Light on Snow (5 page)

I have again an image of the baby still in the sleeping bag. What if we didn’t take that walk yesterday? I am thinking. What if we didn’t find her? Good luck, I’m beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it—no sense of reward or punishment. It simply
is
—the most incomprehensible idea of all.

I wonder if there are still police guarding the site. I decide there won’t be: what reason would they have had to stay? The crime is over, all evidence surely collected. I imagine the sleeping bag and the bloody towel safely tucked away inside plastic bags on a shelf at a police station. I think of the detective with his scars. The detective, who will be busy now with a different crime.

My father is silent.

“Okay then,” I say. “I’ll just go myself.”

In the back hallway, I take my jacket off the hook and put on my hat and mittens. Just outside the back door, I lace up my showshoes and take a step forward. The shoes have no traction on the ice. I lurch, flailing for something to hold on to. After a dozen steps and one hard fall, I slide backwards to the house, hugging the wall, trying to keep the shoes from skidding out from under me. I undo the straps. If my father has seen me slipping and sliding and has had a chuckle over it, he never says so.

I go back inside the house. I make myself an English muffin with peanut butter and think about my mother with her cottage cheese. I walk upstairs to my room, which is decorated with a Yankees pennant and a poster of Garfield. On one wall I’ve been painting a multi-colored mural of all the ski hills in New England—Sunday River, Attitash, Loon Mountain, Bromley, Killington, King Ridge, Sunapee, and others. It took me all of Christmas vacation the year before to sketch the outline, and I think it’s quite a good map in geographical relief. All the mountains I have skied are capped with snow; the hills I have yet to ski remain green. Also in my room is the only radio allowed in the house. The deal my father and I have made is that I can listen towhatever I want, as long as it can’t be heard outside my room. Sometimes my father will ask me to go upstairs and get the weather report, but that’s all he ever wants to know from the radio.

We don’t have a television, and we don’t get the newspaper. When we first moved to New Hampshire, my father tried the local newspaper. One morning there was a front-page story about a woman who had backed over her fourteen-month-old son with her Olds Cutlass. My father rose from the den, walked into the kitchen, stuffed the paper into the trash can, and that was that.

I have an easel and paints in my room and a chair that can be made into a single bed on the rare occasion I have a friend come to visit. I make beaded jewelry on my desk and read on my bed. My father used to ask me to make my bed until I pointed out that he never made his, and so he stopped speaking to me about it. I hate going to the Laundromat and wish we had a washing machine. I have asked for one for Christmas.

In the afternoon, while I’m reading, I hear a dripping that sounds like a summer rain. I go to the window and look out. The ice has begun to thaw. The world around the house is softening, the crust relenting.

I walk out to the barn.

“All right,” my father says, looking up. “Let’s go.”

Walking on snowshoes in heavy melting snow, however, is nearly as difficult as walking on ice. Each footfall digs into the melted crust, shoving us off balance. My legs begin to ache before we’ve gone a hundred feet. The light turns flat, the worst sort of light for walking or skiing. I can’t see the bumps or the ruts, and sometimes it feels as though we’re coasting on fog. We cross the expanse of what in the summer would be lawn and then enter the trees.

I squint into the ugly light, trying to follow the thin imprints on the snow of yesterday’s trek. Occasionally we have to guess at the precise route because a layer of blown snow covered the tracks before the freeze. I see the trail in reverse, and I remember our frantic run of the day before with the baby in my father’s arms. My breath comes hard and fast, and I see that my father has increased his pace as well. We search for the place where we stopped climbing and veered sideways around the hill, lured on by the baby’s cries. I can’t shake the notion that she was calling out specifically to us.

Come get me.

Above us a thin wind begins to whine through the pines, bending the tips and sending small clumps of snow to the ground, dotting the surface of the crust with baseballs. I am wet with sweat inside my parka. I unzip it and let the frigid air cool my skin. I take off my hat and stuff it into a pocket. I brush away the low boughs with my hands. I think that we have lost the tracks, but my father just keeps pushing forward.

My father owns twenty acres of rock, hardwood, and sloped fields. All the wood for his furniture comes from his acreage: walnut and oak and maple; pine and cherry and tamarack. The local lumberyard sawed and planed the lumber, laying in a supply of smooth planks that my father won’t use up for years.

