The Memory Keeper's Daughter (9 page)

It was after eight o'clock. The world had softened at the edges. She went back to the kitchen and stood at the stove, picking at the dried pork. She ate one of the potatoes straight from the pan, smashing it into the drippings with her fork. The broccoli-cheese dish had curdled and was beginning to dry; Norah tasted that too. It burned her mouth, and she reached for her glass. Empty. She drank a glass of water, standing at the sink, and then another, holding on to the edge of the counter because the world was so unsteady. I'm drun't, she thought, surprised and mildly pleased with herself. She had never been drunk before, though Bree had once come home from a dance and thrown up all over the linoleum. Her punch had been spiked, she told their mother, but to Norah she had confessed it all: the bottle in a brown-paper bag and her friends gathered in the bushes, their breath making sharp little clouds in the night.

The telephone seemed a long way away. Walking, she felt strange, as if she were somehow floating, just outside herself. She held on to the doorjamb with one hand and dialed with the other, the receiver pressed between her shoulder and her ear. Bree answered on the first ring.

"I know it's you," she said. "Paul's fine. We read a book and had a bath and now he's sound asleep."

"Oh, good. Yes, wonderful," Norah said. She had intended to tell Bree about this shimmering world, but now it seemed too private somehow, a secret.

"How about you?" Bree was saying. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Norah said. "David's not here yet, but I'm fine."

She hung up fast, poured herself another glass of wine, and stepped onto the porch, where she lifted her face to the sky. A light mist hung in the air. Now the wine seemed to move through her like heat or light, spreading out through her limbs to her fingertips and toes. When she turned, her body once again seemed to float for an instant, as if she were sliding out of herself. She remembered their car, traveling over the icy roads as if airborne, swerving slightly before David got it under control. People were right; she couldn't remember the pain of labor, but she had never forgotten that feeling in the car of the world slipping, spinning, and her hands holding fast to the cold dashboard while David, methodical, stopped at every light.

Where was he, she wondered, sudden tears in her eyes, and why had she married him anyway? Why had he wanted her so much? Those whirlwind weeks after they met he'd been at her apartment every day, offering roses and dinners and drives in the country. Christmas Eve the doorbell rang and she went to answer it in her old robe, expecting Bree. Instead, she opened the door to find David, his face flushed with cold, brightly wrapped boxes in his arms. It was late, he said, he knew that, but would she come with him for a drive?

No, she said, and You're crazy! but all the time she was laughing at the wildness of it, laughing and stepping back and letting him in, this man on her steps holding his flowers and his gifts. She was amazed and pleased and a little astonished. There had been moments, watching others go off to sorority parties, or sitting on her stool in the windowless room of the telephone company while coworkers planned their weddings down to the last corsage and party mint, when Norah, so quiet and reserved, believed she would be single all her life. Yet here was David, handsome, a doctor, standing in the doorway of her apartment saying, Come on, please, there's something special I want you to see.

It had been a clear night, stars vivid in the sky. Norah sat on the wide vinyl front seat of David's old car. She was wearing a red wool dress and she felt beautiful, the air so crisp and David's hands on the wheel and the car traveling through the darkness, through the cold, traveling on smaller and smaller roads, into a landscape she did not recognize. He pulled to a stop beside an old flour mill. They stepped out of the car into the sound of rushing water. Black water caught the moonlight and poured over the rocks, turning the mill's great wheel. The building stood darkly against the darker sky, obscuring stars, and the air was filled with the rushing, spilling sounds of the water.

"Are you cold?" David asked, shouting over the stream, and Norah laughed, shivering, and said, No; no, she was not, she was fine.

"What about your hands?" he shouted, his voice ringing, cascading like the water. "You didn't bring any gloves."

"I'm fine," she shouted back, but he was already taking her hands in his, pressing them to his chest, warming them between his gloves and the dark flecked wool of his coat.

"It's beautiful here!" she called to him, and he laughed. Then he leaned down and kissed her, releasing her hands and letting his own slide inside her coat and up her back. Water rushed, echoing off the rocks.

