The Memory Keeper's Daughter (22 page)

"But he's only thirteen."

"Yes, and he loves music. He says he's most alive when he's playing the guitar."

"But-it's such an unpredictable life. Can he make a living?"

Norah's face was very serious. She shook her head. "I don't know. But what's that old saying? Do what you love, and the money will follow. Don't shut the door on his dream."

"I won't," David said. "But I worry. I want him to be secure in life. And Juilliard is a long shot, no matter how good he is. I don't want Paul to get hurt."

Norah opened her mouth to speak, but the auditorium grew quiet as a young woman in a dark red dress came on with her violin, and they turned their attention to the stage.

David watched the young woman and all those who followed, but it was Paul's music that was with him still. When the performances were over, he and Norah made their way to the lobby, stopping to shake hands every few feet, hearing praise for their son. When they finally reached Paul, Norah pushed through the crowd and hugged him, and Paul, embarrassed, patted her on the back. David caught his eye and grinned, and Paul, to his surprise, grinned back. An ordinary moment: again David let himself believe that things would be all right. But seconds later Paul seemed to catch himself. He pulled away from Norah, stepping back.

"You were great," David said. He hugged Paul, noting the tension in his shoulders, the way he was holding himself: stiff, aloof. "You were fantastic, son."

"Thanks. I was kind of nervous."

"You didn't seem nervous."

"Not at all," Norah said. "You had wonderful stage presence."

Paul shook his hands at his sides, loosely, as if to release leftover energy.

"Mark Miller invited me to play with him at the arts festival. Isn't that the best?"

Mark Miller was David's guitar instructor, with a growing reputation. David felt another surge of pleasure.

"Yes, it is the best," Norah said, laughing. "That's absolutely the best, indeed."

She looked up and caught Paul's pained expression.

"What?" she asked. "What is it?"

Paul shifted, shoving his hands in his pockets, and glanced around the crowded lobby. "It's just-I don't know-you sound kind of ridiculous, Mom. I mean, you're not exactly a teenager, okay?"

Norah flushed. David watched her grow still with hurt, and his own heart ached. She didn't know the source of Paul's anger, or his own. She did not know that her discarded clothes fluttered in a wind that he himself had set in motion so many years ago.

"That's no way to talk to your mother," he said, taking on Paul's anger. "I want you to apologize right now."

Paul shrugged. "Right. Sure. Okay. Sorry."

"Like you mean it."

"David"-Norah's hand was on his arm now^"let's not make a federal case out of this. Please. Everyone is just a little excited, that's all. Let's go home and celebrate. I was thinking I'd invite some people over. Bree said she'd come, and the Marshalls-wasn't Lizzie good on the flute? And maybe Duke's parents. What do you think, Paul? I don't know them very well, but maybe they'd like to come over too?"

"No," Paul said. He was distant now, looking past Norah at the crowded foyer.

"Really? You don't want to invite Duke's family?"

"I don't want to invite anyone," Paul said. "I just want to go home."

For a moment they stood, an island of silence in the midst of the buzzing room.

"All right then," David said at last, "let's go home."

The house was dark when they got there, and Paul went straight upstairs. They heard his footsteps moving to the bathroom and back again; they heard his door shutting softly, the turn of the lock.

"I don't understand," Norah said. She had slipped off her shoes and she looked very small to him, very vulnerable, standing in her stocking feet in the middle of the kitchen. "He was, so good onstage. He seemed so happy-and then what happened? I don't understand." She sighed. "Teenagers. I'd better go talk to him."

"No," he said. "Let me."

He climbed the stairs without turning on the light, and when he reached Paul's door he paused for a long moment in the darkness, remembering how his son's hands had moved with such delicate precision over the strings, filling the wide auditorium with music. He had done the wrong thing all those years ago; he had made a mistake when he handed his daughter to Caroline Gill. He'd made a choice, and so he stood here, on this night, in the darkness outside Paul's room. He knocked on the door, but Paul didn't answer. He knocked again, and when there was still no answer, David went to the bookcase and found the thin nail he kept there and slid it into the hole in the doorknob. There was a soft click, and when he turned the knob the door swung open. It did not surprise him to see that the room was empty. When he turned on the light, a breeze caught the pale white curtain and lifted it to the ceiling.

"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. You don't even give a damn about that Howard guy."

So he did know.

"I give a damn," David said. "But things are complicated, Paul. I'm not going to talk about this with you, now or ever. There's a lot you don't understand."

Paul didn't speak. David stopped at a traffic signal. There were no other cars around and they sat in silence, waiting for the light to change.

