Light on Snow (4 page)

T
he skid marks were forty feet long. The tractor-trailer pushed the VW along the highway as if it were only so much snow to be plowed out of the way.

My mother died instantly. Clara, who was still alive when the medics got her out of the wreckage, died before the ambulance reached the hospital. It was ten days before Christmas, and my mother had taken the baby to the mall for Christmas shopping. For reasons we will never know—did Clara with her charm or her whining make my mother turn her head, even for an instant?—my mother glided onto the highway in the path of the oncoming truck. The driver, who emerged from the accident with only a dislocated shoulder, said he was traveling at just under sixty-five when the green VW floated across his path.

My father, who had stayed late at his office Christmas party in Manhattan and who was on his second martini when his wife and child were being dragged into oblivion, didn’t know about the accident until close to midnight. When he arrived home and found the house empty, he waited an hour or so and then began calling my mother’s friends and then the area hospitals and then the police, until finally he received an answer that even weeks later he was unable fully to comprehend. And for months he had the notion that had he not made the telephone call, he never would have heard the terrible news.

That night he drove to the hospital, his own ten-year-old Saab mocking him with its sturdiness. The interns made a grab for him when he went over, and they had to fight to get his tie off so that he could breathe. After he identified my mother, the staff gave him a minute with Clara, who was strangely intact apart from the purple oval bruise to one side of her forehead. The magnitude of the waste was unbearable, Clara’s perfect body a unique torment only a jealous god could have devised.

The accident happened on a Friday night when I was sleeping over at Tara Rice’s house. Mrs. Rice, who hadn’t heard the news, was surprised to see my father at her door so early on a Saturday morning. I was found amidst a scatter of sleeping bags on Tara’s floor and told to pack my things. When I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, I knew that something terrible had happened. His face, which had been ordinary enough just the day before, seemed to have been recarved by an inept sculptor, the features rearranged and misaligned. He helped me put my jacket on and walked me to the car. Halfway down the driveway, I started yipping at him, a dog at his heels.

“What, Dad? What’s the matter?

“Tell me, Dad. Why do I have to leave?

“What happened, Dad? What happened?”

When we reached the car, I tore my shoulder from his grip and began to run back to the house. Perhaps I thought that by reentering Tara’s house I could stop time, that I would never have to hear the unspeakable thing he had come to tell me. He caught me easily and pressed my face into his overcoat. I began to sob before he said a word.

My grief, which I could not articulate beyond a string of helpless words within an open-mouthed wail, showed itself, as the days wore on, in short, violent squalls. I would bend over and pound the floor or rip the covers from my bed. Once I threw a paperweight against my door, cracking it down the center. My father’s grief was not as dramatic as mine, but instead was resolute, an entity with weight. He held his body with an awful rigidity, the jaw tight, the back hunched, his elbows on his knees, a posture most easily achieved in a chair at the kitchen table, where water or coffee and occasionally food were brought to him.

For days, my father sat in our house in Westchester, unable to go back to the office. After Christmas vacation, I was made to return to school on the theory that it would distract me. My grandmother came to care for us, but my father didn’t like having her there: she reminded him only of happier times when we’d visited her in Indiana in the summer. There we’d spent lazy mornings with Clara in a plastic wading pool and my mother lounging gratefully in a slim black tank suit. In the heat of those afternoons, with my grandmother watching Clara and me, my father and my mother would sometimes slip away to his old childhood bedroom for a nap, and I’d be glad that I’d escaped that dreaded camplike fate.

One day several weeks after the accident, I came home from school on the bus and found my father sitting in the same chair in which I’d left him at breakfast, a wooden chair next to the kitchen table. I was sure that the cup of coffee on the table, with its dark sludge on the bottom, was the same one he’d poured himself at eight a.m. It frightened me to think that all the time I’d been in school—all during math and science and a movie called
Charly
that we’d watched in English class—he’d been sitting in that chair.

In March my father announced that we were moving. When I asked where, he said north. When I asked where in the north, he said he had no idea.

