The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [66]
Norah stood still with her hand outstretched, as frozen in time as any of David’s photographs, trying to take in what had happened. A piece of the tailpipe had been pulled from the car. Seeing this, she understood: the gasoline fumes must have gathered in the vacuum cleaner’s still-hot engine, causing it to explode. Norah thought of Paul, allergic to bees, a boy with a voice like a flute, who might have been in its path if he’d been home.
As she watched, a wasp drifted out of the smoky tailpipe and flew off.
Somehow, this was too much for Norah. Her hard work, her ingenuity, and now, despite everything, the wasps were going to escape. She crossed the lawn. With one swift, unhesitating motion, she opened the Electrolux, reached in through the bloom of smoke to pull out the paper bag full of dust and insects, threw it on the ground, and began to stomp on it, a wild dance. The paper bag spilt along one edge and a wasp slipped out; her foot came down on it. It was Paul she was fighting for, but also for some understanding of herself. You’re afraid of change, Bree had told her. Why can’t you just be? But be what? Norah had wondered all day. Be what? She had known once: she had been a daughter and a student and a long distance-operator, roles she had handled with ease and assurance. Then she had been a fiancée, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.
Even after it was clear that all the wasps inside the bag must be dead, Norah kept dancing on the pulpy mess, wild and intent. Something was happening, something had changed, in the world and in her heart. That night, while the ROTC building on campus burned to the ground, bright flames flowering into the warm spring night, Norah would dream of wasps and bees, large dreamy bumblebees floating through tall grasses. The next day she would replace the vacuum cleaner without ever mentioning the incident to David. She would cancel the tuxedo for Kay’s fund-raiser; she would accept that job. Glamour, yes, and adventure, and a life of her own.
All this would happen, but for the moment she did not consider anything but the movement of her feet and the bag slowly turning to a dirty pulp of wings and stingers. In the distance, the crowd of protesters roared, and the swelling sound traveled through the bright spring air to where she stood. Blood beat in her temples. What was happening there was happening here as well, in the quiet of her own backyard, in the secret spaces of her heart: an explosion, some way in which life could never be the same.
A single wasp buzzed near the fiery azaleas and moved angrily away. Norah stepped off the soggy paper sack. Dazed, cold sober, she walked across the lawn, fingering her keys. She got in the car, as if it were any other day, and drove off to get her son.
II
DAD? DADDY?”
At the sound of Paul’s voice, his quick light steps on the garage stairs, David looked up from the exposed sheet of paper he had just slipped into the developer.
“Hang on!” he called out. “Just a second, Paul.” But even as he spoke the door burst open, spilling light into the room.
“Damn it!” David watched the paper darken rapidly, the image lost in the sudden burst of light. “Damn it, Paul, haven’t I told you a million zillion trillion times not to come in when the red light is on?”
“Sorry. I’m sorry, Dad.”
David took a deep breath, chastened. Paul was only six, and standing in the doorway he looked very small. “It’s okay, Paul. Come on in. I