The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
1964
March 1964
I
THE SNOW STARTED TO FALL SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE HER
labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon
sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of
their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window,
watching
sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground.
All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked
branches of the trees turned white.
After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for
wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The
air
was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the
driveway
was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off
their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in
the
iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the
hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap,
blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly
through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones
of
light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked
out
the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge
of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled
and
disappeared.
He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his
wife, her feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a
copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked
her
index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands
were
slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom
lip
lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of
love
and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just
three
weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be.
They
had been married just a year.
She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her
legs.
"You know, I've been wondering what it's like," she said.
"Before
we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She
opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath,
revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand
across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin,
casting
reddish gold onto her hair. "Do you suppose it's like being
inside a
great lantern? The book says light permeates my skin, that the
baby
can already see."
"I don't know," he said.
She laughed. "Why not?" she asked. "You're the doctor."
"I'm just an orthopedic surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell
you the ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about
it." He
lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue
sock,
and began to massage it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her
heel,
the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and
densely
layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled
the
quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the
perfect,
secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy she seemed to him
beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible through
her pale
white skin.
It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical
restrictions.
Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several
months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to
carry
her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her
cups of
custard. "I'm not an invalid," she protested each time,
laughing.
"I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn." Still, she
was
pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as
she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of
her
chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it
completely with his own.
She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her
not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a
department
store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he
was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to
Lexington,
Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of
vision, her blond hair swept back in an elegant chignon, pearls
glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat
of
dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped
onto
the escalator, pushing his way upward through the crowd,
struggling
to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and
hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with
racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering
softly, a
sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped
him,
smiling, to ask if she could help.
A robe, he said,
scanning the aisles
until he caught sight of her hair, a dark green shoulder, her
bent
head revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck.
A robe for my sister
who lives in New Orleans. He had
no sister, of course, or any living
family that he acknowledged.
The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three
robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing
down,
taking the one on top.
Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and
a better
selection of colors next month,
but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored
robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as
he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she
stood.
She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings,
sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows: taupe,
navy, a maroon as dark as pig's blood. The sleeve of her green
coat
brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and
yet pervasive, something like the dense pale petals of lilacs
outside
the window of the student rooms he'd once occupied in
Pittsburgh.
The squat windows of his basement apartment were always grimy,
opaque with steel-factory soot and ash, but in the spring there
were
lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against
the
glass, their scent drifting in like light.
He cleared his throathe could hardly breatheand held up
the terry cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was
laughing,
telling a joke, and she did not notice him. When he cleared his
throat again she glanced at him, annoyed, then nodded at her
customer,
now holding three thin packages of stockings like giant
playing cards in her hand.
"I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first," the clerk said, cool and
haughty.
Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the
same dark green as her coat. She was taking him inthe solid
tweed overcoat, his face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his
trim fingernails. She smiled, amused and faintly dismissive,
gesturing
to the robe on his arm.
"For your wife?" she asked. She spoke with what he recognized
as a genteel Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where
such
distinctions mattered. After just six months in town, he already
knew this. "It's all right, Jean," she went on, turning back to
the
clerk. "Go on and take him first. This poor man must feel lost
and
awkward, in here with all the lace."
"It's for my sister," he told her, desperate to reverse the bad
impression
he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was
too forward or direct and gave offense. The robe slipped to the
floor
and he bent to pick it up, his face flushing as he rose. Her
gloves
were lying on the glass, her bare hands folded lightly next to
them.
His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes
again, they were kind.
He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing.
And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."
Her smiled changed then, grew serious.
"I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do
take
him first."
She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number
in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her
teacher
an ex-nun who had engraved the rules of penmanship in her small
charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in
the
world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it
perfect.
Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat
who
would become his wife had clenched her small fingers around the
pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after
hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running
water.
Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent
beneath
the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen,
and he would wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in
the
authoritative voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not
know
any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the
pocket of
his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering
her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape
of her
name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the
next night, and three months later they were married.
Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe
fit
her perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up
to
show him. But your sister
died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly
puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from
a
year before darting like a dark bird through the room. Then he
shrugged, sheepish. I had
to say something, he told her.
