The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [40]
“Yes!” she shouted, pressing her palms against his coat again. “Yes, I will!”
He slid a ring on her finger, then: a thin white-gold band, exactly her size, its marquise diamond flanked by two tiny emeralds. To match her eyes, he said later, and the coat she’d worn when they met.
She was inside now, standing in the doorway of the dining room, turning this ring on her finger. Streamers drifted. One brushed her face; another had dipped into her wineglass. Norah watched, fascinated, as the stain spread slowly upward. It was, she noticed, almost exactly the same color as the napkins. Suzy Homemaker, indeed: she couldn’t have found a closer match on purpose. Wine had splashed from her glass and spattered across the tablecloth too, staining the gold striped wrapping of her present to David. She picked this up and, on an impulse, tore the paper off. I’m really very drunk, she thought.
The camera was compact, a pleasing weight. Norah had debated for weeks about a suitable gift, until she’d seen this in the display case at Sears. Black and flashing chrome, with complex dials and levers and numbers etched around the rings, the camera had resembled David’s medical equipment. The salesman, young and eager, had plied her with technical information about apertures and f-stops and wide-angle lenses. The terms washed over her like so much water, but she liked the weight of the camera in her hands, its cool textures, and the way the world was so precisely framed when she held it to her eye.
Tentatively, now, she pushed the silver lever. Click and then snap, loud in the room, as the shutter released. She turned the little dial, advancing the film—she remembered the salesman using that phrase, advancing the film, his voice rising up for a moment out of the stream of noise in the store. She looked through the viewfinder, framing the ruined table again, then turned two different dials to find the focus. This time, when she snapped the shutter, light exploded across the wall. Blinking, she turned the camera over and studied the bulb, now blackened and bubbled. She replaced it, burning her fingers, but somehow distant from that pain.
She stood and glanced at the clock: 9:45 P.M.
The rain was soft, steady. David had walked to work, and she imagined him trudging wearily home down the dark streets. On an impulse she got her coat and the car keys—she would go to the hospital and surprise him.
The car was cold. She backed out of the driveway, fumbling for the heat, and by old habit turned in the wrong direction. Even after she realized her mistake, she kept driving on the same narrow rainy streets, back to their old house, where she’d decorated the nursery with such innocent hope, where she’d sat nursing Paul in the dark. She and David had agreed about the wisdom of moving away, but the truth was she could not bear the idea of selling this place. She still went there almost every day. Whatever life her daughter had known, whatever Norah had experienced of her daughter, had happened in that house.
Except for being dark, the house looked much the same: the wide front porch with its four white columns, the rough-cut limestone and single light burning. There was Mrs. Michaels next door, just a few yards away, moving in her kitchen, washing dishes and staring out into the night; there was Mr. Bennett in his easy chair, the curtains open, the television on. Norah could almost believe, walking up the steps, that she lived here still. But the door opened into rooms that were bare, empty, shocking in their smallness.
Walking through the cold house, Norah struggled to clear her head. The effects of the wine seemed very much stronger now, and she was having trouble connecting one moment to another. She held David’s new camera in one hand. A fact, not a decision. There were fifteen pictures left and spare flashbulbs in her pocket. She took a picture of the chandelier, satisfied, when the bulb flashed, because now she would always have that image with her; she would never wake up in the middle of the night in twenty years and not be able to remember