The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [120]
“Excuse me,” he murmured, interrupting the speaker. He walked with purpose across the hardwood floors to the foyer of the main entrance, where he paused and turned back to survey the gallery room, searching the crowd. Surely, having found her after all this time, he couldn’t possibly lose her again.
But she was gone. Beyond the windows, the lights of the city glittered seductively, scattered like sequins all over the undulating, dramatic hills. Somewhere, here or nearby, Caroline Gill washed dishes, swept the floor, paused to look out a darkened window. Loss and grief: they rushed up through him like a wave, so powerful that he leaned against the wall and bent his head, fighting a deep nausea. They were excessive, his emotions, disproportionate. He’d lived without seeing Caroline Gill for many years, after all. He took a deep breath, running through the periodic table in his mind—silver cadmium indium tin—but he could not seem to still himself.
David reached into his pocket and took out the envelope she’d given him; maybe she’d left an address or a phone number. Inside were two Polaroids, stiff, the color poor, muted and toned with gray. The first showed Caroline, smiling, her arm around the girl beside her, who wore a stiff blue dress, low-waisted, with a sash. They were outside, posed against the brick wall of a house, and the sun-washed air bleached the scene of color. The girl was sturdy; the dress fit her well but did not make her graceful. Her hair fell around her face in soft waves and she smiled a bright smile, her eyes nearly closed in her pleasure at the camera or whoever stood behind it. Her face was wide, gentle-seeming, and it might have been only the angle of the camera that made her eyes slant slightly upward. Phoebe on her birthday, Caroline had written on the back. Sweet Sixteen.
He slid the first photo behind the second, more recent one. Here was Phoebe again, playing basketball. She was poised to shoot, her heels lifting off the asphalt. Basketball, the sport Paul refused to play. David looked at the back and checked the envelope again, but there was no address. He drained his champagne and put his glass down on a marble-topped table. The gallery was still crowded, buzzing with conversation. David paused in the doorway and watched for a moment with curious detachment, as if this scene were something he’d stumbled on by accident, nothing to do with him. Then he turned away and stepped out into the soft, cool, rain-dampened air. He slipped Caroline’s envelope with its photos in his breast pocket and, without knowing where he was going, he began to walk.
Oakland, his old college neighborhood, was changed and yet not changed. Forbes Field, where he had spent so many afternoons hunched high in the bleachers, soaking in the sun, cheering when bats cracked and the balls rose over the bright green fields, was gone. A new university building, square and blunt, rose into the air where the cheers of thousands had once roared. He paused, turning to the Cathedral of Learning, that slender gray monolith, a shadow against the night sky, to regain his bearings.
He walked on, down the dark city streets, past people emerging from restaurants and theaters. He did not really think about where he was going, though he knew. He saw he’d been caught, frozen for all these years in that moment when he handed Caroline his daughter. His life turned around that single action: a newborn child in his arms—and then he reached out to give her away. It was as if he’d taken pictures all these years since to try and give another moment similar substance, equal weight. He’d wanted to try and still the rushing world,