The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards Page A

coldness of the examination table slapping her bare back. Caroline Gill’s gold watch glinting every time she reached to give Norah the gas. Then she was waking up and Paul was in her arms and David was beside her, weeping. She glanced up, watching him with concern and an interested detachment. It was the drugs, the aftermath of the birth, a hormonal high. Another baby, a blue one—how could that be? She remembered the second urge to push, and tension beneath David’s voice like rocks in white water. But the infant in her arms was perfect, beautiful, more than enough. It’s all right, she had told David, stroking his arm, it’s all right.
    It was not until they left the office, stepping tentatively into the chill, damp air of the next afternoon, that the loss had finally penetrated. It was nearly dusk, the air full of melting snow and raw earth. The sky was overcast, white and grainy behind the stark bare branches of the sycamores. She carried Paul—he was as light as a cat—thinking how strange this was, to take an entirely new person to their home. She’d decorated the room so carefully, choosing the pretty maple crib and dresser, pressing the paper, scattered with bears, onto the wall, making the curtains, stitching the quilt by hand. Everything was in order, everything was prepared, her son was in her arms. Yet at the building entrance, she stopped between the two tapering concrete pillars, unable to take another step.
    “David,” she said. He turned, pale and dark-haired, like a tree against the sky.
    “What?” he asked. “What is it?”
    “I want to see her,” she said, her voice a whisper, yet somehow forceful in the quiet of the parking lot. “Just once. Before we go. I have to see her.”
    David shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the pavement. All day, icicles had crashed from the zigzag roof; here they lay shattered near the steps.
    “Oh, Norah,” he said softly. “Please, just come home. We have a beautiful son.”
    “I know,” she said, because it was 1964 and he was her husband and she had always deferred to him completely. Yet she could not seem to move, not feeling as she did, that she was leaving behind some essential part of herself. “Oh! Just for a moment, David. Why not?”
    Their eyes met, and the anguish in his made her own fill with tears.
    “She isn’t here.” David’s voice was raw. “That’s why. There’s a cemetery on Bentley’s family farm. In Woodford County. I asked him to take her. We can go there, later in the spring. Oh, Norah, please. You are breaking my heart.”
    Norah closed her eyes then, feeling something drain out of her at the thought of an infant, her daughter, being lowered into the cold March earth. Her arms, holding Paul, were stiff and steady, but the rest of her felt liquid, as if she too might flow away into the ditches and disappear with the snow. David was right, she thought, she didn’t want to know this. When he climbed the steps and put his arm around her shoulders, she nodded, and they walked together across the empty parking lot, into the fading light. He secured the car seat; he drove them carefully, methodically, home; they carried Paul across the front porch and through the door; and they put him, sleeping, in his room. It had brought her a measure of comfort, the way David had taken care of everything, the way he’d taken care of her, and she had not argued with him again about her wish to see their daughter.
    But now she dreamed every night of lost things.
    Paul had fallen asleep. Beyond the window, dogwood branches, cluttered with new buds, moved against the paling indigo sky. Norah turned, shifted Paul to her other breast, and closed her eyes again, drifting. She woke suddenly to dampness, crying, sunlight full in the room. Her breasts were already filling again; it had been three hours. She sat, feeling heavy, weighted, the flesh of her stomach so loose it pooled whenever she lay down, her breasts stiff and swollen with