I had to find a
way to get your name. She smiled
then, and crossed the room and
embraced him.
The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked.
Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel
the
baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire,
glancing
out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or
six.
The streets were softened and quiet, and there were few cars.
At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs,
reading
the latest issue of The
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. He was
known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and
a
reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his
class.
Still, he was young enough andthough he hid it very carefully
unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare
moment,
collecting each success he accomplished as one more piece of
evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration,
born
with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply
scrambling
to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary
luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the
doctor
at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His
memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of
the
borrowed pickup truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing
road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with
their
parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky green or
turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk
with them, distracted.
All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of
those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a
single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the random excitement of general
medicine
or the delicate risky plumbing of the heart. He dealt mostly
with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing X-rays, watching
breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back together. He
liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white
heat of
cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his
faith in
something so solid and predictable.
He read well past midnight, until the words shimmered
senselessly
on the bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on
the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. He tamped the
charred fire-laced logs into embers, opened the damper fully,
and
closed the brass fireplace screen. When he turned off the
lights,
shards of fire glowed softly through layers of ash as delicate
and
white as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and
the
rhododendron bushes.
The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery
door, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing
table, the stuffed animals arranged on shelves. The walls were
painted a pale sea green. His wife had made the Mother Goose
quilt
that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny stitches, tearing
out entire
panels if she noted the slightest imperfection. A border of
bears
was stenciled just below the ceiling; she had done that too.
On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window,
pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly
eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs.
It
was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the
steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of
excitement
and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of
his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness
and
disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now
beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the
world
subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to
break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He
remembered
such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments
of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing
amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that
bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few
short
hours, transformed.
He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving
quietly.
He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent,
her hands gripping the mattress.
"I think this is labor," she said, looking up. Her hair was
loose, a
strand caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She
shook her head as he sat beside her. "I don't know. I feel
strange.
This crampy feeling, it comes and goes."
He helped her lie down on her side and then he lay down too,
massaging her back. "It's probably just false labor," he assured
her.
"It's three weeks early, after all, and first babies are usually
late."
This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, and he was,
in
fact, so sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep. He
woke to
find her standing over the bed, shaking his shoulder. Her robe,
her
hair, looked nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled
their
room.
"I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, and
I'm scared."
He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled
through him like foam pushed by a wave. But he had been trained
to be calm in emergencies, to keep his emotions in check, so he
was
able to stand without any urgency, take the watch, and walk with
her, slowly and calmly, up and down the hall. When the
contractions
came she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the bones in
his
fingers might fuse. The contractions were as she had said, five
minutes
apart, then four. He took the suitcase from the closet, feeling
numb suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long
expected but a surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but
the
world slowed to stillness around them. He was acutely aware of
every action, the way breath rushed against his tongue, the way
her
feet slid uncomfortably into the only shoes she could still
wear, her
swollen flesh making a ridge against the dark gray leather. When
he took her arm he felt strangely as if he himself were
suspended in
the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching them both
from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled
with
a contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively
around her elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting
down.
He helped her into her green wool coat, which hung unbuttoned,
gaping around her belly. He found the leather gloves she'd
been wearing when he first saw her, too. It seemed important
that
these details be right. They stood together on the porch for a
moment,
stunned by the soft white world.
"Wait here," he said, and went down the steps, breaking a path
through the drifts. The doors of the old car were frozen, and it
took
him several minutes to get one open. A white cloud flew up,
glittering,
when the door at last swung back, and he scrambled on the
floor of the backseat for the ice scraper and brush. When he
emerged his wife was leaning against a porch pillar, her
forehead
on her arms. He understood in that moment both how much pain
she was in and that the baby was really coming, coming that very
night. He resisted a powerful urge to go to her and, instead,
put all
his energy into freeing the car, warming first one bare hand and
then the other beneath his armpits when the pain of the cold
became
too great, warming them but never pausing, brushing snow
from the windshield and the windows and the hood, watching it
scatter and disappear into the soft sea of white around his
calves.
"You didn't mention it would hurt this much," she said, when he
reached the porch. He put his arm around her shoulders and
helped her down the steps. "I can walk," she insisted. "It's
just when
the pain comes."
