The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [133]
“You might as well be,” he said.
She looked up sharply, actual tears in her eyes, as if he’d slapped her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
She kept crying.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he demanded, angry at her tears, at her very presence. “I mean, who do you think you are to latch on to my father and show up here?”
“I don’t think I’m anyone,” she said, but his tone had startled her and she dried her tears, grew tougher and more distant. “And I didn’t ask to come here. It was your father’s idea.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Paul said. “Why would he do that?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? I was living in that old house where he grew up, and he said I couldn’t stay there anymore. And it’s his place, right? What could I say? In the morning we walked into town and he bought bus tickets and here we are. The bus was a drag. It took forever to make all the crazy connections.”
She pulled her long hair back and yanked it into a ponytail, and Paul watched her, thinking how pretty her ears were, wondering if his father thought she was pretty too.
“What old house?” Paul asked, feeling something sharp and hot in his chest.
“Like I said. The one where he grew up. I was living there. I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she added, glancing at the floor.
Paul felt something fill him then, some emotion he couldn’t name. Envy, maybe, that this girl, this thin pale stranger with the beautiful ears, had been to a place that mattered to his father, a place he himself had never seen. I’ll take you there someday, his father had promised, but years had passed and he had never mentioned it again. Yet Paul had never forgotten it, the way his father had sat down amid the wreckage of his darkroom, picking up the photos one by one, so carefully. My mother, Paul, your grandmother. She had a hard life. I had a sister, did you know that? Her name was June. She was good at singing, at music, just like you. He remembered to this day the way his father smelled that morning, clean, already dressed for the hospital, yet sitting on the floor of the darkroom, talking, like he had all the time in the world. Telling a story Paul had never heard.
“My father’s a doctor,” Paul said. “He just likes to help people.”
She nodded and then looked at him straight on, her expression full of something—pity for him, that’s what he read there, and the thin hot flare traveled to his fingertips.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing. You’re right. I needed help. That’s all.”
A strand of hair slipped from her ponytail and fell across her face, very dark with reddish highlights, and he remembered how soft it had been when he touched it as she slept, soft and warm, and he resisted an urge to reach over and brush it behind her ear.
“My father had a sister,” Paul said, remembering the story and his father’s soft steady voice, pushing to see if it was true, that she’d been there.
“I know. June. She’s buried on a hillside above the house. We went there too.”
The thin flare widened, making his breathing low and shallow. Why should it matter that she knew this? What difference did it make? And yet he could not stop imagining her there, walking up some hillside, following his father to this place he’d never seen.
“So what?” he said. “So what that you’ve been there, so what?”
She seemed about to speak for a moment, but then she turned and started walking across the room to the kitchen. Her dark hair, in a long rope, bounced against her back. Her shoulders were lean and delicate, and she walked slowly, with careful grace, like a dancer.
“Wait,” Paul called after her, but when she paused he did not know what to say.
“I needed a place to stay,” she said softly, looking back over her shoulder. “That’s all there is to know about me, Paul.”
He watched her go into the kitchen, heard the refrigerator door open and shut. Then he went upstairs and got the folder he’d hidden in his bottom drawer, full of the photos he’d saved from the night he’d talked with his father.
He took the pictures and his guitar and went out on