The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [121]
He kept walking, agitated, muttering to himself now and then. What had been held still in his heart all this time had been set in motion again by his meeting with Caroline. He thought of Norah, who had become a self-sufficient and powerful woman, who courted corporate accounts with glittery assurance and came in from dinners smelling of wine and rain, traces of laughter, triumph, and success still on her face. She’d had more than one affair over the years, he knew that, and her secrets, like his own, had grown up into a wall between them. Sometimes in the evening he glimpsed, for the briefest instant, the woman he had married: Norah, standing with Paul as an infant in her arms; Norah, her lips stained with berries, tying on an apron; Norah as a fledgling travel agent, staying up late to balance her accounts. But she had shed these selves like skins, and they lived together now like strangers in their vast house.
Paul suffered for it, he knew that. David had tried so hard to give him everything. He had tried to be a good father. They’d collected fossils together, organizing and labeling them and displaying them in the living room. He’d taken Paul fishing at every chance. But however hard he worked to make Paul’s life smooth and easy, the fact remained that David had built that life on a lie. He had tried to protect his son from the things he himself had suffered as a child: poverty and worry and grief. Yet his very efforts had created losses David never anticipated. The lie had grown up between them like a rock, forcing them to grow oddly too, like trees twisting around a boulder.
The streets converged, coming together at odd angles, as the city narrowed to the point where the great rivers met, the Monongahela and the Allegheny, their confluence forming the Ohio, which traveled to Kentucky and beyond before it poured itself into the Mississippi and disappeared. He walked to the very tip of the point. As a young man, a student, David Henry had come here often, standing at the edge of land, watching the two rivers converge. Time and again he had stood here with his toes suspended above the dark skin of the river, wondering in a detached way how cold this black water might be, whether he would be strong enough to swim to shore if he fell in. Now, as then, the wind cut through the fabric of his suit, and he looked down, watching the river move between the tips of his shoes. He edged out an inch farther, changing the composition. A glimmer of regret flashed through his weariness: this would be a good photo, but he’d left his camera in the hotel safe.
Far below the water swirled, foamed white against the cement piling, surged away. The arch of his foot, that’s where David felt the pressure of the concrete edge. If he fell or jumped and couldn’t finally swim to safety, they would find these things: a watch with his father’s name inscribed on the back, his wallet with $200 in cash, his driver’s license, a pebble from the stream near his childhood home that he had carried with him for thirty years. And the photos, in the envelope tucked into the pocket above his heart.
His funeral would be crowded. The cortege would stretch for blocks.
But it would stop there, the news. Caroline might never know. Nor would word travel any farther, back to where he’d been born.
Even if it did, no one there would recognize his name.
The letter had been waiting for him, tucked behind the empty coffee can of the corner store, one day after school. No one said anything, but everyone watched him, knowing what it was; the University of Pittsburgh logo was clear. He’d carried the envelope upstairs and placed it on the table by his bed, too nervous to open it. He remembered the gray sky of that afternoon, flat and blank beyond the window, broken by the leafless branch of an elm.
For two hours he had not allowed himself to look. And then he did, and the news was good: he had been accepted with a full scholarship. He sat on the edge of the bed, too stunned, too wary of good news—as he would