"I know," he said, but he did not let her go.
When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to
the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the
darkness
of the street.
"When we come back we'll have our baby with us," she said.
"Our world will never be the same."
The windshield wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the
back window when he pulled into the street. He drove slowly,
thinking how beautiful Lexington was, the trees and bushes so
heavy with snow. When he turned onto the main street the wheels
hit ice and the car slid, briefly, fluidly, across the
intersection, coming
to rest by a snowbank.
"We're fine," he announced, his head rushing. Fortunately, there
wasn't another car in sight. The steering wheel was as hard and
cold as stone beneath his bare hands. Now and then he wiped at
the
windshield with the back of his hand, leaning to peer through
the
hole he'd made. "I called Bentley before we left," he said,
naming
his colleague, an obstetrician. "I said to meet us at the
office. We'll
go there. It's closer."
She was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as
she breathed through a contraction. "As long as I don't have my
baby in this old car," she managed at last, trying to joke. "You
know
how much I've always hated it."
He smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it.
Methodical, purposeful: even in an emergency he could not
change his nature. He came to a full stop at every light,
signaled
turns to the empty streets. Every few minutes she braced one
hand
against the dashboard again and focused her breathing, which
made him swallow and glance sideways at her, more nervous on
that night than he could ever remember being. More nervous than
his in first anatomy class, the body of a young boy peeled open
to reveal
its secrets. More nervous than on his wedding day, her family
filling one side of the church, and on the other just a handful
of his
colleagues. His parents were dead, his sister too.
There was a single car in the clinic parking lot, the nurse's
powder-blue Fairlane, conservative and pragmatic and newer than
his own. He'd called her, too. He pulled up in front of the
entrance
and helped his wife out. Now that they had reached the office
safely
they were both exhilarated, laughing as they pushed into the
bright
lights of the waiting room.
The nurse met them. The moment he saw her, he knew something
was wrong. She had large blue eyes in a pale face that might
have been forty or twenty-five, and whenever something was not
to
her liking a thin vertical line formed across her forehead, just
between
her eyes. It was there now as she gave them her news: Bentley's
car had fishtailed on the unplowed country road where he
lived, spun around twice on the ice beneath the snow, and
floated
into a ditch.
"You're saying Dr. Bentley won't be coming?" his wife asked.
The nurse nodded. She was tall, so thin and angular it seemed
the bones might poke from beneath her skin at any moment. Her
large blue eyes were solemn and intelligent. For months, there
had
been rumors, jokes, that she was a little bit in love with him.
He had
dismissed them as idle office gossip, annoying but natural when
a
man and single woman worked in such close proximity, day after
day. And then one evening he had fallen asleep at his desk. He'd
been dreaming, back in his childhood home, his mother putting up
jars of fruit that gleamed jewel-like on the oilcloth-covered
table beneath
the window. His sister, age five, sat holding a doll in one
listless
hand. A passing image, perhaps a memory, but one that filled
him simultaneously with sadness and with yearning. The house
was his but empty now, deserted when his sister died and his
parents
moved away, the rooms his mother had scrubbed to a dull
gleam abandoned, filled only with the rustlings of squirrels and
mice.
He'd had tears in his eyes when he opened them, raising his head
from the desk. The nurse was standing in the doorway, her face
gentled by emotion. She was beautiful in that moment, half
smiling,
not at all the efficient woman who worked beside him so quietly
and competently each day. Their eyes met, and it seemed to the
doctor that he knew herthat they knew each otherin some
profound and certain way. For an instant nothing whatsoever
stood
between them; it was an intimacy of such magnitude that he was
motionless, transfixed. Then she blushed severely and looked
aside.
She cleared her throat and straightened, saying that she had
worked two hours overtime and would be going. For many days,
her eyes would not meet his.
After that, when people teased him about her, he made them
stop. She's a very fine
nurse, he would say, holding up one hand
against the jokes, honoring that moment of communion they had
shared. She's the best
I've ever worked with. This was true, and now
he was very glad to have her with him.
"How about the emergency room?" she asked. "Could you
make it?"
The doctor shook his head. The contractions were just a minute
or so apart.
