Light on Snow (16 page)

I think about Jo, the Viking goddess. “I don’t think she knows any more than I do,” I say.

Charlotte brings her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them. The position must hurt, though, because she immediately sets her legs to one side. “It’s unlike anything you can ever imagine,” she says.

The world outside our house is silent—no humming of motors, no groans from the furnace, only the fire snaps. Occasionally, through the windows, I can hear the scrape of a shovel against the snow.

“You know that something is, I won’t say wrong, but different,” she says. “Right away. Food doesn’t taste right.” She touches her throat. “There’s a kind of metallic taste right here. Foods you used to like a lot smell bad. And your breasts hurt. They get swollen and tender. And then you realize you didn’t get your period when you were supposed to. So I bought a test. In a drugstore? And there it was, big as life. The pink doughnut.”

I am pretty sure I know what the pink doughnut means.

“I waited another couple of weeks before I told James. By then I wasn’t feeling well. I was queasy, not just in the mornings, either. It’s sort of a headachy, sick-to-your-stomach feeling.”

“So then you told him?” I asked.

“I did,” she says.

“And what did he say?”

“He was shocked at first and kept asking how this could have happened. We had always been pretty careful.” She glances at me to see whether or not I know what
being careful
means. I nod, though I’m a little fuzzy on the details.

“He paced a lot,” she says. “Sometimes he’d say, ‘What are we going to do?’ and then he’d ask me how I was. He wasn’t happy about it. I think he could see his whole life draining away.”

I hate James even more than I did before. “But what about your life?” I ask. “Did he care about that?”

“He cared,” she says, “of course he cared. He didn’t ask me to get rid of the baby. He’s Catholic, too, and I think he knew enough not to ask me to do that. But he did talk about giving the baby up when it was born. He just kept saying, ‘We’ll take this one step at a time.’” She stops for a moment and arches her back. I have the feeling that it’s hurting her. “The morning sickness goes away, and it feels . . . it just feels . . . so wonderful, I can’t explain it. You feel the baby kick,” she says. “It’s an inside tickle, like gas bubbles moving around. But different. Everything is different from anything you’ve ever felt before. And you feel . . . full. Just full.” She smiles. “Even though you’re always hungry. I craved doughnuts most of all. Nothing on them, just the plain, but hot, with a crispy outside. I ate them with milk.”

Charlotte stretches her legs in front of her and leans back, propping herself up with her elbows. She yawns. “It’ll be different for you,” she says, looking at me. “It will be wonderful and perfect, and it won’t have a bad ending. I’m sure of that.”

Charlotte yawns again. “Thank you for taking me to the place,” she says. “I’m sorry it got you in trouble with your dad.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “He’ll get over it.”

I sit to one side of the fire, poking it from time to time to make the flames burn brighter. I put on another log. I remember that I still need to finish my grandmother’s necklace.

I reach for the flashlight and stand. “I have to go up to my room,” I tell Charlotte, “and get my beads.”

Charlotte yawns again. “The fire is making me sleepy.”

I could find my way without a flashlight, but I use it anyway. I locate the shoebox of beads and rawhide and bring it down to the den. I set it near the hearth so that I can distinguish the beads in the firelight. I rummage around in the box to find a crimp.

“That’s beautiful,” Charlotte says.

“It’s for my grandmother.”

The necklace has six round black Kenyan beads with a silver pendant in the center.

“I’d wear that,” Charlotte says. “You must have a very cool grandmother.”

Charlotte watches me fuss with the crimp, always the hardest part of making a necklace. “I have to fit this rawhide into this little thingy here,” I say, “and then clamp it down so the rawhide won’t come out. This makes the catch.”

“Oh,” she says.

I slide the end of the fine rawhide into the crimp. I use the crimper to flatten it. When I’m done, I pull on the rawhide to make sure the crimp worked. The rawhide springs free. “Crap,” I say.

I search through the beads in my box for another crimp. I might have one in my desk drawer upstairs, but I don’t want to have to go all the way up there again.

The beads in the box flicker and catch the firelight. I have glass pony beads and crow beads, seed beads and Bali silver beads. “What’s this one?” Charlotte asks, holding a blue glass bead up to the light.

“It’s Czechoslovakian. It’s a fire-polished bead.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“You should see it in the daylight. Do you want it?”

“Oh, no,” she says, dropping the bead into the box.

I take it out again. “I have six of them,” I say. “You could make a necklace, too.”

“But they’re your beads,” Charlotte says.

“I have a lot of beads,” I say.

