The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [11]
The city streets were badly plowed and difficult to navigate. Twice the car slid, and twice Caroline almost turned back. The interstate was clearer, however, and once Caroline got on it she made steady time, traveling through the industrial outskirts of Lexington and into the rolling country of the horse farms. Here, miles of white fences made brisk shadows against the snow and horses stood darkly in the fields. The low sky was alive with fat gray clouds. Caroline turned on the radio, searched through the static for a station, turned it off. The world rushed by, ordinary and utterly changed.
Since the moment she had let her head dip in faint agreement to Dr. Henry’s astonishing request, Caroline had felt as if she were falling through the air in slow motion, waiting to hit land and discover where she was. What he had asked of her—that she take his infant daughter away without telling his wife of her birth—seemed unspeakable. But Caroline had been moved by the pain and confusion on his face as he examined his daughter, by the slow numb way he seemed to move thereafter. Soon he’d come to his senses, she told herself. He was in shock, and who could blame him? He’d delivered his own twins in a blizzard, after all, and now this.
She drove faster, images of the early morning running through her like a current. Dr. Henry, working with such calm skill, his movements focused and precise. The flash of dark hair between Norah Henry’s white thighs and her immense belly, rippling with contractions like a lake in the wind. The quiet hiss of the gas, and the moment when Dr. Henry called to her, his voice light but strained, his face so stricken that she was sure the second baby had been born dead. She had waited for him to move, to try to revive it. And when he didn’t she thought suddenly that she should go to him, be a witness, so that she could say, later, Yes, the baby was blue, Dr. Henry tried, we both tried, but there was nothing to be done.
But then the baby cried, and the cry carried her to his side, where she looked and understood.
She drove on, pushing back her memories. The road cut through the limestone and the sky funneled down. She crested the slight hill and began the long descent to the river far below. Behind her, in the cardboard box, the baby slept on. Caroline glanced over her shoulder now and then, both reassured and distressed to see it had not moved. Such sleep, she reminded herself, was normal after the labor of entering the world. She wondered about her own birth, if she had slept so intently in the hours that followed, but both her parents were long dead; there was no one who remembered those moments. Her mother had been past forty when Caroline was born, her father already fifty-two. They had long since given up waiting for a child, had released any hope or expectation or even regret. Their lives were orderly, calm, content.
Until Caroline, startlingly, had arrived, a flower blooming up through snow.
They had loved her, certainly, but it had been a worried love, earnest and intent, layered with poultices and warm socks and castor oil. In the hot still summers, when polio was feared, Caroline had been made to stay inside, sweat beading on her temples as she stretched out on the daybed by the window in the upstairs hallway, reading. Flies buzzed against