Light on Snow (17 page)

“He helped me up. I was sore and could hardly move. ‘Walk like there’s nothing wrong,’ he said. He locked the door of the motel and kept the key. He put me in the passenger side. He opened the back door and bent over the basket like he was tucking the baby in, checking on her, and he said, ‘She’s sleeping now.’ And I said, ‘I have to feed her.’ And he said, ‘When she wakes up.’ I remember I turned around, and I saw the basket mounded up with the blankets we’d brought, and I thought she was in there. I had to reach around to put my hand on the blankets. James put the key in the ignition and started the car. I drifted off again. I woke once, I don’t know how far we’d gone, and I said, ‘She’s still sleeping?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ That was all. Just ‘Yes.’

“And then I fell asleep again.”

“You never saw her,” my father says.

“Just that one time when she was on my stomach,” Charlotte says.

“Then what happened?” my father asks, his voice steady, even a little relentless.

“When we pulled into the driveway of our apartment, I woke up. I said, ‘Get the baby. Maybe something’s wrong. I don’t hear her.’ And James said, ‘She woke up once. You were sleeping. She’s fine.’ And I said, ‘She did?’ And he said, ‘Let’s get you in first. Then I’ll get the baby.’

“So he came around to my side and helped me out and up the steps and into the apartment, and all the time, I’m saying, ‘I’m fine, just get the baby.’ He helped me get my coat off and I sat down on the sofa, and he went out to get the baby, and that was that.”

The silence is long, and I think that maybe Charlotte has finished her story.

“I must have drifted off again for a few minutes,” Charlotte says after a time, “because when I woke up, James was sitting across from me, and he was crying.”

Charlotte’s voice is so low now, I have to strain to hear her.

“I knew right away it was terrible. I started saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ And James told me the baby had died. ‘It’s not true!’ I said. ‘I heard her cry.’ He said she was alive for a few minutes, but that she died. He said he tried to revive her, he did CPR or something, but that she was dead. He said he panicked and wrapped her up in a towel and took her out behind the motel and left her body in a sleeping bag he had in the trunk.

“I went crazy. I hit him in the face. I fell on the floor. ‘She might have been alive,’ I kept screaming.

“‘No,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t.’

“‘Then what was in the basket?’ I yelled. And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘I thought you’d go crazy and I wouldn’t be able to get you into the car. I wanted to get you home first.’

“And I said, ‘Home? I’d rather be dead.’”

In the hallway I bend my forehead to my knees.

“And then I realized that James was crying, too, just as much as I was, and that really scared me because then I believed him. I knew it was all true, and, oh God, I was so sad. . . .”

I wrap my arms around my head.

“‘It’s punishment,’ I said to James,” Charlotte continues. “‘Punishment for what?’ James said. ‘For doing it the way we did. For not telling anyone. For not going to a hospital. If we’d gone to a hospital, she’d be alive.’ He said we didn’t know that. But I was sure of it. It just made it all so much worse.

“He stayed with me that night and most of the next day. But then he said he had to go home to his parents. It was Christmas break, and he’d already had to make too many excuses why he wasn’t home yet. I said I’d be fine. I wanted him to go. I just wanted to be alone. James packed his duffle bag and said good-bye, and I remember that we didn’t even kiss. I remember thinking,
This means something.
I knew he wanted to get away from me just as much as I wanted him to go.” She pauses. “He didn’t love me, did he?”

“No,” my father says.

“You wouldn’t do this to someone you loved, would you?”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Charlotte begins to cry again. After a time, I hear her blow her nose. “About an hour later, I walked into the bedroom to lie down, and the radio was on. I remember this surprised me. I didn’t have the energy to walk around the bed and turn it off. I just climbed in and pulled the covers over my head. When the news came on, I heard something about an abandoned baby being in stable condition. I sat up. The announcer said Shepherd, New Hampshire. I hadn’t known the name of the town where the motel was. I had a map of New England in my car. I went out to get it. I looked up where Shepherd was. I ran back in and got my keys and drove to the store and bought a newspaper. There was a story in it about the baby. I was just so happy. So happy she wasn’t dead.” Charlotte pauses. “And that’s when it hit me. I realized what James had done.
He’d left her to die.
At first I couldn’t believe it. I told myself that he’d just made a horrible mistake. He’d thought she was dead but she wasn’t really. And then slowly I realized he had to have known she was alive, and still he’d traipsed out into the snow and left her there. I could hardly breathe. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t scream. It was just nothing.”

