The Memory Keeper's Daughter (30 page)

He drank until the straw sputtered dry, water like a dirty river in his throat.

"My parents used to own this place," he said, when he finished. "In fact, I still do own it. I have the deed in a safe. Technically, you're trespassing."

She smiled at this and put her fork down carefully in the center of the plate. "You come here to claim it then? Technically?"

Her hair, her cheeks, caught the flickering light. She was so young, yet there was something fierce and strong about her too, something lonely but determined.

"No." He thought of his strange journey from an ordinary morning in Lexington-Paul taking forever in the bathroom and Norah frowning as she balanced the checkbook at the counter, coffee steaming-to the art show, and the river, and now here.

"Then why did you come?" she said, pushing the plate to the middle of the table. Her hands were rough, her fingernails broken. He was surprised that they could have made the delicate, complex paper art that filled the room.

"My name is David Henry McCallister." His real name, so long unspoken.

"I don't know any McCallisters," she said. "But I'm not from around here."

"How old are you?" he asked. "Fifteen?"

"Sixteen," she corrected. And then, primly, "Sixteen or twenty or forty, take your pick."

"Sixteen," he repeated. "I have a son older than you. Paul."

A son, he thought, and a daughter.

"Is that so?" she said, indifferent.

She picked up the fork again, and he watched her eating the eggs, taking such delicate bites and chewing them carefully, and with a sudden powerful rush he was living another moment in this same house, watching his sister June eat eggs in this same way. It was the year she died, and it was hard for her to sit up at the table, but she did; she had dinner with them every night, lamplight in her blond hair and her hands moving slowly, with deliberate grace.

"Why don't you untie me," he suggested softly, his voice hoarse with emotion. "I'm a doctor. Harmless."

"Right." She stood and carried her blue metal plate to the sink.

She was pregnant, he realized with shock, catching her profile as she turned to take the soap from the shelf. Not very far along, just four or five months, he guessed.

"Look, I really am a doctor. There's a card in my wallet. Take a look."

She didn't answer, just washed her plate and fork and dried her hands carefully on a towel. David thought how strange it was that he should be here, lying once again in this place where he'd been conceived and born and mostly raised, how strange that his own family should have disappeared so completely and that this girl, so young and tough and so clearly lost, should have tied him to the bed.

She crossed the room and pulled his wallet from his pocket. One by one she placed his things on the table: cash, credit cards, the miscellaneous notes and bits of paper.

"This says photographer," she said, reading his card in the wavering light.

"That's right," he said. "I'm that, too. Keep going."

"Okay," she said a moment later, holding up his ID. "So you're a doctor. So what? What difference does that make?"

Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail and stray wisps fell around her face; she pushed them back over her ear.

"It means I'm not going to hurt you, Rosemary. First, do no harm."

She gave him a quick, assessing glance. "You'd say that no matter what. Even if you meant me harm."

He studied her, the untidy hair, the clear dark eyes.

"There are some pictures," he said. "Somewhere here…" He shifted and felt the sharp edge of the envelope through the cloth of his shirt pocket. "Please. Take a look. These are pictures of my daughter. She's just about your age."

When she slipped her hand into his pocket, he felt the heat of her again and smelled her scent, natural but clean. What was sugary? he wondered, remembering his dream and the tray of cream puffs that had passed by at the opening of his show.

"What's her name?" Rosemary asked, studying first one photo, then the other.

"Phoebe."

"Phoebe. That's pretty. She's pretty. Is she named for her mother?"

"No," David said, remembering the night of her birth, Norah telling him just before she went under the names she wanted for her child. Caroline, listening, had heard this and had honored it. "She was named for a great-aunt. On her mother's side. Someone I didn't know."

"I was named after both my grandmothers," Rosemary said softly. Her dark hair fell across her pale cheek again and she brushed it back, her gloved finger lingering near her ear, and David imagined her sitting with her family around another lamplit table. He wanted to put his arm around her, take her home, protect her. "Rose on my father's side, Mary on my mother's."

