"Because I enjoy this," she said. "The planning and the cooking—all of it. Because it gives me a lot of pleasure to pull some?thing beautiful out of nothing. I have a lot of talents," she added, coolly, "whether you realize it or not."
"That's not what I meant." David sighed. These days they were like two planets in orbit around the same sun, not colliding but not drawing any closer either. "I just meant, Why not have some help? Hire a catering staff. We can certainly afford it."
"It's not about the money," she said, shaking her head, and stepped outside.
He put the platter away and went upstairs to shave. Paul fol?lowed him in and sat on the edge of the tub, talking a mile a min?ute and kicking his heels against the porcelain. He loved Jason's grandfather's farm, he had helped milk a cow there, and Jason's grandfather had let him drink some milk, still warm, tasting of grass.
David lathered on the soap with a soft brush, taking pleasure in listening. The razor blade slid in smooth clean strokes against his skin, sending quivering motes of light against the ceiling. For a mo?ment the whole world seemed caught, suspended: the soft spring air and the scent of soap and the excited voice of his son.
"I used to milk cows," David said. He dried his face and reached for his shirt. "I used to be able to squirt a stream of milk straight into the cat's mouth."
"That's what Jason's pawpaw did! I like Jason. I wish he was my brother."
David, putting on his tie, watched Paul's reflection in the mirror. In the silence that was not quite silence—the sink faucet dripping, the clock ticking softly, the whisper of cloth against cloth—his thoughts traveled to his daughter. Every few months, shuffling through the office mail, he came across Caroline's loopy handwrit?ing. Though the first few letters had come from Cleveland, now each envelope bore a different postmark. Sometimes Caroline en?closed a new post office box number—always in different places, vast impersonal cities—and whenever she did this David sent money. They had never known each other well, yet her letters to him had grown increasingly intimate over the years. The most re?cent ones might have been torn from her diary, beginning Dear David or simply David, her thoughts pouring forth in a rush. Some?times he tried to throw the letters away unopened, but he always ended up fishing them from the trash and reading them quickly. He kept them locked in the filing cabinet in the darkroom so he would always know where they were. So Norah would never find them.
Once, years ago, when the letters first began to arrive, David had made the eight-hour drive to Cleveland. He'd walked through the city for three days, studying phone books, inquiring at every hospi?tal. In the main post office he'd touched the little brass door num?bered 621 with his fingertips, but the postmaster would not give him the owner's name or address. I'll stand here and wait then, David said, and the man shrugged. Go ahead, he said. Better bring some food, though. Weeks can pass before some of these mailboxes get opened.
In the end, he'd given up and come home, allowing the days to pass, one by one, as Phoebe grew up without him. Each time he sent money, he enclosed a note asking Caroline to tell him where she lived, but he did not press her, or hire a private investigator, as he sometimes imagined doing. It would have to come from her, he felt, the desire to be found. He believed he wanted to find her. He be?lieved that once he did—once he could fix things—he would be able to tell Norah the truth.
He believed all this, and he got up every morning and walked to the hospital. He performed surgeries and examined X-rays and came home and mowed the lawn and played with Paul; his life was full. Yet even so, every few months, for no predictable reason, he woke from dreams of Caroline Gill staring at him from the clinic doorway or across the courtyard at the church. Woke, trembling, and got dressed and went down to the office or out to the dark?room, where he worked on his articles or slid his photographs into their chemical baths, watching images emerge where nothing had been.
"Dad, you forgot to look up the fossils," Paul said. "You promised."
"That's right," David said, pulling himself back to the present, adjusting the knot in his tie. "That's right, son. I did."
They went downstairs together to the den and spread the famil?iar books on the desk. The fossil was a crinoid, from a small sea ani?mal with a flowerlike body. The buttonlike stones had once been plates forming the stem column. He rested his hand lightly on Paul's back, feeling his flesh, so warm and alive, and the delicate vertebrae just beneath his skin.