"This baby won't wait," he said, looking at his wife. Snow had
melted in her hair and glittered like a diamond tiara. "This
baby's
on its way."
"It's all right," his wife said, stoic. Her voice was harder
now, determined.
"This will be a better story to tell him, growing up: him
or her."
The nurse smiled, the line still visible though fainter, between
her eyes. "Let's get you inside then," she said. "Let's get you
some
help with the pain."
He went into his own office to find a coat, and when he entered
Bentley's examination room his wife was lying on the bed, her
feet
in the stirrups. The room was pale blue, filled with chrome and
white enamel and fine instruments of gleaming steel. The doctor
went to the sink and washed his hands. He felt extremely alert,
aware of the tiniest details, and as he performed this ordinary
ritual
he felt his panic at Bentley's absence begin to ease. He closed
his
eyes, forcing himself to focus on his task.
"Everything's progressing," the nurse said, when he turned.
"Everything looks fine. I'd put her at ten centimeters; see what
you
think."
He sat on the low stool and reached up into the soft warm cave
of
his wife's body. The amniotic sac was still intact, and through
it he
could feel the baby's head, smooth and hard like a baseball. His
child. He should be pacing a waiting room somewhere. Across the
room, the blinds were closed on the only window, and as he
pulled
his hand from the warmth of his wife's body he found himself
wondering
about the snow, if it was falling still, silencing the city and
the land beyond.
"Yes," he said, "ten centimeters."
"Phoebe," his wife said. He could not see her face, but her
voice
was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had
reached no decisions. "For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Paul,
after
my great-uncle. Did I tell you this?" she asked. "I meant to
tell you
I'd decided."
"Those are good names," the nurse said, soothing.
"Phoebe and Paul," the doctor repeated, but he was concentrating
on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured
to
the nurse, who readied the gas. During his residency years, the
practice had been to put the woman in labor out completely until
the birth was over, but times had changedit was
1964and
Bentley, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she
should
be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst of the
contractions,
for the crowning and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out,
and the baby moved in the birth canal, bursting the amniotic
sac.
"Now," the doctor said, and the nurse put the mask in place. His
wife's hands relaxed, her fists unclenching as the gas took
effect,
and she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another
contraction
and another moved through her.
"It's coming fast for a first baby," the nurse observed.
"Yes," the doctor said. "So far so good."
Half an hour passed in this way. His wife roused and moaned
and pushed, and when he felt she had had enoughor when she
cried out that the pain was overwhelminghe nodded to the
nurse, who gave her the gas. Except for the quiet exchange of
instructions,
they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting
along the sides of houses, filling the roads. The doctor sat on
a
stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the
essential
facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all
live
births and all successful, and he focused now on those, seeking
in
his memory the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying
with her
feet in the stirrups and her belly rising so high that he could
not see
her face, slowly became one with those other women. Her round
knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were
before
him, familiar and beloved. Yet he did not think to stroke her
skin or
put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her
hand while she pushed. To the doctor, focused on what was
immediately
before him, she became not just herself but more than herself;
a body like other bodies, a patient whose needs he must meet
with every technical skill he had. It was necessary, more
necessary
than usual, to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the
strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him
again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the
scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere,
observing
from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful,
precise incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as
the
blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the
times
he'd touched that same flesh in passion.
The head crowned. In three more pushes it emerged, and then
the body slid into his waiting hands and the baby cried out, its
blue
skin pinking up.
It was a boy, red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert,
suspicious
of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. The doctor tied
the umbilical
cord and cut it. My son,
he allowed himself to think.
My son.
"He's beautiful," the nurse said. She waited while he examined
the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the
long-fingered
hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the
other
room to bathe him and to drop the silver nitrate into his eyes.
The
small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. The
doctor
stayed where he was with his hand on her knee, taking several
deep
breaths, awaiting the afterbirth.
My son, he
thought again.
"Where is the baby?" his wife asked, opening her eyes and
pushing
hair away from her flushed face. "Is everything all right?"
"It's a boy," the doctor said, smiling down at her. "We have a
son.
You'll see him as soon as he's clean. He's absolutely perfect."
