The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [129]
“My Grandma Rose taught me. It’s called scherenschnitte. She grew up in Switzerland, where I guess they make these all the time.”
“She must be worried about you.”
“She’s dead. She died last year.” She paused, concentrating on her cutting. “I like making these. It helps me remember her.”
David nodded. “Do you start with an idea?” he asked.
“It’s in the paper,” she said. “I don’t invent them so much as find them.”
“You find them. Yes.” He nodded. “I understand that. When I take pictures, that’s how it is. They’re already there, and I just discover them.”
“That’s right,” Rosemary said, turning the paper. “That’s exactly right.”
“What are you going to do with me?” he asked.
She didn’t speak, kept cutting.
“I need to piss,” he said.
He had hoped to shock her into speaking, but it was also painfully true. She studied him for a moment. Then she put her scissors down, her paper, and disappeared without comment. He heard her moving outside, in the darkness. She came back with an empty peanut butter jar.
“Look,” he said. “Rosemary. Please. Untie me.”
She put the jar down and picked up the scissors again.
“How could you give her away?” she asked.
Light flashed on the blades of her scissors. David remembered the glint of the scalpel as he made the episiotomy, how he’d floated out of himself to watch the scene from above, how the events of that night had set his life in motion, one thing leading to another, doors opening where none had been and others closing, until he reached this particular moment, with a stranger seeking the intricate design hidden in her paper and waiting for him to answer, and there was nothing he could do and nowhere he might go.
“Is that what worries you?” he asked. “That you’ll give your baby away?”
“Never. I’ll never do that,” she said fiercely, her face set. So someone had done that to her, one way or another, and tossed her out like jetsam to sink or swim. To be sixteen and pregnant and alone, to sit at this table.
“I realized it was wrong,” David said. “But by then it was too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“You’re sixteen,” he said. “Sometimes, trust me, it’s too late.”
Her expression tightened for an instant and she didn’t answer, just kept cutting, and in the silence David started talking again, trying to explain at first about the snow and the shock and the scalpel flashing in the harsh light. How he had stood outside himself and watched himself moving in the world. How he had woken up every morning of his life for eighteen years thinking maybe today, maybe this was the day he would put things right. But Phoebe was gone and he couldn’t find her, so how could he possibly tell Norah? The secret had worked its way through their marriage, an insidious vine, twisting; she drank too much and then she began to have affairs, that sleazy realtor at the beach and then others; he’d tried not to notice, to forgive her, for he knew that in some real sense the fault was his. Photo after photo, as if he could stop time or make an image powerful enough to obscure the moment when he turned and handed his daughter to Caroline Gill.
His voice, rising and falling. Once he began he couldn’t stop, any more than he could stop rain, the stream running down the mountainside, or the fish, persistent and elusive as memory, flashing beneath the ice across the stream. Bodies in motion, he thought, that old scrap of high school physics. He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car or in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with no knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.
She cut and listened. Her silence made him free. He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop. At some point he began to weep again, and he could not stop that either. Rosemary made no comment whatsoever. He talked until the words slowed, ebbed, finally ceased.