"Next time take a coat," Caroline advised.
"Next time," he said, as they started walking, "I'll disappear in Timbuktu."
"You do that," Caroline said, a tide of weariness rushing in. Cro?cuses shouted purple and white against the bright grass; Phoebe was crying in earnest now. She was relieved to have Leo in tow, to have found him safe, grateful that disaster had been averted. Her fault, if he'd been lost or hurt, because she'd been so focused on Phoebe, who'd reached for weeks now and had still not learned to grasp.
They walked a few more feet in silence.
"You're a smart woman," Leo said.
She stopped on the bricks, astonished.
"What? What did you say?"
He looked at her, lucid, his eyes the same bright seeking blue as Doro's.
"I said you're smart. My daughter hired eight different nurses before you. None of them lasted more than a week. Bet you didn't know that."
"No," Caroline said. "No, I didn't."
Later, as Caroline cleaned up the kitchen and carried out the garbage, she thought of Leo's words. I'm smart, she said to her?self, standing in the alley by the trash can. The air was damp and cool. Her breath came out in tiny clouds. Smart won't get you a
husband, her mother said in sharp reply, but even this didn't dampen Caroline's pleasure in the first nice words Leo had ever said to her.
Caroline stood for a moment longer in the chilly air, grateful for the silence. Garages staggered, one after another, down the hill. Gradually, she became aware of a figure standing at the base of the alley. A tall man, in dark jeans and a brown jacket, colors so muted he nearly became another part of the late-winter landscape. Some?thing about him—something about the way he stood and stared so intently in her direction—made Caroline uneasy. She put the metal lid back on the garbage can and folded her arms across her chest. He was walking toward her now, a big man, broad-shouldered and walking fast. His jacket was not brown at all, but a muted plaid with streaks of red. He pulled a bright red hat from the pocket and put it on. Caroline felt oddly comforted by this gesture, though she didn't know why.
"Hey, there," he called. "That Fairlane running okay for you these days?"
Her apprehension deepened, and she turned to look at the house, its dark brick rising into the white sky. Yes, there was her bath?room, where she had stood last night watching the moonlight on the lawn. There was her window, left partly open to the cold spring air, wind stirring the lacy curtains. When she turned back, the man had stopped just a few feet away. She knew him, and she under?stood this in her body, in her relief, before she could formulate it in thought. Then it was so bizarre she couldn't believe it.
"How in the world—" she began.
"It wasn't easy!" Al said, laughing. He had grown a soft beard, and his teeth flashed white. His dark eyes were warm, pleased and amused. She remembered him sliding bacon onto her plate, waving from the silver cab of his truck as he pulled away. "You are one tough lady to track down. But you said Pittsburgh. And I happen to have a layover here every couple of weeks. It kind of got to be a hobby, looking for you." He smiled. "Don't know what I'll do with myself now."
Caroline couldn't answer. There was pleasure at the sight of him but a great confusion too. For nearly a year she had not let herself think too long or too hard about the life she had left, but now it rose up with great force and intensity: the scent of cleaning fluid and sun in the waiting room and the way it felt to come home to her tran?quil, orderly apartment after a long day, fix herself a modest meal, and sit down for the evening with a book. She had given up those pleasures willingly; she had embraced this change out of some deep unacknowledged yearning. Now her heart was pounding, and she stared wildly down the alley, as if she might suddenly see David Henry too. This, she understood suddenly, was why she had never sent that letter. What if he wanted Phoebe back—or Norah did ? The possibility filled her with an excruciating rush of fear.
"How did you do it?" Caroline demanded. "How did you find me? Why?"
Al, taken aback, shrugged. "I stopped in Lexington to stay hello. Your place was empty. Being painted. That neighbor of yours told me you'd been gone three weeks. Guess I don't like mysteries, be?cause I kept thinking of you." He paused, as if debating whether or not to go on. "Plus—hell, I liked you, Caroline, and I figured you were in some kind of trouble, to cut out like you did. You sure had trouble written all over you, standing in the parking lot that day. I figured maybe I could lend you a hand. I figured maybe you might need it."
"I'm doing just fine," she said. "So. What do you figure now?"
She hadn't meant the words to come out as they did, so tough and harsh. There was a long silence before Al spoke again.