"I'm going to show Mom," Paul said. He grabbed the fossils and ran off through the house and out the back door. David got a drink and stood by the window. A few guests had arrived and were scat?tered across the lawn, the men in dark blue coats, the women like bright spring flowers in pink and vibrant yellow and pastel blue. Norah moved among them, hugging the women, shaking hands, managing the introductions. She had been so quiet when David first met her, calm and self-contained and watchful. He could never have imagined her in this moment, so gregarious and at ease, launching a party she had orchestrated down to the very last de?tail. Watching her, David was filled with a kind of longing. For what? For the life they might have had, perhaps. Norah seemed very happy, laughing on the lawn. Yet David knew this success would not be enough, not even for a day. By evening she would have moved on to the next thing, and if he woke in the night and ran his hand along the curve of her back, hoping to stir her, she would murmur and catch his hand in hers and turn away, all with?out waking.
Paul was on the swing set now, flying high into the blue sky. He wore the crinoids on a long piece of string around his neck; they lifted and fell, bouncing against his small chest, sometimes snap?ping against the chains of the swing.
"Paul," Norah called, her voice drifting in clearly through open screen. "Paul, take that thing off your neck. It's dangerous."
David took his drink and went outside. He met Norah on the lawn.
"Don't," he said softly, putting his hand on her arm. "He made it himself."
"I know. I gave him the string. But he can wear it later. If he slips while he's playing and it gets caught, it could choke him."
She was so tense; he let his hand fall.
"That's not likely," he said, wishing he could erase their loss and what it had done to them both. "Nothing bad is going to happen to him, Norah."
"You don't know that."
"Even so, David's right, Norah."
The voice came from behind. He turned to see Bree, whose wild-ness and passions and beauty moved like a wind through their house. She was wearing a spring dress of filmy material, which seemed to float around her as she moved, and holding hands with a young man, shorter than she: clean-cut, with short reddish hair, wearing sandals and an open collar.
"Bree, honestly, it could catch and he could choke," Norah in?sisted, turning too.
"He's swinging," Bree told her lightly, as Paul flew high against the sky, his head tipped back, sun on his face. "Look at him, he's so happy. Don't make him get down and get all worried. David's right. Nothing's going to happen."
Norah forced a smile. "No? The world could end. You said so yourself just yesterday."
"But that was yesterday," Bree said. She touched Norah's arm and they exchanged a long look, connected for a moment in a way that excluded everyone else. David watched with a rush of longing and with a sudden memory of his own sister, the two of them hid?ing under the kitchen table, peeking through the folds of oilcloth, stifling their laughter. He remembered her eyes and the warmth of her arm and the joy of her company.
"What happened yesterday?" David asked, pushing away the memory, but Bree ignored him, talking to Norah,
"I'm sorry, Sis," she said. "Things were a little crazy yesterday. I was out of line."
"I'm sorry too," Norah said. "I'm glad you came to the party."
"What happened yesterday? Were you at the fire, Bree?" David asked again. He and Norah had woken in the night to sirens, to the acrid smell of smoke and a strange glow in the sky. They had come outside to stand with their neighbors on the dark quiet lawns, their ankles growing wet with dew while on campus the ROTC build?ing burned. For days the protests had been growing, layers of ten?sion in the air, invisible but real, while in towns along the Mekong River bombs fell and people ran, cradling their dying children in their arms. Across the river in Ohio now, four students lay dead. But no one had imagined this in Lexington, Kentucky: a Molotov cocktail and a building in flames, police pouring into the streets.
Bree turned to him, her long hair swinging over her shoulders, and shook her head. "No. I wasn't there, but Mark was." She smiled at the young man beside her and slipped her slender arm through his. "This is Mark Bell."
"Mark fought in Vietnam," Norah added. "He's here protesting the war."
"Ah," David said. "An agitator."
"A protester, I believe," Norah corrected, waving across the lawn. "There's Kay Marshall," she said. "Will you excuse me?"
"A protester, then," David repeated, watching Norah walk away, the breeze moving lightly against the sleeves of her silk suit.
"That's right," Mark said. He spoke with self-mocking intentness and a faint familiar accent that reminded David of his father's voice, low and melodic. "The relentless pursuit of equity and justice."
