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By Root 1155 0

swallow, brush her hair behind her ear again, gaze out the dark window. He wanted to comfort her somehow, just as he had so often wanted to comfort others—June, his mother, Norah—but now, as then, he couldn’t. Stillness and motion: there was something here, something he needed to know, but his thoughts kept scattering. He felt caught, as fixed in time as any of his photographs, and the moment that held him was deep and painful. He had only wept once for June, standing with his mother on the hillside in the raw evening wind, holding the Bible in one hand as he recited the Lord’s Prayer over the newly turned earth. He wept with his mother, who hated the wind from that day on, and then they hid their grief away and went on. That was the way of things, and they did not question it.

“Phoebe is my daughter,” he said, astonished to hear himself speaking, yet compelled beyond reason to tell his story, this secret he’d kept for so many years. “But I haven’t seen her since the day she was born.” He hesitated, then forced himself to say it. “I gave her away. She has Down’s syndrome, which means she’s retarded. So I gave her away. I never told anyone.”

Rosemary’s glance was darting, shocked. “I see that as harm,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

They were silent for a long time. Everywhere David looked he was reminded of his family: the warmth of June’s breath against his cheek, his mother singing as she folded laundry at the table, his father’s stories echoing against these walls. Gone, all of them gone, and his daughter too. He struggled against grief from old habit, but tears slipped down his cheeks; he could not stop them. He wept for June, and he wept for the moment in the clinic when he handed Phoebe to Caroline Gill and watched her turn away. Rosemary sat at the table, grave and still. Once their eyes met and he held her gaze, a strangely intimate moment. He remembered Caroline watching him from the doorway as he slept, her face softened with love for him. He might have walked with her down the museum steps and back into her life, but he’d lost that moment too.

“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to pull himself together. “I haven’t been here for a long time.”

She didn’t answer and he wondered if he sounded crazy to her. He took a deep breath.

“When is your baby due?” he asked.

Her dark eyes widened in surprise. “Five months, I guess.”

“You left him behind, didn’t you?” David said softly. “Your boyfriend. Maybe he didn’t want the baby.”

She turned her head, but not before he saw her eyes fill.

“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I don’t mean to pry.”

She shook her head a little. “It’s okay. No big deal.”

“Where is he?” he asked, keeping his voice soft. “Where’s home?”

“Pennsylvania,” she said, after a long pause. She took a deep breath, and David understood that his story, his grief, had made it possible for her to reveal her own. “Near Harrisburg. I used to have an aunt here in town,” she went on. “My mother’s sister, Sue Wallis. She’s dead now. But when I was a little girl we came here, to this place. We used to wander all over these hills. This house was always empty. We used to come here and play, when we were kids. Those were the best times. This was the best place I could think of.”

He nodded, remembering the rustling silence of the woods. Sue Wallis. An image stirred, a woman walking up the hill, carrying a peach pie beneath a towel.

“Untie me,” he said, softly still.

She laughed bitterly, wiping her eyes. “Why?” she asked. “Why would I do that, with us alone up here and no one around? I’m not a total idiot.”

She rose and gathered her scissors and a small stack of paper from the shelf above the stove. Shards of white flew as she cut. The wind moved, and the candle flames flickered in the drafts. Her face was set, resolute, focused and determined like Paul when he played music, setting himself against David’s world and seeking another place. Her scissors flashed and a muscle worked in her jaw. It had not occurred to him before that she might harm him.

“Those paper things you make,” he said. “They’re beautiful.