"I guess I figure I was wrong about some things," Al said. He shook his head. "I thought we hit it off, you and me."
"We did," Caroline said. "I'm just shocked, that's all. I thought I'd cut my ties."
He looked at her then; his brown eyes met hers.
"It took me a full year," he said. "If you're worried about some?one else tracking you down, remember that. And I knew where to start, and I had good luck. I started checking the motels I know, asking about a woman with a baby. Each time I went to a different place, and last week I hit pay dirt. The clerk at the place you stayed remembered you. She's retiring next week, by the way." He held his thumb and forefinger up, close together. "I came this close to miss?ing you forever."
Caroline nodded, remembering the woman behind the desk with her white hair in a careful beehive, pearl earrings glimmering. The motel had been in her family for fifty years. The heat rattled all night, and the walls were constantly damp, peeling the paper. You never knew, anymore, the woman said, pushing a key across the counter, who was going to walk through the door.
Al nodded at the powder-blue hood of the Fairlane.
"I knew I'd found you the minute I saw that," he said. "How's your baby?"
She remembered the empty parking lot, all the light that had spilled into the snow and faded, the way his hand had rested, so gently, on Phoebe's tiny forehead.
"Do you want to come in?" she heard herself ask. "I was just about to wake her. I'll make you some tea."
Caroline took him down the narrow sidewalk and up the steps to the back porch. She left him in the living room and climbed the stairs, feeling giddy, unsteady, as if she'd suddenly become aware that the planet beneath her turned in space, shifting her world no matter how hard she tried to hold it still. She changed Phoebe and splashed water on her own face, trying to calm herself down.
Al was sitting at the dining room table, looking out the window. When she came down the stairs he turned, his face breaking into a wide grin. He reached for Phoebe at once, exclaiming over how big she'd grown, how beautiful she was. Caroline felt a rush of plea?sure, and Phoebe, delighted, laughed, her dark curls falling down around her cheeks. Al reached into his shirt and pulled out a medallion, clear plastic over gilded turquoise letters that said grand ole opry. He'd gotten it in Nashville. Come with me, he had said to her, all those long months ago, joking and yet not joking.
And here he was, having traveled all this way to find her.
Phoebe was making soft sounds, reaching. Her hands were brushing against Al's neck, his collarbone, his dark plaid shirt. At first, it didn't register with Caroline, what was happening; then, suddenly, it did. Whatever Al was saying receded, merging with Leo's footsteps upstairs and the rush of traffic outside, sounds that Caroline would forever afterward remember as being lucky.
Phoebe was reaching for the medallion. Not batting at air, as she had this morning, but using Al's chest for resistance, her small fingers scraping and scraping the medallion into her palm until she could close her fist around it. Rapt with success, she yanked the medallion hard on its string, making Al raise his hand to the chafing.
Caroline touched her own neck too, feeling the quick burn of joy.
Oh, yes, she thought. Grab it, my darling. Grab the world.
May 1965
ORAH WAS AHEAD OF HIM, MOVING LIKE LIGHT, FLASHES of white and denim amid the trees: there, and then gone. David followed, leaning down now and then to pick up stones. Rough-skinned geodes, fossils etched in shale. Once, an arrow?head. He held each of these for a moment, pleased by their weight and shape, by the coolness of the stones against his palm, before he slipped them into his pockets. As a boy, the shelves of his room had always been littered with stones, and to this day he couldn't pass them up, their mysteries and possibilities, even though bending was awkward with Paul in a carrier against his chest and the camera scraping against his hip.
Far ahead, Norah paused to wave, then seemed to vanish straight into a wall of smooth gray stone. Several other people, wearing matching blue baseball caps, spilled suddenly, one by one, from this same gray wall. As David drew closer he realized that the stairway leading to the natural stone bridge rose up there, just out of sight. Better watch your step, a woman, descending, warned him. It's steep li'teyou wouldn't believe. Slippery too. Breathless, she paused and held her hand on her heart.
David, noting her paleness, her shortness of breath, paused. "Ma'am? I'm a doctor. Are you all right?"
"Palpitations," she said, waving her free hand. "I've had them all my life."