"Does your family know where you are?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I can't go back," she said, both anguish and anger woven in her voice. "I can't ever go back. I won't."

She looked so young, sitting at the table, her hands closed in loose fists and her expression dark, worried. "Why not?" he asked.

She shook her head and tapped the photo of Phoebe. "You say she's my age?"

"Close, I'm guessing. She was born March sixth, 1964."

"I was born in February, 1966." Her hands trembled a little as she put the photos down. "My mom was planning a party for me: sweet sixteen. She's into all the pink frilly stuff."

David watched her swallow, brush her hair behind her ear again, gaze out the dark window. He wanted to comfort her somehow, just as he had so often wanted to comfort others-June, his mother, Norah-but now, as then, he couldn't. Stillness and motion: there was something here, something he needed to know, but his thoughts kept scattering. He felt caught, as fixed in time as any of his photographs, and the moment that held him was deep and painful. He had only wept once for June, standing with his mother on the hillside in the raw evening wind, holding the Bible in one hand as he recited the Lord's Prayer over the newly turned earth. He wept with his mother, who hated the wind from that day on, and then they hid their grief away and went on. That was the way of things, and they did not question it.

"Phoebe is my daughter," he said, astonished to hear himself speaking, yet compelled beyond reason to tell his story, this secret he'd kept for so many years. "But I haven't seen her since the day she was born." He hesitated, then forced himself to say it. "I gave her away. She has Down's syndrome, which means she's retarded. So I gave her away. I never told anyone."

Rosemary's glance was darting, shocked. "I see that as harm," she said.

"Yes," he said. "So do I."

They were silent for a long time. Everywhere David looked he was reminded of his family: the warmth of June's breath against his cheek, his mother singing as she folded laundry at the table, his father's stories echoing against these walls. Gone, all of them gone, and his daughter too. He struggled against grief from old habit, but tears slipped down his cheeks; he could not stop them. He wept for June, and he wept for the moment in the clinic when he handed Phoebe to Caroline Gill and watched her turn away. Rosemary sat at the table, grave and still. Once their eyes met and he held her gaze, a strangely intimate moment. He remembered Caroline watching him from the doorway as he slept, her face softened with love for him. He might have walked with her down the museum steps and back into her life, but he'd lost that moment too.

"I'm sorry," he said, trying to pull himself together. "I haven't been here for a long time."

She didn't answer and he wondered if he sounded crazy to her. He took a deep breath.

"When is your baby due?" he asked.

Her dark eyes widened in surprise. "Five months, I guess."

"You left him behind, didn't you?" David said softly. "Your boyfriend. Maybe he didn't want the baby."

She turned her head, but not before he saw her eyes fill.

"I'm sorry," he said at once. "I don't mean to pry."

She shook her head a little. "It's okay. No big deal."

"Where is he?" he asked, keeping his voice soft. "Where's home ?"

"Pennsylvania," she said, after a long pause. She took a deep breath, and David understood that his story, his grief, had made it possible for her to reveal her own. "Near Harrisburg. I used to have an aunt here in town," she went on. "My mother's sister, Sue Wallis. She's dead now. But when I was a little girl we came here, to this place. We used to wander all over these hills. This house was always empty. We used to come here and play, when we were kids. Those were the best times. This was the best place I could think of."

He nodded, remembering the rustling silence of the woods. Sue Wallis. An image stirred, a woman walking up the hill, carrying a peach pie beneath a towel.

"Untie me," he said, softly still.

She laughed bitterly, wiping her eyes. "Why?" she asked. "Why would I do that, with us alone up here and no one around? I'm not a total idiot."

She rose and gathered her scissors and a small stack of paper from the shelf above the stove. Shards of white flew as she cut. The wind moved, and the candle flames flickered in the drafts. Her face was set, resolute, focused and determined like Paul when he played music, setting himself against David's world and seeking another place. Her scissors flashed and a muscle worked in her jaw. It had not occurred to him before that she might harm him.