“He did it deliberately,” my father says. “He knew she was alive.”

Charlotte is silent.

“He planned it all along,” my father says.

“I don’t know,” Charlotte says. “Maybe he just panicked. I can’t believe he drove all that way, knowing he was going to kill her.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I was afraid,” Charlotte says. “If I went to the police, I knew I’d be charged with attempted murder. I was scared. So I began to think, Well, it’s okay now, isn’t it? She’s alive, and someone will take care of her. I couldn’t take care of her. I had no money. I would have to leave James’s apartment. I couldn’t go home to my family with a baby. So it was all right, wasn’t it?”

My father is silent.

“I called James at his home,” Charlotte says. “He wasn’t there. His mother said he’d gone skiing with friends.”

“Skiing?” my father asks, incredulous.

“I was so dumbfounded I just hung up the phone.”

“Incredible,” my father says.

“I lay in bed for a week,” Charlotte says. “I hardly ate anything. I was so tired. Finally I got up and drove myself to the library and looked up all the back issues of the newspapers until I came to a story with your name in it.” She pauses. “And then I drove here.”

“Why?”

“I had to see you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What was my life worth if I didn’t thank you?” Charlotte says.

Her extraordinary question—almost more amazing than her confession, almost more astonishing than her terrible story—floats through the kitchen and out to the hallway. A pulse in my left ear begins to pound.

“I’d better go back to bed,” Charlotte says. I can hear rustling, a soft thump against the cabinet. “My leg has fallen asleep.”

“Give it a shake.”

“It must be hard for you to hear this,” Charlotte says.

“It would be a hard story for anyone to listen to,” my father says.

“Look, I’m really sorry about what I said about losing a child.”

“That’s all right,” my father says.

“I keep thinking I could have stopped him,” Charlotte says.

A bomb explodes, one without sound. I bring my hand to my eyes, temporarily blinded by the light. Our house begins to hum.

“Oh!” Charlotte says, startled.

“The power’s back,” my father announces, sounding a little stunned himself.

I squint in the overbright light. The wood floor shines, and there’s a glare off the painted wall. I want to shut my eyes. The world is harsh and ugly, and I hate it.

I scoot along the floor and crawl into my sleeping bag. When Charlotte enters the room, I prop myself up. “What happened?” I ask, squinting up at her.

“The power’s on,” she says. The palms of her hands are bright red. Her nose is pink and raw, and her voice is thick.

“Weird,” I say.

“It’s the middle of the night,” she says. “Do you want me to turn off the light so you can go back to sleep?”

“Where were you?”

“I got up to get some milk.”

“What happened to your hands?”

“I tripped over your father,” she says. She turns off the light and crawls into the sleeping bag beside me.

I slide back into my own bag. I press my hand against my chest to keep my heart from jumping out of my skin. I think about everything Charlotte told my father—the blood on the snow, the way Charlotte kept passing out, the moment she realized James had left the baby to die. It was all too awful, too horrible. I cover my face with my hands.

And then I begin to think about how my father and I drove north from New York and settled in a town called Shepherd. Charlotte and James drove south from Burlington and found a random motel in Shepherd. Our paths crossed at a single spot in the woods. But what if, I wonder, on the second day of our trip, my father and I had figured out the complicated interchange at White River Junction and gone north as we were supposed to do? What if my father had decided to make a go of it in New York after all? What if my mother had dropped a quarter at the register when she was buying a present for her parents at the mall and knelt to retrieve it, thus delaying her two seconds to her car? What if my father had not, as my mother had once told me, walked into the university library one spring morning to read about the Yankees-Orioles game the night before and seen my mother at the circulation desk, studying for a chemistry exam while putting in her work-study hours, and asked her, on the spur of the moment, how he might get permission to look at a series of rare Jefferson drawings kept in the vault?

