Light on Snow (3 page)

“Twelve,” I say.

“Seventh grade?”

“Yes.”

“The Regional?”

I nod.

“You get off the bus what time?”

“Three fifteen,” I say.

“It takes another fifteen minutes to walk the rest of the way up the hill,” my father adds.

Warren turns back to my father. “How’d you find the baby, Mr. Dillon?”

“With a flashlight. We’d heard her crying. We were looking for her by then. Well, for a baby.”

“How long had you been walking?”

A voice over the loudspeaker, asking for Dr. Gibson, interrupts them. I wonder if there’s an emergency with the baby. “About thirty minutes,” my father says.

“You hear anything unusual?”

“I thought it was a cat at first,” my father says. “I heard a car door shutting. And then a car engine being turned on.”

“A truck? A sedan?”

“Couldn’t tell.”

“After you found the infant?”

“No. Before.”

“Before or after you heard the first cry?”

“After,” my father says. “I remember thinking it must be a man or a woman taking a walk with a baby.”

“In the woods? In the winter?”

My father shrugs. “I was headed up the back of Bott Hill. There’s a stone wall there. We often make it a kind of destination.”

I think of all the times my father has sat on the wall and had a cigarette. Will we ever go there again?

“Could you find it?” Warren asks. “The place where you found the baby?”

“I’m not sure,” my father says. “There might be shallow tracks. We were on snowshoes, but the crust was hard. I might be able to show you approximately in the morning.”

Detective Warren sits back in his chair. He glances at me and then away. “Mr. Dillon,” he says and then pauses. “Do you know anyone who could have given birth to this infant?”

The question startles my father—because of its content, because it has been asked in front of me. “No,” he says, the word barely slipping through his lips.

“You married?”

I glance away from my father.

“No,” he says.

“Other children?”

A hot wind blows through my chest.

“My daughter and I live alone,” my father says.

“So what made you move up here?” the detective asks.

There’s a small silence, and I’m wishing I hadn’t been allowed to stay in the room. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I hear my father say.

“Didn’t like the pressure?” Warren suggests.

I look up. My father is staring at the skis in the corner. “Something like that,” he says.

“What did you do in the city?”

“I worked for an architectural firm.”

Warren nods, absorbing the facts. “So what do you do now?” he asks. “Up on Bott Hill?”

“I make furniture,” my father says.

“What kind of furniture?”

“Simple stuff. Tables. Chairs.”

Behind me, I hear the door of the lounge open. Dr. Gibson enters, peeling off his white coat as he does so. He tosses it into a bin in the corner. He nods a hello to the detective. Either the two know each other, I am thinking, or they spoke before the detective came into the lunchroom. “I’m off now,” the doctor says, clearly exhausted.

“How’s the baby?” my father asks.

“Better,” Dr. Gibson says. “She’s stabilizing.”

“Could I see her?” my father asks.

Dr. Gibson takes a yellow-and-black parka out of a locker. “She’s asleep in the ICU,” he says.

I see a look pass between the detective and the doctor. The doctor checks his watch.

“Okay,” Gibson says, “a quick peek. Can’t see the harm in that.”

We follow Dr. Gibson through a series of corridors, all painted the same dispiriting mint and beige. The detective falls behind, and I imagine him studying my father and me as we walk.

The pediatric ICU has been built in the shape of a wheel, with the nurses’ station the hub and each patient room a spoke. I pass parents sitting in plastic chairs, staring at dials and flickering red lights. I am waiting for someone to start screaming.

Dr. Gibson motions us into a room that seems enormous compared with the tiny infant in the plastic box. He gives us masks and tells us to hold them over our mouths.

“I thought she’d be in the nursery,” my father says through the blue paper.

“Once the infant has been outside of the hospital, she can’t go back into the nursery. Might infect the other infants,” the doctor explains. He leans over the cot, adjusts a tube, and examines a screen.

The baby lies inside a heated Plexiglas case. A bandaged hand and foot stick out doll-like from the scrawny body. The hair, black and feathery, covers the wrinkled scalp like a bird’s crown. She makes delicate sucking motions as we watch.

