The Memory Keeper's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

when he didn’t she thought suddenly that she should go to him, be a witness, so that she could say, later, Yes, the baby was blue, Dr. Henry tried, we both tried, but there was nothing to be done.
    But then the baby cried, and the cry carried her to his side, where she looked and understood.
    She drove on, pushing back her memories. The road cut through the limestone and the sky funneled down. She crested the slight hill and began the long descent to the river far below. Behind her, in the cardboard box, the baby slept on. Caroline glanced over her shoulder now and then, both reassured and distressed to see it had not moved. Such sleep, she reminded herself, was normal after the labor of entering the world. She wondered about her own birth, if she had slept so intently in the hours that followed, but both her parents were long dead; there was no one who remembered those moments. Her mother had been past forty when Caroline was born, her father already fifty-two. They had long since given up waiting for a child, had released any hope or expectation or even regret. Their lives were orderly, calm, content.
    Until Caroline, startlingly, had arrived, a flower blooming up through snow.
    They had loved her, certainly, but it had been a worried love, earnest and intent, layered with poultices and warm socks and castor oil. In the hot still summers, when polio was feared, Caroline had been made to stay inside, sweat beading on her temples as she stretched out on the daybed by the window in the upstairs hallway, reading. Flies buzzed against the glass and lay dead on the sills. Outside, the landscape shimmered in the light and heat, and children from the neighborhood, children whose parents were younger and thus less acquainted with the possibility of disaster, shouted to one another in the distance. Caroline pressed her face, her fingertips, against the screen, listening. Yearning. The air was still and sweat dampened the shoulders of her cotton blouse, the ironed waistband of her skirt. Far below in the garden, her mother, wearing gloves, a long apron, and a hat, pulled weeds. Later, in the dusky evenings, her father walked home from his insurance office, taking his hat off as he entered the still, shuttered house. Beneath the jacket, his shirt was stained and damp.
    She was crossing the bridge now, her tires singing, the Kentucky River meandering far below and the high charged energy of the previous night melting away. She glanced again at the baby. Surely Norah Henry would want to hold this child, even if she couldn’t keep her.
    Surely this was none of Caroline’s affair.
    Yet she did not turn around. She turned on the radio again—this time she found a station of classical music—and drove on.
    Twenty miles outside of Louisville, Caroline consulted Dr. Henry’s directions, written in his sharp close hand, and left the highway. Here, so near the Ohio River, the upper branches of hawthorns and hackberry trees glittered with ice, though the roads were clear and dry. White fences enclosed the snow-dusted fields, and horses moved darkly behind them, their breath making clouds in the air. Caroline turned onto an even smaller road, where the land was rolling, unconfined. Soon, across a mile of pale hills, she glimpsed the building, built of red brick at the turn of the century, with two incongruous low-slung modern wings. It disappeared, now and again, as she followed the curves and dips of the country road, and then was suddenly before her.
    She pulled into the circular driveway. Up close, the old house was in a state of mild disrepair. Paint was peeling on the wood trim and on the third floor a window had been boarded up, broken panes backed with plywood. Caroline got out of the car. She was wearing a pair of old flats, thin-soled and scuffed, kept in the closet and flung on hastily in the middle of last night when she couldn’t find her boots. Gravel pushed up through the snow and her feet were immediately cold. She slung the