I would not exist. My father and mother would not have married. There would have been no Clara.

I want to believe that my father and I were meant to stumble across Baby Doris and give her a chance at life. But now I’m not so sure. I am thinking about accidents and intersecting footsteps as I drift off to sleep.

S
ix days after Clara was born, she developed a cough and a fever. My mother took her to the pediatrician, who prescribed a mild antibiotic and cool baths which made my sister howl. Her temperature came down, and my mother thought the worst was over. That afternoon I went into my parents’ room to see Clara, who was sleeping on her back, her body uncovered but for a diaper. My mother, who hadn’t eaten since the evening before, had gone downstairs to make herself a bowl of soup. I sat on my parents’ bed and gazed at the crib, Clara’s tiny body moving in and out of focus depending upon whether I stared at the wooden bars of the railing or at her. The crib sheet and comforter were of pastel checks; a threadbare duck we called Quack-Quack was perched in a corner. Quack-Quack was remarkably intact but for the missing plush on one side of his face. I actually thought he looked a little creepy and was glad when Clara inherited him. As I watched, I let my eyes focus on Clara, and I noticed that her stomach, below her rib cage, compressed with each breath. I hadn’t known this about babies before, and I thought it fascinating. It was as though her skin were a thin rubber membrane and someone was sucking the air out her back. I observed this for a few minutes more, and it suddenly occurred to me that this might not be normal. I went to the top of the stairs and called my mother.

“Mom?”

I could hear her in the kitchen.

“Mom?” I yelled again.

“What?” she asked from the bottom of the stairs.

“Clara’s stomach is doing something weird,” I said.

Perhaps I had noticed it because I was eye level with my sister. Or maybe it was only because I was bored and had nothing to do. My mother came running up the stairs. “See?” I pointed. “The way it goes up and down?”

“You’re right,” she said, at first not understanding its significance. “I’ll call Dr. Blake.”

She sat on the bed and made the call. She was in the middle of describing Clara’s condition when she was interrupted. She sat up straight. “Yes,” she said. “Right away.”

She hung up and called for an ambulance.

“Mom?” I asked. “What is it?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “We just have to get Clara checked out.” She picked Clara up and held her head against her shoulder. “Grab the diaper bag,” she said.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’re waiting for an ambulance,” she said.

“To go to the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we just drive there?”

“Dr. Blake said not to, that this is the fastest way.”

My mother paced by the front door, peering out the sidelights from time to time. I stood with my jacket on and the diaper bag slung over my shoulder. Within minutes we heard the siren.

Neither my mother nor I was allowed to go with the medics. My mother handed the baby over, and it wouldn’t be until years later that I’d understand how hard that was for her to do. After the rear doors of the ambulance were shut, my mother ran for her car, the green VW. “Get in,” she yelled to me.

My mother, a ridiculously cautious driver—sometimes to the point of exasperation on the part of her passenger, usually me—backed out of the driveway in one shot and left rubber as she raced after the ambulance. She took the Bug to its max, straining the engine, so that she could keep the ambulance in sight. I held on to the door handle and tried not to speak, because my mother, under the best of circumstances, was not an expert driver. Usually she sat forward, hunched over the wheel, looking behind her in both directions before she dared to change lanes, a practice I never saw my father do. But that day my mother was a pro.

She abandoned the VW, door open, at the emergency entrance and ran after the gurney that held Clara, whose cries we could hear receding. I followed my mother, the oversized bag flapping against my thigh and slowing me down. I knew it was serious as soon as I saw the doctor hovering over the gurney. Clara was wheeled into a cubicle with white curtains on either side. She was put inside a metal box, which struck me as bizarre and my mother as horrifying. “Can’t I at least hold her?” my mother begged.

“Step aside, Mrs. Dillon,” the doctor said.

“If I nurse her, she’ll stop crying,” my mother said.

“Nursing her right now would be the worst possible thing you could do,” he said.

I didn’t like the doctor, who seemed bossy and self-important and barked at the nurses around him. He treated my mother as an annoying object that was simply in the way.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

“Your baby can’t breathe,” the doctor said.