I want to put my cheek close to the baby’s mouth and feel the warm breath against my skin. Finding her might be the single most important thing my father and I have ever done.

“What will happen to her?” my father asks.

“The Division of Youth Services and Families will take care of her,” Dr. Gibson says.

“And then what?”

“Foster care. Adoption if she’s lucky.”

The four of us go down the elevator in silence. I realize that my father stinks. When we step off, Dr. Gibson puts out his hand to my father. “I’m in the back,” he says. “I’m glad you found her, Mr. Dillon.”

My father shakes the doctor’s hand. “I’d like to call you tomorrow,” he says. “To see how she is.”

“I’m on all day,” Dr. Gibson says. He hands my father a card, and we watch him walk away.

“Where’s your car?” Detective Warren asks my father.

My father has to think a minute. “In the front lot,” he says.

“I’d like you to come for a ride with me,” Warren says. “I want you to take a look at something.”

“My daughter’s tired,” my father says.

“We can leave her here,” the detective says. “Pick her up when I drop you off. This won’t take long.”

“No, Dad,” I say quickly.

The detective opens his mouth to speak, but my father cuts him off. “She’ll come with us,” my father says.

W
arren drives a red Jeep, which seems an odd choice for a state policeman. I decide he probably doesn’t do too much undercover work. Maybe he needs the truck for chasing criminals on back roads.

“You’ll have to give me directions,” Warren says. “I don’t have much call to come up here.”

“To where?” my father asks.

“To the motel,” Warren says.

We pass through the small town of Shepherd, New Hampshire, named after Asa Henry Shepherd, a farmer who came up from Connecticut to till the land in 1763. In the local phone book there are over thirty Shepherds listed.

“We’re getting some weather tomorrow,” Warren says. “Ice, according to the radio. I hate ice.”

My father says nothing. It’s freezing in the Jeep. I’m sitting in back. The detective drives with his coat open, the red scarf loose around his neck.

“Black ice is the worst,” Warren says. “Two years ago there was this family from North Carolina, coming off the exit ramp to Grantham. They were up skiing, had no clue about black ice. The Chevy they were in went airborne.”

I watch the rhythm of my father’s frozen breaths.

“A couple checked in to the motel over by you,” Warren says. “The owner gave a description of the man but says she didn’t see the woman. Male, Caucasian, five-eleven, twenty, twenty-one, black wavy hair, wearing a navy peacoat. She thinks he was driving a Volvo, six, seven years old. They’re supposed to get a plate number, but she didn’t.”

“A Volvo?” my father asks, surprised.

The detective bypasses our road, heading east toward the drive that will lead to the motel. The headlights provide small glimpses into the forest, the same woods that border our property. Through the windshield I can see a puzzling glow in the night sky, as if there were a small city waiting for us at the top of the hill.

Warren drives with a heavy foot. My father has never liked being a passenger, hasn’t been one in years. I can smell the detective in front of me—a mixture of wet wool and coffee, with a faint overlay of spearmint.

“Turn here,” my father says.

Warren makes a turn onto a paved driveway that runs up a short hill to a low red-shingled motel. There are two cruisers and three other cars in the parking lot. Behind the motel the woods are lit with a series of powerful spotlights.

Warren gets out of the Jeep and beckons to my father to join him.

“You stay here,” my father says to me.

“I want to come,” I say.

“I’ll be right back,” he says.

The door to a motel room is open, and I can see two uniformed policemen inside, one of whom is Chief Boyd. My father follows the detective across the lot.

I draw up my knees and wrap my arms around them. The window next to me is smeary, but I can see my father stepping over the threshold and into the lighted room. I don’t understand why I’ve been left alone in the car. What if the person who left the baby to die is still around?

I lean to one side and let my weight topple me onto the cushion so that I am lying on the backseat in a fetal position. I am in a detective’s car. A small jolt of something like excitement mixed with fear tingles at the back of my neck.

