The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [179]
“To spare us,” his mother said, and her voice caught. “That’s what she said. But she couldn’t go through with it, Caroline Gill. She took your sister, Paul. She took Phoebe. All these years your twin has been alive and well, growing up in Pittsburgh.”
“My sister?” Paul said. “In Pittsburgh? I was just in Pittsburgh last week.” It was not an appropriate response, but he did not know what else to say; he was filled with a strange emptiness, a kind of stunned detachment. He had a sister: that was news enough. She was retarded, not perfect, so his father had sent her away. It wasn’t anger, strangely, but fear that rose up next, some old apprehension born of the pressure his father had focused on him as the only child. Born, too, of Paul’s need to make his own way, even if his father might disapprove enough to leave. A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.
“Caroline went to Pittsburgh and started a new life,” his mother said. “She raised your sister. I guess it was a struggle; it would have been, especially in those days. I keep trying to be thankful that she was good to Phoebe, but there’s a part of me that’s just raging.”
Paul closed his eyes for a moment, trying to hold all these ideas together. The world felt flat, strange, and unfamiliar. All these years he’d tried to imagine his sister, what she would be like, but now he couldn’t bring a single idea of her to mind.
“How could he?” he asked finally. “How could he keep this a secret?”
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing for hours. How could he? And how dare he die and leave us to discover this alone?”
They sat there silently. Paul remembered an afternoon of developing photos with his father on the day after he’d trashed the darkroom, when he was full of guilt and his father was too, when the very air was charged with what they said and what they left unspoken. Camera, his father told him, came from the French chambre, room. To be in camera was to operate in secret. This was what his father had believed: that each person was an isolated universe. Dark trees in the heart, a fistful of bones: that was his father’s world, and it had never made him more bitter than at this moment.
“I’m surprised he didn’t give me away,” he said, thinking of how hard he’d always fought against his father’s vision of the world. He had gone out and played his guitar, music rising straight up through him and entering the world, and people turned, put down their drinks, and listened, and a room full of strangers was connected, each to each. “I’m sure he wanted to.”
“Paul!” His mother frowned. “No. If anything, he wanted even more for you because of all this. Expected even more. Demanded perfection of himself. That’s one of the things that’s become clear to me. That’s the terrible part, actually. Now that I know about Phoebe, so many mysteries about your father make sense. That wall I always felt—it was real.”
She got up, went inside, and came back with two Polaroids. “Here she is,” she said. “This is your sister: Phoebe.”
Paul took them and stared from one to the other: a posed picture of a girl, smiling, and then a candid shot of her shooting a basket. He was still trying to take in what his mother had told him: that this stranger with the almond eyes and sturdy legs was his twin.
“You have the same hair,” Norah said softly, sitting down next to him again. “She likes to sing, Paul. Isn’t that something?” She laughed. “And guess what—she’s a basketball fan.”
Paul’s laugh was sharp and full of pain.
“Well,” he said, “I guess Dad chose the wrong kid.”
His mother took the photos in her ash-stained hands.
“Don’t be bitter, Paul. Phoebe has Down’s syndrome. I don’t know much about it, but Caroline Gill had a lot to say. So much I could hardly take it all in, really.”
Paul had been running his thumb along the concrete edge of the step and now he stopped,