The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [99]
“Let’s go to my place,” Paul shouted, as the train bore down. “No one’s home.” He imagined them smoking pot on his mother’s new chintz sofa, and he laughed out loud. Then the train was rushing between them; there was the roar and silence, roar and silence, of the passing cars. He glimpsed Duke in flashes, like photographs hanging in his father’s darkroom, all those moments from his father’s life like glimpses from a train. Trapped and caught. Rush and silence. Like this.
So they walked back to Duke’s house and got on their bicycles, crossing over Nicholasville Road and meandering through the neighborhoods to Paul’s.
The house was locked, the key hidden under the loose flagstone by the rhododendron. Inside the air was warm, faintly stale. While Duke called home to say he’d be late, Paul opened a window, and the breeze lifted the curtains his mother had made. Before she’d started working, she’d redecorated the whole house every year. He remembered her bent over the sewing machine, swearing when the lining snagged and bunched. These curtains had a creamy background with country scenes in dark blue that matched the dark-striped wallpaper. Paul remembered sitting at the table staring at them, as if the figures might suddenly start to move, might step out of their houses and hang up their clothes and wave goodbye.
Duke hung up and looked around. Then he whistled. “Man,” he said. “You’re rich.’ He sat at the dining room table and spread out a thin rectangular paper. Paul watched, fascinated, as Duke arranged a line of ragged weed, then rolled a thin white tube.
“Not in here,” Paul said, uneasy at the last minute. They went outside and sat on the back steps, and the joint flared orange on the tip and moved back and forth between them. Paul felt nothing at first. It began to sprinkle, then stopped, and after a while—he wasn’t sure how long—he realized that he had been staring at a drop of water on the pavement, watching it spread slowly and merge with another drop and then spill off the edge into the grass. Duke was laughing hard.
“Man, you should see yourself,” he said. “Are you ever stoned!”
“Leave me alone, you asshole,” Paul said, and then he started laughing too.
They went inside at some point, though not before the rain had started again, leaving them soaked and suddenly chilled. His mother had left a casserole on the stove but Paul ignored it. Instead, he opened a jar of pickles and another of peanut butter, and then Duke ordered a pizza and Paul got out his guitar and they went into the living room, where the piano was, to jam. Paul sat on the edge of the raised hearth and strummed a few chords, and then his fingers started moving in the familiar patterns of the Segovia pieces he’d played the night before: “Estudio” and “Estudio Sin Luz.” The titles made him think of his father, tall and silent, bending over the enlarger in the darkroom. The songs felt like light and shadow, one set against the other, and now the notes had been woven into his own life, into the silence in the house and the vacation on the beach and the high-windowed classrooms of his school. Paul played, and he felt himself being lifted up, the waves riding in and he was on them, he was making the music and then he was the music and it was carrying him up and up, rising to a crest.
When he finished there was silence for a minute, before Duke said, Damn, that was good! He ran a scale on the piano and launched into his piece from the recital, Grieg’s March of the Trolls, with its energy and dark joy. Duke played and then Paul did and they didn’t hear the doorbell or the knocking; suddenly the pizza delivery boy was standing in the open door. It was dusk by then; a darkening wind surged into the house. They ripped open the boxes and ate furiously, quickly and without tasting, burning their tongues. Paul felt the food settling in him, holding him down like a stone. He looked up through the French doors to the bleak