I sit up in the bed and see light at the edges of the curtains. I push the covers away and step onto the cold floorboards. I raise the shades and put a hand to my eyes. Every twig and late-to-fall leaf is coated with an icy shine. I am giddy with this news. Even in New Hampshire, the school buses won’t risk the ice. I turn on the radio and listen to the school closing announcements. Grantham public schools,
closed.
Newport public schools,
closed.
Regional High School,
closed.

I take a shower, towel off, and dress in jeans and a sweater. I make myself a cup of hot chocolate. Looking for my father, I move, mug in hand, through the rooms of the house, a long, narrow Cape turned sideways with a porch to the west. The house is painted yellow with dark green trim, and in the summer a wild vine grows along the porch railing, creating a kind of trellis. The paint job is ancient and needs to be seen to, and my father plans to tackle it in the summer. Last summer, our second in the house, my father made a small patch of lawn that I was periodically asked to mow. The rest of the property he let go. Where it isn’t woods, it’s bush and meadow, and on summer evenings we sometimes sit on the porch, my father with a beer and me with a lemonade, and watch birds we can’t identify skit along the tips of the overlong grasses. Occasionally, we’ll each read a book.

I walk into a front room that runs the width of the house and has two long windows to the south. When my father bought the place, the windows were painted shut, and two tarnished chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls were papered in a faded and peeling blue print, and the fireplace was boarded up. My father had picked the house solely for its isolation and the promise of anonymity, but after he spent two weeks sitting in a chair unable to do much but look out a window, he began to meander through the rooms. He decided to strip the house down to its bare bones.

Starting in the front room, he plastered over the ceiling, an ugly expanse that looked like the hardened frosting of a day-old birthday cake. He stripped the walls and painted them white. He bought a sander and refinished the floors, polishing them to a warm honey stain. Sometimes he made me help him; most of the work he did himself. The room has nothing in it now but the pieces of furniture my father has made over the course of the past two years: tables and bookcases and wooden chairs with straight backs and legs. The room is clean and simple and resembles a schoolroom, a look I think my father was unconsciously trying to achieve all along, as if he wished to return to the blank rooms of his childhood. He sometimes uses the space as a showroom when Mr. Sweetser down at the hardware store sends customers his way. The carpentry is a kind of career for my father, though careers were for his previous life, not this one.

In the room that was once a dining room, my father built floor-to-ceiling bookcases and filled them with his books. He put a leather chair, a sofa, two lamps, and a rug in it, and it’s the room we sometimes eat and read in. We call it the den. The transformation of rooms into something other than what they were—a parlor into a showroom; a dining room into a den; an old barn into a workshop—has given my father a kind of perverse pleasure. Just beyond the kitchen is a long hallway paneled in cream bead board with a row of sturdy hooks at shoulder height. Off another hallway is a small room that my father didn’t know what to do with. He cleaned it up and filled it with boxes that he didn’t want to open. As a result the room has become a kind of shrine. Neither of us ever goes inside.

Upstairs there are three bedrooms: one for me, one for my father, and one for my grandmother when she comes to visit.

The kitchen is the one other room my father hasn’t tackled. It has a red Formica counter and brown metal-framed sliders out to a redwood deck. Though it is the room that needs the most work, my father goes into the kitchen only to make a quick cup of coffee or a sandwich or a rudimentary dinner for the two of us. We never sit down to a meal there, but instead bring our food to the den when we eat together, or he to his workshop and me to my bedroom when we each eat alone.

We never eat a meal in the kitchen because the kitchen of our previous life was at the heart of our family in New York. The two rooms do not resemble each other much, but the memories of that former kitchen can unravel either one of us in an instant.

