Paper Daughter Read Free

after he got killed, Mom, over breakfast one day, had suddenly exclaimed, "Who'd have thought Manhattan might be safer than Seattle?"
    I hadn't answered her then, but I did now, aloud, in the glue-smelling, paper-webbed, memory-tangled lonely mess of a garage. "No one. No one!" No one would have thought it, and what happened wasn't right, and I didn't know what to do with this clipping or with all the stuff that was still wet, or with the way I felt...
    How I wished I had someone to talk to and work with. A brother or a sister. Perhaps a big family. Aunts to chatter and keep everyone fed and uncles to string more drying wires and help with bundling cardboard for recycling.
    Or even a friend. If Bett and Aimee weren't fifty miles away in the San Juan Islands, I might have called them to come over. But they were.
    So I put the award banquet story safely back on the line, and then found and rearranged several items that were still damp.
    ***
    It was Thursday by the time all the things we'd taken up from Dad's office were completely dry. I was mentally dividing the garage into areas for a preliminary sort when Mom came out to tell me she was on her way to work.
    "I hate leaving you with all this," she said.
    "I've got a plan. And the work will keep my mind off starting at the
Herald
next week. I'm ready to admit I'm getting ner vous."
    "Not too late to change your mind. Whoever's running the intern program probably chose alternates."
    "No," I said. "I want to do it. I just want to do it
well.
If I don't, I'll embarrass myself, you, and the teachers who wrote me recommendations."
    "Maggie!" she exclaimed. Sudden, laughing exasperation made her sound like her old self. "You'll do fine! You're your father's daughter. You've got printer's ink in your veins!"
    I held my breath, waiting for the wipeout I was sure would follow when Mom's mirth collapsed atop memories. But this time it didn't. She gave me a hug. "You'll do yourself, me, and your teachers proud. Which reminds me. Did you call your father's prep school?"
    For a moment I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I remembered the letter saying he wasn't on its alumni list. Even though Dad hadn't kept up with associations there, Mom wanted the school to know he'd died.
    "Not yet," I said. "I'll do it today. I promise."
    ***
    Once Mom was gone, I began a rough triage, identifying papers as
toss, keep,
or
decide later.
    At first I worked quickly, but pretty soon my scanning became reading. I stopped to study the draft of one of Dad's columns. His published articles had always been so smooth and seemed so effortless that the draft surprised me, with its arrows and inserted words and cross-outs over cross-outs.
    Then I began reading his reporter's notebooks, which I went through as I picked them up. Some were from twenty years earlier, others quite recent, and the images they brought to mind made me feel a bittersweet ache. And a swelling pride, too. This was the dad I knew, but more, also. Someone connected to the world in a thousand ways and able, through his writing, to let others know what that was like.
    Dad hadn't recorded just what he saw as he went after a story; he also got the sound and smell and feel, sometimes even the taste of it. Quoted words got a context and often a reminder of how they were said. "Shouted over the scream of machinery..." "Whispered, as her eyes searched the deserted street..."
    I smiled at the way, in between notes such as those, he'd jotted down personal reminders like "Pick up the turkey"—that would have been Thanksgiving two years past—and research questions: "Federal law in effect when? Any changes?"
    And he'd tracked ongoing projects: the effects of a factory closure, tourism trends, a business forecast. In a notebook so new the last pages were blank, he'd written, "Progress on family project, finally? Possible search will end right here! Give mail a week, then fly CA."
    It sounded like a story he'd worked on for a good while,