The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [64]
David. How was it that he grew more mysterious to her as the years passed, as well as more familiar? He had left a pair of amber cuff links on the console beneath the photos. Norah picked these up and held them in her palm, listening to the clock tick softly in the living room. The stones warmed in her hand; she was comforted by their smoothness. She found rocks everywhere, clustered in David’s pockets, scattered on the dresser, tucked into envelopes in the desk. Sometimes she glimpsed David and Paul in the backyard, their heads bent together over some likely looking stone. Watching them, her heart always opened with a kind of wary gladness. Such moments were rare; David was so busy these days. Stop, Norah wanted to say. Take a minute. Spend some time. Your son is growing so fast.
Norah slipped the cuff links in her pocket and took her drink outside. She stood below the papery nest, watching the wasps circle it and disappear inside. Now and then one flew close to her, drawn to the sweet smell of gin. She sipped and watched. Her muscles, her very cells, were relaxing in a fluid chain reaction, as if she had swallowed the warmth of the day. She finished the drink, put the glass down on the driveway, and went to find her garden gloves and hat, stepping around Paul’s tricycle. He was already too big for it; she should pack it away with the other things: his baby clothes, his outgrown toys. David did not want more children, and now that Paul was in school she had given up arguing with him about it. It was hard to imagine going back to diapers and 2 A.M. feedings, though she often longed to hold another baby in her arms: like Angela this morning, the sweet warmth and weight of her. How lucky Kay was and didn’t even know it.
Norah pulled on her gloves and stepped back into the sun. She had no experience with wasps or bees, except for one sting on her toe when she was eight, which had hurt for an hour and healed. When Paul picked the dead bee off the floor and cried out in pain she’d felt no panic at all. Ice for the swelling, a long hug in the porch swing; all would be well. But the swelling and the redness had started in his hand and quickly spread. His face grew puffy, and she’d called for David with fear in her voice. He’d known right away what was happening, what shot to give. Within moments Paul began to breathe more easily. No harm done, David said. That was true, but it still made her sick with fear. What if David had not been home?
She watched the wasps for a few minutes, thinking of the protesters on the hill, the shimmering, unsteady world. She’d done what was expected of her, always. She had gone to college and taken a little job; she had married well. Yet since the birth of her children—Paul, careening down the slide with his arms outflung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence, arriving in dreams, standing on the unseen edge of every moment—Norah could no longer understand the world in the same way. Her loss had left her feeling helpless, and she fought that helplessness by filling up her days.
Now she studied the tools with purpose. She would deal with these insects herself.
The long-handled hoe was heavy in her hands. She lifted it slowly and took a bold swipe at the nest, the blade slicing easily through the papery skin. It thrilled her, the power of that initial strike. But as she pulled the hoe back, wasps, furious and determined, poured