The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [53]
“Let’s move away from here,” he said again, at last. “Let me take your picture.”
She nodded, but when he reached the safe center of the bridge and turned, Norah was still near the edge, facing him, arms folded, smiling.
“Take it right here,” she said. “Make it look like I’m walking on air.”
David squatted, fiddling with the camera dials, heat radiating up from the bare golden rocks. Paul squirmed against him and started to fuss. David would remember all this—which went unseen and unrecorded—when the image rose up later in the developing fluid, taking slow shape. He framed Norah in the viewfinder, wind moving in her hair, her skin tan and healthy, wondering at all she kept from him.
The spring air was warm, softly fragrant. They hiked back down, passing cave entrances and sprays of purple rhododendron and mountain laurel. Norah led them off the main path and through the trees, following a creek, until they emerged in a sunstruck place she remembered for its wild strawberries. Wind moved lightly in the long grass, and the dark green leaves of the strawberry plants shimmered low against the earth. The air was full of sweetness, the hum of insects, heat.
They spread out their picnic: cheese and crackers and clusters of grapes. David sat down on the blanket, cradling Paul’s head against his chest as he undid the baby carrier, thinking idly of his own father, stocky and strong, with skilled blunt fingers that covered David’s hands as he taught him to heft an ax or milk the cow or pound a nail through the cedar shingles. His father, who smelled of sweat and resin and the dark hidden earth of the mines where he worked in the winter. Even when David was a teenager, boarding in town all week so he could go to high school, he had loved walking home on the weekend and finding his father there, smoking his pipe on the porch.
Doo, Paul said. Free, he immediately pulled off one shoe. He studied it intently, then dropped it almost at once and crawled off toward the grassy world beyond the blanket. David watched him yank a fistful of weeds and put them in his mouth, a look of surprise flashing across his small features at the texture. He wished, suddenly, fiercely, that his parents were alive to meet his son.
“Awful stuff, isn’t it?” he said softly, wiping grassy drool from Paul’s chin. Norah moved beside him, quietly, efficiently, taking out silverware and napkins. He kept his face turned; he didn’t want her to see him so stirred by emotion. He took a geode from his pocket and Paul grasped it in both hands, turning it over.
“Should he have that in his mouth?” Norah asked, settling down beside him, so close he could feel her warmth, her scent of sweat and soap filling the air.
“Probably not,” he said, retrieving the stone and giving Paul a cracker instead. The geode was warm and damp. He gave it a sharp crack on the rock, splitting it open to reveal its crystalline purple heart.
“So beautiful,” Norah murmured, turning it in her hand.
“Ancient seas,” David said. “The water got trapped inside and crystallized, over centuries.”
They ate lazily, then picked ripe strawberries, sun-warmed and tender. Paul ate them by fistfuls, juice running down his wrists. Two hawks circled lazily in the deep blue sky. Didi, Paul said, lifting a chubby arm to point. Later, when he fell asleep, Norah settled him on a blanket in the grassy shade.
“This is nice,” Norah observed, settling with her back against a boulder. “Just the three of us, sitting in the sun.”
Her feet were bare and he took them in his hands, massaging them, delicate bones hidden beneath the flesh.
“Oh,