The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [188]
His sister. His twin. What if she’d been born without Down’s? Or what if she’d been born as she was, simply herself, and their father had not raised his eyes to Caroline Gill, snow falling in the world outside and his colleague in a ditch? He imagined his parents, so young and so happy, bundling the two of them into the car, driving slowly through the watery streets of Lexington in the March thaw that followed their birth. The sunny playroom adjoining his would have belonged to Phoebe. She’d have chased him down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the wild garden, her face always with him, his laughter an echo of her own. Who would he have been, then?
But his mother was right; he could never know what might have happened. All he had were the facts. His father had delivered his own twins in the middle of an unexpected storm, following the steps he knew by heart, keeping his focus on the pulse and heart rate of the woman on the table, the taut skin, the crowning head. Breathing, skin tone, fingers and toes. A boy. On the surface, perfect, and a small singing started, deep in his father’s brain. A moment later, the second baby. And then his father’s singing stopped for good.
They were close to town now. Paul waited for a break in traffic, then turned into the Lexington cemetery, past the gatehouse made of stone. He parked beneath an elm tree that had survived a hundred years of drought and disease and got out of the car. He walked around to Phoebe’s door and opened it, offering his hand. She looked at it, surprised, then up at him. Then she pushed herself out of the seat on her own, still holding the daffodils, their stems crushed and pulpy now. They followed the path for a while, past the monuments and the pond with the ducks, until he guided her across the grass to the stone that marked their father’s grave.
Phoebe traced her fingers over the names and dates engraved in the dark granite. He wondered again what she was thinking. Al Simpson was the man she called her father. He did puzzles with her in the evenings, and brought her favorite albums home from his trips; he used to carry her on his shoulders so that she could touch the high leaves of the sycamores. It couldn’t mean anything to her, this slab of granite, this name.
David Henry McCallister. Phoebe read the words out loud, slowly. They filled her mouth and fell heavily into the world.
“Our father,” he said.
“Our father,” she said, “who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.”
“No,” he said, surprised. “Our father. My father. Yours.”
“Our father,” she repeated, and he felt a surge of frustration, for her words were agreeable, mechanical, of no significance in her life.
“You’re sad,” she observed, then. “If my father died, I’d be sad too.”
Paul was startled. Yes, that was it—he was sad. His anger had cleared, and suddenly he could see his father differently. His very presence must have must have reminded his father in every glance, with every breath, of the choice he’d made and could not undo. Those Polaroids of Phoebe that Caroline had sent over the years, found hidden in the back of a darkroom drawer after the curators had gone; the single photograph of his father’s family too, the one Paul still had, standing on the porch of their lost home. And the thousands of others, one after another, his father layering image on image, trying to obscure the moment he could never change, and yet the past rising up anyway, as persistent as memory, as powerful as dreams.
Phoebe, his sister, a secret kept for a quarter of