The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [175]
And he had sent their daughter away and told her she was dead.
Norah slammed her fist on the counter, making the glasses jump. She made herself a gin and tonic and wandered upstairs. She lay down, got up, called Frederic, and hung up when the machine answered. After a time she went back out to David’s studio. Everything was the same, the air so warm, so still, the photographs and boxes scattered all over the floor, just as she’d left them. At least fifty thousand dollars, the curators had estimated. More if there were notes in David’s hand about his process.
Everything was the same, yet not the same at all.
Norah picked up the first box and lugged it across the room. She heaved it up to the counter, then balanced it on the windowsill overlooking the backyard. She paused to catch her breath before she opened the screen and pushed the box firmly out, using both hands, hearing it land with a satisfying thunk on the ground below. She went back for the next one, and the next. She was everything she had wanted to be earlier: determined, brisk—yes, ruthless. In less than an hour, the studio was cleared. She walked back into the house, passing the broken boxes in the driveway, photographs spilling out and scuttling across the lawn in the late afternoon light.
Inside, she took a shower, standing beneath the rushing water until it ran cold. She put on a loose dress and made another drink and sat on the sofa. The muscles in her arms hurt from heaving the boxes. She got another drink and came back. When it got dark, hours later, she was still there. The phone rang, and she heard herself, recorded, and then Frederic, calling from France. His voice was so smooth and even, like a distant shore. She yearned to be there, to be in that place where her life had made sense, but she didn’t pick up the phone or call him back. A train sounded, far away. She pulled the afghan up and slid into the darkness of that night.
She dozed, off and on, but didn’t sleep. Now and then she got up to make another drink, walking through the empty rooms, shadowy with moonlight, filling her glass by touch. Not bothering, after a time, with tonic or lime or ice. Once she dreamed that Phoebe was in the room, emerging somehow from the wall where she had been all these years, Norah walking past day after day without seeing her. She woke then, weeping. She poured the rest of the gin down the sink and drank a glass of water.
She finally fell asleep at dawn. At noon, when she woke, the front door was standing wide open and in the backyard there were pictures everywhere: caught in the rhododendrons, plastered up against the foundation, stuck in Paul’s old rusting swing set. Flashes of arms and eyes, of skin that resembled beaches, a glimpse of hair, blood cells scattered like oil across the water. Glimpses of their lives as David had seen them, as David had tried to shape them. Negatives, dark celluloid, scattered on the grass. Norah imagined the shocked and outraged voices of the curators, friends, of her son, even of a part of herself, imagined them crying out, But you’re destroying history!
No, she answered, I’m claiming it.
She drank two more glasses of water and took some aspirin, then started hauling boxes to the far side of the overgrown yard. One box, the one full of images of Paul throughout his life, she pushed into the garage again to save. It was hot and her head ached; sparks of dizziness whirled before her eyes when she stood up too suddenly. She remembered that long-ago day on the beach, the glinting water and the silverfish of vertigo and Howard walking into her line of vision.
There were stones, piled behind the garage. She dragged these out, one by one, and arranged them in a wide circle. She dumped the first box, the glossy black and white images startling in the sunlight, all the unfamiliar faces of young women gazing up at her from the grass. Squatting in the harsh noon sun, she held a lighter to the edge of a glossy 8-by-10. When a flame licked and rose, she slid the burning photo into the shallow pile inside the