The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [104]
Paul nodded, but the tightness in his chest grew stronger and he couldn’t hold it back. “You just want an excuse to make me stop playing.”
“That’s not true. Damn it, Paul, you know that’s not true.”
His father shook his head and Paul was afraid he was going to stand up and leave, but instead he looked down at the photo in his hand. It was black and white, with a scalloped white border around the family standing in front of the low small house.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked.
“No,” Paul said, but even as he spoke he realized that he did. “Oh,” he said, pointing to the boy on the steps. “Oh. That’s you.”
“Yes. I was your age. That’s my father right behind me. And beside me is my sister. I had a sister, did you know that? Her name was June. She was good at music, like you. This is the last photo that was ever taken of us all. June had a heart condition, and she died the next fall. It just about killed my mother, losing her.”
Paul was looking at the photo differently now. These people weren’t strangers after all, but his own flesh and blood. Duke’s grandmother lived in an upstairs room and made apple pies and watched soap operas every afternoon. Paul studied the woman in the picture with her barely suppressed laughter—this woman he had never known was his grandmother.
“Did she die?” he asked.
“My mother? Yes. Years later. Your grandfather too. They weren’t very old, either of them. My parents had hard lives, Paul. They didn’t have money. I don’t mean that they weren’t rich. I mean that sometimes they didn’t know if we were going to have food to eat. It pained my father, who was a hard-working man. And it pained my mother, because they couldn’t get much help for June. When I was about your age, I got a job so I could go to high school in town. And then June died, and I made a promise to myself. I was going to go out and fix the world.” He shook his head. “Well, of course I didn’t really do that. But here we are, Paul. We have plenty of everything. We never worry about having enough to eat. You’ll go to any college you want. And all you can think to do is get drugged up with your friends and throw it all away.”
The tightness in his stomach had moved to his throat, and Paul couldn’t answer. The world was still too bright and not quite steady. He wanted to make the sadness in his father’s voice go away, to erase the silence that filled up their house. More than anything, he longed for this moment—his father sitting next to him and telling him family stories—to never end. He was afraid he would say the wrong thing and ruin everything, like too much light flooding onto the paper ruined the picture. Once that happened you could never go back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
His father nodded, looking down. Briefly, lightly, his hand passed over Paul’s hair.
“I know,” he said.
“I’ll clean it all up.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“But I love music,” Paul said, knowing this was the wrong thing, the pulse of sudden light that turned the paper black, yet unable to stop himself. “Playing is my life. I’ll never give it up.”
His father sat in silence for a moment, his head bent. Then he sighed and stood.
“Don’t close any doors just now,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Paul watched his father disappear into the darkroom. Then he got on his knees and began to pick up shards of broken glass. Distantly, trains rushed, and the sky beyond the windows opened up forever, clear and blue. Paul paused for a moment in the harsh morning light, listening to his father work inside the darkroom, imagining those same hands moving carefully inside a person’s body, seeking to repair what had been broken.
September 1977
CAROLINE CAUGHT THE CORNER OF THE POLAROID BETWEEN her thumb and first finger as it slipped from the camera, the image already emerging. The table with its white cloth appeared to float on a sea of dark grass. Moonflowers, white and faintly luminous, climbed the hillside. Phoebe was a pale blur in her confirmation dress. Caroline waved the photo dry in the fragrant air. There was thunder far away, a late summer storm gathering;