The Memory Keeper's Daughter (7 page)

"Hi," he said. "Looks like you had a good day here."

"Yes. It was good." She nearly told him what she'd done, but in-stead she made him a drink: whiskey, neat, like he liked it. He leaned against the counter while she washed the lettuce. "How about you?" she asked, turning off the water.

"Not so bad," he said. "Busy. Sorry about last night. A patient with a heart attack. Not fatal, thankfully."

"Were bones involved?" she asked.

"Oh. Yes, he fell down the stairs. Broke his tibia. The baby's asleep?"

Norah glanced at the clock and sighed. "I should probably get him up," she said. "If I'm ever going to get him on a schedule."

"I'll do it," David said, carrying the flowers upstairs. She heard him moving above, and she imagined him leaning down to touch Paul's forehead lightly, to hold his small hand. But in a few minutes David came back downstairs alone, wearing jeans and a sweater. "He looked so peaceful," David said. "Let's let him sleep."

They went into the living room and sat together on the sofa. For a moment it was like before, just the two of them, and the world around them 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 nnd 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.

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 the asphalt and past the wide blank squares of light, to the automatic doors of the grocery store. Locked. Caroline shouted and knocked, her voice weaving with Phoebe's cries. Inside, the brightly lit aisles were empty. A discarded mop bucket stood nearby; cans gleamed in the silence. For several minutes Caroline stood silently herself, listening to Phoebe's cries and the distant rush of the wind through the trees. Then she pulled herself together and made her way to the back of the store. The rolling metal door off the loading platform was closed, but she walked up to it anyway, aware of the scent of rotting produce on the cold, greasy concrete where the snow had melted. She kicked hard at the door, so satisfied by its booming echo that she kicked it several more times, until she was breathless.

"If they're still in there, honey, which I kinda doubt, they aren't ^oing to be opening up anytime soon."

A man's voice. Caroline turned and saw him standing below her, on the ramplike decline that allowed tractor trailers to back into the loading area. Even at this distance she could tell he was a large person. He wore a bulky coat and a wool knit hat. His hands were shoved into his pockets.

"My baby's crying," she said, unnecessarily. "My car battery is dead. There's a phone right inside the front door, but I can't get to it."

"How old's your baby ?" the man asked.

"A newborn," Caroline told him, hardly thinking, the edge of tears and panic in her voice. Ridiculous, an idea she had always loathed, and yet here she was-a damsel in distress.

"It's Saturday night," the man observed, his voice traveling over the snowy space between them. Beyond the parking lot, the street was still. "Any garage in town is likely to be closed."

Caroline didn't answer.

"Look here, ma'am," he began slowly, the steadiness of his voice some kind of anchor. Caroline realized he was being deliberately calm, deliberately soothing; he might even think she was crazy. "I left my jumper cables with another trucker last week by mistake, so I can't help you that way. But it's cold out here, like you say. I'm thinking, Why don't you come sit with me in the rig? It's warm. I delivered a load of milk here a couple of hours ago, and I was waiting to see about the weather. I'm saying that you're welcome, ma'am. To sit in the truck with me. Might give you some time to think this through." When Caroline didn't immediately respond, he added, "I'm considering that baby."

She looked across the parking lot then, to its very edge, where a tractor trailer with a dark gleaming cab sat idling. She had seen it earlier, but she had not taken it in, the long dull silver box of it, its presence like a building at the edge of the world. In her arms Phoebe gasped, caught her breath, and resumed her crying.

"All right," Caroline decided. "For the moment, anyway." She stepped carefully around some broken onions. When she reached the edge of the ramp he was there, holding up a hand to help her down. She took it, annoyed but also grateful, for she felt the layer of ice beneath the rotting vegetables and snow. She looked up to see his face, thickly bearded, a cap pulled down to his eyebrows and, beneath it, dark eyes: kind eyes. Ridiculous, she told herself, as they walked together across the parking lot. Crazy. Stupid, too. He could be an ax murderer. But the truth was, she was almost too tired to care.

He helped her collect some things from the car and get settled in the cab, holding Phoebe while Caroline climbed into the high seat, then handing her up through the air. Caroline poured more formula from the thermos into the bottle. Phoebe was so worked up that it took her a few moments to realize that food had come, and even then she struggled to suck. Caroline stroked her cheek gently, and at last she clamped down on the nipple and started drinking.