Charlotte looks at me and tilts her head the way she often does. “Thanks,” she says.

I hand her a coil of rawhide. I search the box for the remaining five blue glass beads. The color is hard to detect in the dark, but the beads have a distinctive shape—round and multifaceted. Charlotte sets the beads on the floor and then begins to string them.

I pick up my grandmother’s necklace and hold it up to the firelight. There’s a sheen on the beads and the pendant is perfectly centered.

I glance over at Charlotte. She has strung the beads on the rawhide. “Wait a sec,” I say. “I should have told you. If you do it like that, the beads will slide around and the clasp will end up in the front. What you have to do is put a knot on either side of each bead. Because you have six beads, you have to put your first knot in the exact center of the string.”

I reach over to show her. I make a simple overhand knot.

“Okay,” she says.

I hand her the rawhide. I watch as she slides a bead on. Her delicate fingers make an easy knot, nicely placed. Her hair hangs down around her face, and she has to flip it to one side so that she can see in the firelight. I watch as she strings another bead and another and then begins on the opposite side. It’s a simple necklace to make—they’re all simple, really—but it’s her first, and spacing the knots on the opposite side to match the first side is sometimes a little tricky.

For a while I simply observe. Charlotte’s face is tight with concentration. She must look like this when she’s studying, I think.

When she has strung the last bead, she holds the necklace up to the light. The facets sparkle. “Looks great,” I say.

Charlotte lays the necklace against the small triangle of skin inside the collar of her white shirt and my father’s V-neck sweater.

“You’ll love it in the morning,” I add.

Earlier, when I was rummaging through the box for the six blue beads, I felt a second crimp under my fingers. “I think I’ve got one in here somewhere,” I say, holding the box up and tipping it toward the light. I sift through the beads. A bit of silver catches the light. “So here’s the hard part,” I say.

The telephone rings. Again, it seems wrong in the cozy firelight, as if something from one century had crept into another. I glance over at the kitchen. “Jo again,” I say, standing. “I’ll be right back.”

I walk into the kitchen and pick up the phone. “Hi,” I say.

“Nicky?”

I spin around, my back to the den.

“This is Detective Warren. Is your dad there?”

I hear the rhythmic scrape of the shovel outside. I take a quick breath.

“No,” I say. “He’s in the shower.”

I can hear Charlotte behind me in the doorway.

“Tell him to call me when he gets out, okay?” Warren asks.

“Sure.”

“Let me give you the number.”

Detective Warren gives me a phone number, which I don’t write down.

“Your power out?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Here, too. Stay warm.”

“We will,” I say.

I hang up the phone. I turn and look at Charlotte.

“Oh God,” I say.

“What?” Charlotte asks.

“It was that detective.”

Charlotte’s face is expressionless. “What did he want?”

“He wanted my dad.” I feel breathless with my crime. “I said he was in the shower.”

“I’ll go in the morning,” Charlotte says. “You can’t keep this up.”

I think about how my father drove to the police station in back of the post office, how he intended to tell Chief Boyd. If Chief Boyd had been there, Charlotte would be in jail now.

Charlotte turns and walks into the den. I follow her. She stands a minute by the fire. “Maybe I should go to bed,” she says.

I’m not sleepy in the slightest.

She scans the room. “We’re supposed to sleep here?”

I roll out the two sleeping bags. I put hers closest to the fire because that’s the best spot. I think about everything Charlotte told me. How could a man really love a woman and expect her to give up her baby once it was born? The idea of giving up a baby—never mind leaving it to die—is incomprehensible to me. I can’t imagine it. Wouldn’t it just hurt your whole life, just like losing Clara always hurts me even if I don’t think about it every second? It’s why I’ve had to create the idea of Clara still growing, still alive. It’s where I send my thoughts whenever I start to think about her.

Charlotte climbs into her bag and adjusts her pillow. I sit to one side of the fire, poking it from time to time to make the flames burn brighter. I put on another log. I’m still not sleepy.

Charlotte falls asleep at once. I listen as she begins to snore lightly.

I work on Charlotte’s necklace until I’ve finished it. I set it in the box. In the morning I’ll insist she put it on. I climb into my sleeping bag and stare at the ceiling. I think about morning sickness and the pink doughnut. I wonder about a metallic taste at the back of the throat. I glance over at Charlotte and realize once again that she is the mother of a baby that was left to die. She is sleeping in our house, on the floor, right next to me. She might get caught and go to jail. My father and I might go to jail.

