The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [132]
The girl in the bed sighed, her lips working. Jailbait, his friends warned him about Lauren. Duke Madison especially, who had dropped out of school to marry his girlfriend the year before, who hardly played the piano anymore and had a haggard glancing-at-the-clock kind of look when he did. Get her pregnant and you’re more than screwed.
Paul studied this girl, her paleness and long dark hair, her scattered freckles. Who was she? His father, methodical, predictable as a ticking clock, had simply disappeared. On the second day his mother called the police, who had remained noncommittal and jocular, until his father’s briefcase was found in the cloakroom of the museum in Pittsburgh, his suitcase and camera in his hotel. Then they got serious. He’d been seen at the reception, arguing with a woman with dark hair. She turned out to be an art critic; her review of the show had been in the Pittsburgh papers, and it wasn’t pretty.
Nothing personal, she had told the police.
Then last night a key had turned in the lock and his father had walked into the house with this pregnant girl he claimed to have just met, a girl whose presence he would not explain. She needs help, he said, tersely
There are plenty of ways to help, his mother had pointed out, talking about the girl as if she weren’t standing in the foyer in her too big coat. You give money. You take her to a place for unmarried mothers. You don’t disappear for days on end without a word and then show up with a pregnant stranger. My God, David, don’t you have any idea? We called the police! We thought you were dead.
Maybe I was, he said, the strangeness of his answer quelling his mother’s protests, fixing Paul in his place on the stairs.
And now she slept, oblivious, and within her the baby grew in its dark sea. Paul reached out, touched her hair lightly, then let his hand fall. He had a sudden urge to get into the bed with her, to hold her. It wasn’t like with Lauren somehow, it wasn’t about sex; he just wanted to feel her near him, her skin and her warmth. He wanted to wake up next to her, to run his hand over the rising curve of her belly, to touch her face and hold her hand.
To find out what she knew about his father.
Her eyes blinked open, and for a moment she stared at him, unseeing. Then she sat up quickly, pushing her hands through her hair. She was wearing one of his old faded T-shirts, blue with the Kentucky Wildcats logo across the front, that he’d worn a couple of years ago while running track. Her arms were long and lean, and he caught a glimpse of her underarm, stubbled and tender, and of the smooth rising curve of her breast.
“What are you looking at?” She swung her feet to the floor.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
“You’re Paul,” she said. “Your father told me about you.”
“He did?” he asked, hating the need in his voice. “What’d he say?”
She shrugged, pushing her hair behind her ears, and stood up. “Let’s see. You’re headstrong. You hate him. You’re a genius on the guitar.”
Paul felt the heat rising to his face. Usually, he thought his father didn’t even see him, or saw only the ways he didn’t measure up.
“I don’t hate him,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”
She leaned down to gather up the blankets, then sat with them in her arms, looking around.
“This is nice,” she said. “Someday I’m going to have a place like this.”
Paul gave a startled laugh. “You’re pregnant,” he said. It was his own fear in the room, the fear that rose up each time when, trembling, he crossed the garage to Lauren Lobeglia, drawn by the irresistible power of his desire.
“Right. So what? I’m pregnant. Not dead.”
She spoke defiantly but she sounded scared, as scared as Paul sometimes felt himself, waking up in the middle of the night, dreaming of Lauren, all warmth and silk and her voice low in his ear, knowing he could never stop though they were