"Norah," he shouted, his voice part of the night, rolling like the stream, the words clear and yet small amid the other sounds. "Norah! Will you marry me?"

She laughed, letting her head fall back, the night air pouring over her.

"Yes!" she shouted, pressing her palms against his coat again. "Yes, I will!"

He slid a ring on her finger, then: a thin white-gold band, exactly her size, its marquise diamond flanked by two tiny emeralds. To match her eyes, he said later, and the coat she'd worn when they met.

She was inside now, standing in the doorway of the dining room, turning this ring on her finger. Streamers drifted. One brushed her face; another had dipped into her wineglass. Norah watched, fascinated, as the stain spread slowly upward. It was, she noticed, almost exactly the same color as the napkins. Suzy Homemaker, indeed: she couldn't have found a closer match on purpose. Wine had splashed from her glass and spattered across the tablecloth too, staining the gold striped wrapping of her present to David. She picked this up and, on an impulse, tore the paper off. I'm really very drun't, she thought.

The camera was compact, a pleasing weight. Norah had debated for weeks about a suitable gift, until she'd seen this in the display Case at Sears. Black and flashing chrome, with complex dials and levers and numbers etched around the rings, the camera had resembled David's medical equipment. The salesman, young and eager, had plied her with technical information about apertures and f-stops and wide-angle lenses. The terms washed over her like so much water, but she liked the weight of the camera in her hands, its cool textures, and the way the world was so precisely framed when she held it to her eye.

Tentatively, now, she pushed the silver lever. Click and then snap, loud in the room, as the shutter released. She turned the little dial, advancing the film-she remembered the salesman using that phrase, advancing the film, his voice rising up for a moment out of the stream of noise in the store. She looked through the viewfinder, framing the ruined table again, then turned two different dials to find the focus. This time, when she snapped the shutter, light exploded across the wall. Blinking, she turned the camera over and studied the bulb, now blackened and bubbled. She replaced it, burning her fingers, but somehow distant from that pain.

She stood and glanced at the clock: 9:45 p.m.

The rain was soft, steady. David had walked to work, and she imagined him trudging wearily home down the dark streets. On an impulse she got her coat and the car keys-she would go to the hospital and surprise him.

The car was cold. She backed out of the driveway, fumbling for the heat, and by old habit turned in the wrong direction. Even after she realized her mistake, she kept driving on the same narrow rainy streets, back to their old house, where she'd decorated the nursery with such innocent hope, where she'd sat nursing Paul in the dark. She and David had agreed about the wisdom of moving away, but the truth was she could not bear the idea of selling this place. She still went there almost every day. Whatever life her daughter had known, whatever Norah had experienced of her daughter, had happened in that house.

Except for being dark, the house looked much the same: the wide front porch with its four white columns, the rough-cut limestone and single light burning. There was Mrs. Michaels next door, just a few yards away, moving in her kitchen, washing dishes and staring out into the night; there was Mr. Bennett in his easy chair, the curtains open, the television on. Norah could almost believe, walking up the steps, that she lived here still. But the door opened into rooms that were bare, empty, shocking in their smallness.

Walking through the cold house, Norah struggled to clear her head. The effects of the wine seemed very much stronger now, and she was having trouble connecting one moment to another. She held David's new camera in one hand. A fact, not a decision. There were fifteen pictures left and spare flashbulbs in her pocket. She took a picture of the chandelier, satisfied, when the bulb flashed, because now she would always have that image with her; she would never wake up in the middle of the night in twenty years and not be able to remember this detail, these graceful sickles of gold.

She walked from room to room, still drunk but charged with purpose, framing windows, light fixtures, the swirling grain of the floor. It seemed vitally important that she record every detail. At one point, in the living room, a spent and blistered bulb slipped from her hand and shattered; when she stepped back, glass pierced her heel. She studied her stocking feet for a moment, amused and impressed by her degree of drunkenness-she must have left her wet shoes by the front door, out of old habit. She wandered through the house twice more, documenting light switches, windows, the pipe where gas had once come up to the second floor. It was only on her way downstairs that she realized her foot was bleeding, leaving a splotchy trail: grim hearts, bloody little valentines. Norah was shocked and also strangely thrilled at the damage she had managed to inflict.