I stood against the wall on the far side of the room. I let the diaper bag fall to the ground.

“Nicky, here’s two quarters,” my mother said, standing in front of me. “Go find a pay phone and call your father. You know the number?”

I did. I sometimes called him from home after school if I had a math problem I couldn’t solve.

“Do it now,” she said.

I picked up the diaper bag and searched for a pay phone. A woman sitting behind a desk gave me directions, and I finally found a bank of phones near an elevator. “Dad, you better come,” I said.

“Why?” he asked, and I could hear alarm in his voice.

“Clara can’t breathe,” I said.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“At the hospital where she was born.”

“Tell your mother I’ll be right there.”

I sat by the wall, a buffer of nurses and curtains shielding me from Clara. She was moved to another part of the hospital, and I moved with the entourage. Sometime that night my mother looked over in my direction and said, “Rob, she’s green.”

My father came over and sat beside me.

“She’s going to die, isn’t she?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Then why is there so much fuss?”

“That’s the way hospitals are,” he said.

I knew this wasn’t true. When I’d broken my wrist the year before, we’d had to wait for two hours in the emergency room, until my father finally lost his temper and started yelling at the triage nurse that his daughter was in pain.

“I’ll call Jeff and Mary,” my father said, referring to a couple my parents were friendly with and who lived near the hospital. “You can eat and watch TV, and I’ll come get you later.”

That night the doctors worked on Clara for hours. She had a not-uncommon but life-threatening form of infant pneumonia. My mother was told that Clara might not make it through the night, a fact I wouldn’t learn until later. At Jeff and Mary’s, I ate pizza and stayed up late watching TV. I slept in a guest room in a shirt that belonged to Mary. In the morning Jeff took me to my house so I could change and go to school. When we arrived the front door was open and the house was freezing. A newspaper my mother had set on the coffee table had blown all over the room. Jeff made me wait outside while he moved through all the rooms in a crouch like the cops do on TV. He returned and reported that the house was empty and that nothing had been disturbed. Even so, I was afraid to step over the threshold. Jeff had to persuade me that my mother, as she was running to the ambulance, had forgotten to shut the door. I made Jeff come upstairs with me and stand outside my room anyway while I changed my clothes.

Clara was in the hospital for three days, during which my mother never left her side. My father went to work in the mornings only, so that he’d be home when I got off the bus. Together we’d travel to the hospital, more relaxed the second day than the first, more relaxed the third day than the second. On the third night, we came home with Clara, who weighed two pounds less than she had when she’d left the house. She looked scrawny, like a plucked bird. Every so often during that week and the next, my mother and father would look at each other, sigh, and then shake their heads, as if to say,
That was a close one
.

“You may have saved your sister’s life,” my mother said once to me.

I wake at daybreak. From my vantage point on the floor, I see something I haven’t seen in days, a powder-blue sky shot through with pink silk. Beside me, Charlotte sleeps. Even my father seems not to be up.

Daybreak comes fast in northern New England. I know that the sun will rise within minutes if not seconds. I wait, snug in my bag. I remember the events of the night before. A story was told. In the daylight it seems impossible.

The sun rises over the top of Bott Hill and lights up the snow-covered woods and meadows with such an intense pink light that I slide out of my sleeping bag to see. The color spills slowly across the landscape, and for the first time in my life, I wish I had a camera. I know that we once owned one—I can remember my father taking that picture of me holding Clara on my mother’s bed, and there are certainly many other photographs in my album to prove it—but I haven’t seen it out since we moved to New Hampshire. Like everything else from our former lives, the reminder of family photographs has been too difficult for my father to manage. But that morning, for the three or four minutes that the snow is on fire, I want one. I make a square with my thumbs and forefingers and stand at the window framing shots and making barely audible clicks with my tongue. Then so fast that it seems like a trick, the lovely pink is gone, and the snow is white and bright and hard to look at. The sky deepens to the chrome blue of postcards. Only the tall pines show green.

