The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [68]
“It’s not about the money,” she said, shaking her head, and stepped outside.
He put the platter away and went upstairs to shave. Paul followed him in and sat on the edge of the tub, talking a mile a minute and kicking his heels against the porcelain. He loved Jason’s grandfather’s farm, he had helped milk a cow there, and Jason’s grandfather had let him drink some milk, still warm, tasting of grass.
David lathered on the soap with a soft brush, taking pleasure in listening. The razor blade slid in smooth clean strokes against his skin, sending quivering motes of light against the ceiling. For a moment the whole world seemed caught, suspended: the soft spring air and the scent of soap and the excited voice of his son.
“I used to milk cows,” David said. He dried his face and reached for his shirt. “I used to be able to squirt a stream of milk straight into the cat’s mouth.”
“That’s what Jason’s pawpaw did! I like Jason. I wish he was my brother.”
David, putting on his tie, watched Paul’s reflection in the mirror. In the silence that was not quite silence—the sink faucet dripping, the clock ticking softly, the whisper of cloth against cloth—his thoughts traveled to his daughter. Every few months, shuffling through the office mail, he came across Caroline’s loopy handwriting. Though the first few letters had come from Cleveland, now each envelope bore a different postmark. Sometimes Caroline enclosed a new post office box number—always in different places, vast impersonal cities—and whenever she did this David sent money. They had never known each other well, yet her letters to him had grown increasingly intimate over the years. The most recent ones might have been torn from her diary, beginning Dear David or simply David, her thoughts pouring forth in a rush. Sometimes he tried to throw the letters away unopened, but he always ended up fishing them from the trash and reading them quickly. He kept them locked in the filing cabinet in the darkroom so he would always know where they were. So Norah would never find them.
Once, years ago, when the letters first began to arrive, David had made the eight-hour drive to Cleveland. He’d walked through the city for three days, studying phone books, inquiring at every hospital. In the main post office he’d touched the little brass door numbered 621 with his fingertips, but the postmaster would not give him the owner’s name or address. I’ll stand here and wait then, David said, and the man shrugged. Go ahead, he said. Better bring some food, though. Weeks can pass before some of these mailboxes get opened.
In the end, he’d given up and come home, allowing the days to pass, one by one, as Phoebe grew up without him. Each time he sent money, he enclosed a note asking Caroline to tell him where she lived, but he did not press her, or hire a private investigator, as he sometimes imagined doing. It would have to come from her, he felt, the desire to be found. He believed he wanted to find her. He believed that once he did—once he could fix things—he would be able to tell Norah the truth.
He believed all this, and he got up every morning and walked to the hospital. He performed surgeries and examined X-rays and came home and mowed the lawn and played with Paul; his life was full. Yet even so, every few months, for no predictable reason, he woke from dreams of Caroline Gill staring at him from the clinic doorway or across the courtyard at the church. Woke, trembling, and got dressed and went down to the office or out to the darkroom, where he worked on his articles or slid his photographs into their chemical baths, watching images emerge where nothing had been.
“Dad, you forgot to look up the fossils,” Paul said. “You promised.”
“That’s right,” David said, pulling himself back to the present, adjusting the knot in his tie. “That’s right, son. I did.”
They went downstairs together to the den and spread the