The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [94]
“He’s gone,” he told Norah. She was still in the kitchen, standing with her arms folded, waiting for the teakettle to boil.
“Gone?”
“Out the window. Down the tree, most likely.”
She pressed her hands to her face.
“Any idea where he went?”
She shook her head. The kettle started to whistle and she didn’t respond right away, and the thin persistent wailing filled the room.
“I don’t know. With Duke, maybe.”
David crossed the room and pulled the kettle from the burner.
“I’m sure he’s okay,” he said.
Norah nodded, then shook her head.
“No,” she said. “That’s the thing. I really don’t think he is.”
She picked up the phone. Duke’s mother gave Norah the address of a post show party, and Norah reached for her keys.
“No,” David said, “I’ll go. I don’t think he wants to talk to you right now.”
“Or to you,” she snapped.
But he saw her understand, even as she spoke. In that moment something was stripped away. It all stood between them then, her long hours away from their cottage, the lies and the excuses and the clothes on the beach. His lies too. She nodded once, slowly, and he was afraid of what she might say or do, of how the world might be forever changed. He wanted, more than anything, to fix this moment in place, to keep the world from moving forward.
“I blame myself,” he said. “For everything.”
He took the keys and went out into the soft spring night. The moon was full, the color of rich cream, so beautiful and round and low on the horizon. David kept glancing at it as he drove through the silent neighborhood, along streets solid and prosperous, the sort of place he’d never even imagined as a child. This is what he knew that Paul didn’t: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He’d had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.
He saw Paul a block before the party, walking down the sidewalk with his hands shoved into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. There were cars parked all along the road, no place to pull over, so David slowed and tapped the horn. Paul looked up, and for a moment David was afraid he might run.
“Get in,” David said. And Paul did.
David started driving. They didn’t speak. The moon cast the world with a beautiful light, and David was aware of Paul sitting beside him, aware of his soft breathing and his hands lying still in his lap, aware that he was staring out the window at the silent lawns they passed.
“You were really good tonight. I was impressed.”
“Thanks.”
They drove two blocks in silence.
“So. Your mother says you want to go to Juilliard.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re good,” David said. “You’re good at so much, Paul. You’ll have a lot of choices in your life. A lot of directions you can go. You could be anything.”
“I like music,” Paul said. “It makes me feel alive. I guess I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“I understand it,” David said. “But there’s being alive, and there’s making a living.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“You can talk like this because you’ve never wanted for a thing,” David said. “That’s a luxury you don’t understand.”
They were close to home now, but David turned in the opposite direction. He wanted to stay with Paul in the car, driving through the moonlit world where this conversation, however strained and awkward, was possible.
“You and Mom,” Paul said, his words bursting out, as if he’d been holding them back a long time. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You live like you don’t care about anything. You don’t have any joy. You just get through the days, no matter what.