The Memory Keeper's Daughter (5 page)

The parking lot was nearly empty, the last few cars idling or pulling slowly out into the street. Caroline rested her paper sack of groceries on the hood and settled Phoebe in her box in the backseat. The faint voices of employees echoed across the lot. Scattered flakes swirled in the cones from the streetlights, no more or less than before. The forecasters so often got it wrong. The snow that had started before Phoebe was born-just last night, she reminded herself, though it seemed ages past-had not even been predicted. She reached into the paper sack and ripped open a loaf of bread, taking out a slice, for she had not eaten all day and was ravenous. She chewed as she shut the door, thinking with weary longing of her apartment, so spare and tidy, of her twin bed with its white chenille spread, everything in order and in place. She was halfway around the back of the car before she realized that her taillights were glowing weakly red.

She stopped where she was, staring. All that time, while she had dithered in the grocery aisles, while she had sat in the unfamiliar restroom quietly feeding Phoebe, this light had been spilling out across the snow.

When she tried the ignition it merely clicked, the battery so dead the engine wouldn't even groan.

She got out of the car and stood by the open door. The parking lot was empty now; the last car had driven away. She began to laugh. It wasn't a normal laugh; even Caroline could hear that: her voice too loud, halfway to a sob. "I have a baby," she said out loud, astonished. "I have a baby in this car." But the parking lot stretched quietly before her, the lights from the grocery store windows making large rectangles in the slush. "I have a baby here," Caroline repeated, her voice thinning quickly in the air. "A baby!" she shouted then, into the stillness.

ORAH OPENED HER EYES. OUTSIDE, THE SKY WAS FADING into dawn, but the moon was still caught in the trees, shedding pale light into the room. She had been dreaming, searching on frozen ground for something she had lost. Blades of grass, sharp and brittle, shattered at her touch, leaving tiny cuts on her flesh. Waking, she held her hands up, momentarily confused, but her hands were unmarked, her nails carefully filed and polished.

Beside her, in his cradle, her son was crying. In one smooth motion, more instinct than intention, Norah lifted him into the bed. The sheets beside her were cool, arctic white. David was gone then, called to the clinic while she slept. Norah pulled her son into the warm curve of her body, opened her nightgown. His small hands fluttered against her swollen breasts like moth wings; he latched on. A sharp pain, which subsided in a wave as the milk came. She stroked his thin hair, his fragile scalp. Yes, astonishing, the powers of the body. His hands stilled, resting like small stars against her aureolas.

She closed her eyes, drifting slowly between sleep and waking. A well deep within her was tapped, released. Her milk flowed and, mysteriously, Norah felt herself becoming a river or a wind, encom-passing everything: the daffodils on the dresser and the grass growing sweetly and silently outside, the new leaves pressing open against the buds of the trees. Tiny larvae, white as seed pearls and hidden in the ground, transforming themselves into caterpillars, inchworms, bees. Birds in winged flight, calling. All this was hers. Paul clenched his tiny fists below his chin. His cheeks moved rhythmically as he drank. Around them the universe hummed, exquisite and demanding.

Norah's heart surged with love, with vast unwieldy happiness and sorrow.

She had not cried about their daughter right away, though David had. A blue baby, he had told her, tears catching in the stubble of his one-day beard. A little girl who never took a breath. Paul was in her lap and Norah had studied him: the tiny face, so serene and wrinkled, the little striped knit cap, the infant fingers, so pink and delicate and curved. Tiny, tiny fingernails, still soft, translucent as the daylight moon. What David was saying-Norah could not take it in, not really. Her memories of the night before were distinct, then blurry: there was the snow, and the long ride to the clinic through the empty streets, and David stopping at every light while she fought against the rippling urge, seismic and intense, to push. After that she remembered only scattered things, strange things: the unfamiliar quietness of the clinic, the soft worn feel of a blue cloth across her knees. The coldness of the examination table slapping her bare back. Caroline Gill's gold watch glinting every time she reached to give Norah the gas. Then she was waking up and Paul was in her arms and David was beside her, weeping. She glanced up, watching him with concern and an interested detachment. It was the drugs, the aftermath of the birth, a hormonal high. Another baby, a blue one-how could that be? She remembered the second urge to push, and tension beneath David's voice like rocks in white water. But the infant in her arms was perfect, beautiful, more than enough. It's all right, she had told David, stroking his arm, it's all right.

