The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [15]
This dust, this snow. It was not fair, not fair at all, that Norah Henry should have so much, should have her seamless happy life. Shocked at this thought, at the depth of her bitterness, Caroline let the curtains fall and walked out of the room, moving toward the sound of human voices.
She entered a hallway, fluorescent lights humming against the high ceiling. The air was thick with cleaning fluid, steamed vegetables, the faint yellow scent of urine. Carts rattled; voices called and murmured. She turned one corner, then another, descending a single step to enter a more modern wing with pale turquoise walls. Here the linoleum floor gave loosely against the plywood below. She passed several doors, glimpsing moments of people’s lives, the images suspended like photographs: a man staring out a window, his face cast in shadows, his age indeterminate. Two nurses making a bed, their arms lifted high and the pale sheet floating for an instant near the ceiling. Two empty rooms, tarps spread, paint cans stacked in the corner. A closed door, and then the last one, open, where a young woman wearing a white cotton slip sat on the edge of a bed, her hands folded lightly in her lap, her head bent. Another woman, a nurse, stood behind her, silver scissors flashing. Hair cascaded darkly onto the white sheets, revealing the woman’s bare neck: narrow, graceful, pale. Caroline paused in the doorway.
“She’s cold,” she heard herself saying, causing both women to look up. The woman on the bed had large eyes, darkly luminous in her face. Her hair, once quite long, now jutted raggedly at the level of her chin.
“Yes,” the nurse said, and reached to brush some hair off the woman’s shoulder; it drifted through the dull light and settled on the sheets, the speckled gray linoleum. “But it had to be done.” Her eyes narrowed then as she studied Caroline’s wrinkled uniform, her capless head. “Are you new here or something?” she asked.
Caroline nodded. “New,” she said. “That’s right.”
Later, when she remembered this moment, one woman with a pair of scissors and the other sitting in a cotton slip amid the ruins of her hair, she would think of it in black and white and the image would fill her with a wild emptiness and yearning. For what, she was not certain. The hair was scattered, irretrievable, and the cold light fell through the window. She felt tears in her eyes. Voices echoed in another hall, and Caroline remembered the baby, left sleeping in a box on the overstuffed velvet sofa of the waiting room. She turned and hurried back.
Everything was just as she had left it. The box with its cheerful red cherubs was still on the sofa; the baby, her hands curled into small fists by her chin, was still sleeping. Phoebe, Norah Henry had said, just before she went under from the gas. For a girl, Phoebe.
Phoebe. Caroline unfolded the blankets gently and lifted her. She was so tiny, five and a half pounds, smaller than her brother though with the same rich dark hair. Caroline checked her diaper—tarry meconium stained the damp cloth—changed her, and wrapped her back up. She had not woken, and Caroline held her for a moment, feeling how light she was, how small, how warm. Her face was so small, so volatile. Even in her sleep, expressions moved like clouds across her features. Caroline glimpsed Norah Henry’s frown in one, David Henry’s concentrated listening in another.
She put Phoebe back into the box and tucked the blankets lightly around her, thinking of David Henry, edged with weariness, eating a cheese sandwich at his desk, finishing a cup of half-cold coffee, then rising to open the office doors again on Tuesday nights, a free clinic for patients who could not afford to pay him. The waiting room