The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [38]
“Not funny,” Norah said. “Not funny at all.”
But she agreed, finally, and packed Paul’s things. His soft hair against her cheek, his large dark eyes watching her seriously as Bree walked out the door with him, and then he was gone. She watched from the window as Bree’s taillights disappeared down the street, taking her son away. It was all she could do to keep herself from running after them. How was it possible to let a child grow up and go out into that dangerous and unpredictable world? She stood for several minutes, staring out into the darkness. Then she went into the kitchen, where she put foil over the roast and turned the oven off. It was seven o’clock. Bree’s bottle of wine was nearly empty. In the kitchen, so silent she could hear the clock ticking, Norah opened another bottle, expensive and French, which she had bought for dinner.
The house was so quiet. Had she been alone, even once, since Paul was born? She did not think so. She had avoided such moments of solitude, moments of stillness when thoughts of her lost daughter might come rising up, unbidden. The memorial service, held in the church courtyard beneath the harsh light of the new March sun, had helped, but Norah sometimes still had the sense, inexplicably, of her daughter’s presence, as if she might turn and see her on the stairs or standing outside on the lawn.
She pressed her hand flat against the wall and shook her head to clear it. Then, glass in hand, she walked through the house, her footsteps hollow on the newly polished floors, surveying the work she’d done. Outside, the rain fell steadily, blurring the lights across the street. Norah remembered another night, the swirling snow. David had taken her by the elbow, helping her into her old green coat, a raggy thing now but that she could not bring herself to discard it. The coat had fallen open around the fullness of her belly, and their eyes had met. He was so concerned, so serious, so charged with nervous excitement; in that moment Norah felt she knew him as she knew herself.
Yet everything had changed. David had changed. Evenings, when he sat beside her on the couch, browsing through his journals, he was no longer really there. In her former life, as a long-distance operator, Norah had touched the cool switches and metal buttons, listening for the distant ringing, the click of connection. Hold, please, she’d said, and words echoed, were delayed; people spoke at once and then stopped, revealing the wild static night that lay between them. Sometimes she had listened, the voices of people she would never meet spilling out their formal heartfelt news: of births or weddings, illnesses or deaths. She had felt the dark night of those distances and the power of her ability to make them disappear.
But it was a power she had lost—at least now, and where it mattered most. Sometimes, even after they had made love in the middle of the night and still lay together, heart beating against heart, she would look at David and feel her ears filling up with the dark distant roar of the universe.
It was after eight o’clock. The world had softened at the edges. She went back to the kitchen and stood at the stove, picking at the dried pork. She ate one of the potatoes straight from the pan, smashing it into the drippings with her fork. The broccoli-cheese dish had curdled and was beginning to dry; Norah tasted that too. It burned her mouth, and she reached for her glass. Empty. She drank a glass of water, standing at the sink, and then another, holding on to the edge of the counter because the world was so unsteady. I’m drunk, she thought, surprised and mildly pleased with herself. She had never been drunk before, though Bree had once come home from a dance and thrown up all over the linoleum. Her punch had been spiked, she told their mother, but to Norah she had confessed it all: the bottle in a brown-paper bag and her friends gathered in the bushes, their breath making sharp little clouds in the night.
The telephone seemed a long way away. Walking, she felt strange,