The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [127]
“Sixteen,” he repeated. “I have a son older than you. Paul.”
A son, he thought, and a daughter.
“Is that so?” she said, indifferent.
She picked up the fork again, and he watched her eating the eggs, taking such delicate bites and chewing them carefully, and with a sudden powerful rush he was living another moment in this same house, watching his sister June eat eggs in this same way. It was the year she died, and it was hard for her to sit up at the table, but she did; she had dinner with them every night, lamplight in her blond hair and her hands moving slowly, with deliberate grace.
“Why don’t you untie me,” he suggested softly, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I’m a doctor. Harmless.”
“Right.” She stood and carried her blue metal plate to the sink.
She was pregnant, he realized with shock, catching her profile as she turned to take the soap from the shelf. Not very far along, just four or five months, he guessed.
“Look, I really am a doctor. There’s a card in my wallet. Take a look.”
She didn’t answer, just washed her plate and fork and dried her hands carefully on a towel. David thought how strange it was that he should be here, lying once again in this place where he’d been conceived and born and mostly raised, how strange that his own family should have disappeared so completely and that this girl, so young and tough and so clearly lost, should have tied him to the bed.
She crossed the room and pulled his wallet from his pocket. One by one she placed his things on the table: cash, credit cards, the miscellaneous notes and bits of paper.
“This says photographer,” she said, reading his card in the wavering light.
“That’s right,” he said. “I’m that, too. Keep going.”
“Okay,” she said a moment later, holding up his ID. “So you’re a doctor. So what? What difference does that make?”
Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and stray wisps fell around her face; she pushed them back over her ear.
“It means I’m not going to hurt you, Rosemary. First, do no harm.”
She gave him a quick, assessing glance. “You’d say that no matter what. Even if you meant me harm.”
He studied her, the untidy hair, the clear dark eyes.
“There are some pictures,” he said. “Somewhere here….” He shifted and felt the sharp edge of the envelope through the cloth of his shirt pocket. “Please. Take a look. These are pictures of my daughter. She’s just about your age.”
When she slipped her hand into his pocket, he felt the heat of her again and smelled her scent, natural but clean. What was sugary? he wondered, remembering his dream and the tray of cream puffs that had passed by at the opening of his show.
“What’s her name?” Rosemary asked, studying first one photo, then the other.
“Phoebe.”
“Phoebe. That’s pretty. She’s pretty. Is she named for her mother?”
“No,” David said, remembering the night of her birth, Norah telling him just before she went under the names she wanted for her child. Caroline, listening, had heard this and had honored it. “She was named for a great-aunt. On her mother’s side. Someone I didn’t know.”
“I was named after both my grandmothers,” Rosemary said softly. Her dark hair fell across her pale cheek again and she brushed it back, her gloved finger lingering near her ear, and David imagined her sitting with her family around another lamplit table. He wanted to put his arm around her, take her home, protect her. “Rose on my father’s side, Mary on my mother’s.”
“Does your family know where you are?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I can’t go back,” she said, both anguish and anger woven in her voice. “I can’t ever go back. I won’t.”
She looked so young, sitting at the table, her hands closed in loose fists and her expression dark, worried. “Why not?” he asked.
She shook her head and tapped the photo of Phoebe. “You say she’s my age?”
“Close, I’m guessing. She was born March sixth, 1964.”
“I was born in February, 1966.” Her hands trembled a little as she put the photos down. “My mom was planning a party for me: sweet sixteen. She’s into all the pink frilly stuff.”
David watched her