The Memory Keeper's Daughter Read online

  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 his 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 in his 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 jewellike 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 her—that they knew each other—in 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 wor
ked 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 changed—it was 1964—and 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 enough—or when she cried out that the pain was overwhelming—he 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 me
morized 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 uphill 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 night—and 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 gather—what 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.