His wife's face, soft with relief and exhaustion, suddenly
tightened
with another contraction, and the doctor, expecting the
afterbirth,
returned to the stool between her legs and pressed lightly
against her abdomen. She cried out, and at the same moment he
understood what was happening, as startled as if a window had
appeared
suddenly in a concrete wall.
"It's all right," he said. "Everything's fine. Nurse," he
called, as
the next contraction tightened.
She came at once, carrying the baby, now swaddled in white
blankets.
"He's a nine on the Apgar," she announced. "That's very good."
His wife lifted her arms for the baby and began to speak, but
then the pain caught her and she lay back down.
"Nurse?" the doctor said, "I need you here. Right now."
After a moment's confusion the nurse put two pillows on the
floor, placed the baby on them, and joined the doctor by the
table.
"More gas," he said. He saw her surprise and then her quick nod
of comprehension as she complied. His hand was on his wife's
knee;
he felt the tension ease from her muscles as the gas worked.
"Twins?" the nurse asked.
The doctor, who had allowed himself to relax after the boy was
born, felt shaky now, and he did not trust himself to do more
than
nod. Steady,
he told himself, as the next head crowned.
You are anywhere,
he thought, watching from some fine point on the ceiling as
his hands worked with method and precision.
This is any birth.
This baby was smaller and came easily, sliding so quickly into
his
gloved hands that he leaned forward, using his chest to make
sure it
did not fall. "It's a girl," he said, and cradled her like a
football, face
down, tapping her back until she cried out. Then he turned her
over to see her face.
Creamy white vernix whorled in her delicate skin, and she was
slippery with amniotic fluid and traces of blood. The blue eyes
were
cloudy, the hair jet black, but he barely noticed all of this.
What he
was looking at were the unmistakable features, the eyes turned
up
as if with laughter, the epicanthal fold across their lids, the
flattened
nose. A classic case,
he remembered his professor saying as they examined
a similar child, years ago.
A mongoloid. Do you know what
that means? And the doctor,
dutiful, had recited the symptoms he'd
memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and
mental development, possible heart complications, early death.
The
professor had nodded, placing his stethoscope on the baby's
smooth
bare chest. Poor kid.
There's nothing they can do except try to keep him
clean. They ought to spare themselves and send him to a home.
The doctor had felt transported back in time. His sister had
been
born with a heart defect and had grown very slowly, her breath
catching and coming in little gasps whenever she tried to run.
For
many years, until the first trip to the clinic in Morgantown,
they
had not known what was the matter. Then they knew, and there
was nothing they could do. All his mother's attention had gone
to her, and yet she had died when she was twelve years old. The
doctor had been sixteen, already living in town to attend high
school, already on his way to Pittsburgh and medical school and
the life he was living now. Still, he remembered the depth and
endurance
of his mother's grief, the way she walked up hill to the
grave every morning, her arms folded against whatever weather
she encountered.
The nurse stood beside him and studied the baby.
"I'm sorry, doctor," she said.
He held the infant, forgetting what he ought to do next. Her
tiny
hands were perfect. But the gap between her big toes and the
others,
that was there, like a missing tooth, and when he looked deeply
at her eyes he saw the Brushfield spots, as tiny and distinct as
flecks
of snow in the irises. He imagined her heart, the size of a plum
and
very possibly defective, and he thought of the nursery, so
carefully
painted, with its soft animals and single crib. He thought of
his wife
standing on the sidewalk before their brightly veiled home,
saying,
Our world will never be the same.
The baby's hand brushed his, and he started. Without volition he
began to move through the familiar patterns. He cut the cord and
checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of
the
snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of
this empty
clinic. Later, when he considered this nightand he would think
of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point
of his
life, the moments around which everything else would always
gatherwhat he remembered was the silence in the room and the
snow falling steadily outside. The silence was so deep and
encompassing
that he felt himself floating to a new height, some point
above this room and then beyond, where he was one with the snow
and where this scene in the room was something unfolding in a
different
life, a life at which he was a random spectator, like a scene
glimpsed through a warmly lit window while walking on a darkened
street. That was what he would remember, that feeling of
endless space. The doctor in the ditch, and the lights of his
own
house burning far away.