"Those paper things you make," he said. "They're beautiful."

"My Grandma Rose taught me. It's called scherenschnitte. She grew up in Switzerland, where I guess they make these all the time."

"She must be worried about you."

"She's dead. She died last year." She paused, concentrating on her cutting. "I like making these. It helps me remember her."

David nodded. "Do you start with an idea?" he asked.

"It's in the paper," she said. "I don't invent them so much as find them."

"You find them. Yes." He nodded. "I understand that. When I take pictures, that's how it is. They're already there, and I just discover them."

"That's right," Rosemary said, turning the paper. "That's exactly right."

"What are you going to do with me?" he asked.

She didn't speak, kept cutting.

"I need to piss," he said.

He had hoped to shock her into speaking, but it was also painfully true. She studied him for a moment. Then she put her scissors down, her paper, and disappeared without comment. He heard her moving outside, in the darkness. She came back with an empty peanut butter jar.

"Look," he said. "Rosemary. Please. Untie me."

She put the jar down and picked up the scissors again.

"How could you give her away?" she asked.

Light flashed on the blades of her scissors. David remembered the glint of the scalpel as he made the episiotomy, how he'd floated out of himself to watch the scene from above, how the events of that night had set his life in motion, one thing leading to another, doors opening where none had been and others closing, until he reached this particular moment, with a stranger seeking the intricate design hidden in her paper and waiting for him to answer, and there was nothing he could do and nowhere he might go.

"Is that what worries you?" he asked. "That you'll give your baby away ?"

"Never. I'll never do that," she said fiercely, her face set. So someone had done that to her, one way or another, and tossed her out like jetsam to sink or swim. To be sixteen and pregnant and alone, to sit at this table.

"I realized it was wrong," David said. "But by then it was too late."

"It's never too late."

"You're sixteen," he said. "Sometimes, trust me, it's too late."

Her expression tightened for an instant and she didn't answer, just kept cutting, and in the silence David started talking again, trying to explain at first about the snow and the shock and the scalpel flashing in the harsh light. How he had stood outside himself and watched himself moving in the world. How he had woken up every morning of his life for eighteen years thinking maybe today, maybe this was the day he would put things right. But Phoebe was gone and he couldn't find her, so how could he possibly tell Norah? The secret had worked its way through their marriage, an insidious vine, twisting; she drank too much and then she began to have affairs, that sleazy realtor at the beach and then others; he'd tried not to notice, to forgive her, for he knew that in some real sense the fault was his. Photo after photo, as if he could stop time or make an image powerful enough to obscure the moment when he turned and handed his daughter to Caroline Gill.

His voice, rising and falling. Once he began he couldn't stop, any more than he could stop rain, the stream running down the mountainside, or the fish, persistent and elusive as memory, flashing beneath the ice across the stream. Bodies in motion, he thought, that old scrap of high school physics. He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car or in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with no knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.

She cut and listened. Her silence made him free. He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop. At some point he began to weep again, and he could not stop that either. Rosemary made no comment whatsoever. He talked until the words slowed, ebbed, finally ceased.

Silence welled.

She did not speak. The scissors glinted; the half-cut paper slid from the table to the floor as she stood. He closed his eyes, fear rising, because he had seen anger in her eyes, because everything that happened had been his fault.

Her footsteps and then the metal, cold and bright as ice, slid against his skin.

The tension in his wrists released. He opened his eyes to see her stepping back, her eyes, bright and wary, fixed on his, her scissors glinting.

"All right," she said. "You're free."

AUL," SHE CALLED. HER HEELS WERE A SHARP STACCATO ONthe polished stairs and then she was standing in the doorway, slender and stylish in a navy suit with a narrow skirt and thickly padded shoulders. Through barely opened eyes, Paul saw what she was seeing: clothes scattered on the floor, a cascade of albums and sheet music, his old guitar propped in a corner. She shook her head and sighed. "Get up, Paul," she said. "Do it now."