I examine the floor of the Jeep in the light from the parking lot. There’s an empty Coke can on its side, a used tissue, and several scattered coins. In the pocket of the seat back, there’s an atlas and a tape cassette. And what’s this? I reach my hand out and touch a Snickers bar, unopened. I pull my hand back. There’s a long metal object that might be a tool tucked under the passenger seat. Other than that, the Jeep is fairly clean, not like the cab of my father’s truck, which is covered with rags, pieces of wood, sawdust, tools, jackets, and socks. It smells, too—like old apples. My father swears that there aren’t any apples in the truck, that he’s searched all through it, but I am certain there’s at least one rotten one back there somewhere.

I let myself cry for a minute. It feels good, though I have nothing but my sleeve to wipe my nose on. I remember the way my father cried in the parking lot. He seemed not to know I was even there.

My father and I saved a person’s life. I’ll be a celebrity at school in the morning. I hope my father doesn’t tell me not to talk about it. I wonder if I’ll be in the newspapers. My teeth begin to chatter, and maybe I help them along a bit. I think about our walk, about finding the baby in the woods, about the way my father fell to his knees. I wonder if being dangerously chilled is reason enough to get out of the car and go inside.

I sit up and peer out the window, which has steamed up a bit. How long has my father been gone? My fingers are cold. What happened to my mittens? I am starving. I haven’t eaten anything since school lunch at eleven thirty. I think about the Snickers bar. Will the detective notice if I eat it? And if he notices, will he care? I reach over to the seat back pocket and slip the bar out. I hold it in my lap for a moment, my eye on the door of the motel room. I will have to eat it fast and hide the wrapper. I don’t want to get caught with half a candy bar in my mouth.

I tear the wrapper open. The bar is hard from the cold, but the candy is delicious. I eat it as fast as I can, wiping my mouth with my fingers and stuffing the wrapper in the pocket of my jeans. I sit back, slightly breathless.

With shoulders hunched, waiting for a reprimand, I step out of the Jeep and shut the door. I walk across the plowed parking lot. I can hear voices now—the deliberately calm voices of technicians at work. I hesitate on the steps, expecting a bark.

It’s a small room and would be depressing even without the bloody sheets or the soiled covers ripped from the bed. The walls are paneled in thin wallboard meant to look like pine. The room has a bureau and a TV and smells heavily of mildew. A bloodied sheet lies just below the lone window, which is open. Through that window I can see the spotlights on the snow.

A technician is working over the bed.

“A woman gave birth in here,” Warren is saying.

On a side table is a glass of water, half full. A sock lies on the rug. “There’ll be fingerprints,” my father says.

“There’ll be fingerprints all over the place,” Warren says, “but none of them will do us any good unless one of them has a record—which I sincerely doubt.” The detective takes a handkerchief from his back pocket and blows his nose. “That tiny girl you found?” he asks. “She started life in this room. And then someone, most likely the father, went out that window there and tried to kill her. No one put that baby in a warm place where she’d be found. No one called in a tip. A man took that infant, minutes old, walked her out into the woods on a December night, temps in the single digits, and laid her naked in a sleeping bag. If you hadn’t found her, we’d have come across her, when? March? April? If even then. Most likely a dog would have gotten to her first.”

I think about a dog dragging a bone across the snow with its teeth. My father stands near the detective while he confers with a technician. Chief Boyd is leaning against a wall, his lips pressed hard together. From where I’m standing he can’t see me. I try to picture what went on in this room. I don’t know much about giving birth, but I can feel hysteria in the walls, the wrinkled sheets, the clothes left behind. Did the woman know what the man would do with the infant? The sock is pearl gray, angora maybe, with a cable knit up the side. A woman’s sock to judge from the size of it. A technician picks it up and sticks it in a plastic bag.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been with the state police,” Warren says, “I’ve seen maybe twenty-five cases of abandoned infants. Three months ago, in Lebanon, a woman left an infant in a trash barrel outside her house. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. The baby was dead when we found him. Had Campbell’s soup up its nose.”

A technician interrupts Warren with a question.

