eyes falling shut for a moment as if something had been settled between them. But Norah did not know what. The presence of this woman from the long-lost past had set up a fluttering deep in her heart, taking her back to that dreamlike night when she and David had ridden to the clinic through the silent snow-filled streets, when Caroline Gill had administered gas and held her hand during the contractions, saying Look at me, look at me now, Mrs. Henry, I’m right here with you and you’re doing just fine. Those blue eyes, the steady grip of her hand, as deeply woven into the fabric of those moments as her memory of David’s methodical driving or Paul’s first fluted cry.

  “What are you doing here?” Norah asked. “David died a year ago.”

  “I know,” Caroline said, nodding. “I know, I’m so sorry. Look, Norah—Mrs. Henry—I have something I need to talk with you about, something rather difficult. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes. When it’s convenient. I can come back if this isn’t a good time.”

  There was both an urgency and a firmness in her voice, and against her better judgment Norah found herself stepping back and letting Caroline Gill step into the foyer. Boxes, neatly filled and taped, were stacked against the walls. “You’ll have to excuse the house,” she said. She gestured to the living room, the furniture all pushed to the center of the room. “I have painters coming in to give some bids. And a furniture appraiser. I’m getting married again,” she added. “I’m moving.”

  “I’m glad I caught you then,” Caroline said. “I’m glad I didn’t wait.”

  Caught me why? Norah wondered, but from force of habit she invited Caroline into the kitchen, the only place they could comfortably sit. As they walked through the dining room, not speaking, Norah remembered the abruptness of Caroline’s disappearance, the scandal. She glanced back twice, unable to shake the strange sensations Caroline’s presence had stirred. Sunglasses hung from a chain around Caroline’s neck. Her features had grown stronger over the years, her nose and chin more pronounced. She’d be formidable, Norah decided, in a business situation. Not a person to be taken lightly. Still, Norah realized, her uneasiness came from another source. Caroline had known her as a different person—a woman young and unsure, embedded in a life and a past she was not particularly proud to remember.

  Caroline took a seat in the breakfast nook while Norah filled two glasses with ice and water. David’s final note—I fixed the bathroom sink. Happy Birthday—was tacked onto the bulletin board just behind Caroline’s shoulder. Norah thought impatiently of the photos waiting in the garage, of all she had to do that couldn’t wait.

  “You’ve got bluebirds,” Caroline observed, nodding at the wild, chaotic garden.

  “Yes. It took years to attract them. I hope the next people will feed them.”

  “It must be strange to be moving.”

  “It’s time,” Norah said, getting out two coasters and putting the glasses on the table. She sat down. “But you didn’t come to ask about that.”

  “No.”

  Caroline took a drink, then placed her hands flat on the table as if, Norah sensed, to steady them. But when she spoke she seemed calm, resolved.

  “Norah—may I call you Norah? That’s how I’ve thought of you, all these years.”

  Norah nodded, still perplexed, increasingly unnerved. When was the last time Caroline Gill had crossed her mind? Not in ages, and never except as part of the fabric of the night when Paul was born.

  “Norah,” Caroline said, as if reading her mind, “what do you remember about the night your son was born?”

  “Why do you ask?” Norah’s voice was firm, but she was already leaning back, pulling away from the intensity in Caroline’s eyes, from some swirling undercurrent, from her own fear of what might be coming. “Why are you here, and why are you asking me that?”

  Caroline Gill didn’t answer right away. The lilting voices of the bluebirds flashed through the room like motes of light.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “I don’t know how to say this. There isn’t an easy way, I suppose, so I’ll just come out with it. Norah, that night when your twins were born, Phoebe and Paul, there was a problem.”

  “Yes,” Norah said sharply, thinking of the bleakness she had felt after the birth, joy and bleakness woven together, and the long hard path she had taken to reach this moment of steady calm. “My daughter died,” she said. “That was the problem.”

  “Phoebe did not die,” Caroline said evenly, looking straight at her, and Norah felt caught in the moment as she had been all those years ago, holding on to that gaze as the known world shifted around her. “Phoebe was born with Down’s syndrome. David believed the prognosis was not good. He asked me to take her to a place in Louisville where such children were routinely sent. It wasn’t uncommon, in 1964, to do that. Most doctors would have advised t
he same. But I couldn’t leave her there. I took her and moved to Pittsburgh. I’ve raised her all these years. Norah,” she added gently, “Phoebe is alive. She’s very well.”

