Light on Snow (2 page)

I
watch the baby disappear behind massive automatic doors. My father puts his head back and closes his eyes. When we hear the distant wail of a siren, he sits up. He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. How long has he been crying? He turns the key in the ignition, stripping the starter because the motor is already on. He drives as if he were new at the wheel, following signs to the parking lot. When we get out of the car, he looks down, only then realizing that his shirt is still unbuttoned beneath his jacket.

At the curb in front of the emergency entrance, my father hesitates.

“Dad?”

He puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk toward the entrance, our boots coasting on the salt pellets.

The beige-and-mint entryway is empty, and there seems to be a lot of metal. I squint in the overbright lights that flicker like a strobe. I wonder where the baby is and where we should go. My father follows signs for Triage, each step forward on the tiles an effort. We don’t belong in here. No one does.

We turn a corner and see a small room in which a half-dozen people sit on plastic chairs attached to the walls. A woman in jeans and a sweater is pacing, her yellow hair still bearing the imprint of her rollers. She seems impatient, annoyed with a sullen boy who might be her son. He sits in his plastic chair, his coat still on, his chin besieged with angry pimples. I think I see the reason for the visit in the way he cradles his right hand: a finger? a wrist? My father walks toward the Triage window and stands at its opening while a woman speaks into a telephone and ignores him.

I put my hands into the pockets of my jacket and look down the hallway. Somewhere there is a room and a cot and a doctor working on a baby. Is she still alive? The receptionist taps on the window to get my father’s attention.

“I brought in a baby,” my father says. “I found her in the woods.”

The woman is silent a moment. “You found a baby?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says.

She writes something on a pad of paper. “Does the child have injuries?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you the father?”

“No,” he says. “I found her in the woods. I’m not a relative. I have no idea who she is.”

The receptionist studies him again, and I know what she is seeing: a tallish man in a stained beige parka; forty, maybe forty-five; a three-day growth of beard; dark brown hair with a sheen of gray; sharp vertical lines between the brows. My father probably hasn’t had a shower, I realize, since breakfast the day before yesterday.

“Your name?”

“Robert Dillon.”

She writes quickly, in red ink. “Address?”

“Bott Hill.”

“You have insurance?”

“I have insurance personally,” my father says.

“May I see your card?” she asks.

My father feels in all his pockets, and then he stops. “I don’t have my wallet with me,” he says. “I left it on a shelf in the back hallway.”

“No driver’s license?”

“No,” my father says.

The receptionist’s face goes still. She sets her pen down and folds her hands together in a slow, controlled manner, as if she were afraid of sudden movement. “Take a seat,” she says. “Someone will be right with you.”

I sit next to a man with a doughy face who coughs quietly into the collar of a quilted parka the color of weeds. The light is harsh and unflattering, making the elderly look nearly dead and even the children blotchy with imperfections. After a time—twenty minutes? half an hour?—a young doctor in a white coat steps into the room, a mask loose around his neck, a stethoscope anchored in a breast pocket. Behind him is a uniformed policeman.

“Mr. Dillon?” the doctor asks.

My father stands and meets the men in the center of the room. I get up and follow. The doctor is pale and blond and looks too young to be a doctor. “Are you the man who found the infant?” he asks.

“Yes,” my father says.

“I’m Dr. Gibson, and this is Chief Boyd.”

Chief Boyd, one of only two police officers in the town of Shepherd, is, I know, Timmy Boyd’s father. They are both overweight and have the same rectangular black eyebrows. Chief Boyd pulls a notebook and a short pencil from a uniform pocket.

“Is she all right?” my father asks the doctor.

“She’ll lose a finger, possibly some toes,” the doctor answers, rubbing his forehead. “And her lungs may be compromised. It’s too soon to tell.”

“Where’d you find her?” the chief asks my father.

“In the woods behind my house.”

“On the ground?”

“In a sleeping bag. She was wrapped inside a towel inside the bag.”

