The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [178]
He leaned back, searching in his pocket for the house key. Once his mother understood that his father’s work was valuable, she’d started keeping the doors locked, though the boxes sat unopened in the studio.
Well, he didn’t want to look at that stuff either.
When Paul finally got out of the car he stood for a moment on the curb, looking around the neighborhood. It was hot; a high faint breeze moved through the tops of the trees. Pin oak leaves dug into the light, creating a play of shadows on the ground. Strangely, too, the air seemed to be full of snow, a feathery gray-white substance drifting down through the blue sky. Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father’s photographs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. Ashes were drifting down like snow in the dense July heat.
He left footprints on the sidewalk as he walked up the steps. The front door was unlocked, but the house was empty. Hello? Paul called, walking through the rooms, the furniture pushed into the middle of the floor and covered with tarps, the walls bare, ready for painting. He hadn’t lived here for years but he found himself pausing in the living room, stripped of everything that had made it meaningful. How many times had his mother decorated this room? And yet it was just a room, finally. Mom? he called, but got no answer. Upstairs, he stood in the doorway of his own room. Boxes were piled here too, full of old things he had to sort. She hadn’t thrown anything away; even his posters were rolled neatly and secured with rubber bands. There were faint rectangles on the walls where they’d once hung.
“Mom?” he called again. He went downstairs and onto the back porch.
She was there, sitting on the steps, wearing old blue shorts and a limp white T-shirt. He stopped, wordless, taking in the strange scene. A fire still smoldered in a circle of stones, and the ashes and wisps of burned paper that had fallen around him in the front yard were here too, caught in the bushes and in his mother’s hair. Papers were scattered all over the lawn, pressed against the bases of trees, against the rusting metal legs of the ancient swing set. Paul realized with shock that his mother had been burning his father’s photographs. She looked up, her face streaked with ashes and with tears.
“It’s all right,” she said, in an even voice. “I’ve stopped burning them. I was so angry with your father, Paul, but then it struck me: This is your inheritance too. I only burned one box. It was the box with all the girls, so I don’t imagine it was very valuable.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
She handed him a photo of himself, one he’d never seen. He was about fourteen, sitting in the porch swing, bent over his guitar, playing intently, oblivious to everything around him, caught up in the music. It startled him that his father had captured this moment—a private moment, completely unself-conscious, one of the moments of his life when Paul felt most alive.
“Okay. But I don’t understand. Why are you so mad?”
His mother pressed her hands to her face, briefly, and sighed. “Do you remember the story of the night you were born, Paul? The blizzard, how we barely got to the clinic in time?”
“Sure.” He waited for her to go on, not knowing what to say, yet understanding at some instinctive level that this had to do with his twin sister, who had died.
“Do you remember the nurse, Caroline Gill? Did we tell you about her?”
“Yes. Not her name. You said she had blue eyes.”
“She does. Very blue. She came here yesterday, Paul. Caroline Gill. I haven’t seen her since that night. She brought news, shocking news. I’m just going to tell you, since I don’t know what else to do.”
She took his hand. He didn’t pull away. His sister, she told him calmly,