The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [171]
Norah let the folder fall into her lap, spilling photos. What was this? All these girls, young women: it could have been a sexual fixation, yet Norah knew instinctively that it was not. What the photos shared in common was not a darkness but an innocence. Children playing in the park across the street, wind lifting their hair and clothes. Even the older ones, the grown women, had this quality; they turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning. Loss lingered in the play of lights and shadows; these were photos full of yearning. Of longing, yes, not lust.
She flipped back the box lid to read the label. SURVEY was all it said.
Quickly, careless of the disorder she was creating, Norah went through all the other boxes, pulling one off another. In the middle of the room she found another with that bold black word SURVEY. She opened it and pulled the folders out.
Not girls this time, not strangers, but Paul. Folder after folder of Paul in all his ages, his transformations and his growth, his turning-away rage. His intentness and his stunning gift of music, fingers flying over his guitar.
For a long time Norah sat very still, agitated, on the edge of knowing. And then suddenly the knowledge was hers, irrevocable, searing: all those years of silence, when he would not speak of their lost daughter, David had been keeping this record of her absence. Paul, and a thousand other girls, all growing.
Paul, but not Phoebe.
Norah might have wept. She longed suddenly to talk with David. All these years, he’d missed her too. All these photographs, all this silent, secret longing. She went through the images once more, studying Paul as a boy: catching a baseball, playing the piano, striking a goofy pose under the tree in the backyard. All these memories he’d collected, moments Norah had never seen. She studied them again and then again, trying to imagine herself in the world David had experienced, into his mind’s eye.
Two hours passed. She was aware of being hungry, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave or even to rise from her place on the floor. So many photos, all these pictures of Paul, all these anonymous girls and women, mirroring his age. Always, all these years, she had felt her daughter’s presence, a shadow, standing just beyond every photo that was taken. Phoebe, lost at birth, lingered just out of sight, as if she had risen moments earlier and left the room, as if her scent, the brush of air from her passing, still moved in the spaces she’d left. Norah had kept this feeling to herself, fearing that anyone who heard her would think her sentimental, even crazy. It astonished her now, it brought tears to her eyes, to realize how deeply David, too, had felt their daughter’s absence. He had looked for her everywhere, it seemed—in every girl, in each young woman—and had never found her.
Finally, into the expanding rings of silence in which she sat, gravel popped faintly: a car in the driveway. Someone was arriving. Distantly she heard a slammed door, footsteps, the doorbell ringing in the house. She shook her head and swallowed, but she did not get up. Whoever it was would go away and come back later, or not. She was wiping tears from her eyes; whoever wanted her could wait. But no. The furniture appraiser had promised to stop by this afternoon. So Norah pressed her hands across her cheeks and entered the house from the back, pausing to splash water, on her face and run a comb through her hair. “I’m coming,” she called over the rush of water when the doorbell rang again. She walked through the rooms, the furniture all clustered into the center and covered with tarps: the painters were coming tomorrow. She calculated the days left, wondering if she could possibly get everything done. Remembering, for an instant, those evenings in Châteauneuf, where it seemed possible her life would always be serene, expanding into calm like a flower budding into air.
She opened the door, still drying off her hands.
The woman on the porch was vaguely familiar. She was dressed