p. 25
…this little girl, slid into the world, setting something into motion.
Into motion. Yes, it could not be contained. Even sitting here on this sofa in the stillness of this place, even waiting, Caroline was troubled by the feeling that the world was shimmering, that things would not be still. This? was the refrain in her mind. This now, after all these years?
For Caroline Gill was thirty-one, and she had been waiting a long time for her real life to begin. Not that she had ever put it that way to herself. But she had felt since childhood that her life would not be ordinary. A moment would come—she would know it when she saw it—and everything would change. She’d dreamed of being a great pianist, but the lights of the high school stage were too different from the lights at home, and she froze in their glare. Then, in her twenties, as her friends from nursing school began to marry and have their families, Caroline too had found young men to admire, one especially, with dark hair and pale skin and a deep laugh. For a dreamy time she imagined that he—and, when he didn’t call, that someone else—would transform her life. When years passed she gradually turned her attention to her work, again without despair. She had faith in herself and her own capabilities. She was not a person who ever got halfway to a destination and paused, wondering if she’d left an iron on and if the house was burning down. She kept on working. She waited.
p.77
“I couldn’t live like you do,” Norah said. Since Paul was born, since Phoebe had died, she’d felt the need to keep a constant vigil, as if a second’s inattention would open the door for disaster. “I just couldn’t do it—break all the rules. Blow everything up.”
“The world doesn’t end,” Bree said quietly. “Amazing, but it really doesn’t.”
Norah shook her head. “It could. At any given moment, anything at all could happen.”
“I know,” Bree told her. “Honey, I know.” Norah’s earlier irritation was washed away by a sudden rush of gratitude. Bree would always listen and respond, would not demand anything less than the truth of her experience. “You’re right, Norah, anything can happen, any time. But what goes wrong is not your fault. You can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll just end up missing the life you have.”
p. 88
A film closed over the past as she spoke, a barrier as brittle and fragile as ice forming. It would grow and strengthen. It would become impenetrable, opaque. Norah felt this happening and she feared it, but now she feared more what would happen if it shattered. Yes, they would move on. This would be her gift, to David and to Paul. (p. 89) …His (David’s) hands were on her shoulders then, and for an instant she stood again amid the sound of rushing water from the mill, happiness as full around her as the night. Don’t breathe, she thought. Don’t move. But there was no stopping anything….Paul sighed and shifted in his sleep. He would wake tomorrow, grow, and change. They’d live their lives day by day, each one taking them another step away from their lost daughter.
p. 109
Cautiously, he (David) walked out onto the bridge and went to stand beside 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 protect 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.
p. 113
“Norah, what do you dream about?” he asked. “What do you dream for Paul?”
Norah didn’t answer right away. “I suppose I want him to be happy,” she said at last. “Whatever in life makes him happy, I want him to have that. I don’t care what it is, as long as he grows up to be good and true to himself. And generous and strong, like his father.”
“No,” David said, uncomfortable. “You don’t want him to take after me.”
She gave him an intent look, surprised. “Why not?”
He didn’t answer. After a long, hesitant moment, Norah spoke again.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, not aggressively but thoughtfully, as if she were trying to puzzle out the answer as she spoke. “Between us, I mean, David.”
He didn’t answer, struggling against a sudden surge of anger. Why did she have to stir things up again? Why coulcn’t she let the past rest and move on? But she spoke again.
“It hasn’t been the same since Paul was born and Phoebe died. And yet you still won’t talk about her. It’s like you want to erase the fact that she existed.”
“Norah, what do you want me to say? Of course life hasn’t been the same.”
“Don’t get angry, David. That’s just some kind of strategy, isn’t it? So I won’t talk about her anymore. But I won’t back down. What I’m saying is true.” (p. 115)…”I still think about her, David,” she said, turning on her side and meeting his gaze. “Our daughter. What she would be like.”
….”And you?’ she demanded, fierce now. “don’t you ever miss her too?”
“Yes,” he said truthfully. “I think about her all the time.”
…He shrugged off his shirt, but even so, when he slid his arms around he again, he was thinking, I love you. I love you so much, and I lied to you. And the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood. He pulled away, back into the light and shadow, the clouds over him and then not, and the sun-warmed rock hot against his back.
“What is it?” she asked, stroking his chest. “Oh, David, what is wrong?”
…He hesitated, on the edge of confessing everything, and then he could not.
p. 332
The air was cooler, and people had begun to stroll through the gardens, lovers holding hands, couple with children, solitary walkers. An elderly couple approached. She was tall, with a flash of white hair, and he walked slowly, stooping slightly, with a cane. She had her hand tucked around his elbow and was leaning down to speak to him, and he was nodding, pensive, frowning, looking across the gardens, beyond the gates, at whatever she wanted him to note. Norah felt a pang to see this intimacy. Once she had imagined herself and David moving into such an old age, their histories woven together like vines, tendril around shoot, leaves meshed. Oh, she’d been so old-fashioned; even her regret was old-fashioned. She had imagined that, married, she would be some sort of lovely bud, wrapped in the tougher, resilient calyx of the flower. Wrapped and protected, the layers of her own life contained within another’s.
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