Free The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards Page B

was an understandable place, full of promise. Norah had planned to tell David about her plans over dinner, but now, suddenly, she found herself explaining the simple service she had organized, the announcement she had placed. As she talked she was aware of David’s gaze growing more intent, somehow deeply vulnerable. His expression made her hesitate; it was as if he’d been unmasked, and she was talking now to a stranger whose reactions she couldn’t anticipate. His eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them, and she could not tell what was going on in his mind.
    “You don’t like the idea,” she said.
    “It’s not that.”
    Again she saw the grief in his eyes; she heard it in his voice. Out of a desire to assuage it, she nearly took everything back, but she felt her earlier inertia, pushed aside with such great effort, lurking in the room.
    “It helped me to do this,” she said. “That isn’t wrong.”
    “No,” he said. “It isn’t wrong.”
    He seemed about to say more, but then he stopped himself and stood up instead, walking to the window and staring out into the darkness at the little park across the street. “But damn it, Norah,” he said, his voice low and harsh, a tone he had never used before. It frightened her, the anger underlying his words. “Why do you have to be so stubborn? Why, at least, didn’t you tell me before you called the papers?”
    “She died,” Norah said, angry now herself. “There’s no shame in it. No reason to keep it a secret.”
    David, stiff-shouldered, didn’t turn. A stranger, holding a coral-colored robe over his arm in Wolf Wile’s department store, he had seemed strangely familiar, like someone she had once known well and hadn’t seen for years. Yet now, after a year of marriage, she hardly knew him at all.
    “David,” she said, “what is happening to us?”
    He did not turn. Scents of meat and potatoes filled the room; she remembered the dinner, warming in the oven, and her stomach churned with a hunger she had denied all day. Upstairs, Paul began to cry, but she stayed where she was, waiting for his answer.
    “Nothing’s happening to us,” he said at last. When he turned, the grief was still vivid in his eyes and something else—a kind of resolution—that she did not understand. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, Norah,” he said. “Which, I suppose, is understandable.”
    Cold. Dismissive. Patronizing. Paul was crying harder. The force of Norah’s anger wheeled her around and she stormed upstairs, where she lifted the baby and changed him, gently, gently, all the time trembling with rage. Then the rocking chair, buttons, the blissful release. She closed her eyes. Downstairs, David moved through the rooms. He, at least, had touched their daughter, seen her face.
    She would have the service, no matter what. She would do it for herself.
    Slowly, slowly, as Paul nursed, as the light faded, she grew calm, became again that wide tranquil river, accepting the world and carrying it easily on its currents. Outside, the grass was growing slowly and silently; the egg sacs of spiders were bursting open; the wings of birds were pulsing in flight. This is sacred, she found herself thinking, connected through the child in her arms and the child in the earth to everything that lived and ever had. It was a long time before she opened her eyes, and then she was startled by both the darkness and the beauty all around: a small oblong of light, reflected off the glass doorknob, quivering on the wall. Paul’s new blanket, lovingly knit, cascading like waves from the crib. And on the dresser David’s daffodils, delicate as skin and almost luminous, collecting the light from the hall.

IV
    O NCE HER VOICE DWINDLED TO NOTHING IN THE EMPTY parking lot, Caroline slammed the car door and started picking her way through the slush. After a few steps, she stopped and went back for the baby. Phoebe’s thin wails rose in the darkness, propelling Caroline across