The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [170]
He had been transferred to France. Twice the transfer had fallen through, and they had talked of moving in together in Lexington, selling both their places and starting fresh: something brand new, a place where no one else had ever lived. Their talk was idle, languorous, conversations that bloomed over their dinners together or while they lay together in the dusk, glasses of wine on the bedside tables, the moon a pale disk in the window above the trees. Lexington, France, Taiwan—it didn’t matter to Norah, who felt she had already discovered another country with Frederic. Sometimes, at night, she closed her eyes and lay awake, listening to his steady breathing, filled with a deep sense of contentment. It pained her to realize how far she and David had drifted away from love. His fault, certainly, but hers too. She had held herself so close and tight, she had been so afraid of everything after Phoebe died. But those years were gone now; they had flowed away, leaving nothing but memory behind.
So France was fine. When the news came that the posting was just outside of Paris, she was glad. They had already rented a little cottage at the edge of the river in Châteauneuf. Frederic was there at this very moment, putting in a greenhouse for his orchids. Even now it filled Norah’s imagination: the smooth red tiles of the patio, the slight river breeze in the birch tree by the door, and the way the sunlight fell on Frederic’s shoulders, his arms, as he worked to frame the walls of glass. She could walk to the train station and be in Paris in two hours, or she could walk to the village and buy fresh cheese and bread, and dark gleaming bottles of wine, her cloth tote bags growing heavier with each stop. She could sauté onions, pausing to look up at the river moving slowly beyond the fence. On the patio in the evenings she’d spent there, the moonflowers had opened with their lemony fragrance and she and Frederic sat drinking wine and talking. Such simple things, really. Such happiness. Norah glanced at the boxes of photographs, wanting to take that young woman she had been by the arm and shake her gently. Keep going, she wanted to tell her. Don’t give up. Your life will be fine in the end.
She drained her Coke and went back to work, bypassing the box in which she’d gotten so mired and opening another. Inside this one there were file folders neatly arranged, organized by year. The first held shots of anonymous infants, sleeping in their carriages, sitting on lawns or porches, held in the warm arms of their mothers. The photos were all 8-by-10s, glossy black-and-whites; even Norah could tell that they were David’s early experiments in light. The curators would be pleased. Some were so dark the figures were barely visible; others were washed nearly white. David must have been testing the range of his camera, keeping the subject the same and varying the focus, the aperture, the available light.
The second folder was very similar, and the third and the fourth. Photos of girls, not infants anymore but two and three and four years old. Girls in their Easter dresses at church, girls running in the park, girls eating ice cream or clustered outside the school at recess. Girls dancing, throwing balls, laughing, crying. Norah frowned, flipping more quickly through the images. There wasn’t one child she recognized. The photos were arranged carefully by age. When she skipped to the end, she found not girls but young women, walking, shopping, talking to each other. The last was a young woman in the library, her chin resting in her hand as she gazed out the window, a distant