I roll over and watch the fire. I might have to lie awake for hours, I decide. I might have to go find my book and read it with the flashlight.

But after a time, I begin to picture a different future—one in which Charlotte doesn’t get caught; one in which she gets her baby back; one in which she and her baby live with my father and me.

I see this future in great detail. A white crib in the guest room; in the den, an old high chair with a red leather seat that I once saw at Sweetser’s. A blue stroller in the back hallway; in Charlotte’s car, a padded baby seat. I’ll go to school during the day, and when I get home Charlotte will be pacing the back hallway with the baby on her hip. She’ll have on her fuzzy pink sweater and a pair of jeans. She’ll have chocolate-chip brownies waiting for me, and she’ll ask me questions about my boyfriend. She’ll have an errand to do, or maybe she’ll go to school in the evenings, and she’ll ask me to babysit. At night, while we do our homework together, we’ll have to talk quietly so we won’t wake the baby up. Charlotte will take me to Hanover to get my hair frosted, and she’ll drive me and my friends to the movies.

There will be no James.

My father will come around.

I’ll make Charlotte an ankle bracelet, and I’ll knit a blanket for the baby out of the pastel multicolor yarn that Marion is always trying to palm off on me and I never take. No, I’ll make it out of the soft yellow yarn I once saw at Ames in Newport. Charlotte will take me to the store, and I’ll buy the yarn with my own money. I’m thinking about a basket-weave pattern when the warmth of the fire begins to work on me as it must have done on Charlotte. The last sound I hear is that of my father stomping the snow from his boots in the back hallway.

I
wake once during the night—there’s a disturbance—but I’m so tired from the shoveling and the hiking and the nervous atmosphere in the house since Charlotte’s arrival that I go back to sleep almost immediately. I wake again, however, just a short time later, to the sound of voices from the kitchen. I don’t want the voices to be there, I want to slip back into my dream, but the fact of the voices makes me open my eyes. Voices? There are murmurs, long strings of syllables, clipped answers, but I can’t actually hear the words. The fire has mostly gone out, and only a few embers glow. Charlotte, I see, is not in her sleeping bag.

Later I will learn that Charlotte, waking during the night and wanting a glass of milk—and not knowing that my father would be sleeping in the kitchen—tripped over the sleeping bag (with my father in it) and smashed her palms hard into the grillwork on the stove. My father woke and examined Charlotte’s hands. He lit the kerosene lantern and made two ice packs with plastic bags. He told Charlotte to sit on the sleeping bag and lean her back against the cabinet and let the ice do its work on her bruised palms.

I squiggle out of the sleeping bag and walk down the hallway. I see Charlotte cradling the ice packs in her palms. My father is standing in the opposite corner, not far from her because the kitchen is so small. He has his back against the counters where they meet at a right angle. I can see them because of the light from the kerosene lantern, but the hallway is dark and they haven’t yet seen me. I am about to step into the kitchen when I hear Charlotte say, “You shouldn’t blame Nicky for what happened today.”

I stop.

“It was all my idea,” Charlotte adds. “I begged her.”

“She should have known better,” my father says. “You both should have known better.”

I turn away from the kitchen and put my back to the wall.

“It was awful,” Charlotte says.

“I imagine it was,” my father says.

I’m not sure what surprises me more—that my father and Charlotte are in the kitchen together or that they’re actually talking.

“How’re the hands?” I hear my father ask.

“A little numb,” she says.

“Keep the ice on them. I should have told Nicky I was sleeping here before you both went to bed.”

“I didn’t see you.”

I slide down the wall and sit on the floor. I draw my knees up to my chin.

“You warm enough?” my father asks.

“I’m all right,” Charlotte says.

I imagine Charlotte with her head tilted back against the cabinets, possibly with her eyes closed.

“You’ll be going tomorrow,” my father says after a time. “The plow should get here in the afternoon.”

There is a long silence in the kitchen.

“It was never our plan to abandon the baby,” Charlotte says. “I want you to know that.”

My father says nothing.

“James just kept saying, ‘We’ll take it one step at a time.’ That’s what he’d say whenever I’d mention the future. I thought he would know what to do when the time came. He’d worked in a hospital for a semester, and he was going to medical school.”

I hear the clink of ice cubes in a plastic bag. I’m breathing so shallowly I have to take a gulp of air.

“I suppose you thought you loved him,” my father says.

“I did love him,” she says.

“You’re how old?” my father asks.

“Nineteen.”

“Old enough to think for yourself. Didn’t it ever occur to you that you might be endangering the life of the child by not telling anyone beforehand?”