“Last year,” Warren continues, “a fourteen-year-old girl threw her baby out a second-story window. She’s charged with attempted murder.” Warren studies a drinking glass and a plastic bag on the bedside table. “In Newport we found a newborn girl, alive, on a shelf at Ames. Over to Conway they found a newborn boy in a trash bin in the back of a restaurant. The mother was twenty. It was freezing outside. She’s charged with attempted murder.” The detective squats down to look under the bed. “What else? Oh, in Manchester an eighteen-year-old mother abandoned her baby girl in a park. She left the child in a plastic bag, and two ten-year-old girls discovered the infant when they were biking through the park. Can you imagine? The mother’s charged with attempted murder and cruelty.” Warren stands. He points under the bed and asks a technician a question. “And listen to this one: Two years ago, a high school senior discovered she was pregnant. She said nothing. She hid it by wearing baggy sweatshirts and pants, hoping all the while that she’d miscarry. But she didn’t. In the fall she went off to college. The day before Thanksgiving, after everyone had gone home, she delivered a baby girl on the floor of her dormitory room. She wrapped the infant in a T-shirt and sweater, put her in a plastic grocery bag, and carried her down three flights of stairs. She laid her in a trash bin just outside the dorm.”

Warren walks to the window and looks through it.

“But College Girl had a conscience,” he says. “She called in an anonymous tip to campus security, and they came and found the baby. Didn’t take them long to find the mother either. She pled to endangerment and was sentenced to a year’s house arrest.”

“How do you know it was a man who did this?” my father asks. “In all the other examples you’ve just mentioned, it was a woman who abandoned the baby.”

“Come with me,” Warren says to my father. “I want you to see something.”

The two men turn, and as they do they see me just outside the doorway.

My father moves to stand in front of me, as if to block my view of the room, but we both know it’s too late: I’ve seen what there is to see.

“I thought I told you to stay in the car,” my father says, both surprised and angry.

“It was cold.”

“If I tell you to stay in the car, I mean stay in the car.”

“It’s all right,” Warren says as he slides past my father. “She can come with us.”

My father gives me a stony look. He makes me walk in front of him, following the detective around the back of the motel. The snow is deep, and Warren motions for us to step in his slow and precise bootsteps. From a window at the back of the motel, another set of prints stretches into the woods. The lights are so bright I have to put up my hand. Fifty feet from where we stand, two policemen are bent over the snow.

“Bootsteps,” Warren says. “They go down two feet in some cases. Size ten and a half. Every twenty feet or so, the guy sank up to his knees in the snow. The tracks go way out, five hundred yards anyway, and then double back. You know how hard that is to do?”

My father says he knows how hard that is to do.

“You could break your leg doing that,” Warren says.

My father nods.

“City guy, wouldn’t you say?” the detective asks.

“Might be.”

“A woman who had just given birth couldn’t have done that.”

“I don’t think so,” my father says.

Warren turns toward my father and puts a hand on his shoulder. My father flinches. “Despite the fact that you won’t unzip your jacket,” the detective says, “that you have blood on your collar, that you’re looking a little rough around the edges, and that you live on a deserted road near the motel, you’ll be happy to know I don’t think you did this.”

We ride with Chief Boyd back to town. In the morning everyone will wake to the news. I try to picture again the man and the woman who went to the motel to have a baby and then kill it. Where are they now?

“That’s my truck over there,” my father says when we reach the hospital parking lot. Chief Boyd drives us to the truck and we get out. “Thanks for the ride,” my father says, but Boyd, still tight-lipped, doesn’t answer. He peels out of the lot.

We climb up into the truck and my father turns the key. The engine catches on the first try. Two for two. As we wait for the truck to warm up, I look out through a thin layer of frost crystals that shine under the lamplight of the parking lot. Beyond the frost is the front door of the emergency room, and beyond that is a cot in which a newborn girl is trying to start her life.

“You shouldn’t have had to hear all that,” my father says.

“It’s not that,” I say.

“What is it?”

“I was just thinking about Clara.”

The truck jounces a little as it revs. There’s an empty Coke can under my feet that’s annoying me. My father guns the engine. He makes a sharp U-turn in the nearly empty lot, and we drive out into the night.