It was not until they left the office, stepping tentatively into the chill, damp air of the next afternoon, that the loss had finally penetrated. It was nearly dusk, the air full of melting snow and raw earth. The sky was overcast, white and grainy behind the stark bare branches of the sycamores. She carried Paul-he was as light as a cat-thinking how strange this was, to take an entirely new person to their home. She'd decorated the room so carefully, choosing the pretty maple crib and dresser, pressing the paper, scattered with bears, onto the wall, making the curtains, stitching the quilt by hand. Everything was in order, everything was prepared, her son was in her arms. Yet at the building entrance, she stopped between the two tapering concrete pillars, unable to take another step.

"David," she said. He turned, pale and dark-haired, like a tree against the sky.

"What?" he asked. "What is it?"

"I want to see her," she said, her voice a whisper, yet somehow forceful in the quiet of the parking lot. "Just once. Before we go. I have to see her."

David shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the pavement. All day, icicles had crashed from the zigzag roof; here they lay shattered near the steps.

"Oh, Norah," he said softly. "Please, just come home. We have a beautiful son."

"I know," she said, because it was 1964 and he was her husband and she had always deferred to him completely. Yet she could not seem to move, not feeling as she did, that she was leaving behind some essential part of herself. "Oh! Just for a moment, David. Why not?"

Their eyes met, and the anguish in his made her own fill with tears.

"She isn't here." David's voice was raw. "That's why. There's a cemetery on Bentley's family farm. In Woodford County. I asked him to take her. We can go there, later in the spring. Oh, Norah, please. You are breaking my heart."

Norah closed her eyes then, feeling something drain out of her at the thought of an infant, her daughter, being lowered into the cold March earth. Her arms, holding Paul, were stiff and steady, but the rest of her felt liquid, as if she too might flow away into the ditches and disappear with the snow. David was right, she thought, she didn't want to know this. When he climbed the steps and put his arm around her shoulders, she nodded, and they walked together across the empty parking lot, into the fading light. He secured the car seat; he drove them carefully, methodically, home; they carried Paul across the front porch and through the door; and they put him, sleeping, in his room. It had brought her a measure of comfort, the way David had taken care of everything, the way he'd taken care of her, and she had not argued with him again about her wish to see their daughter.

But now she dreamed every night of lost things.

Paul had fallen asleep. Beyond the window, dogwood branches, cluttered with new buds, moved against the paling indigo sky. Norah turned, shifted Paul to her other breast, and closed her eyes again, drifting. She woke suddenly to dampness, crying, sunlight full in the room. Her breasts were already filling again; it had been three hours. She sat, feeling heavy, weighted, the flesh of her stomach so loose it pooled whenever she lay down, her breasts stiff and swollen with milk, her joints still aching from the birth. In the hall, the floorboards creaked beneath her.

On the changing table Paul cried louder, turning an angry mottled red. She stripped off his damp clothes, his soaked cotton diaper. His skin was so delicate, his legs as scrawny and reddened as plucked chicken wings. At the edge of her mind her lost daughter hovered, watchful, silent. She swabbed Paul's umbilical cord with alcohol, threw the diaper in the pail to soak, then dressed him again.

"Sweet baby," she murmured, lifting him. "Little love," she said, and carried him downstairs.

In the living room the blinds were still closed, the curtains drawn. Norah made her way to the comfortable leather chair in the corner, opening her robe. Her milk rose up again with its own irresistible tidal rhythms, a force so powerful it seemed to wash away everything she had been before. I wa^e to sleep, she thought, settling back, troubled because she could not remember who had written this.

The house was quiet. The furnace clicked off; leaves rustled on the trees outside. Distantly, the bathroom door opened and shut, and water ran faintly. Bree, her sister, came lightly down the stairs, wearing an old shirt whose sleeves hung down to her fingertips. Her legs were white, her narrow feet bare against the wood floors.

"Don't turn on the light," Norah said.

"Okay." Bree came over and touched her fingers lightly to Paul's scalp.

"How's my little nephew?" she said. "How's sweet Paul?"

Norah looked at her son's tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. He had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people-where? she could not remember this either- who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.

"Paul." She said it out loud, solid and definite, warm as a stone in sunlight. An anchor.

Silently, to herself, she added, Phoebe.

"He's hungry," Norah added. "He's always so hungry."

"Ah. He takes after his aunt, then. I'm going to get some toast and coffee. You want anything?"

"Maybe some water," she said, watching Bree, long-limbed and graceful, leave the room. How strange it was that her sister, who had always been her opposite, her nemesis, should be the one she wanted here, but it was so.