“You mean, like, a doctor,” Charlotte says.

“Yes, a doctor.”

“I thought about it,” Charlotte says. “I went to the library and read about pregnancy and birth. I was sick during the early part of the summer. Morning sickness, except that it lasted all day. I was worried about that. But if I went to a doctor, I was afraid either my parents would find out or the school would.”

“There are clinics,” my father says.

It’s cold in the hallway, and I don’t have the sleeping bag. I draw myself together in a ball.

“I worked as a temp with an insurance agency,” Charlotte says. “I moved from office to office, subbing for people who went on vacation. I was living with James by then. My parents thought I was sharing an apartment with another girl. Once they came to visit, and we had to put all of James’s stuff in his car for the weekend. My father found an issue of
Sports Illustrated
in the bathroom, and I had to go on this riff about how I’d just become a baseball fan.”

Charlotte pauses.

“In the fall,” she continues, “I pretty much stopped going to my classes. I took long walks, and I learned to cook a couple of things.”

“You were playing house,” my father says dismissively.

“I suppose.”

“Where do your parents live?”

Charlotte doesn’t answer.

“I’m not going to call them, if that’s what you’re worried about,” my father says.

“No, it’s just that . . .”

“I’m not going to call in the police either,” he adds. “If I were going to do that, I’d have done it already. That’s a decision you’re going to have to make.”

In the hallway I begin to shiver from the cold. I want to blow on my hands, but I don’t dare for fear of giving myself away. My father will be furious if he finds out I am listening.

“They live in Rutland,” Charlotte says.

“Vermont?”

“Yes. They worked in a paper mill,” Charlotte says. “They got laid off. Now my mother works at a drugstore, but my father’s still unemployed.”

“Paying for school must have been a struggle,” he says.

“One of my brothers is helping.
Was
helping. And I had loans, though I probably don’t anymore.”

“And the car?”

“It was my brother’s. His old one. He gave it to me.”

“Where’s the school?”

“UVM.”

“You’re a long way from Burlington,” my father says.

I know where Burlington is. I’ve skied Stowe, which isn’t far from the northern Vermont city.

“When the labor started,” Charlotte says, “we got in the car. James wanted to get as far away from the college as possible. And then the labor stopped for a while, so we kept going. When it started up again, we looked for signs for a motel. That was James’s plan. To go to a motel and have the baby ourselves. If there was any sign of trouble, James said, he’d make sure we’d be only a few minutes away from a hospital. But if we didn’t have to go, why should we risk it?”

My father makes a sound of disgust.

“And yes,” Charlotte says, “I guess I was playing house. I convinced myself that James and I would get married, and I’d have the baby, and we’d live in his apartment, and he’d go to medical school, and everything would be great. The fact that it was secret just made it . . . just made it seem all the more romantic.”

I imagine my father shaking his head.

“And no matter what happened afterward,” Charlotte says with a quaver in her voice, “or what happens from here on out . . .” She takes a breath to collect herself. “That will always be a good memory for me. The time I spent with her. With the baby. Because she was inside me, and I talked to her, and . . .”

I hear a rip of paper towel.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says.

“Here, use this,” I hear my father say.

Charlotte blows her nose. “Thank you,” she says.

“Where’s he from?” From the sound of my father’s voice, it seems that he’s leaning against the counter again.

“You won’t . . . ?”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“His father’s a doctor. They live just outside of Boston. I’ve never met them.”

“He didn’t want his parents to know.”

“That’s the thing he was most afraid of.”

“How was he going to explain you and the baby? Eventually?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

My father clears his throat. “Are you thinking about trying to get the baby back?” he asks.

“Part of me wants to,” Charlotte says.

“Can you take care of her?”

“No.”

“I don’t know the law,” my father says. “I don’t know if they would give her to you. Even after whatever happens in court.”

“When she was inside me, I wanted her so much,” Charlotte says.

“Charlotte,” my father says, his voice low. It’s the first time he has used her name, and it shocks me. “You have your whole life in front of you. No, don’t look away. Listen to me. There will be consequences whatever you decide. Hard consequences. Things you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. But
think
first. Think about the baby, about what might be best for her. Maybe you should fight for her, I can’t say. Only you can answer that.”

“You lost a baby,” Charlotte says with a kind of snap.

Her words send an electric zing through the air and around the corner to me. I wait for the sound of footsteps, for the sound of my father leaving the room.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says at once. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It was different,” my father says.

“Really, I’m sorry,” Charlotte says.

