The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [134]
He kept on playing. It soothed him, the music, in a way that nothing else did. He entered some other plane where his hands seemed to move automatically. The next note was right there, and then the next and the next. He reached the end and stopped, eyes closed, letting the notes die away into the air.
Never again. Not this music, this moment, ever again.
“Wow.” He opened his eyes and she was leaning against the doorjamb. She pushed open the screen door and came out onto the porch, carrying a glass of water, and sat down. “Wow, your father was right,” she said. “That was amazing.”
“Thanks,” he said, ducking his head to hide his pleasure, hitting a chord. The music had released him; he was not so angry anymore. “What about you? You play?”
“No. I used to take piano lessons.”
“We have a piano,” he said, nodding at the door. “Go ahead.”
She smiled, though her eyes were still serious. “That’s okay. Thanks. I’m not in the mood. Besides, you’re really, really good. Like a professional. I’d be embarrassed to pound out “Für Elise’ or something.”
He smiled too. “‘Für Elise.’ I know that one. We could do a duet.”
“A duet,” she repeated, nodding, frowning a little. Then she looked up. “Are you an only child?” she asked.
He was startled. “Yes and no. I mean, I had a sister. A twin. She died.”
Rosemary nodded. “Do you ever think about her?”
“Sure.” He felt uncomfortable and looked away. “Not about her, exactly. I mean, I never knew her. But about what she might have been like.”
He flushed then, shocked to have revealed so much to this girl, this stranger who’d disrupted all their lives, this girl he didn’t even like.
“So okay,” he said. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me something personal. Tell me something my father doesn’t know.”
She gave him a searching look.
“I don’t like bananas,” she said at last, and he laughed, and then she did. “No, honestly, I don’t. What else? When I was five, I fell off my bike and broke my arm.”
“Me too,” Paul said. “I broke my arm too, when I was six. I fell out of a tree.” He remembered it then, the way his father had lifted him, the way the sky had flashed, full of sun and leaves, as he was carried to the car. He remembered his father’s hands, so focused and so gentle as he set the bones, and coming home again, into the bright golden light of the afternoon.
“Hey,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He laid the guitar flat on the swing and picked up the grainy black-and-white photos.
“Was it this place?” he asked, handing one to her. “Where you met my father?”
She took the photo and studied it, then nodded. “Yes. It looks different now. I can see from this picture—those sweet curtains in the windows and the flowers growing—that it was a nice house once. But no one lives there now. It’s just empty. The wind comes through because the windows are broken. When I was a kid we used to play there. We used to run wild in those hills, and I used to play house with my cousins. They said it was haunted, but I always liked it. I don’t know exactly why. It was like my secret place. Sometimes I just sat inside, dreaming about what I was going to be.”
He nodded, taking the photo back and studying the figures as he had so many times before, as if they might answer all his questions about his father.
“You didn’t dream this,” he said at last, looking up.
“No,” she said softly. “Never this.”
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Sunlight slanted through the trees and cast shadows on the painted floor of the porch.
“Okay. It’s your turn again,” she said after a minute, turning back to him.
“My turn?”
“Tell me something your father doesn’t know.”
“I’m going to Juilliard,” he said, the words coming in a rush, bright as music in the room. He’d told no one but