The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [34]
Caroline waited, drinking coffee, until she heard the door slam downstairs and Lucy’s car roar into life. Quickly, then, she picked Phoebe up and stood for a moment in the doorway of the apartment where she had spent so many hopeful years, years that seemed as ephemeral now as if they had never happened. Then she shut the door firmly and went down the stairs.
She put Phoebe in her box on the backseat and drove into town, passing the clinic with its turquoise walls and orange roof, passing the bank and dry cleaners and her favorite gas station. When she reached the church she parked on the street and left Phoebe asleep in the car. The group gathered in the courtyard was larger than she’d expected, and she paused at its outside edge, close enough to see the back of David Henry’s neck, flushed pink from the cold, and Norah Henry’s blond hair swept up in a formal twist. No one noticed Caroline. Her heels sank into the mud at the edge of the sidewalk. She eased her weight to her toes, remembering the stale smells of the institution Dr. Henry had sent her to last week. Remembering the woman in her slip, her dark hair falling to the floor.
Words drifted on the still morning air.
The night is as clear as day; the darkness and light are to thee both alike.
Caroline had woken at all hours. She’d stood eating crackers at the kitchen window in the middle of the night. Her days and nights had become indistinguishable, the comforting patterns of her life shattered once and for all.
Norah Henry wiped at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. Caroline remembered her grip as she pushed one baby out and then the other, and the tears in her eyes, then, too. This would destroy her, David Henry had declared. And what would it do if Caroline stepped forward now with the lost baby in her arms? If she interrupted this grief, only to introduce so many others?
Thou has set our misdeeds before thee, and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
David Henry shifted his weight as the minister spoke. For the first time Caroline understood in her body what she was about to do. Her throat closed and her breath grew short. The gravel seemed to press up through her shoes, and the group in the courtyard trembled in her sight, and she thought she might fall. Grave, Caroline thought, watching Norah’s long legs bending, so graceful, kneeling suddenly in the mud. Wind caught at Norah’s short veil, pulled at her pillbox hat.
For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
Caroline watched the minister’s hand and, when he spoke again, the words, though faint, seemed addressed not to Phoebe but to herself, some kind of finality that could not be reversed.
We have committed her body to the elements, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and give her peace.
The voice paused, the wind moved in the trees, and Caroline pulled herself together, wiped her eyes with her handkerchief, and gave her head a swift shake. She turned and went to her car, where Phoebe was still sleeping, a wand of sunlight falling across her face.
In every end, then, a beginning. Soon enough she was turning the corner by the monument factory with its rows of tombstones, headed for the interstate. How strange. Wasn’t it a bad omen to have a gravestone factory marking the entrance to a city? But then she was beyond it all, and when she reached the split in the highway she chose to go north, to Cincinnati and then to Pittsburgh, following the Ohio River to the place where Dr. Henry had lived a part of his mysterious past. The other road,