The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [118]
In moments she was outside, hurrying down the stone steps into the night.
It was spring, the air crisp and damp, and Caroline was too agitated to wait for the bus. Instead she walked quickly, block after block, oblivious to the traffic or the people passing or even the slight danger involved in being out by herself at this hour. Moments came back to her, in swirls and glimpses, strange disconnected details. There had been a patch of dark hair over his right ear, and his fingernails had been clipped down to the quick. Square-tipped fingers, she remembered those, but his voice had changed, become more gravelly. It was disconcerting: the images she’d kept in her mind all this time had altered the moment she had seen him.
And for herself? How had she seemed to him tonight? What had he seen, what had he ever seen, of Caroline Lorraine Gill? Of her secret heart? Nothing. Nothing at all. And she’d known that too, she’d known it for years, ever since the moment outside the church when the circle of his life had closed against her, when she had turned and left. In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.
She had walked five blocks. It had started to rain. Her face was wet, her coat and shoes. The chill night seemed to have entered her, seeped beneath her skin. She was near a corner when a 61B squealed to a stop and she ran to catch it, brushing off her hair, sitting on the cracked plastic of the seat. Lights, neon, and the watery red blur of headlights moved across the windows. The early spring air was cool and damp on her face. The bus lumbered through the streets, picking up speed as it reached the dark stretches of the park, the long low hill.
She got off in the center of Regent Square. A roar, shouts, swelled out of the tavern as she passed, and through the glass she glimpsed the shadowy figures of the players she’d seen earlier, glasses in their hands now and fists pumping in the air as they gathered around the television. Light from the jukebox cast stripes of neon blue across the arm of the waitress as she turned from the table nearest the window. Caroline paused, the wild adrenaline rush of her meeting with David Henry suddenly gone, dissipating into the spring night like mist. She felt her own isolation acutely, the figures in the bar joined by a common purpose, the people moving around her on the sidewalk drawn along the lines of their lives to places she could not even imagine.
Tears rose in her eyes. The television screen flickered and another cheer swelled through the glass. Caroline moved off, jostling a woman carrying a paper sack of groceries, stepping over a pile of fast-food trash someone had left on the sidewalk. Down the hill and then up the alley to her house, the city lights giving way to those so well known and so familiar: the O’Neills, where a golden glow spilled out over the dogwood tree; the Soulards, with their dark stretch of garden, and finally the Margolis lawn, moonflowers growing wild up the hillside in the summertime, beautiful and chaotic. Houses in a row like so many steps down a hill and then, finally, her own.
She paused in the alley, looking at her tall, narrow house. She had closed the blinds, she was sure of it, but now they were open and she could see clearly through the dining room windows. The chandelier glowed over the table where Phoebe had spread out her yarns. She was bent over the loom, moving the shuttle back and forth, calmly, intently. Rain was curled on her lap, a fluffy orange ball. Caroline watched, worried at how vulnerable her daughter seemed, how exposed to the world that swirled so mysteriously in the darkness behind her. She frowned, trying to remember that moment—her hand turning the narrow plastic stick and the blinds falling closed. Then she glimpsed a movement deeper in the house, a shadow shifting beyond the French doors to the living room.
Caroline caught her breath, startled but not yet alarmed,