On the night Phoebe and Paul are born, an uncharacteristically serious snowstorm has hit Lexington, Kentucky. Snow blankets everything, and falls softly and dreamily as David and Norah make their way to the hospital. The streets are abandoned, and Norah’s obstetrician, Dr. Bentley, is caught in a drift and unable to get to the hospital. David, an orthopedic surgeon, is forced to deliver the babies himself—as a result, he is given the freedom and control to make the terrible decision of sending Phoebe away when he realizes she has been born with Down syndrome. As Caroline, the nurse present for the delivery of the babies, takes Phoebe first to a home for the impaired and later, after refusing to leave her there, drives through the snowy streets of Lexington unsure of what to do, snow emerges as a symbol of things blanketed in secrets—of facts and choices covered-up, hidden, and yet bound to be revealed one day when the truth melts off the surface of things. Snow, beautiful and blank but impermanent, represents the threat that comes along with a secret—one day, it will surely be brought to light.
Snow Quotes in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street.
“When we come back we’ll have our baby with us,’’ she said. “Our world will never be the same.”
He cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. Later, when he considered this night—and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather—what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside.
She began to laugh. It wasn’t a normal laugh; even Caroline could hear that: her voice too loud, halfway to a sob. “I have a baby,” she said out loud, astonished. “I have a baby in this car.” But the parking lot stretched quietly before her, the lights from the grocery store windows making large rectangles in the slush. “I have a baby here,” Caroline repeated, her voice thinning quickly in the air. “A baby!” she shouted then, into the stillness.
Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father’s photographs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. Ashes were drifting down like snow in the dense July heat.
Snow Symbol Timeline in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
