The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [14]
She was still trying to compose herself when the door from the vestibule to the waiting room swung open. A man in a brown tweed overcoat hesitated in the doorway for a moment, his hat in his hand, taking in the yellow textured wallpaper, the fern in the corner, the metal rack of worn magazines. He had brown hair with a reddish tinge and his face was lean, his expression attentive, assessing. He was not distinguished, yet there was something in his stance, his manner—some quiet alertness, some quality of listening—that set him apart. Caroline’s heart quickened and she felt a tingling on her skin, both pleasurable and irritating, like the unexpected brush of a moth’s wing. His eyes caught hers—and she knew. Before he crossed the room to shake her hand, before he opened his mouth to speak his name, David Henry, in a neutral accent that placed him as an outsider. Before all this, Caroline was sure of a single simple fact: the person she’d been waiting for had come.
He had not been married then. Not married, not engaged, and with no attachments that she could ascertain. Caroline had listened carefully, both that day as he toured the clinic and later at the welcome parties and meetings. She heard what others, absorbed by the flow of polite conversation, distracted by his unfamiliar accent and sudden unexpected bursts of laughter, did not: that aside from mentioning his time in Pittsburgh now and then, a fact already known from his résumé and diploma, he never made reference to the past. For Caroline, this reticence gave him an air of mystery, and the mystery increased her sense that she knew him in ways the others did not. For her, their every encounter was charged, as if she were saying to him across the desk, the examination table, the beautiful, imperfect bodies of one patient or another, I know you; I understand; I see what the others have missed. When she overheard people joking about her crush on the new doctor, she flushed with surprise and embarrassment. But she was secretly pleased, too, for the rumors might reach him in a way that she, with her shyness, could not.
One late evening, after two months of quiet work, she had found him sleeping at his desk. His face was resting on his hands and he breathed with the light, even cadence of deep sleep. Caroline leaned against the doorway, her head tilted, and in that moment the dreams she’d nurtured for years had all coalesced. They would go together, she and Dr. Henry, to some remote place in the world, where they would work all day with sweat rising on their foreheads and instruments growing slippery in their palms, and where of an evening she would play to him on the piano that would be sent across the sea and up some difficult river and across the lush land to where they lived. Caroline was so immersed in this dream that when Dr. Henry opened his eyes she smiled at him, openly and freely, as she had never done before with anyone.
His clear surprise brought her to herself. She stood up straight and touched her hair, murmured some apology, blushed deep red. She disappeared, mortified but also faintly thrilled. For now he must know, now he would see her at last as she saw him. For a few days her anticipation of what might happen next was so great that she found it difficult to be in the same room with him. And yet when the days passed and nothing happened she was not disappointed. She relaxed and made excuses for the delay and went on waiting, unperturbed.
Three weeks later, Caroline had opened the newspaper to find the wedding photo on the society page: Norah Asher, now Mrs. David Henry, caught with her head turned, her neck elegant, her eyelids faintly curved, like shells….
Caroline started, sweating in her coat. The room was overheated; she had almost drifted off. Beside her, the baby still slept. She stood and walked to the windows, the floorboards shifting and creaking beneath the worn carpet. Velvet drapes