She found her shoes, went outside. Her heel throbbed as she slid into the car, the camera still dangling from her wrist.

Later, she would not remember much about the drive, only the dark narrow streets, the wind in the leaves, light flashing on the puddles, and water spraying off her tires. She would not remember the crash of metal against metal, but only the sudden startling sight of a trash can, glittering, flying up in front of the car. Wet with rain, it seemed suspended for a long moment before it began to fall. She remembered that it hit the hood and rolled up to shatter the windshield; she remembered the car, bouncing over the curb and coming to a gentle stop in the median, beneath a pin oak. She did not remember hitting the windshield, but it looked like a spiderweb, the intricate lines fanning out, delicate, beautiful, and precise. When she pressed her hand to her forehead, it came away lightly smeared with blood.

She did not get out of the car. The trash can was rolling in the street. Dark shapes-cats-lurked at the edges of the trash, scattered in an arc. Lights flashed on in the house to her right, and a man came out in his robe and slippers, hurrying down the sidewalk to her car.

"Are you all right?" he asked, leaning down to look in the window as she rolled it slowly open. The cool night air lapped at her face. "What happened out here? Are you all right? Your forehead's bleeding," he added, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket.

"It's nothing," Norah said, waving away his handkerchief, suspiciously wrinkled. She pressed her palm gently to her forehead again, wiping away another smear of blood. The camera, still dangling from her wrist, tapped against the steering wheel. She slipped it off and put it carefully beside her on the seat. "It's my anniversary," she informed the stranger. "My heel's bleeding, too."

"Do you need a doctor?" the man asked.

"My husband's a doctor," Norah said, noting the man's uncertain expression, aware that she had perhaps not made much sense a moment earlier. Was, perhaps, not making much sense now. "He's a doctor," she repeated firmly. "I'll go find him."

"I'm not sure you should be driving," the man said. "Why don't you leave the car here and let me call an ambulance?"

At his kindness her eyes filled with tears, but then she imagined it, the lights and sirens and gentle hands, how David would come hurrying and find her in the ER, disheveled and bloody and somewhat drunk: a scandal and a disgrace.

"No," she said, becoming very careful of her words. "I'm fine, really. A cat ran out and startled me. But truly, I'm fine. I'll just go home now, and my husband will attend to this cut. It's really nothing."

The man hesitated for a long moment, the streetlight shining silver in his hair, before he shrugged and nodded once and stepped back onto the curb. Norah drove carefully, slowly, using her turn signals properly on the empty street. In the rearview mirror she saw him, arms folded, watching her until she turned the corner and disappeared.

The world was quiet as she drove back through the familiar streets, the effects of the wine beginning to ebb. Her new house was ablaze with lights in every window, upstairs and down, light pouring out like something liquid, something that had overflowed and could no longer be contained. She parked in the driveway and got out, standing for a moment on the damp grass, rain falling softly and beading on her hair, her coat. Inside, she glimpsed David sitting on the sofa. Paul was in his arms, sleeping with his head resting lightly on David's shoulder. She thought of how she'd left things, the spilled wine and trailing streamers, the ruined roast. She pulled her coat around her and hurried up the steps.

"Norah!" David met her at the door, still carrying Paul. "Norah, what happened to you? You're bleeding."

"It's okay. I'm okay," she said, refusing David's hand when tried to help her. Her foot hurt, but she was glad for the sharp pain; a counterpoint to the throbbing in her head, it seemed to run straight through her in a line and hold her steady. Paul was sound asleep, his breathing slow and even. She rested the palm of her hand lightly on his small back.

"Where's Bree?" she asked.

"She's looking for you," David said. He glanced into the dining room and she followed his gaze, saw the ruined dinner, the streamers all pooled on the floor. "When you weren't home, I panicked and called her. She brought Paul over, and then she went out looking for you."