The Memory Keeper's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

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.”

II
    C AROLINE GILL WADED CAREFULLY, AWKWARDLY, ACROSS the parking lot. Snow reached her calves; in places, her knees. She carried the baby, swathed in blankets, in a cardboard box once used to deliver samples of infant formula to the office. It was stamped with red letters and cherubic infant faces, and the flaps lifted and fell with every step. There was an unnatural welling quiet in the nearly empty lot, a silence that seemed to originate from the cold itself, to expand in the air and flow outward like ripples from a stone thrown in water. Snow billowed, stinging her face, when she opened the car door. Instinctively, protectively, she curved herself around the box and wedged it into the backseat, where the pink blankets fell softly against the white vinyl upholstery. The baby slept, a fierce, intent, newborn sleep, its face clenched, its eyes only slits, the nose and chin mere bumps. You wouldn’t know, Caroline thought. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Caroline had given her an eight on the Apgar.
    The city streets were badly plowed and difficult to navigate. Twice the car slid, and twice Caroline almost turned back. The interstate was clearer, however, and once Caroline got on it she made steady time, traveling through the industrial outskirts of Lexington and into the rolling country of the horse farms. Here, miles of white fences made brisk shadows against the snow and horses stood darkly in the fields. The low sky was alive with fat gray clouds. Caroline turned on the radio, searched through the static for a station, turned it off. The world rushed by, ordinary and utterly changed.
    Since the moment she had let her head dip in faint agreement to Dr. Henry’s astonishing request, Caroline had felt as if she were falling through the air in slow motion, waiting to hit land and discover where she was. What he had asked of her—that she take his infant daughter away without telling his wife of her birth—seemed unspeakable. But Caroline had been moved by the pain and confusion on his face as he examined his daughter, by the slow numb way he seemed to move thereafter. Soon he’d come to his senses, she told herself. He was in shock, and who could blame him? He’d delivered his own twins in a blizzard, after all, and now this.
    She drove faster, images of the early morning running through her like a current. Dr. Henry, working with such calm skill, his movements focused and precise. The flash of dark hair between Norah Henry’s white thighs and her immense belly, rippling with contractions like a lake in the wind. The quiet hiss of the gas, and the moment when Dr. Henry called to her, his voice light but strained, his face so stricken that she was sure the second baby had been born dead. She had waited for him to move, to try to revive it. And