The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards Page B

milk, her joints still aching from the birth. In the hall, the floorboards creaked beneath her.
    On the changing table Paul cried louder, turning an angry mottled red. She stripped off his damp clothes, his soaked cotton diaper. His skin was so delicate, his legs as scrawny and reddened as plucked chicken wings. At the edge of her mind her lost daughter hovered, watchful, silent. She swabbed Paul’s umbilical cord with alcohol, threw the diaper in the pail to soak, then dressed him again.
    “Sweet baby,” she murmured, lifting him. “Little love,” she said, and carried him downstairs.
    In the living room the blinds were still closed, the curtains drawn. Norah made her way to the comfortable leather chair in the corner, opening her robe. Her milk rose up again with its own irresistible tidal rhythms, a force so powerful it seemed to wash away everything she had been before. I wake to sleep, she thought, settling back, troubled because she could not remember who had written this.
    The house was quiet. The furnace clicked off; leaves rustled on the trees outside. Distantly, the bathroom door opened and shut, and water ran faintly. Bree, her sister, came lightly down the stairs, wearing an old shirt whose sleeves hung down to her fingertips. Her legs were white, her narrow feet bare against the wood floors.
    “Don’t turn on the light,” Norah said.
    “Okay.” Bree came over and touched her fingers lightly to Paul’s scalp.
    “How’s my little nephew?” she said. “How’s sweet Paul?”
    Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. He had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people—where? she could not remember this either—who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.
    “Paul.” She said it out loud, solid and definite, warm as a stone in sunlight. An anchor.
    Silently, to herself, she added, Phoebe.
    “He’s hungry,” Norah added. “He’s always so hungry.”
    “Ah. He takes after his aunt, then. I’m going to get some toast and coffee. You want anything?”
    “Maybe some water,” she said, watching Bree, long-limbed and graceful, leave the room. How strange it was that her sister, who had always been her opposite, her nemesis, should be the one she wanted here, but it was so.
    Bree was only twenty, but headstrong and so sure of herself that she seemed to Norah, often, the elder. Three years ago, as a junior in high school, Bree had run away with the pharmacist who lived across the street, a bachelor twice her age. People blamed the pharmacist, old enough to know better. They blamed Bree’s wildness on losing her father so suddenly when she was in her early teens, a vulnerable age, everyone agreed. They predicted that the marriage would end soon and badly, and it had.
    But if people imagined that Bree’s failed marriage would subdue her, they were wrong. Something had begun to change in the world since Norah was a girl, and Bree had not come home as expected, chastened and embarrassed. Instead, she’d enrolled at the university, changing her name from Brigitte to Bree because she liked the way it sounded: breezy, she said, and free.
    Their mother, mortified by the scandalous marriage and more scandalous divorce, had married a pilot for TWA and moved to St. Louis, leaving her daughters to themselves. Well, at least one of my daughters knows how to behave, she had said, looking up from the box of china she was packing. It was autumn, the air crisp, full of golden raining leaves. Her white-blond hair was spun in an airy cloud, and her delicate features were softened with sudden emotion. Oh, Norah, I’m so thankful to have one proper girl, you can’t imagine. Even if you never marry, darling, you’ll always be a lady. Norah, sliding a framed portrait of her father into a carton, had flushed