  Norah sat very still. The birds in the garden were fluttering, calling. She was remembering, for some reason, the time she had fallen through an unmarked grate in Spain. She had been walking on a sunny street, carefree. Then a rush, and she was up to her waist in a ditch with a sprained ankle and long bloody scrapes on her calves. I’m okay, I’m okay, she had kept telling the people who helped her out, who took her to the doctor. Brightly, unconcerned, blood seeping from her cuts: I’m okay. It was only later, alone and safe in her room, when she closed her eyes and felt that rush again, that loss of control, and wept. She felt this way now. Shaking, she held on to the edge of the table.

  “What?” she said. “What did you say?”

  Caroline said it again: Phoebe, not dead but taken away. All these years. Phoebe, growing up in another city. Safe, Caroline kept saying. Safe, well cared for, loved. Phoebe, her daughter, Paul’s twin. Born with Down’s syndrome, sent away.

  David had sent her away.

  “You must be crazy,” Norah said, though even as she spoke so many jagged pieces of her life were falling into place that she knew what Caroline was saying must be true.

  Caroline reached into her purse and slid two Polaroids across the polished maple. Norah couldn’t pick them up, she was trembling too hard, but she leaned close to take them in: a little girl in a white dress, chubby, with a smile that lit her face, her almond-shaped eyes closed in pleasure. And then another, this same girl years later, about to shoot a basketball, caught in the instant before she jumped. She looked a little like Paul in one, a little like Norah in the other, but mostly she was just herself: Phoebe. Not any of the images so neatly filed away in David’s folders but simply herself. Alive, and somewhere in the world.

  “But why?” The anguish in her voice was audible. “Why would he do this? Why would you?”

  Caroline shook her head and looked out into the garden again.

  “For years I believed in my own innocence,” she said. “I believed I’d done the right thing. The institution was a terrible place. David hadn’t seen it; he didn’t know how bad it was. So I took Phoebe, and I raised her, and I fought many, many fights to get her an education and access to medical care. To make sure she would have a good life. It was easy to see myself as the hero. But I think I always knew, underneath, that my motives weren’t entirely pure. I wanted a child and I didn’t have one. I was in love with David too, or thought I was. From afar, I mean,” she added quickly. “It was all in my own head. David never even noticed me. But when I saw the funeral announcement, I knew I had to take her. That I’d have to leave anyway, and I couldn’t leave her behind.”

  Norah, caught in a wild turmoil, went back to those blurry days of grief and joy, Paul in her arms and Bree handing her the phone, saying, You have to put this to rest. She had planned the whole memorial service without telling David, each arrangement helping her return to the world, and when David had come home that night she’d fought his resistance.

  What must it have been like for him, that night, that service?

  And yet he had let it all happen.

  “But why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “All these years, and he never told me.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I can’t speak for David,” she said. “He was always a mystery to me. I know he loved you, and I believe that as monstrous as this all seems, his initial intentions were good ones. He told me once about his sister. She had a heart defect and died young, and his mother never got over her grief. For what it’s worth, I think he was trying to protect you.”

  “She is my child.” Norah said, the words torn out of some deep place in her body, some old long-buried hurt. “She was born of my flesh. Protect me? By telling me she’d died?”

  Caroline didn’t answer, and they sat for a long time, the silence gathering between them. Norah thought of David in all those photos, and in all the moments of their lives together, carrying this secret with him. She hadn’t known, she hadn’t guessed. But now that she’d been told, it made a terrible kind of sense.

  At last Caroline opened her purse and took out a piece of paper with her address and telephone number on it. “This is where we live,” she said. “My husband, Al, and I, and Phoebe. This is where Phoebe grew up. She has had a happy life, Norah. I know that’s not much to give you, but it’s true. She’s a lovely young woman. Next month, she’s going to move into a group home. It’s what she wants. She has a good job in a photocopy shop. She loves it there, and they love her.”

  “A photocopy shop?”

  “Yes. She’s done very well, Norah.”

  “Does she know?” Norah asked. “Does she know about me? About Paul?”

  Caroline glanced down at the table, fingering the edge of the photo. “No. I didn’t want to tell her until I’d talked to you. I didn’t know what you’d want to do, if you’d want to meet her. I hope you will. But of course I won’t blame you if you don’t. All these years—oh, I’m so sorry. But if you want to come, we’re there. Just call. Next week or next year.”