Charlotte is still snoring lightly on the floor. Maybe everybody snores. I think it amazing that she can sleep at all—the den is lit brighter than it has been in weeks, maybe a year. And lit bright, it shows its dust: the dust of ashes on the hearth; a fine layer of ordinary dust on the coffee table; a weird, weblike dust on the lamp shades. The sun makes oblongs of high reality on the floor and rug and on Charlotte, who rolls over and turns her face away.

In the kitchen I find cornmeal and flour and baking powder and eggs. I mix the ingredients in a bowl and wait for the pan to heat up. I move easily between counter and stove. I wonder if dark stories can be told with the sun streaming through the windows. I sprinkle raspberries, like seeds, onto the circles of batter. The raspberries were frozen in the summer, and we have bags and bags of them in a freezer in the basement. I’ll mash and mix some of them with sugar and serve them in a small pitcher to pour over the pancakes.

I fetch the trays from the top of the fridge and begin to set them up. The batter sizzles in the hot oil. My pancakes are always crispy; the secret is the cornmeal.

Finding room to lay the trays down is a problem as usual. I set one across the sink, another on a pile of books. Charlotte appears in the doorway.

She has removed my father’s clothes and has on her wrinkled white blouse and jeans. Her face is pink and creased with sleep. Her hair, uncombed, separates at one ear. She hugs her arms. “I rolled the bags,” she says.

In the other doorway, as if summoned, my father appears as well. His hair is spiked in all directions. He has on a maroon sweatshirt and a pair of tan moccasins, frayed at the heel. For a moment all I can think about is my father and Charlotte in the kitchen together last night.

“Hi,” he says. He looks the same as he did yesterday. I realize I’ve been expecting a different father, a different Dad.

“Good morning,” he says to Charlotte.

“Good morning,” she says back to him.

I glance from Charlotte to my father and back again. Do I see an acknowledgment pass between them, or do I only imagine it?

“Pancakes,” my father says. “Good. I’m starved.”

He takes the pot from under the Mr. Coffee and fills it with water.

“What can I do?” Charlotte asks.

“Nothing, really,” I say. I pause. I have an idea.

“Watch these,” I say to my father, indicating the frying pan. “I just put them in. I’ll be right back. Charlotte, come with me.”

Charlotte follows me into the front room, lit just as bright as the other rooms. I touch a walnut dining table—oval and beautifully finished.

“What are we doing?” she asks.

“We’re going to lift this off and carry it into the kitchen,” I say. “Take that end.”

Together Charlotte and I maneuver the tabletop through the kitchen door and prop it up against the cabinets.

My father studies us, spatula in hand.

Charlotte walks with me to the front room again and helps me bring the bottom structure into the kitchen. We set that down as well and then lift the tabletop onto it. The table takes up most of the kitchen. For us to be able to cook and wash dishes, a good third of it will have to stick out into the passageway between the den and the back hallway. But we have a table in the kitchen.

“Well,” my father says.

I set the plates and the silverware and glasses on the table and store the trays over the fridge. I bring out two chairs from the front room and get the third from my bedroom. I pour orange juice in glasses and fill a white pitcher with raspberry syrup.

My father sits at the head of the table, Charlotte and I across from each other. For a few seconds the three of us look at one another and at the stack of pancakes, as if we are a family pondering whether or not to say grace. Sitting at a table in our kitchen feels both strange and familiar. It is a simple thing, but my father and I have gone a long time without it.

I look at the place on the kitchen floor where Charlotte was sitting last night. I remember the clink of ice cubes, the small circle of light from the lantern. I remember all these sights and sounds, but the words I heard last night seem part of a dream.

“These are good,” Charlotte says.

I pick up my fork and take a bite. I decide I like having my plate on a stable surface, being able to shift my legs while eating. I enjoy the sight of the small white pitcher of raspberry syrup against the dark wood. For the second time that day, I wish I had a camera.

“This is a beautiful table,” Charlotte says after a time.

“My father taught me the rudiments of carpentry when I was fourteen,” my father says. “I helped him build a house.”

I didn’t know this fact. I examine my father. There might be whole universes of facts about him I don’t know. “When’s Grammie’s plane?” I ask.

“Two thirty,” my father says.