"You were on the news," David said, remembering him all at once. "Last night. You were giving some kind of speech. So. You must be glad about the fire."
Mark shrugged. "Not glad. Not sorry. It happened, that's all. We go on."
"Why are you being so hostile, David?" Bree asked, fixing her green eyes on him.
"I'm not being hostile," David said, realizing even as he spoke that he was. Realizing, too, that he was beginning to flatten and ex?tend his own vowels, called by the deep pull of language, patterns of speech as familiar and compelling as water. "I'm gathering infor?mation, that's all. Where are you from?" he asked Mark.
"West Virginia. Over near Elkins. Why?"
"Just curious. I had family there once."
"I didn't know that about you, David," Bree said. "I thought you were from Pittsburgh."
"I had family near Elkins," David repeated. "A long time ago."
"Is that so?" Mark was watching him less warily now. "They work coal ?"
"Sometimes, in the winter. They had a farm. A hard life, but not as hard as coal."
"They keep their land?"
"Yes." David thought of the house he had not seen for nearly fif?teen years.
"Smart. My daddy, now, he sold the home place. When he died in the mines five years later, we had nowhere to go. Nowhere at all." Mark smiled bitterly and thought for a moment. "You ever go back there?"
"Not in a long time. You?"
"No. After Vietnam I went to college. Morgantown, the GI bill. It got to be strange, going back. I belonged and I didn't belong, if you know what I mean. When I left I didn't think I was making a choice. But it turned out I was."
David nodded. "I know," he said. "I know what you mean."
"Well," Bree said, after a long moment of silence. "You're both here now. I'm getting thirstier by the second," she added. "Mark? David? Want a drink?"
"I'll come with you." Mark said, extending his hand to David. "Small world, isn't it? It's good to meet you."
"David is a mystery to us all," Bree said, pulling him away. "Just ask Norah."
David watched them merge into the bright milling crowd. A simple encounter, yet he felt strangely agitated, exposed and vul?nerable, his past rising up like the sea. Each morning he stood for a moment in his office doorway, surveying his clean simple world: the orderly array of instruments, the crisp white length of cloth on the examination table. By every external measure he was a success, yet he was never filled, as he hoped to be, with a sense of pride and reassurance. / suppose this is it, his father had said, slamming the truck door and standing on the curb by the bus stop on the day David left for Pittsburgh. 1 suppose this is the last we can expect to hear from you, moving up in the world and all. You won't have time for the likes of us anymore. And David, standing on the curb with early leaves falling down around him, had felt a deep sense of despera?tion, because even then he sensed the truth of his father's words: whatever his own intentions were, however much he loved them, his life would carry him away.
"Are you all right, David?" Kay Marshall asked. She was walk?ing by, carrying a vase of pale pink tulips, each petal as delicate as the edge of a lung. "You look a million miles away."
"Ah, Kay," he said. She reminded him a little of Norah, some kind of loneliness moving always beneath her carefully polished surface. Once, after drinking too much at another party, Kay had followed him into a dark hallway, slipped her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Startled, he had kissed her back. The mo?ment had passed, and although he often thought about the cool, surprising touch of her lips on his, every time he saw her David also wondered that it had ever really happened. "You look ravishing as always, Kay." He raised his glass to her. She smiled and laughed and moved on.
He went into the coolness of the garage and up the stairs, where he took his camera from the cupboard and loaded a new roll of film. Norah's voice lifted above the crowd, and he remembered the feel of her skin when he'd reached for her that morning, the smooth curve of her back. He remembered the moment she'd shared with Bree, how connected they were, beyond any bond he'd ever share with her again. / want, he thought, slipping the camera around his neck. / want.
He moved around the edges of the party, smiling and saying hello, shaking hands, drifting away from conversations to catch moments of the party on film. He paused before Kay's tulips, focus?ing in close, thinking how much they really did resemble the deli?cate tissue of lungs and how interesting it would be to frame shots of both and stand them next to each other, exploring this idea he had that the body was, in some mysterious way, a perfect mirror of the world. He grew absorbed in this, the sounds of the party falling away as he concentrated on the flowers, and he was startled to feel Norah's hand on his arm.