  “I don’t know,” Norah said slowly. “I think I’m in shock.”

  “Of course you are.” Caroline stood up.

  “May I keep the photos?” Norah asked.

  “They’re yours. They’ve always been yours.”

  On the porch, Caroline paused and looked at her, hard.

  “He loved you very much,” she said. “David always loved you, Norah.”

  Norah nodded, remembering that she’d said the same thing to Paul in Paris. She watched from the porch as Caroline walked to the car, wondering about the life Caroline was driving back to, what complexities and mysteries it held.

  Norah stood on the porch for a long time. Phoebe was alive, in the world. That knowledge was a pit opening, endless, in her heart. Loved, Caroline had said. Well cared for. But not by Norah, who had worked so hard to let her go. The dreams she’d had, all that searching through the brittle frozen grass, came back to her, pierced her.

  She went back in the house, crying now, walking past the shrouded furniture. The appraiser would come. Paul was coming too, today or tomorrow; he’d promised to call first, but sometimes he just showed up. She washed the water glasses and dried them, then stood in the silent kitchen, thinking of David, all those nights in all those years when he rose in the dark and went to the hospital to mend someone who was broken. A good person, David. He ran a clinic, he tended those in need.

  And he had sent their daughter away and told her she was dead.

  Norah slammed her fist on the counter, making the glasses jump. She made herself a gin and tonic and wandered upstairs. She lay down, got up, called Frederic, and hung up when the machine answered. After a time she went back out to David’s studio. Everything was the same, the air so warm, so still, the photographs and boxes scattered all over the floor, just as she’d left them. At least fifty thousand dollars, the curators had estimated. More if there were notes in David’s hand about his process.

  Everything was the same, yet not the same at all.

  Norah picked up the first box and lugged it across the room. She heaved it up to the counter, then balanced it on the windowsill overlooking the backyard. She paused to catch her breath before she opened the screen and pushed the box firmly out, using both hands, hearing it land with a satisfying thunk on the ground below. She went back for the next one, and the next. She was everything she had wanted to be earlier: determined, brisk—yes, ruthless. In less than an hour, the studio was cleared. She walked back into the house, passing the broken boxes in the driveway, photographs spilling out and scuttling across the lawn in the late afternoon light.

  Inside, she took a shower, standing beneath the rushing water until it ran cold. She put on a loose dress and made another drink and sat on the sofa. The muscles in her arms hurt from heaving the boxes.
She got another drink and came back. When it got dark, hours later, she was still there. The phone rang, and she heard herself, recorded, and then Frederic, calling from France. His voice was so smooth and even, like a distant shore. She yearned to be there, to be in that place where her life had made sense, but she didn’t pick up the phone or call him back. A train sounded, far away. She pulled the afghan up and slid into the darkness of that night.

  She dozed, off and on, but didn’t sleep. Now and then she got up to make another drink, walking through the empty rooms, shadowy with moonlight, filling her glass by touch. Not bothering, after a time, with tonic or lime or ice. Once she dreamed that Phoebe was in the room, emerging somehow from the wall where she had been all these years, Norah walking past day after day without seeing her. She woke then, weeping. She poured the rest of the gin down the sink and drank a glass of water.

  She finally fell asleep at dawn. At noon, when she woke, the front door was standing wide open and in the backyard there were pictures everywhere: caught in the rhododendrons, plastered up against the foundation, stuck in Paul’s old rusting swing set. Flashes of arms and eyes, of skin that resembled beaches, a glimpse of hair, blood cells scattered like oil across the water. Glimpses of their lives as David had seen them, as David had tried to shape them. Negatives, dark celluloid, scattered on the grass. Norah imagined the shocked and outraged voices of the curators, friends, of her son, even of a part of herself, imagined them crying out, But you’re destroying history!

  No, she answered, I’m claiming it.

  She drank two more glasses of water and took some aspirin, then started hauling boxes to the far side of the overgrown yard. One box, the one full of images of Paul throughout his life, she pushed into the garage again to save. It was hot and her head ached; sparks of dizziness whirled before her eyes when she stood up too suddenly. She remembered that long-ago day on the beach, the glinting water and the silverfish of vertigo and Howard walking into her line of vision.