Bree was only twenty, but headstrong and so sure of herself that she seemed to Norah, often, the elder. Three years ago, as a junior in high school, Bree had run away with the pharmacist who lived across the street, a bachelor twice her age. People blamed the pharmacist, old enough to know better. They blamed Bree's wildness on losing her father so suddenly when she was in her early teens, a vulnerable age, everyone agreed. They predicted that the marriage would end soon and badly, and it had.

But if people imagined that Bree's failed marriage would subdue her, they were wrong. Something had begun to change in the world since Norah was a girl, and Bree had not come home as expected, chastened and embarrassed. Instead, she'd enrolled at the university, changing her name from Brigitte to Bree because she liked the way it sounded: breezy, she said, and free.

Their mother, mortified by the scandalous marriage and more scandalous divorce, had married a pilot for TWA and moved to St. Louis, leaving her daughters to themselves. Well, at least one of my daughters knows how to behave, she had said, looking up from the box of china she was packing. It was autumn, the air crisp, full of golden raining leaves. Her white-blond hair was spun in an airy cloud, and her delicate features were softened with sudden emotion. Oh, Norah, I'm so thankful to have one proper girl, you can't imagine. Even if you never marry, darling, you'll always be a lady. Norah, sliding a framed portrait of her father into a carton, had flushed dark with annoyance and frustration. She too had been shocked by Bree's nerve, her daring, and she was angry that the rules seemed to have shifted, that Bree had more or less gotten away with it-the marriage, the divorce, the scandal.

She hated what Bree had done to them all.

She wished desperately that she'd done it first.

But it would never have occurred to her. She'd always been good; that was her job. She had been close to their father, an affable, disorganized man, an expert in sheep, who had spent his days in the closed-up room at the top of the stairs, reading journals, or out at the research station, standing amid the sheep with their strange and slanting yellow eyes. She'd loved him, and all her life she had felt a compulsion to make up, somehow: for his inattention to his family; and for her mother's disappointment in having married a man so alien, finally, to herself. When he died, this compulsion to make things right again, to fix the world, had only intensified. So she went on, studying quietly and doing what was expected of her. After graduation she had worked for six months at the telephone company, a job she'd not enjoyed and had given up quite happily when she married David. Their meeting in the lingerie department of Wolf Wile's department store, their whirlwind private wedding, had been the closest she'd come to wild, herself.

Norah's life, Bree was fond of saying, was just like a TV sitcom. It's fine for you, she'd say, tossing back her long hair, wide silver bracelets halfway to her elbow. For me, I couldn't take it. I'd go nuts in about a wee't. A day!

Norah smoldered, disdained and envied Bree, bit her tongue; Bree took classes on Virginia Woolf, moved in with the manager of a health-food restaurant in Louisville, and stopped coming by. Yet strangely, when Norah became pregnant, everything changed. Bree started showing up again, bringing lacy booties and tiny silver ankle bracelets imported from India; these, she'd found in a shop in San Francisco. She brought mimeographed sheets with advice on breast-feeding, too, once she heard that Norah planned to forgo bottles. Norah, by then, was glad to see her. Glad for the sweet, impractical gifts, glad for her support; in 1964 breast-feeding was radical, and she'd had a hard time finding information. Their mother refused to discuss the idea; the women in her sewing circle had told her they would put chairs in their bathrooms to ensure her privacy. At this, to her relief, Bree had scoffed out loud. What a bunch of prudes! she insisted. Pay no attention.

Still, while Norah was grateful for Bree's support, she was, at times, also secretly uneasy. In Bree's world, which seemed mostly to exist elsewhere, in California, or Paris, or New York City, young women walked around their houses topless, took pictures of themselves with babies at their enormous breasts, wrote columns advocating the nutritional benefits of human milk. It's completely natural; it's in our nature as mammals, Bree explained, but the very thought of herself as a mammal, driven by instincts, described by words like suckling (so close to rutting, she thought, reducing something beautiful to the level of a barn), had made Norah blush and want to leave the room.

Now Bree came back in carrying a tray with coffee, fresh bread, butter. Her long hair fell over her shoulder as she bent to put a tall glass of ice water on the table next to Norah. She slid the tray on the coffee table and settled onto the couch, tucking her long white legs beneath her.

"David's gone?"

Norah nodded. "I didn't even hear him getting up."

"You think it's good for him to be working so much?"

"Yes," Norah said firmly. "I do." Dr. Bentley had talked to the other doctors in the practice, and they had offered David time off, but David had refused. "I think it's good for him to be busy right now."

"Really? And what about you?" Bree asked, biting into her bread.

"Me? Honestly, I'm fine."