“Very, very different.”

“I know,” Charlotte says, “I know. You weren’t to blame. You didn’t do anything. It just happened to you.”

“You know about the accident,” my father says.

“Yes. Nicky told me.”

“Did she.”

“Just the fact of it. That it happened.”

I hear a creak from upstairs. Wood settling, my father once explained. Even after a hundred and fifty years, the house was still settling into the ground. Burrowing in.

“Maybe you should take those off now,” my father says.

“I want to tell you what happened in the motel room,” Charlotte says.

“I don’t want to know.”

“Please,” she says. “I want you to understand.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You found her.”

“Nicky’s asleep?” my father asks.

“She was snoring when I got up.”

My head snaps up. I snore?

“James and I drove a long way,” Charlotte says. “I had to get out once. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I couldn’t even make it to the woods. I just went on the snowbank. And then there was this terrible shuddering feeling, and I saw that there was blood and . . . other stuff on the snowbank . . . and I got scared, and I started yelling for James. He got out of the car and went white when he saw the blood. I couldn’t get up, the pain from the contractions was so bad, so he hauled me up and got me in the car and we made it to the motel.”

In the hallway I fold my hands like two fists under my chin. My eyes are wide open, even though there’s nothing to see.

“There were maybe two other cars in the lot,” Charlotte says. “Hardly anyone there at all. James went into the office while I stayed in the car. He told me not to yell, so I bit my hand. He came out and got me inside. I can hardly remember what the room looked like. There were these curtains. Green plaid. Ugly.”

“I’ve seen the room,” my father says.

“I lay down on the bed,” she says. “The contractions were every minute or so. There was hardly any time in between. I was grunting. I thought because of the blood the baby would come fast, but it didn’t. It felt like I was there for hours.”

“You didn’t think of getting to a hospital?” my father asks.

“I said once, ‘I need to get to a hospital,’ but the contractions were coming so fast, I thought I would deliver any minute, and I didn’t want it to happen in the car. I was in so much pain, I didn’t know how I’d even get to the car.”

Charlotte pauses. “I didn’t know what it would be like. What was normal to feel. I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die.”

“And what was James doing all this time?”

“Sometimes he sat with me. I remember digging my fingernails into his arm when I was having a contraction. He paced. He’d bought some Demerol from a guy to have on hand for the pain, and he gave me two with a glass of water. And then when it got worse, he gave me two more. I didn’t even care what the right dose was. I’d have taken a hundred of them. I just wanted the pain to go away.”

I can hear my father sighing.

“I started wanting to push,” Charlotte says. “I realized then that I couldn’t get up from that bed and make it to the car. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen in that motel room. And that’s when James really started to fall apart. He kept yelling, ‘What are we going to do? I don’t know what to do.’ So I had to tell him. I had to talk him through it. I asked him if he could see the head. I made him wash his hands. I was just grunting then. I tried to breathe the way they say to in the books, but it didn’t work.”

I wrap my arms around my legs.

“And then I couldn’t stop pushing, and the pain was just unbelievable,” Charlotte says. “I felt as though I was being torn wide open. I was sure I was going to die. I yelled, and it’s amazing someone didn’t hear us.”

In the kitchen there’s a long silence.

“And then she was out,” Charlotte says finally. “The baby was born. James was crying. I told him to pick the baby up and get the mucus out, and she cried right away. She was covered with that white stuff. James thought there was something wrong with her. I told him to cut the cord—the scissors were in my bag in a plastic bag—and he did. And then I told him to wrap her in a towel. I told him to watch for the placenta, the placenta had to come out. There was a lot of pain then, and this surprised me. I think something got torn. I was shivering, and I had a terrible headache.”

There’s another silence.

“I think that’s when I realized how much James didn’t want the baby,” Charlotte says. “I really started to lose it then. I was crying. I told him to pick the baby up and hold her and to check for all her toes and fingers. He seemed calmer then. I said, ‘Give her to me,’ and he did. He just laid her across my stomach. I put my hand on her, but I was drifting by then, drifting in and out. I remember I propped myself up and looked at her. She had her face turned toward me. I had a tremendous feeling of relief. And then I lay back again, just resting for a second. And then I must have passed out.”

“You passed out?” my father asks.

“The next thing I knew was James was in my face, and he was saying, ‘Get up. We have to get out of here. We have to get you to the car.’ And I said, ‘Where’s the baby?’ and he said, ‘She’s in the car. She’s sleeping in the basket we brought. But it’s cold out there, and we have to get going.’