"Sick," he mumbled, pulling the covers over his head, making his voice hoarse. Through the loose weave of the summer blanket he could still see her, hands on her hips. The early light caught in her hair, frosted yesterday, glinting with red and gold. He'd heard her on the phone with Bree, describing the little strands of hair wrapped up in foil and baked.

She'd been sauteing ground beef as she talked, her voice calm, her eyes red from crying, earlier. His father had disappeared, and for three days no one knew if he was dead or alive. Then last night his father had come home, walking through the door as if he'd never been gone, and their tense voices had traveled up the stairs for hours.

"Look," she said now, glancing at her watch. "I know you're not sick, anymore than I am. I'd like to sleep all day. God knows I'd like to. But I can't, and neither can you. So get yourself out of that bed and get dressed. I'll drop you at school."

"My throat's on fire," he insisted, making his voice as rough as possible.

She hesitated, closed her eyes, and sighed again, and he knew he'd won.

"If you stay home, you stay home," she warned. "There'll be no hanging out with that quartet of yours. And-listen to me-you have to clean up this pigsty. I'm serious, Paul. I have all I can deal with on my plate right now."

"Right," he croaked. "Yep. I will."

She stood a moment longer without speaking. "This is hard," she said at last. "It's hard for me too. I'd stay with you, Paul, but I promised to take Bree to the doctor."

He pushed up on his elbows then, alerted by her somber tone. "Is she okay?"

His mother nodded, but she was looking out the window and wouldn't meet his eyes. "I think so. But she's having some tests and she's a little worried. Which is natural. I promised her last week that I'd go. Before all this with your father."

"It's okay," Paul said, remembering to make his voice sound hoarse. "You should go with her. I'll be okay." He spoke with assurance, but part of him hoped she'd pay no attention, that she'd stay home instead.

"It shouldn't take long. I'll come straight back."

"Where's Dad?"

She shook her head. "I have no idea. Not here. But how unusual is that?"

Paul didn't answer, just lay back down and closed his eyes. Not very, he thought. Not unusual at all.

His mother put her hand on his cheek lightly, but he didn't move, and then she was gone, leaving a coolness on his face where her hand had rested. Downstairs, doors slammed; Bree's voice rose from the foyer. Over these last years they'd become very close, his mother and Bree, so close they'd even started to look alike, Bree with her hair streaked too, a briefcase swinging from her hand. She was still a very cool and together person, she was still the one who'd take a risk, the one who told him to follow his heart and apply to Juilliard like he wanted. Everyone liked Bree: her sense of adventure, her exuberance. She brought in a lot of business. She and his mother were complementary forces, he'd heard her say. And Paul saw that. Bree and his mother moved through their lives like point and counterpoint, one impossible without the other, one pulling always against the other. So, their voices, mingling, back and forth, and then his mother's unhappy laugh, the door slamming. He sat up, stretching. Free.

The house was quiet, the hot water heater ticking. Paul went downstairs and stood in the cool light of the refrigerator, eating macaroni and cheese from a Corningware dish with his fingers, studying the shelves. Not much. In the freezer he found six boxes of Girl Scout cookies, thin mints. He ate a handful, rinsing down the cool chocolate disks with milk drunk straight from the plastic jug. Another handful, then, the milk jug swinging from his hand, he walked back through the living room, where his father's blankets were piled neatly on the couch, to the den.

The girl was still there, sleeping. He slipped another cookie in his mouth, letting the mint and chocolate melt slowly, studying her. Last night the familiar angry voices of his parents had risen up to his room, and although they were arguing, the stone he had felt in his throat at the thought of his father lying dead somewhere, his father gone forever-immediately, that had dissolved. Paul got out of bed and started down the stairs, but on the landing he stopped, taking in the scene: his father in a white shirt that had gone unwashed for days, his dress pants stained everywhere with mud, limp and bedraggled, a full beard on his face and his hair barely combed; his mother in her peach satin robe and slippers, curved around her folded arms, her eyes narrowed, and this girl, this stranger, standing in the doorway in a black coat that was too big, clutching at the edges of the sleeves with her fingertips. His parents' voices mingling, rising. This girl had looked up, past the swirling anger. Her eyes had met his. He'd stared, taking her in: her paleness and her uncertain glance, her ears so delicately sculpted. Her eyes were such a clear brown, so tired. He had wanted to walk down the steps and cup her face in his hands.

