The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [126]
Grease spattered and the girl’s hand flew up. He lay still for several minutes, watching her, every detail vivid: the black stove handles his mother had scrubbed, and this girl’s bitten nails, and the flicker of candles in the window. She reached to the shelf above the stove for salt and pepper, and he was struck by the way light traveled across her skin, her hair, as she moved in and out of shadow, by the fluid nature of everything she did.
He had left his camera in the hotel safe.
He tried to sit up then, but was stopped again by his wrists. Puzzled, he turned his head: a filmy red chiffon scarf tied him to one bedpost; the strings from a mop to the other. She noticed his movement and turned, tapping her palm lightly with a wooden spoon.
“My boyfriend’s coming back any minute now,” she announced.
David let his head fall back heavily on the pillow. She was slight, no older and perhaps even younger than Paul, out here in this abandoned house. Shacking up, he thought, wondering about the boyfriend, realizing for the first time that maybe he ought to be afraid.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Rosemary,” she said, and then looked worried. “You can believe that or not,” she added.
“Rosemary,” he said, thinking of the piney bush Norah had planted in a sunny spot, its wands of fragrant needles, “I wonder if you would be good enough to untie me.”
“No.” Her voice was swift and bright. “No way.”
“I’m thirsty,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment; her eyes were warm, sherry-tinted brown, wary. Then she went outside, releasing a wedge of cold air into the room, setting all the paper cuttings fluttering. She came back with a metal cup of water from the stream.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I can’t drink this lying down.”
She attended to the stove for a minute, turning the sputtering eggs, then rummaged through a drawer, coming up with a plastic straw from some fast-food place, dirty at one end, which she thrust into the metal cup.
“I suppose you’ll use it,” she said, “if you’re thirsty enough.”
He turned his head and sipped, too thirsty to do more than note the taste of dust in the water. She slid the eggs onto a blue metal plate speckled with white and sat down at the wooden table. She ate quickly, pushing the eggs onto a plastic fork with the forefinger of her left hand, delicately, without thinking, as if he weren’t in the room at all. In that moment he understood somehow that the boyfriend was fiction. She was living here alone.
He drank until the straw sputtered dry, water like a dirty river in his throat.
“My parents used to own this place,” he said, when he finished. “In fact, I still do own it. I have the deed in a safe. Technically, you’re trespassing.”
She smiled at this and put her fork down carefully in the center of the plate. “You come here to claim it then? Technically?”
Her hair, her cheeks, caught the flickering light. She was so young, yet there was something fierce and strong about her too, something lonely but determined.
“No.” He thought of his strange journey from an ordinary morning in Lexington—Paul taking forever in the bathroom and Norah frowning as she balanced the checkbook at the counter, coffee steaming—to the art show, and the river, and now here.
“Then why did you come?” she said, pushing the plate to the middle of the table. Her hands were rough, her fingernails broken. He was surprised that they could have made the delicate, complex paper art that filled the room.
“My name is David Henry McCallister.” His real name, so long unspoken.
“I don’t know any McCallisters,” she said. “But I’m not from around here.”
“How old are you?” he asked. “Fifteen?”
“Sixteen,” she corrected. And then, primly, “Sixteen or twenty or