“Where are the towel and bag now?” Chief Boyd asks, licking the tip of his pencil, a gesture I’ve seen my grandmother make when composing her shopping lists. He speaks like most of the New Hampshire natives do—with broad
a
’s, no
r
’s, and a slight rhythm to the sentences.

“In the woods. I left them there.”

“You live on Bott Hill, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen you around,” Chief Boyd says. “In Sweetser’s.”

“I think it was near the motel up there,” my father says. “I can’t remember the name.”

The chief turns away from my father and speaks into a radio he has clipped to his shoulder. I study the paraphernalia attached to his uniform.

“How long was she there?” the doctor asks my father.

“I don’t know,” my father says.

I have then an image of the baby still in the snow in the dark. I make a sound. My father puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Tell me how you found her,” Chief Boyd says to my father.

“My daughter and I were taking a walk, and we heard these cries. We didn’t know what it was at first. We thought it might be a cat. And then it sounded human.”

“Did you see anything? Anyone near the baby?”

“We heard a car door shutting. Then an engine starting up,” my father says.

There’s a squawk on Chief Boyd’s radio. He speaks into his shoulder. He seems agitated, and he turns away from us. I hear him say
twenty-eight years’ experience
and
he’s here.

I hear him swear under his breath.

He turns back to us and puts away his notebook and pencil. He takes a long time doing this. “Is there somewhere I can put Mr. Dillon?” the chief asks the doctor. “I’ve got a detective from the state police major crimes unit coming up from Concord.”

The doctor pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyes are pink-rimmed with fatigue. “He can sit in the staff lounge,” the doctor says.

“I can run the girl home,” Chief Boyd says as if I’m not even there. “I’m headed that way anyway.”

I lean into my father. “I want to stay with
you,
” I whisper.

My father examines my face. “She’ll stay with me,” he says.

We follow the doctor to a lunchroom not far from the waiting room. Inside are tall metal lockers, a pair of cross-country skis propped in a corner, a pile of jackets on a Formica table against the wall. I sit at another table and study the vending machines. I realize that I’m hungry. I remember that my father doesn’t have his wallet.

I think about the baby losing her finger and possibly some toes. I wonder if she’ll have a handicap. Will she have trouble learning to walk without her toes? Will she be able to play basketball without a finger?

“I can call Jo’s mother,” my father says. “She’ll come get you.”

I shake my head.

“I could pick you up after this is all over,” he adds.

“I’m fine,” I say, not mentioning my hunger, a fact that is sure to get me sent to Jo’s. “Will the baby be all right?” I ask.

“We’ll have to see,” my father says.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“It was weird, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

I shift in my seat and sit on my hands. “Scary, too,” I say.

“A bit.”

My father takes his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket but then thinks better of it.

“Who do you think left her there?” I ask.

He rubs the stubble on his chin. “I have no idea,” he says.

“Do you think they’ll give her to us?”

My father seems surprised by the question. “The baby isn’t ours to have,” he says carefully.

“But we found her,” I say.

My father bends forward and folds his hands together between his knees. “We found her, but she doesn’t belong to us. They’ll try to find the mother.”

“The mother doesn’t want her,” I protest.

“We don’t know that for sure,” my father says.

I shake my head with all the certainty of a twelve-year-old. “
Of course
we know for sure,” I say. “What mother would leave her baby to die in the snow? I’m hungry.”

My father pulls a Werther’s out of his parka and slides it across the table.

“What will happen to the baby?” I ask, unwrapping the cellophane.

“I’m not exactly sure. We can ask the doctor.”

I stick the candy into my mouth and tuck it into my cheek. “But Dad, let’s say they let us have the baby. Would you take her?”

My father unwraps his own candy. He balls the cellophane and slips it into his pocket. “No, Nicky,” he says, “I would not.”

The minutes pass. A half hour passes. I ask my father for another candy. Overhead, on a TV screen, a newsreader announces budget cuts. Three teenagers from White River Junction have been arraigned following an attempted robbery. A storm system is moving in. I study the weather map and then glance at the clock: six-ten.

