The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [54]
“Stay awake,” he said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know. I was just remembering this little field by the sheep farm. When Bree and I were little we used to wait for our father there. We gathered huge bunches of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. The sun felt just like this—like an embrace. Our mother put the flowers in vases all over the house.”
“That’s nice too,” David said, releasing one of her feet and attending to the other. He ran his thumb, lightly, over the thin white scar the broken flashbulb had left. “I like thinking of you there.” Norah’s skin was soft. He remembered sunny days from his own childhood, before June got so sick, when the family had gone hunting for ginseng, a fragile plant hidden in the dusky light amid the trees. His parents had met on such a search. He had their wedding photo, and on the day of their own marriage Norah had presented it to him in a handsome oak frame. His mother, with clear skin and wavy hair, a narrow waist, a faint, knowing smile. His father, bearded, standing behind her, his cap in his hand. They had left the courthouse after the wedding and moved into the cabin his father had built on the mountainside overlooking their fields. “My parents loved being outside,” he added. “My mother planted flowers everywhere. There was a cluster of jack-in-the-pulpit by the stream up from our house.”
“I’m sorry I never met them. They must have been so proud of you.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. They were glad my life was easier.”
“Glad,” she agreed slowly, opening her eyes and glancing at Paul, who slept peacefully, dappled light falling on his face. “But maybe a little sorry too? I would be, if Paul grew up and moved away.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That’s true. They were proud and sorry both. They didn’t like the city. They only visited me once in Pittsburgh.” He remembered them sitting awkwardly in his single student room, his mother starting every time a train whistle sounded. June was dead by then, and as they sat sipping weak coffee at his rickety student table, he remembered thinking bitterly that they did not know what to do with themselves without June to care for. She had been the center of all their lives for so long. “They only stayed with me for one night. After my father died, my mother went to live with her sister in Michigan. She wouldn’t fly, and she never learned to drive. I only saw her once, after that.”
“That’s too sad,” Norah said, rubbing away a smear of dirt on her calf.
“Yes,” David said. “Too sad indeed.” He thought of June, the way her hair got so blond in the sun each summer, the scent of her skin—soap and warmth and something metallic, like a coin—filling the air when they squatted side by side, digging up the ground with sticks. He had loved her so much, her sweet laughter. And he had hated coming home to find her lying on a pallet on the porch on sunny days, his mother’s face drawn with concern as she sat beside her daughter’s limp form, singing softly, husking corn or shelling peas.
David looked at Paul, sleeping so deeply on the blanket with his head turned to the side, his long hair curling against his damp neck. His son, at least, he had sheltered from grief. Paul would not grow up, as David had, suffering the loss of his sister. He would not be forced to fend for himself because his sister couldn’t.
This thought, and the force of its bitterness, shocked David. He wanted to believe he’d done the right thing when he handed his daughter to Caroline Gill. Or at least that he’d had the right reasons. But perhaps he had not. Perhaps it was not so much Paul he’d been protecting on that snowy night as some lost version of himself.
“You look so far away,” Norah observed.
He shifted, moving closer to her, leaning against the boulder too.
“My parents had great dreams for me,” he said. “But they didn’t match my own dreams.”
“Sounds like me and my mother,” Norah said, hugging her knees. “She says she’s coming to visit next month. Did I tell you? She’s got a free flight.