The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [173]
“Norah,” Caroline said, as if reading her mind, “what do you remember about the night your son was born?”
“Why do you ask?” Norah’s voice was firm, but she was already leaning back, pulling away from the intensity in Caroline’s eyes, from some swirling undercurrent, from her own fear of what might be coming. “Why are you here, and why are you asking me that?”
Caroline Gill didn’t answer right away. The lilting voices of the bluebirds flashed through the room like motes of light.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “I don’t know how to say this. There isn’t an easy way, I suppose, so I’ll just come out with it. Norah, that night when your twins were born, Phoebe and Paul, there was a problem.”
“Yes,” Norah said sharply, thinking of the bleakness she had felt after the birth, joy and bleakness woven together, and the long hard path she had taken to reach this moment of steady calm. “My daughter died,” she said. “That was the problem.”
“Phoebe did not die,” Caroline said evenly, looking straight at her, and Norah felt caught in the moment as she had been all those years ago, holding on to that gaze as the known world shifted around her. “Phoebe was born with Down’s syndrome. David believed the prognosis was not good. He asked me to take her to a place in Louisville where such children were routinely sent. It wasn’t uncommon, in 1964, to do that. Most doctors would have advised the same. But I couldn’t leave her there. I took her and moved to Pittsburgh. I’ve raised her all these years. Norah,” she added gently, “Phoebe is alive. She’s very well.”
Norah sat very still. The birds in the garden were fluttering, calling. She was remembering, for some reason, the time she had fallen through an unmarked grate in Spain. She had been walking on a sunny street, carefree. Then a rush, and she was up to her waist in a ditch with a sprained ankle and long bloody scrapes on her calves. I’m okay, I’m okay, she had kept telling the people who helped her out, who took her to the doctor. Brightly, unconcerned, blood seeping from her cuts: I’m okay. It was only later, alone and safe in her room, when she closed her eyes and felt that rush again, that loss of control, and wept. She felt this way now. Shaking, she held onto the edge of the table.
“What?” she said. “What did you say?”
Caroline said it again: Phoebe, not dead but taken away. All these years. Phoebe, growing up in another city. Safe, Caroline kept saying. Safe, well cared for, loved. Phoebe, her daughter, Paul’s twin. Born with Down’s syndrome, sent away.
David had sent her away.
“You must be crazy,” Norah said, though even as she spoke so many jagged pieces of her life were falling into place that she knew what Caroline was saying must be true.
Caroline reached into her purse and slid two Polaroids across the polished maple. Norah couldn’t pick them up, she was trembling too hard, but she leaned close to take them in: a little girl in a white dress, chubby, with a smile that lit her face, her almond-shaped eyes closed in pleasure. And then another, this same girl years later, about to shoot a basketball, caught in the instant before she jumped. She looked a little like Paul in one, a little like Norah in the other, but mostly she was just herself: Phoebe. Not any of the images so neatly filed away in David’s folders but simply herself. Alive, and somewhere in the world.
“But why?” The anguish in her voice was audible. “Why would he do this? Why would you?”
Caroline shook her head and looked out into the garden again.
“For years I believed in my own innocence,” she said. “I believed I’d done the right thing. The institution was a terrible place. David hadn’t seen it; he didn’t know how bad it was. So I took Phoebe, and I raised her, and I fought many, many fights to get her an education and access to medical care. To make sure she would have a good life. It was easy to see myself as the hero. But I think I always knew,