The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [73]
His hands were shaking. He forced himself to take several deep breaths, then took the negatives down and slipped Paul’s X-rays beneath the clips. His son’s small bones, solid yet delicate, stood out with ghostly clarity. David traced the light-filled image with his fingertips. So beautiful, the bones of his small son, opaque yet appearing here as if they were filled with light, translucent images floating in the darkness of his office, as strong and as delicate as the intertwined branches of a tree.
The damage was simple enough: clear, straightforward fractures of the ulna and the radius. These bones ran parallel; the greatest danger was that, in healing, the two might fuse together.
He flipped on the overhead light and started back down the hall, thinking of the beautiful hidden world inside the body. Years ago, in a shoe store in Morgantown, while his father tried on work boots and frowned over the price tag, David had stood on a machine that X-rayed his feet, turning his ordinary toes into something ghostly, mysterious. Rapt, he’d studied the wands and bulbs of shadowy light that were his toes, his heels.
It was, though he would not realize it for years, a defining moment. That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him. In the weeks that followed, watching deer run and birds lift off, leaves fluttering and rabbits bursting suddenly from the undergrowth, David stared hard, seeking to glimpse their hidden structures. And June—sitting on the porch steps, calmly shelling peas or shucking corn, her lips parted with concentration—he had stared at her too. For she was like him yet not like him, and what separated them was a great mystery.
His sister, this girl who loved wind, who laughed at the sun on her face and was not afraid of snakes. She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love—nothing, now, but bones.
And his daughter, six years old, walked in the world, but he did not know her.
When he got back, Norah was holding Paul in her lap, though he was almost too big for such comfort, his head resting awkwardly on her shoulder. His arm was trembling with minor convulsions from the trauma.
“Is it broken?” she asked right away.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” David said. “Come and take a look.”
He slipped the X-rays onto the light table and pointed out the darkened lines of fracture.
Skeletons in the closet, people said, and bone dry, and I have a bone to pick with you. But bones were alive; they grew and mended themselves; they could knit back together what had been torn apart.
“I was so careful about the bees,” Norah said, helping him move Paul back to the examination table. “The wasps, I mean. I got rid of the wasps, and now this.”
“It was an accident,” David said.
“I know,” she said, near tears. “That’s the whole problem.”
David didn’t answer. He had taken out the materials for the cast, and now he concentrated on applying the plaster. It had been a long time since he’d done this—usually he set the bone and left the rest to the nurse—and he found it comforting. Paul’s arm was small and the cast grew steadily, white as a bleached shell, as bright and seductive as a sheet of paper. In a few days it would be turning a dull gray, covered with bright childhood graffiti.
“Three months,” David said. “Three months, and you’ll have the cast off.”
“That’s almost the whole summer,” Norah said.
“What about Little League?” Paul asked. “What about swimming?”
“No baseball,” David said. “And no swimming. I’m sorry.”
“But Jason and I are supposed to play Little League.”
“I’m sorry,” David said, as Paul dissolved into tears
“You said nothing would happen,” Norah said, “and now he has a broken arm. Just like that. It