The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [87]
“I think I’ll go inside,” Norah said faintly.
“Norah gets bored,” David said.
“Who can blame her?” Howard said, and his hand pressed low on her belly, hard and swift, like the beat of a wing. Then he slid it from her pocket. “Come tomorrow morning if you want,” he said. “I’m making some drawings with the camera obscura.”
Norah nodded without speaking, imagining the single shaft of light piercing through darkness, casting marvelous images on the wall.
He left a few minutes later, disappearing almost at once into the darkness.
“I like that guy,” David said later, when they were inside. The kitchen was immaculate now, all evidence of her dreamy afternoon hidden away.
Norah was standing at the window looking out at the dark beach, listening to the waves, both hands sunk deeply in the pockets of her dress.
“Yes,” she agreed. “So do I.”
The next morning, David and Paul rose before sunrise to drive up the coast and catch the fishing boat. Norah lay there in the dark while they got ready, the clean cotton sheet soft against her skin, listening to them bump around awkwardly in the living room, trying not to make any noise. Footsteps, then, and the roar of the car starting, then fading into silence, the sound of waves. She lay there, languid, as a line of light formed where sky and ocean met. Then she showered and got dressed and made herself a cup of coffee. She ate half a grapefruit, washed her dishes and put them neatly away, and walked out the door. She was wearing shorts and a turquoise blouse patterned with flamingos. Her white sneakers were tied together and swinging from her hand. She had washed her hair and the ocean wind was blowing it dry, tangling it around her face.
Howard’s cottage, a mile down the beach, was nearly identical to her own. He was sitting on the porch, bent over a darkly finished wooden box. He was wearing white shorts and an orange plaid madras shirt, unbuttoned. His feet, like hers, were bare. He stood up as she drew near.
“Want some coffee?” he called. “I’ve been watching you walk down the beach.”
“No, thanks,” she said.
“You sure? It’s Irish coffee. With a little jolt, if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe in a minute.” She climbed the steps and ran her hand over the polished mahogany box. “Is this the camera obscura?”
“It is,” he said. “Come. Take a look.”
She sat down on the chair, still warm from his flesh, and looked through the aperture. The world was there, the long stretch of beach and the cluster of rocks, and a sail moving slowly in the horizon. Wind lifted in the piney casuarina trees, everything tiny and rendered in such sharp detail, framed and contained, yet alive, not static. Norah looked up then, blinking, and found that the world had been transformed as well: the flowers, so sharply drawn against the sand, the chair with its bright stripes, and the couple walking at the edge of the water. Vivid, startling, so much more than she’d realized.
“Oh,” she said, looking back into the box. “It’s astonishing. The world is so precise, so rich. I can even see the wind moving in the trees.”
Howard laughed. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I knew you’d like it.”
She thought of Paul as an infant, his mouth rounded in a perfect O as he lay in his crib staring up at some ordinary amazement. She bent her head again to view the world contained, then looked up to see it transformed. Released from its surrounding frame of darkness, even the light was shimmering, alive. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “I almost can’t stand how beautiful it is.”
“I know,” Howard said. “Go. Be in it. Let me draw you.”
She rose and walked out into the hot sand, the glare. She turned and stood before Howard, his head bent over the aperture, watching his hand move across the sketch pad. Her hair kindled—already the sun was a hot flat hand—and she remembered posing the day before, and the day before that. How many times had she stood just this way, the subject and an object too, posed to evoke or to preserve what really did not exist, her true thoughts locked away?
So she stood