Kim Edwards

“Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.”

“He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.”

“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”

“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.”

“It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.”

“Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained.”

“All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.”

“Norah looked at her son’s tiny face, surprised, as always, by his name. he had not grown into it yet, he still wore it like a wrist band, something that might easily slip off and disappear. She had read about people – where? she could not remember this either – who refused to name their children for several weeks, feeling them to be not yet of the earth, suspended still between two worlds.”

“On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.”

“his discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.”

“The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.”

“Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.”

“Either things grow and change or they die.”

“So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.”

“A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.”

“...bleak territory of the heart.”

“Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.”

“They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“He had handed his daughter to Caroline Gill and that act had led him here, years later, to this girl in motion of her own, this girl who had decided yes, a brief moment of release in the back of a car, in the room of a silent house, this girl who had stood up later, adjusting her clothes, with now knowledge of how that moment was already shaping her life.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“He had never even glimpsed her.”

“You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.”

“...so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“A moment might be a thousand different things.”

“This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.”

“He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.”

“Paul, careening down the slide with his arms out flung, and Phoebe, present somehow through her absence.”

“...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.”

“...her tone more disapproving than dismayed.”

“Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement.”

“...a vase full of flowers: dark red and pale pink in a cloud of baby's breath.”

“...Caroline said easily, amazed all over again at this sudden facility she'd developed, the fluidity and ease of her lies.”

“Short on money, long on hope”

“There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.”