The table was always half-covered with magazines and mail. Neither my father nor mother was a fastidious housekeeper, and with Clara just a year old, a case of mild clutter was always turning into serious chaos. My mother made baby food in the Cuisinart on a counter usurped by appliances: a juicer, a blender, a microwave, and a coffee grinder that made a racket like a jackhammer and never failed to wake Clara. Between the table and a hutch was a baby swing, a contraption in which Clara, with drool sliding down her chin, would bounce happily and for long enough that my parents could get a meal on the table. During dinner my father sat with Clara in his lap, introducing her to foods she smashed into her mouth with a fat palm. When she fussed he jiggled her on his knee, and by the time dinner was over, his work shirt would be finger-painted with carrots and gravy and buttered peas.

In my album there’s a picture of my mother trying to eat her dinner at the counter while she holds Clara on her hip. Clara has a finger in her mouth and is drooling, and my mother is slightly out of focus, her back to me, as if she might be jouncing Clara up and down to keep her quiet. In the kitchen window just beyond my mother, there’s a blinding reflection of a flashbulb. Inside the halo I can just make out my father, beer in hand, his mouth open, about to take a sip. I have no idea why I felt it necessary to take this photo in the middle of dinner, why I thought it important to capture my mother’s back or Clara with her finger in her mouth. Perhaps the camera was new and I was trying it out. Maybe I was trying to annoy my mother. I can’t remember now.

I also have a photograph of my mother holding me as a baby under a snowball tree in our backyard. My mother’s hair is long and thick and light brown, waved in a style that might have been popular in
1972,
when I’d have been a year old. She has on a plaid, open-necked shirt and a rust-colored suede jacket, and I am guessing that the month is September. She looks
present
in the picture, smiling slightly at my father, who’d have been behind the camera. I have on a silly pink hat and seem to be gnawing on my knuckles. I inherited my mother’s hair and wide mouth but my father’s eyes. After Clara was born, my mother cut her hair, and I never again saw her with it long.

I walk out to the barn and find my father sitting with his coffee in the chair by the stove. On the floor are drifts of sawdust, and in the corners, plastic bags of shavings. The air is suffused with fine particles, like a dissipating fog on a summer day. I watch as he puts the mug on a windowsill and bends his head. He does this often when he doesn’t know I’m in the room. He folds his hands, his elbows on his thighs, his legs spread wide. His grief has no texture now—no tears, no ache in the throat, no rage. It is simply darkness, I think, a cloak that sometimes makes it hard for him to breathe.

“Dad,” I say.

“Yup,” he says, raising his head and turning toward me.

“No school today,” I say.

“I didn’t think there would be. What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“You slept late.”

“I did.”

Through his shop window and just beyond the pines, I can see a sliver of lake—green glass in summer; blue in fall; and in the winter, simply a wedge of white. To the left of the lake is an abandoned ski hill with only three trails. There are remnants of a chairlift and a small shack at the top. It is said that in years gone by, the operator, a jovial fellow named Al, always saluted each skier as he or she slid off the chair.

Beyond the clearing my father has made, the woods grow immediately dense. In the summer they are full of mosquitoes and blackflies, and I always have to spray myself with Off. My father is thinking of screening in the porch, and I figure that maybe in a year or two he’ll get around to it.

“You eat breakfast?” he asks.

“Not yet.”

“There’s English muffins and jelly.”

“I like them sometimes with peanut butter,” I say.

“Your mother would mix peanut butter with cottage cheese in a bowl,” he says. “It used to make me want to gag, but she liked it so much I never told her how disgusting it was.”

I hold my breath and look down into my cup. My father almost never speaks about my mother unless to answer a direct question from me.

I clamp my teeth shut. I know that if my eyes well up, it will be the last memory he’ll allow himself to share with me for some time.

In my mind I see a small stone dislodged in a wall, one stone shoved forward until it falls. The other stones shift and settle and try to fill in the space, but still there is a hole through which water, in the form of memory, begins to seep.

Seepage.

In September I had the word in a spelling bee. A simple word, though I got it wrong, spelling it
seapage,
which, if you think about it, is not entirely illogical.

“I bet we could find the spot,” I say, announcing the reason I’ve come to find him. “When we get close enough, the orange tapes will give the place away.”