After a time, my father finds our earlier tracks, and we follow them at a slower pace. When we’ve gone for about fifteen minutes, I see, in the distance, a sliver of orange tape. “There it is,” I say.

We make our way to the place that has been cordoned off. A circle of tape has been threaded through the trees. It funnels off into a path back to the motel, as if for a bride returning from an outdoor wedding. Within the circle is the soft place where the sleeping bag was, a print of my father’s snowshoe outlined in a thin stream of red spray paint, and, similarly outlined, a size ten and a half bootprint. Neither of us noticed the bootprint the night before. I wonder if the police found my father’s flashlight, if it’s worth trying to get it back. Did my father tell Detective Warren about the flashlight? I try to remember. Will they think it was the other guy’s and waste a lot of time trying to track it down?

We walk around the circle and stand with our backs to the motel. I examine the soft place where the sleeping bag was.

“Dad,” I say. “Why did he put the baby in a sleeping bag if he meant to kill her?”

My father looks up at the bare tree limbs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess he didn’t want her to be cold.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

“None of it makes any sense.”

I pull on the plastic tape, seeing if it will stretch. “What do you think they’ll call her?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Maybe they’ll give her our last name,” I say. “Maybe she’ll be called Baby Dillon. Remember how they called Clara ‘Baby Baker-Dillon’?”

We stand for a time in silence, and I know that my father is thinking about Baby Baker-Dillon. I can feel it coming off him in waves. I have the tape looped around my mitten now.

“Dad,” I say.

“What?”

“Why was there so much blood and stuff in the motel room?”

My father picks up some soft wet snow and starts to fashion it into a ball. “There’s some blood when a woman gives birth,” he says. “And there’s something called the placenta, which is full of blood and which is the thing that nourishes the baby. It comes out after the birth.”

“I know about that,” I say.

“So all of that blood was natural. It doesn’t mean that the woman was hurt or injured.”

“But it
does
hurt, right?”

In the flat light my father looks old. The skin beneath his lower lids is almost lavender in color and loose with wrinkles. “It hurts,” he says carefully, “but every birth is different.”

“Did Mom hurt when I was born?”

My father whacks the ball against the tree. “Yes, she did,” he says. “And if she were here, she would tell you that every minute was worth it.”

A crunch of snow startles both of us. We turn to see Detective Warren, with his crimson-muffled neck, not twenty feet away. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says.

“Like hell,” my father says under his breath.

Warren stands with his hands in his overcoat pockets, a man out for an unlikely stroll behind a motel in the dead of winter. “Went to your place, no one answered the door. Drove over here on a hunch.” He moves a step closer. “You had to see the spot again, didn’t you?”

He is walking in the prints made by the technicians the night before, placing each Timberland boot into a hole.

“People are predictable, Mr. Dillon,” he says. “We go back to the places that once gave us a jolt. Lovers do it all the time.”

He keeps moving toward us, one careful footfall at a time. “You’re all over the papers today, Mr. Dillon. I’m surprised I didn’t see Channel 5 at your place. Your house is wide open, by the way.”

“You went inside,” my father says.

“I was looking for you to tell you about the girl. I drove all the way up your road, and I wasn’t going to leave without seeing if you were in. You make nice stuff, by the way.”

My father is silent, refusing to be drawn in by the compliment.

“The baby’s doing fine,” Warren says.

My father bangs a snowshoe against a mound of hardpacked snow.

“We’re on the same side here, Mr. Dillon,” Warren says.

“What side would that be?”

“You found the baby and saved her life,” Warren says, shooting a cigarette from a pack of Camels. He lights it with a lighter. “You smoke?” he asks.

My father shakes his head, even though he does.

“Then I find the guy who did it,” Warren says. “That’s how it works. We’re a team.”

“We’re not a team,” my father says.

“I called down to Westchester,” Warren says, “and spoke to a guy named Thibodeau. You remember Thibodeau?”

Even I remember Thibodeau. Officer Thibodeau came to our house the morning after the accident with the news we already knew. My father shouted at him to get off our goddamn steps.

