The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [101]
Later, when he was older, maybe nine or ten, she had taken him to the quiet cemetery in the country where his sister was buried. It was a cool spring day, and his mother had planted morning glory seeds along the cast-iron border. Paul stood, reading the name—PHOEBE GRACE HENRY—and his own birth date, feeling an uneasiness, a weight, he could not explain. Why did she die? he asked, when his mother finally joined him, slipping off her gardening gloves. No one knows, she said and then, seeing his expression, she put her arm around him. It wasn’t your fault, she said fiercely. It was nothing to do with you.
But he hadn’t really believed her, and he didn’t now. If his father secluded himself in his darkroom every evening and his mother worked long past dinner most days and, on their vacations, shed her clothes and slipped into the cottages of strange men, whose fault could it be? Not his sister’s, who had died at birth and left this silence. It all made a knot in his stomach, which started each morning the size of a penny and grew throughout the day and made him sick to his stomach. He was alive, after all. He was here. So surely it was his job to protect them.
Duke appeared in the doorway, and he stopped playing.
“He’s coming over, Joe is,” he said. “If you have the cash.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “Follow me.”
They went out the back door and down the wet concrete steps and up the side stairs to the big open room above the garage. This room had tall windows on every wall, and during the day it was filled with light from every direction. A darkroom, windowless, was inset like a closet just next to the entrance. A few years ago, once his photographs had started to get noticed, his father had built this. Now he spent most of his free time here, developing film, doing experiments with light. Almost no one else came up here—his mother, never. Sometimes his father invited Paul, who looked forward to these days with a yearning that embarrassed him.
“Hey, these are cool,” Duke said, walking around the exterior wall, studying the framed prints.
“We’re not supposed to be inside,” Paul said. “We can’t hang out here.”
“Hey, I’ve seen this one,” Duke said, stopping before the photo of smoldering ruins of the ROTC building, dogwood petals pale against the charred walls. This was his father’s breakthrough photograph. It had been picked up by the wire services and flashed across the country, years before. It started everything, his father was fond of saying. It put me on the map.
“Yeah,” Paul said. “My father took that. Don’t touch anything, okay?”
Duke laughed. “Be cool, man. Everything’s cool.”
Paul went into the darkroom, where the air was warmer and stiller. Prints were strung, drying. He opened the little refrigerator where his father kept the film and took a cool manila envelope from the back. Inside was another envelope, full of twenty-dollar bills. He slipped one out, then another, and put the rest of the money back.
He came here with his father, and other times, secretly, he came here by himself. That was how he’d found the money, one afternoon when he’d been playing the guitar up here, angry because his father had promised to teach him to use the enlarger and then canceled at the last minute. Angry and disappointed and finally hungry. He’d rummaged through the refrigerator and found this envelope with cool bills, new, inexplicable. He’d taken one twenty that first time, more later. His father never seemed to notice. So now and then he came up here