The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [124]
The wind rose. He walked up the steps. The door hung crookedly on its hinges and would not close. The air inside was chilly, musty. It was a single room, the sleeping loft compromised now by the sagging ridgepole. The walls were water-stained; through chinks, he glimpsed pale sky. He’d helped his father put this roof on, sweat pouring down their faces and sap on their hands, their hammers rising into the sun, into the sharp fragrance of fresh-cut cedar.
As far as David knew, no one had been here for years. Yet a frying pan sat on the old stove, cold, the grease congealed but not, when he leaned to smell it, rancid. In the corner there was an old iron bed covered with a worn quilt like his grandmother and his mother had made. The cloth was cool, faintly damp, beneath his hand. There was no mattress, only a thick layering of blankets against boards set into the frame. The plank floor was swept clean, and there were three crocuses in a jar in the window.
Someone was living here. A breeze moved through the room, stirring the paper cutouts that hung everywhere—from the ceiling, from the windows, above the bed. David walked around, examining them with a growing sense of wonder. They were a little like the snowflakes he’d cut out in school, but infinitely more intricate and detailed, showing entire scenes to the last detail: the state fair, a tidy living room before a fire, a picnic with exploding fireworks. Delicate and precise, they gave the old house an air of rustling mystery. He touched the scalloped edge of a hay-wagon scene, the girls wearing lace-trimmed bonnets, the boys with their pants rolled to their knees. Ferris wheels, fluttering carousels, cars traveling down highways: these hung above the bed, moving lightly in the drafts, as fragile as wings.
Who had made these with such skill and patience? He thought of his own photographs: he tried so hard to catch each moment, pin it in place, make it last, but when the images emerged in the darkroom they were already altered. Hours, days had passed by then; he had become a slightly different person. Yet he had wanted so much to catch the fluttering veil, to capture the world even as it disappeared, once and again and then again.
He sat on the hard bed. His head still throbbed. He lay down and pulled the damp quilt around him. There was a soft gray light in all the windows. The bare table, and the stove: everything smelled faintly of mildew. The walls were covered with layers of newspaper that had begun to peel. His family had been so poor; everyone they knew had been poor. It wasn’t a crime, but it might as well have been. That’s why things got saved, old engines and tin cans and milk bottles scattered across the lawns and hills: a spell against need, a hedge against want. When David was small, a boy named Daniel Brinkerhoff had climbed into an old refrigerator and suffocated to death. David remembered the hushed voices, and then the body of a boy his own age lying in a cabin much like this one, with candles lit. The mother had wept, which had made no sense to him; he had been too young to understand grief, the magnitude of death. But he remembered what had been said, outside but within his mother’s hearing, by the anguished father who had lost his son: Why my child? He was whole, he was strong. Why not that sickly girl? If it had to be someone, why not her?
He closed his eyes. It was so quiet. He thought of all the sounds that filled up his life in Lexington: footsteps and voices in the hallways and the phone ringing, shrill in his ear; his pager beeping through the sounds of the radio as he drove; and at home, always, Paul on the guitar and Norah with the phone cord wrapped around one