The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [51]
And here he was, having traveled all this way to find her.
Phoebe was making soft sounds, reaching. Her hands were brushing against Al’s neck, his collarbone, his dark plaid shirt. At first, it didn’t register with Caroline, what was happening; then, suddenly, it did. Whatever Al was saying receded, merging with Leo’s footsteps upstairs and the rush of traffic outside, sounds that Caroline would forever afterward remember as being lucky.
Phoebe was reaching for the medallion. Not batting at air, as she had this morning, but using Al’s chest for resistance, her small fingers scraping and scraping the medallion into her palm until she could close her fist around it. Rapt with success, she yanked the medallion hard on its string, making Al raise his hand to the chafing.
Caroline touched her own neck too, feeling the quick burn of joy.
Oh, yes, she thought. Grab it, my darling. Grab the world.
May 1965
NORAH WAS AHEAD OF HIM, MOVING LIKE LIGHT, FLASHES of white and denim amid the trees: there, and then gone. David followed, leaning down now and then to pick up stones. Rough-skinned geodes, fossils etched in shale. Once, an arrowhead. He held each of these for a moment, pleased by their weight and shape, by the coolness of the stones against his palm, before he slipped them into his pockets. As a boy, the shelves of his room had always been littered with stones, and to this day he couldn’t pass them up, their mysteries and possibilities, even though bending was awkward with Paul in a carrier against his chest and the camera scraping against his hip.
Far ahead, Norah paused to wave, then seemed to vanish straight into a wall of smooth gray stone. Several other people, wearing matching blue baseball caps, spilled suddenly, one by one, from this same gray wall. As David drew closer he realized that the stairway leading to the natural stone bridge rose up there, just out of sight. Better watch your step, a woman, descending, warned him. It’s steep like you wouldn’t believe. Slippery too. Breathless, she paused and held her hand on her heart.
David, noting her paleness, her shortness of breath, paused. “Ma’am? I’m a doctor. Are you all right?”
“Palpitations,” she said, waving her free hand. “I’ve had them all my life.”
He took her plump wrist and felt her pulse, swift but steady, slowing as he counted. Palpitations: people used the term freely, to talk about any quickening of the heart, but he could tell at once that the woman was in no real distress. Not like his sister, who had grown breathless and dizzy and was forced to sit anytime she so much as ran across the room. Heart trouble, the doctor in Morgantown had said, shaking his head. He had not been more specific, and it had not mattered; there was nothing he could do. Years later, in medical school, David had remembered her symptoms and read late into the night to make his own diagnosis: a narrowing of the aorta, or maybe an abnormality of the heart valve. Either way, June had moved slowly and fought to breathe, her condition worsening as the years passed, her skin pale and faintly blue in the months before she died. She had loved butterflies, and standing with her face turned to the sun, eyes closed, and eating homemade jelly on the thin saltines his mother bought in town. She was always singing, made-up tunes she hummed softly to herself, and her hair was pale, almost white, the color of buttermilk. For months after she died he had woken in the night, thinking he heard her small voice, singing like the wind in the pines.
“You say you’ve had this all your life?” he asked the woman gravely, releasing her hand.
“Oh, always,” she said. “The doctors tell me it’s not serious. Just annoying.”
“Well, I think you’ll be fine,