The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [47]
“I’ll have you fired by lunchtime,” he called from the kitchen.
“You go right ahead,” she said again.
There was a cascade of falling pots, the old man swearing. Caroline imagined him stooped over to push the tangle of cookware back into the cupboard. She ought to go help him—but no, let him cope by himself. In her first weeks she’d been afraid to talk back, afraid not to jump whenever Leonard March called, until Doro had taken her aside. Look, you’re not a servant. You answer to me; you don’t have to be at his beck and call. You’re doing fine, and you live here too, she had said, and Caroline had understood that her period of probation was over.
Leo came in, carrying a plateful of eggs and a glass of orange juice.
“Don’t worry,” he said, before she could speak. “I turned off the damned stove. And now I’m taking my breakfast upstairs to eat it in peace.”
“Watch your language,” Caroline said.
He grunted his answer and thumped up the stairs. She paused in her work, suddenly near tears, watching a cardinal land in the lilac bush outside the window, then fly away. What was she doing here? What yearning had driven her to this radical decision, this place of no return? And what, finally, would become of her?
After a few minutes, the trumpets started again upstairs and the doorbell rang twice. Caroline lifted Phoebe from the playpen.
“Here they are,” she said, drying her eyes with her wrist. “Time to practice.”
Sandra was standing on the porch, and when Caroline opened the door she burst in, holding Tim by one hand and hauling a big cloth bag in the other. She was tall, large-boned, blond, and forceful; she sat down without ceremony in the middle of the rug, dumping the stacking toys in a pile.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she said. “The traffic’s awful out there. Doesn’t it drive you crazy, living this close to the crosstown? It would drive me nuts. Anyway, check out what I found. Look at these great stacking toys—plastic, different colors. Tim loves them.”
Caroline sat down on the floor too. Like Doro, Sandra was an unlikely friend, someone Caroline would never have known in her old life. They’d met in the library one bleak January day when Caroline, overwhelmed by experts and grim statistics, had slammed a book shut in despair. Sandra, two tables over amid her own stack of books, the spines and covers terribly familiar to Caroline, looked up. Oh, I know just how you feel. I’m so angry I could break a window.
They’d begun to talk, then: cautiously at first, then in a rush. Sandra’s son, Tim, was nearly four. He had Down’s too, but Sandra hadn’t known it. That he was slower to develop than her three other children, this she had noticed, but to Sandra slow was only slow, and no excuse for anything. A busy mother, she’d simply expected Tim to do what her other children had done, and if it took him longer that was all right. He’d been walking by the time he was two, toilet trained by age three. The diagnosis had shocked her family; the doctor’s suggestion—that Tim should be put into an institution—had angered her into action.
Caroline had listened intently, her heart lifting with every word.
They left the library and went for coffee. Caroline would never forget those hours, the excitement she’d felt, as if she were waking from a long, slow dream. What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?
Yes, why not? They’d begun to meet, here or at Sandra’s house with her older, rambunctious boys. They brought books and toys, research and stories, and their own experiences—Caroline’s as a nurse, Sandra’s as a schoolteacher and mother of four. A lot of it was simple common sense. If Phoebe needed to learn to roll over, put a bright ball just out of her reach; if Tim needed to work on coordination,