"Three days," his mother was saying, "and then you come home like-my God, look at you, David-like this and with this girl. Pregnant, you say? And I'm supposed to take her in, no questions asked ?"

The girl flinched then and looked away, and Paul's eyes had fallen to her stomach, flat enough beneath the coat, except that she had rested one hand there protectively and he saw the slight swell beneath her sweater. He stood very still. The argument went on; it seemed to last a long time. Finally, his mother, silent and tight-lipped, had pulled sheets, blankets, pillows from the linen closet and thrown them down the stairs at his father, who had taken the girl very formally by the elbow and led her to the den.

Now she slept on the fold-out couch, her head turned to the side, one hand resting near her face. He studied her, the way her eyelids moved, the slow rise and fall of her chest. She was lying on her back; her belly rose up like a low wave. Paul's own flesh quickened, and he was afraid. He'd had sex with Lauren Lobeglio six times since March. She had hung around during quartet rehearsals for weeks, watching him, not speaking: a pretty, wasted, eerie chick. One afternoon she had stayed after the rest of the band left, and it was just the two of them in the silence of the garage, light moving through the leaves outside and making patterns of flickering shadow on the concrete floor. She was strange but sexy, with her long thick hair, her black eyes. He had sat in the old lawn chair, adjusting the strings on his guitar and wondering if he should go over to where she was standing by the wall of tools and kiss her.

But it was Lauren who crossed the room. She stood in front of him for a heartbeat, then slid onto his lap, her skirt hiking up, revealing slender white legs. This was what people said: that Lauren Lobeglio would do it if she liked you. He'd never really thought it was true, but there he was, slipping his hands beneath her T-shirt, her skin so warm, her breasts so soft beneath his hands.

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you. She hung around like before, except now the air was charged, and when they were alone he would cross the room and kiss her, sliding his hands up the smooth satin skin of her back.

The girl in the bed sighed, her lips working. Jailbait, his friends warned him about Lauren. Duke Madison especially, who had dropped out of school to marry his girlfriend the year before, who hardly played the piano anymore and had a haggard glancing-at-the-clock kind of look when he did. Get her pregnant and you're more than screwed.

Paul studied this girl, her paleness and long dark hair, her scattered freckles. Who was she? His father, methodical, predictable as a ticking clock, had simply disappeared. On the second day his mother called the police, who had remained noncommittal and jocular, until his father's briefcase was found in the cloakroom of the museum in Pittsburgh, his suitcase and camera in his hotel. Then they got serious. He'd been seen at the reception, arguing with a woman with dark hair. She turned out to be an art critic; her review of the show had been in the Pittsburgh papers, and it wasn't pretty.

Nothing personal, she had told the police.

Then last night a key had turned in the lock and his father had walked into the house with this pregnant girl he claimed to have just met, a girl whose presence he would not explain. She needs help, he said, tersely

There are plenty of ways to help, his mother had pointed out, talking about the girl as if she weren't standing in the foyer in her too-big coat. You give money. You take her to a place for unmarried mothers. You don't disappear for days on end without a word and then show up with a pregnant stranger. My God, David, don't you have any idea? We called the police! We thought you were dead.

Maybe I was, he said, the strangeness of his answer quelling his mother's protests, fixing Paul in his place on the stairs.

And now she slept, oblivious, and within her the baby grew in its dark sea. Paul reached out, touched her hair lightly, then let his hand fall. He had a sudden urge to get into the bed with her, to hold her. It wasn't like with Lauren somehow, it wasn't about sex; he just wanted to feel her near him, her skin and her warmth. He wanted to wake up next to her, to run his hand over the rising curve of her belly, to touch her face and hold her hand.

