The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [10]
When the doctor finished, he found the nurse sitting in a rocker in the waiting room, cradling the baby girl in her arms. She met his gaze without speaking, and he remembered the night she had watched him as he slept.
“There’s a place,” he said, writing the name and address on the back of an envelope. “I’d like you to take her there. When it’s light, I mean. I’ll issue the birth certificate, and I’ll call to say you’re coming.”
“But your wife,” the nurse said, and he heard, from his distant place, the surprise and disapproval in her voice.
He thought of his sister, pale and thin, trying to catch her breath, and his mother turning to the window to hide her tears.
“Don’t you see?” he asked, his voice soft. “This poor child will most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I’m trying to spare us all a terrible grief.”
He spoke with conviction. He believed his own words. The nurse sat staring at him, her expression surprised but otherwise unreadable, as he waited for her to say yes. In the state of mind he was in it did not occur to him that she might say anything else. He did not imagine, as he would later that night, and in many nights to come, the ways in which he was jeopardizing everything. Instead, he felt impatient with her slowness and very tired all of a sudden, and the clinic, so familiar, seemed strange around him, as if he were walking in a dream. The nurse studied him with her blue unreadable eyes. He returned her gaze, unflinching, and at last she nodded, a movement so slight as to be almost imperceptible.
“The snow,” she murmured, looking down.
But by midmorning the storm had begun to abate, and the distant sounds of plows grated through the still air. He watched from the upstairs window as the nurse knocked snow from her powder-blue car and drove off into the soft white world. The baby was hidden, asleep in a box lined with blankets, on the seat beside her. The doctor watched her turn left onto the street and disappear. Then he went back and sat with his family.
His wife slept, her gold hair splayed across the pillow. Now and then the doctor dozed. Awake, he gazed into the empty parking lot, watching smoke rise from the chimneys across the street, preparing the words he would say. That it was no one’s fault, that their daughter would be in good hands, with others like herself, with ceaseless care. That it would be best this way for them all.
In the late morning, when the snow had stopped for good, his son cried out in hunger, and his wife woke up.
“Where’s the baby?” she said, rising up on her elbows, pushing her hair from her face. He was holding their son, warm and light, and he sat down beside her, settling the baby in her arms.
“Hello, my sweet,” he said. “Look at our beautiful son. You were very brave.”
She kissed the baby’s forehead, then undid her robe and put him to her breast. His son latched on at once, and his wife looked up and smiled. He took her free hand, remembering how hard she had held onto him, imprinting the bones of her fingers on his flesh. He remembered how much he had wanted to protect her.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. “Darling? What is it?”
“We had twins,” he told her slowly, thinking of the shocks of dark hair, the slippery bodies moving in his hands. Tears rose in his eyes. “One of each.”
“Oh,” she said. “A little girl too? Phoebe and Paul. But where is she?”
Her fingers were so slight, he thought, like the bones of a little bird.
“My darling,” he began. His voice broke, and the words he had rehearsed so carefully were gone. He closed his eyes, and when he could speak again more words came, unplanned.
“Oh, my love,” he said. “I am so sorry. Our little daughter died as she was born.”
II
CAROLINE GILL WADED CAREFULLY, AWKWARDLY, ACROSS the parking lot. Snow reached her calves; in places, her knees. She carried the baby, swathed in blankets, in a cardboard box once used to deliver samples of infant formula to the office. It was