He took her plump wrist and felt her pulse, swift but steady, slowing as he counted. Palpitations: people used the term freely, to talk about any quickening of the heart, but he could tell at once that the woman was in no real distress. Not like his sister, who had grown breathless and dizzy and was forced to sit anytime she so much as ran across the room. Heart trouble, the doctor in Morgan-town had said, shaking his head. He had not been more specific, and it had not mattered; there was nothing he could do. Years later, in medical school, David had remembered her symptoms and read late into the night to make his own diagnosis: a narrowing of the aorta, or maybe an abnormality of the heart valve. Either way, June had moved slowly and fought to breathe, her condition worsening as the years passed, her skin pale and faintly blue in the months be?fore she died. She had loved butterflies, and standing with her face turned to the sun, eyes closed, and eating homemade jelly on the thin saltines his mother bought in town. She was always singing, made-up tunes she hummed softly to herself, and her hair was pale, almost white, the color of buttermilk. For months after she died he had woken in the night, thinking he heard her small voice, singing like the wind in the pines.
"You say you've had this all your life?" he asked the woman gravely, releasing her hand.
"Oh, always," she said. "The doctors tell me it's not serious. Just annoying."
"Well, I think you'll be fine," he said. "But don't push yourself too hard."
She thanked him, touched Paul's head and said, You watch out for that little one now. David nodded and moved off, protecting Paul's head with his free hand as he climbed between the damp stone walls. He was pleased—it was good to be able to help people in need, to offer healing—something he could not seem to do for those he loved the most. Paul patted softly at his chest, grabbing at the envelope he'd stuffed in his pocket: a letter from Caroline Gill, de?livered that morning to his office. He had read it only once, swiftly, putting it away as Norah came in, trying to conceal his agitation. We are well, Phoebe and I, it had said. So far, she does not have any problems with her heart.
Now he caught Paul's small fingers in his own, gently. His son looked up, wide-eyed, curious, and he felt a deep swift rush of love.
"Hey," David said, smiling. "I love you, little guy. But don't eat that, okay?"
Paul studied him with wide dark eyes, then turned his head and rested his cheek against David's chest, radiating warmth. He wore a white hat with yellow ducks that Norah had embroidered in the quiet, watchful days after her accident. With the emergence of each duck, David had breathed a little easier. He had seen her grief, the space it had left in her heart, when he'd developed the spent roll of film in his new camera: room after empty room in their old house, close-ups of window frames, the stark shadows of the stair rail, the floor tiles, skewed and crooked. And Norah's footprints, those er?ratic, bloody trails. He'd thrown the photos out, negatives and all, but still they haunted him. He was afraid they always would. He had lied, after all; he had given away their daughter. That terrible consequences would follow seemed both inevitable and just. But days had passed, now nearly three months, and Norah seemed to be herself again. She worked in the garden, or laughed on the tele?phone with friends, or lifted Paul from his playpen with her lean, graceful arms.
David, watching, told himself she was happy.
Now the ducks bounced cheerfully with every step, catching the light as David emerged from the narrow stairs onto the natural stone bridge spanning the gorge. Norah, wearing denim shorts and a sleeveless white blouse, stood in the center of the bridge, the toes of her white sneakers flush with the rocky edge. Slowly, with a dancer's grace, Norah opened her arms and arched her back, eyes closed, as if offering herself to the sky.
"Norah!" he called out, appalled. "That's dangerous!"
Paul pushed his small hands against David's chest. Doo, he echoed, when he heard David say dangerous, a baby word applied to electrical outlets, stairs, fireplaces, chairs, and now to this sheer drop to the earth so far below his mother.
"It's spectacular!" Norah called back, letting her arms fall. She turned, causing pebbles to skid beneath her feet and slide over the edge. "Come see!"
Cautiously, he walked out onto the bridge and went to stand be?side her at the edge. Tiny figures moved slowly on the path far below, where an ancient river had once rushed. Now hills rolled away into lush spring, a hundred different shades of green against the clear blue sky. He took a deep breath, fighting a wave of vertigo, afraid even to glance at Norah. He had wanted to spare her, to pro?tect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past. When he imagined the daughter he'd given away, it was his sister's face he saw, her pale hair, her serious smile.
