The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [123]
He nodded at the men, then turned and started walking, feeling their stares.
A light rain, delicate as mist, began to fall. He walked, though his legs ached. He thought of his bright office, a lifetime or a dream away. It was late afternoon. Norah would still be at work and Paul would be up in his room, pouring his loneliness and anger into music. They expected him home tonight, but he would not be there. He’d have to call, later, once he knew what he was doing. He could get on another bus and go back to them right now. He knew this, but it also seemed impossible for that life to exist in the same world as this one.
The sidewalk, uneven, was soon broken up by lawns on the edge of town, a stop-and-start pattern like some sort of Morse code, abandoned for intervals and then gone entirely. Shallow ditches ran along the edges of the narrow road; he remembered them full of daylilies, swelling orange masses like running flames. He slid his hands under his arms to warm them. It was a season earlier here. The lilacs of Pittsburgh and the warm rain were nowhere. Crusts of snow broke under his feet. He kicked the blackened edges into the ditches, where more snow lingered, broken through with weeds, debris.
He’d reached the local highway. Speeding cars forced him to the grassy shoulder, spraying him with a fine mist of slush. This had once been a quiet road, cars audible for miles before they came in sight, and usually it was a familiar face behind the windshield, the car slowing, stopping, and a door swinging open to let him in. He was known, his family was, and after the small talk—How’s your mama, your daddy; how’s the garden doing this year?—a silence would fall, in which the driver and the other passengers thought carefully about what might be said and what might not to this boy so smart he had a scholarship, to this boy with a sister too sick to go to school. There was in the mountains, and perhaps in the world at large, a theory of compensation that held that for everything given something else was immediately and visibly lost. Well, you’ve got the smarts, even if your cousin did get the looks. Compliments, seductive as flowers, thorny with their opposites: Yes, you may be smart but you sure are ugly; You may look nice but you didn’t get a brain. Compensation; balance in the universe. David heard accusation in each remark about his studies—he’d taken too much, taken everything—and in the cars and trucks silence had swelled until it seemed impossible that a human voice could ever break it.
The road curved, then curved again: June’s dancing road. The hillsides steepened and streams cascaded down and the houses grew steadily sparser, poorer. Mobile homes appeared, set into the hills like tarnished dime-store jewelry, turquoise and silver and yellow faded to the color of cream. Here was the sycamore, the heart-shaped rock, the curve where three white crosses, decorated with faded flowers and ribbons, had been pounded into the earth. He turned and went up the next stream, his stream. The path was overgrown; almost, but not quite, disappeared.
It took him nearly an hour to reach the old house, now weather-beaten a soft gray, the roof sagging at the center of the ridgepole and some of the shingles missing. David stopped, taken so powerfully into the past that he expected to see them again: his mother coming down the steps with a galvanized tin tub to collect water for the laundry, his sister sitting on the porch, and the sound of the ax striking logs from where his father chopped firewood, just out of sight. He had left for school and June had died, and his parents had stayed