"Kinda strange, isn't it," the man said, once she had quieted. He had climbed into the driver's seat. The engine hummed in the darkness, comforting, like some great cat, and the world stretched away to the dark horizon. "This kind of snow in Kentucky, I mean."

"Every few years it happens," she said. "You're not from here?"

"Akron, Ohio," he said. "Originally, that is. But I've been on the road five years now. I like to think of myself as being from the world, these days."

"Don't you get lonely?" Caroline asked, thinking of herself on a usual night, sitting alone in her apartment in the evening. She couldn't believe she was here, talking so intimately with a stranger. It was odd but thrilling too, like confiding in a person you met on a train or a bus.

"Oh, some," he admitted. "It's lonely work, sure. But just as often I get to meet someone unexpected. Like tonight."

It was warm in the cab, and Caroline felt herself giving in to it, settling back on the high comfortable seat. Snow still sputtered in the streetlights. Her car stood in the middle of the parking lot, a lone dark shape, brushed with snow.

"Where were you heading?" he asked her.

"Just to't Lexington. There was a wreck on the interstate a few miles back. I thought I'd save myself some time and trouble."

His face was lit softly by the streetlight and he smiled. To her surprise, so did Caroline, and then they were both laughing.

"The best-laid plans," he said.

Caroline nodded.

"Look," he said, after a silence. "If it's only Lexington we're talking about, I could give you a lift. I might as well park the rig there as here. Tomorrow-well, tomorrow's Sunday, isn't it? But on Monday, first thing, you can call a towing service about your car. It'll be safe here, that's for sure."

Light from the streetlamp was falling across Phoebe's tiny face. He reached over and gently, gently, stroked her forehead with his large hand. Caroline liked his awkwardness, his calmness.

"All right," she decided. "If it doesn't put you out."

"Oh, no," he said. "Hell, no. Excuse my French. Lexington is on my way."

He collected the rest of the things from her car, the grocery sacks and blankets. His name was Al, Albert Simpson. He groped on the floor and found an extra cup beneath the seat. This he wiped out carefully with a handkerchief before he poured her coffee from his thermos. She drank, glad it was dark, glad for the warmth and the company of someone who didn't know a thing about her. She felt safe and strangely happy, though the air was stale and smelled of dirty socks, and a baby that did not belong to her lay sleeping on her lap. As he drove, Al talked, telling her stories of his life on the road, truck stops with showers and the miles sliding beneath the wheels as he pushed through one night after another.

Lulled by the hum of the tires, by the warmth and the snow rushing in the headlights, Caroline half drifted into sleep. When they pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex, the trailer took five spaces. Al got out to help her down and left the truck idling while he carried her things up the exterior stairs. Caroline followed, Phoebe in her arms. A curtain flashed in a lower window-Lucy Martin, spying as usual-and Caroline paused, overcome for an instant by something like vertigo. For everything was just the same, but surely she was not the same woman who had left here in the middle of the previous night, wading through the snow to her car. Surely she had been transformed so completely that she should walk into different rooms, different light. Yet her familiar key slid into the lock, catching in the usual place. When the door swung open, she carried Phoebe into a room she knew by heart: the durable dark-brown carpet, the plaid sofa and chair she had gotten on sale, the glass-topped coffee table, the novel she'd been reading before bed-Crime and Punishment-neatly marked. She had left Raskolnikov confessing to Sonya, had dreamed of them in their cold garret, and had woken to the phone ringing and to snow filling the streets.

Al hovered awkwardly, filling up the doorway. He could be a serial killer, or a rapist, or a con man. He could be anything at all.

"I have a sofa bed," she said. "You're welcome to use it tonight."

After a moment's hesitation, he stepped inside.

"What about your husband?" he asked, looking around.

"I don't have a husband," she said, then realized her mistake. "Not anymore."

He studied her, standing with his wool hat in his hand, surprising dark curls sticking out of his head. She felt slow, yet hyper-alert from the coffee and her fatigue, and she suddenly wondered how she must look to him-still in her nurse's uniform, her hair uncombed for hours, her coat gaping open, this baby in her arms, her tired arms.

"I don't want to be any trouble to you," he said.

"Trouble?" she said. "I'd still be stranded in a parking lot except for you."

He grinned then, went to his truck, and came back a few minutes later with a small duffel bag of dark green canvas.

"Someone was watching from a window downstairs. You sure I won't be causing you any grief, here?"