I get up and walk around the room. There isn’t very far to go. At the end of the row of lockers is a mirror the size of a book. My mouth protrudes because of my braces. I try not to smile, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I have smooth skin, not a pimple in sight. I have my mother’s brown eyes and wavy hair, which at the moment is kinked up on top of my head. I try to straighten it out with my fingers.

A man in a navy overcoat and a red scarf enters the room without knocking, and I guess that he is another doctor. He unwinds his scarf and lays it over a chair. I can see that my father wants to unzip his jacket, but he can’t. He has no buttons on his shirt.

The man takes off his coat and sets it down on top of the scarf. He rubs the palms of his hands together as if anticipating a good time. He has on a black cabled sweater and a blazer, and his face is gravelly with acne scars. To the right of his chin is an extra flap of skin, as if he’d been in a car accident or a knife fight.

“Robert Dillon?” the man asks.

I am surprised that this other doctor knows my father’s name, and then I realize he isn’t a doctor at all. I sit up straighter in my seat. My father nods.

“George Warren,” the man says. “Call me Warren. Want a coffee?”

My father shakes his head. “This is my daughter, Nicky,” my father says. Warren holds out his hand and I shake it.

“She was with you when you found the baby?” Warren asks.

My father nods.

“I’m a detective with the state police,” Warren says. He takes some change from his pocket and inserts it into the coffee machine. “You told Chief Boyd you found the baby on Bott Hill,” he says with his back to my father.

“I did,” my father says.

A heavy paper cup tumbles into place. I watch the coffee run from the spigot. Warren picks up the cup and blows over the top.

“The sleeping bag and the towel should still be there,” my father adds. “I found her in a sleeping bag.”

Warren stirs the coffee with a wooden stick. His hair is gray but his face is young. “Why’d you leave it there?” he asks. “The sleeping bag.”

“It was too slippery,” my father says. “I was afraid I’d drop the baby.”

“How did you carry her?”

“I put her inside my jacket.”

Warren’s eyes slide to my father’s jacket. The detective draws a chair back from the table with the toe of his Timberland boot. He sits down. “Can I see some ID?” he asks.

“I left my wallet at the house,” my father says. “I was hurrying, trying to get the baby to the hospital.”

“You didn’t call the police? An ambulance?”

“We live at the end of a long hilly drive. The town doesn’t maintain it very well. I was afraid an ambulance would get stuck.”

Warren eyes my father over the rim of his cup. “Tell me about the sleeping bag,” he says.

“It was shiny blue on the outside, plaid on the inside,” my father says. “Cheap, like you’d buy at Ames. There was a towel, too. White and bloody.”

“You’ve lived on Bott Hill a long time?” Warren takes another tentative sip of coffee. His eyes are both alert and distant, as if all the important stuff were going on somewhere else.

“Two years.”

“Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Indiana, but I came here from New York.”

“The city?” Warren says, pulling on an earlobe.

“I worked in the city, but we lived just north of it.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, Mr. Dillon,” Warren says, “we’d have found a couple of bones in the spring.”

My father looks at me. I hold my breath. I don’t want to think about the bones.

“You hot?” Warren asks my father. “Take off your jacket.”

My father shrugs, but anyone can see he’s sweating in the overheated room.

“What were you doing when you found the infant?” the detective asks.

“We were taking a walk.”

“When?”

My father thinks a minute. What time was it? He no longer wears a watch because he catches it too often in his tools. I glance up at the clock over the door. Six twenty-five. It feels like midnight.

“It was after sunset,” my father says. “The sun had just set over the top of the hill. I’d say we found her maybe ten, fifteen minutes after that.”

“You were in the woods,” Warren says.

“Yes.”

“You often go walking in the woods after sunset?”

The detective sets the coffee cup on the table, reaches into the pocket of his overcoat, and takes out a small notebook. He flips it open and makes a notation with a short pencil. I want one of those short pencils.

“On good days,” my father says. “I usually quit working around three forty-five or so. We try to take a walk before it gets completely dark.”

“You and your daughter.”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?” the detective asks me.