The Memory Keeper's Daughter

by Kim Edwards

  “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 ponytail 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. Th
ose 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.”

  III

  PAUL,” SHE CALLED. HER HEELS WERE A SHARP STACCATO ON the 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 sautéing 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, any more 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.