To find out what she knew about his father.

Her eyes blinked open, and for a moment she stared at him, unseeing. Then she sat up quickly, pushing her hands through her hair. She was wearing one of his old faded T-shirts, blue with the Kentucky Wildcats logo across the front, that he'd worn a couple of years ago while running track. Her arms were long and lean, and he caught a glimpse of her underarm, stubbled and tender, and of the smooth rising curve of her breast.

"What are you looking at?" She swung her feet to the floor.

He shook his head, unable to speak.

"You're Paul," she said. "Your father told me about you."

"He did?" he asked, hating the need in his voice. "What'd he say?"

She shrugged, pushing her hair behind her ears, and stood up. "Let's see. You're headstrong. You hate him. You're a genius on the guitar."

Paul felt the heat rising to his face. Usually, he thought his father didn't even see him, or saw only the ways he didn't measure up.

"I don't hate him," he said. "It's the other way around."

She leaned down to gather up the blankets, then sat with them in her arms, looking around.

"This is nice," she said. "Someday I'm going to have a place like this."

Paul gave a startled laugh. "You're pregnant," he said. It was his own fear in the room, the fear that rose up each time when, trembling, he crossed the garage to Lauren Lobeglia, drawn by the irresistible power of his desire.

"Right. So what? I'm pregnant. Not dead."

She spoke defiantly but she sounded scared, as scared as Paul sometimes felt himself, waking up in the middle of the night, dreaming of Lauren, all warmth and silk and her voice low in his ear, knowing he could never stop though they were heading for disaster.

"You might as well be," he said.

She looked up sharply, actual tears in her eyes, as if he'd slapped her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean anything."

She kept crying.

"What are you doing here anyway?" he demanded, angry at her tears, at her very presence. "I mean, who do you think you are to latch on to my father and show up here?"

"I don't think I'm anyone," she said, but his tone had startled her and she dried her tears, grew tougher and more distant. "And I didn't ask to come here. It was your father's idea."

"That doesn't make sense," Paul said. "Why would he do that?"

She shrugged. "How should I know? I was living in that old house where he grew up, and he said I couldn't stay there anymore. And it's his place, right? What could I say? In the morning we walked into town and he bought bus tickets and here we are. The bus was a drag. It took forever to make all the crazy connections."

She pulled her long hair back and yanked it into a ponytail, and Paul watched her, thinking how pretty her ears were, wondering if his father thought she was pretty too.

"What old house?" Paul asked, feeling something sharp and hot in his chest.

"Like I said. The one where he grew up. I was living there. I didn't have anywhere else to go," she added, glancing at the floor.

Paul felt something fill him then, some emotion he couldn't name. Envy, maybe, that this girl, this thin pale stranger with the beautiful ears, had been to a place that mattered to his father, a place he himself had never seen. I'll take you there someday, his father had promised, but years had passed and he had never mentioned it again. Yet Paul had never forgotten it, the way his father had sat down amid the wreckage of his darkroom, picking up the photos one by one, so carefully. My mother, Paul, your grandmother. She had a hard life. I had a sister, did you I{now that? Her name was June. She was good at singing, at music, just like you. He remembered to this day the way his father smelled that morning, clean, already dressed for the hospital, yet sitting on the floor of the darkroom, talking, like he had all the time in the world. Telling a story Paul had never heard.

"My father's a doctor," Paul said. "He just likes to help people."

She nodded and then looked at him straight on, her expression full of something-pity for him, that's what he read there, and the thin hot flare traveled to his fingertips.

"What?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Nothing. You're right. I needed help. That's all."

A strand of hair slipped from her ponytail and fell across her face, very dark with reddish highlights, and he remembered how soft it had been when he touched it as she slept, soft and warm, and he resisted an urge to reach over and brush it behind her ear.