The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [180]
“Don’t be bitter? We visited her grave,” he said, remembering his mother walking through the cast-iron gate with her arms full of flowers, telling him to wait in the car. Remembering her kneeling the dirt, planting morning glory seeds. “What about that?”
“I don’t know. It was Dr. Bentley’s land, so he must have known too. Your father never wanted to take me there. I had to fight so hard. At the time I thought he was afraid I’d have a nervous breakdown. Oh, it made me so mad—the way he always knew best.”
Paul started at the vehemence in her voice, remembering his conversation that morning with Michelle. He pressed the edge of his thumb to his lips and sucked away the little beads of blood, glad for the sharp copper taste. They sat in silence for a time, looking at the backyard with its wisps of ash, its scattered photos and damp boxes.
“What does it mean,” he asked at last, “that she’s retarded? I mean, day-to-day.”
His mother looked at the photographs again. “I don’t know. Caroline said she’s quite high-functioning, whatever that means. She has a job. A boyfriend. She went to school. But apparently she can’t really live on her own.”
“This nurse—Caroline Gill—why did she come here now, after all these years? What did she want?”
“She just wanted to tell me,” his mother said softly. “That’s all. She didn’t ask for anything. She was opening a door, Paul. I really do believe that. It was an invitation. But whatever happens next is up to us.”
“And what is that?” he asked. “What happens now?”
“I’ll go to Pittsburgh. I know I have to see her. But after that, I don’t know anything. Should I bring her back here? We’ll be strangers to her. And I have to talk with Frederic; he has to know.” She put her face in her hands for a moment. “Oh, Paul—how can I go to France for two years and leave her behind? I don’t know what to do. It’s too much for me, all at once.”
A breeze fluttered the photographs scattered across the lawn. Paul sat quietly, struggling with many confused emotions: anger at his father, and surprise, and sadness for what he’d lost. Worry, too; it was terrible to be concerned about this, but what if he had to take care of this sister who couldn’t live on her own? How could he possibly do that? He’d never even met a retarded person, and he found that the images he had were all negative. None of them fit with the sweetly smiling girl in the photograph, and that was disconcerting too.
“I don’t know either,” Paul said. “Maybe the first thing is to clean this mess up.”
“Your inheritance,” his mother said.
“Not just mine,” he said thoughtfully, testing the words. “It’s my sister’s too.”
They worked through that day and the next, sorting the photos and repacking the boxes, dragging them into the cool depths of the garage. While his mother met with the curators, Paul called Michelle to explain what had happened and to tell her he would not be at her concert after all. He expected her to be angry, but she listened without comment and hung up. When he tried to call back, the machine picked up; that happened all day long. More than once he considered getting in his car and driving like wild home to Cincinnati, but he knew it would do no good. Knew, too, that he didn’t really want to go on this way, always loving Michelle more than she could love him back. So he forced himself to stay. He turned to the physical work of packing up the house, and in the evening he walked downtown to the library to check out books on Down’s syndrome.
On Tuesday morning, quiet and distracted and full of apprehension, he and his mother got into her car and drove over the river and through the lush late-summer green of Ohio. It was very hot, the leaves of the corn shimmering against the expansive blue sky. They arrived in Pittsburgh amid returning Fourth of July traffic, traveling through the tunnel that opened onto the bridge in a breathtaking view of the two rivers merging. They crawled through downtown traffic and followed the Monongahela, traveling through another long tunnel. At last they