The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [13]
Into motion. Yes, it could not be contained. Even sitting here on this sofa in the stillness of this place, even waiting, Caroline was troubled by the feeling that the world was shimmering, that things would not be still. This? was the refrain in her mind. This now, after all these years?
For Caroline Gill was thirty-one, and she had been waiting a long time for her real life to begin. Not that she had ever put it that way to herself. But she had felt since childhood that her life would not be ordinary. A moment would come—she would know it when she saw it—and everything would change. She’d dreamed of being a great pianist, but the lights of the high school stage were too different from the lights at home, and she froze in their glare. Then, in her twenties, as her friends from nursing school began to marry and have their families, Caroline too had found young men to admire, one especially, with dark hair and pale skin and a deep laugh. For a dreamy time she imagined that he—and, when he didn’t call, that someone else—would transform her life. When years passed she gradually turned her attention to her work, again without despair. She had faith in herself and her own capabilities. She was not a person who ever got halfway to a destination and paused, wondering if she’d left an iron on and if the house was burning down. She kept on working. She waited.
She read, too, Pearl Buck’s novels first and then everything she could find about life in China and Burma and Laos. Sometimes she let the books slip from her hands and gazed dreamily out the window of her plain little apartment on the edge of town. She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life. Her clinic would be simple, set in a lush jungle, perhaps near the sea. It would have white walls; it would gleam like a pearl. People would line up outside, squatting beneath coconut trees as they waited. She, Caroline, would tend to them all; she would heal them. She would transform their lives and hers.
Consumed by this vision, she had applied, in a great rush of fervor and excitement, to become a medical missionary. One brilliant late-summer weekend, she had taken the bus to St. Louis to be interviewed. Her name was put on a waiting list for Korea. But time passed; the mission was postponed, then canceled altogether. Caroline was put on another list, this time for Burma.
And then, while she was still checking the mail and dreaming of the tropics, Dr. Henry had arrived.
An ordinary day, nothing to indicate otherwise. It was late autumn by then, a season of colds, and the room was crowded, full of sneezes, muffled coughs. Caroline herself could feel a dull scratching deep in her throat as she called the next patient, an elderly gentleman whose cold would worsen in the next weeks, turning into the pneumonia that would finally kill him. Rupert Dean. He was sitting in the leather armchair, fighting a nosebleed, and he stood up slowly, stuffing his cloth handkerchief, with its vivid spots of blood, into his pocket. When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean’s wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. “She was the love of my life,” he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.
The outer door of the office opened, rattling the glass-paneled inner door.
“She’s lovely,” Caroline said. Her hands were trembling. Because she was moved by his love and his sorrow, and because no one had ever loved her with this same passion. Because she was almost thirty years old, and yet if she died the next day there would be no one to mourn her like Rupert Dean still mourned his wife after more than twenty years. Surely she, Caroline Lorraine Gill, must be as unique and deserving of love