"All right. Clean her up, please," he said, releasing the slight
weight of the infant into the nurse's arms. "But keep her in the
other room. I don't want my wife to know. Not right away."
The nurse nodded. She disappeared and then came back to lift
his son into the baby carrier they'd brought. The doctor was by
then intent on delivering the placentas, which came out
beautifully,
dark and thick, each the size of a small plate. Fraternal twins,
male and female, one visibly perfect and the other marked by an
extra chromosome in every cell of her body. What were the odds
of
that? His son lay in the carrier, his hands waving now and then,
fluid and random with the quick water motions of the womb. He
injected his wife with a sedative, then leaned down to repair
the
episiotomy. It was nearly dawn, light gathering faintly in the
windows.
He watched his hands move, thinking how well the stitches
were going in, as tiny as her own, as neat and even. She had
torn
out a whole panel of the quilt because of one mistake, invisible
to him.
When the doctor finished, he found the nurse sitting in a rocker
in the waiting room, cradling the baby girl in her arms. She met
his
gaze without speaking, and he remembered the night she had
watched him as he slept.
"There's a place," he said, writing the name and address on
the back of an envelope. "I'd like you to take her there. When
it's
light, I mean. I'll issue the birth certificate, and I'll call
to say you're
coming."
"But your wife," the nurse said, and he heard, from his distant
place, the surprise and disapproval in her voice.
He thought of his sister, pale and thin, trying to catch her
breath,
and his mother turning to the window to hide her tears.
"Don't you see?" he asked, his voice soft. "This poor child will
most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I'm trying
to
spare us all a terrible grief."
He spoke with conviction. He believed his own words. The
nurse sat staring at him, her expression surprised but otherwise
unreadable,
as he waited for her to say yes. In the state of mind he was
in it did not occur to him that she might say anything else. He
did
not imagine, as he would later that night, and in many nights to
come, the ways in which he was jeopardizing everything. Instead,
he felt impatient with her slowness and very tired all of a
sudden,
and the clinic, so familiar, seemed strange around him, as if he
were
walking in a dream. The nurse studied him with her blue
unreadable
eyes. He returned her gaze, unflinching, and at last she nodded,
a movement so slight as to be almost imperceptible.
"The snow," she murmured, looking down.
But by midmorning the storm had begun to abate, and the distant
sounds of plows grated through the still air. He watched from
the
upstairs window as the nurse knocked snow from her powder-blue
car and drove off into the soft white world. The baby was
hidden,
asleep in a box lined with blankets, on the seat beside her. The
doctor
watched her turn left onto the street and disappear. Then he
went back and sat with his family.
His wife slept, her gold hair splayed across the pillow. Now and
then the doctor dozed. Awake, he gazed into the empty parking
lot,
watching smoke rise from the chimneys across the street,
preparing
the words he would say. That it was no one's fault, that their
daughter
would be in good hands, with others like herself, with ceaseless
care. That it would be best this way for them all.
In the late morning, when the snow had stopped for good, his
son cried out in hunger, and his wife woke up.
"Where's the baby?" she said, rising up on her elbows, pushing
her hair from her face. He was holding their son, warm and
light,
and he sat down beside her, settling the baby in her arms.
"Hello, my sweet," he said. "Look at our beautiful son. You were
very brave."
She kissed the baby's forehead, then undid her robe and put him
to her breast. His son latched on at once, and his wife looked
up and
smiled. He took her free hand, remembering how hard she had
held onto him, imprinting the bones of her fingers on his flesh.
He
remembered how much he had wanted to protect her.
"Is everything all right?" she asked. "Darling? What is it?"
"We had twins," he told her slowly, thinking of the shocks of
dark hair, the slippery bodies moving in his hands. Tears rose
in his
eyes. "One of each."
"Oh," she said. "A little girl too? Phoebe
and Paul. But
where is
she?"
Her fingers were so slight, he thought, like the bones of a
little
bird.
"My darling," he began. His voice broke, and the words he had
rehearsed so carefully were gone. He closed his eyes, and when
he
could speak again more words came, unplanned.
"Oh, my love," he said. "I am so sorry. Our little daughter died
as
she was born."
(c) 2005, Kim Edwards. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Group.
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