"That was Lucy Martin," Caroline said. Phoebe had been stirring, and she took the bottle from its warmer, tested the formula on her arm, and sat down. "She's a dreadful gossip. Trust me. You just made her day."

Phoebe wouldn't drink, however, but began to wail, and Caroline stood, pacing the room, murmuring. Al, meanwhile, got straight to Work. In no time at all he had pulled out the sofa bed and made it up, sharp military folds at each corner. When Phoebe finally quieted, Caroline nodded at him and whispered good night. She closed the bedroom door quite firmly. It had occurred to her that Al would be the type to notice the absence of a crib.

During the drive Caroline had been making plans, and now she pulled a drawer from her dresser and dumped its neat contents in a pile on the floor. Then she folded two towels in the bottom and tucked a folded sheet around them, nestling Phoebe amid the blankets. When she climbed into her own bed, fatigue rolled over her like waves, and she slept at once, a hard and dreamless sleep. She did not hear Al snoring loudly in the living room, or the noise of snowplows moving through the parking lot, or the clatter of garbage trucks on the street. When Phoebe stirred, however, sometime in the middle of the night, Caroline was on her feet in an instant. She moved through the darkness as if through water, exhausted and yet with purpose, changing Phoebe's diaper, warming her bottle, concentrating on the infant in her arms and the tasks before her-so urgent, so consuming and imperative-tasks that now only she could do, tasks that could not wait.

Caroline woke to a flood of light and the smell of eggs and bacon. She stood, pulling her robe around her, and bent over to touch the baby's tranquil cheek. Then she went to the kitchen, where Al was buttering toast.

"Hey, there," he said, looking up. His hair was combed but still a little wild. He had a bald spot on the back of his scalp, and he wore a gold medallion on a chain around his neck. "Hope you don't mind my making myself at home. I missed dinner last night."

"It smells good," Caroline said. "I'm hungry too."

"Well, then," he said, handing her a cup of coffee. "Good thing I made plenty. It's a neat little place you've got here. Nice and tidy."

"Do you like it?" she asked. The coffee was richer and darker than she usually made it. "I'm thinking of moving."

Her own words surprised her, but once they were out, in the air, they seemed true. Ordinary light fell across the dark-brown carpet and the arm of her sofa. Water dripped from the eaves outside. She'd been saving money for years, imagining herself in a house or on an adventure, and now here she was: a baby in her bedroom and a stranger at her table and her car stranded in Versailles.

"I'm thinking of going to Pittsburgh," she said, surprising herself again.

Al stirred the eggs with a spatula, then lifted them onto plates. "Pittsburgh? Great town. What would take you there?"

"Oh, my mother had family there," Caroline said, as he put the plates on the table and sat down across from her. It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

"You know, I've been meaning to say I'm sorry," Al said. His dark eyes were kind. "For whatever happened to your baby's father."

Caroline had half forgotten that she'd made up a husband, so she was surprised to hear in his voice that Al didn't believe she'd ever had one. He thought she was an unwed mother, she marveled. They ate without speaking much, passing remarks now and then about the weather and the traffic and Al's next destination, which was Nashville, Tennessee.

"I've never been to Nashville," Caroline said.

"No? Well, hop aboard, you and your daughter too," Al said. It was a joke, but within the joke was an offer. An offer not to her, not really, but rather to an unwed mother down on her Juck. Still, for a moment Caroline imagined walking out the door with her boxes and her blankets and never looking back.

"Maybe next time," she said, reaching for the coffee. "I've got some things to settle here."

Al nodded. "Gotcha," he said. "I know how that goes."

"But thanks," she said. "I appreciate the thought."

"My infinite pleasure," he said seriously, and then he stood upto go-Caroline watched from the window as he went to his truck, climbing up the steps into the cab and turning once to wave from the open doorway. She waved back, happy to see his smile, so ready and so easy, surprised by the tug in her heart. She had an impulse to run after him, remembering the narrow bed in the back of the cab where he sometimes slept and the way he'd touched Phoebe's forehead so gently. Surely a man who lived such a solitary life could keep her secrets, contain her dreams and fears. But his engine caught, and smoke billowed up from the silver pipe on his cab, and then he was pulling carefully out of the parking lot and onto the (]uiet street and away.

"Isn't she beautiful?" she asked, sitting down next to Lucy.

"Oh, she is. She's lovely!" Lucy said, touching one of Phoebe's tiny hands.