"Let's stay focused here," David said at last. "You don't need to worry about your mother and me. That's not your job. Your job is to find your way in the world. To use all your many gifts. And it can't all be for yourself. You have to give something back. That's why I do that clinic work."

"I love music," Paul said softly. "When I play, I feel like I'm doing that-giving something back."

"And you are. You are. But Paul, what if you have it in you to discover, say, another element in the universe? What if you could discover the cure for some rare and awful disease?"

"Your dreams," Paul said. "Yours, not mine."

David was silent, realizing that once, indeed, those had been exactly his dreams. He'd set out to fix the world, to change it and shape it, and instead he was driving in the flooding moonlight with his nearly grown son, and every aspect of his life seemed beyond his grasp.

"Yes," he said. "Those were my dreams."

"What if I could be the next Segovia?" Paul asked. "Think of it, Dad. What if I have it in me to do that, and I don't try?"

David didn't answer. He'd reached their street again, and this time he turned toward home. They pulled into the driveway, bouncing a little over the uneven edge where it met the street, and stopped in front of the detached garage. David turned off the car, and for a few seconds they sat in silence.

"It's not true that I don't care," David said. "Come on. I want to show you something."

He led Paul out into the moonlight and up the exterior stairs to the darkroom above the garage. Paul stood by the closed door, his arms folded, radiating impatience, while David set up the developing process, pouring out the chemicals and sliding the negative into the enlarger. Then he called Paul over.

"Look at this," he said. "What do you think it is?"

After a moment's hesitation, Paul crossed the room and looked. "A tree?" he said. "It looks like a silhouette of a tree."

"Good," David said. "Now look again. I took this during surgery, Paul. I stood up on the balcony of the operating theater with a telephoto lens. Can you see what else it is?"

"I don't know… is it a heart?"

"A heart, yes. Isn't that amazing? I'm doing a whole perception series, images of the body that look like something else. Sometimes I think the entire world is contained within each living person. That mystery, and the mystery of perception-I care about that. So I understand what you mean about music."

David sent concentrated light through the enlarger, then slid the paper into the developer. He was deeply aware of Paul standing next to him in the darkness and the silence.

"Photography is all about secrets," David said, after a few minutes, lifting the photo with a pair of tongs and slipping it into the fixer. "The secrets we all have and will never tell."

"That's not what music is like," Paul said, and David heard the rejection in his son's voice. He looked up, but it was impossible to read Paul's expression in the soft red light. "Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connected to everything else."

Then he turned and walked out of the darkroom.

"Paul!" David called, but his son was already clattering angrily down the exterior steps. David went out to the window, watching him run through the moonlight and up the back stairs and disappear inside. Moments later a light went on in his room, and the precise notes of Segovia drifted clearly and delicately through the air.

David, running oyer their conversation in his mind, considered going after him. He'd wanted to connect with Paul, to have a moment when they understood each other, but his good intentions had spiraled into argument and distance. After a moment, he turned and went back to the darkroom. The soft red light was very soothing. He considered what he'd said to Paul-that the world was made of hidden things, of secrets; built of bones that never saw the light. It was true that he'd once sought unity, as if the underlying correspondences between tulips and lungs, veins and trees, flesh and earth, might reveal a pattern he could understand. But they had not. In a few minutes he would go inside and get a drink of water. He would walk upstairs and find Norah already asleep, and he would stand watching her-this mystery, a person he would never really know, curled around her secrets.

David went to the mini refrigerator where he kept his chemicals and film. The envelope was tucked far in the back, behind several bottles. It was full of twenty dollar bills, new and crisp and cold. He counted out ten, then twenty, and put the envelope away, behind the bottles. The bills sat neatly on the counter.

Usually he mailed the money, wrapped in a sheet of blank paper, but tonight, Paul's anger lingering in the room, his music floating on the air, David sat down and wrote a letter. He wrote swiftly, letting the words pour out, all his regrets about the past, all his hopes for Phoebe. Who was she, this child of his flesh, the girl he had given away? He had not expected that she would live this long, or that she would have the sort of life Caroline wrote him about. He thought of his son, sitting all alone on the stage, and of the loneliness Paul carried with him everywhere. Was it the same for Phoebe? What would it have meant to them to grow up together, like Norah and Bree, different in every way yet intimately connected too? What would it have meant to David if June had not died? I would lifye very much to meet Phoebe, he wrote. I would like her to know her brother, and for him to know her. Then he folded the letter around the money without rereading it, put it all in an envelope, and addressed it. Sealed it, stamped it. He would mail it tomorrow.