“A terrible thing,” Warren says. “I probably would have done the same as you—moved away, reinvented my life. Don’t know where I’d have gone, though. Maybe Canada, maybe the city. Anonymity in the city.”

I have the orange tape wrapped around my mittens. I give it another tug.

“I got two boys, eight and ten,” Warren says.

“Let’s go, Nicky,” my father says.

“I want this guy,” Warren says.

“I think we’re done here,” my father says.

The detective drops the barely smoked butt onto the snow. He pulls his gloves out of his pocket and puts them on.

“No one’s done here,” Warren says.

W
hen we return to the house, my father calls Dr. Gibson. I hang around in the den so that I can hear him in the kitchen.

“I just wondered how the baby was doing,” I hear my father say into the phone.

“That’s good, right?” my father says.

“Where is she now?” he asks.

“She’ll be there how long? . . .

“Does she have a name yet? . . .

“Baby Doris,” my father repeats. He sounds surprised, taken aback. “You say she’ll go into foster care? . . .

“It seems so —”

Dr. Gibson must make a comment about foster care and adoption, because my father says, “Yes, cold.”

I can hear my father pouring himself a cup of coffee. “When the system doesn’t work, what happens? . . .

“She’d be prosecuted, though. . . .

“Thanks,” my father says. “I just wanted to know that the baby was okay.”

My father hangs up the phone. I move into the kitchen. He’s sipping the lukewarm coffee and looking out the kitchen window. “Hey,” he says when he hears me.

“She’s all right?” I ask.

“She’s fine.”

“They’ve named her Baby Doris?”

“Apparently.” He sets the mug down. “Going to Sweetser’s,” he says. “Want to come?”

I don’t have to be asked twice to accompany my father on a trip to town.

My father holds the door for me when we enter the hardware store. Mr. Sweetser looks up from the paper he has spread across the counter next to the register. “Our local hero,” he says.

“You heard,” my father says.

“Front page. See for yourself.”

My father and I make our way to the counter. In a newspaper known for its high-school sports news, Sunday comics, and coupons, I can see a headline that reads
INFANT FOUND IN SNOW.
Below that is another, smaller headline:
Local Carpenter Finds Baby Alive in Bloody Sleeping Bag.
I bend closer to the counter and read the paper with my father. The reporter has largely got the story right. There is mention of the motel, the Volvo, and the navy peacoat. There is no mention of me.

“Got your name spelled wrong,” Sweetser says.

“Yeah, I saw that,” my father says.

Dylan.
It happens all the time.

“You want me to cut it out for you?”

My father shakes his head.

“So what happened?” Sweetser asks.

My father unzips his jacket. The store is heated by a fickle woodstove in the corner that makes the temperature fluctuate between ninety degrees and sixty. Today it feels like eighty. “Nicky and I were taking a walk when we heard a cry,” my father says. “We thought it might be an animal at first. And then we heard the sound of a car door shutting.”

“The baby was in a sleeping bag?” Sweetser asks.

My father nods.

“Weirdest thing,” Sweetser says, smoothing the pink strands of hair over his head. He has recently shaved his beard, revealing a sunken chin and strange pale skin like a new layer on an animal that’s just molted. “You wouldn’t think.”

“No, you wouldn’t think,” my father says.

“It’s like those fairy tales my wife used to read the kids,” Sweetser says. “Carpenter goes into the woods and finds a baby.”

“In a fairy tale it would be a princess,” my father says.

“You should be so lucky,” Sweetser says.

For a hardware store in the no-man’s-land between Hanover and Concord, Sweetser’s carries an impressive array of tools. Sweetser likes their heft and shape, he says, much as my father does. Beyond the shelves of tools are other shelves, of Pyrex dishes, boxes of Miracle-Gro (dusty now in the off-season), and cans of Sherwin-Williams paint. Attached to the store is a smaller, shedlike annex in which Sweetser sells antiques, the word
antiques
used loosely. Much of the furniture is from the sixties.

“That couple make it up to your place last Friday?” Sweetser asks.

“What couple?”

“I sent some tourists your way when they started asking for a Shaker table. I said you did stuff that looked like Shaker.”

“Never saw them,” my father says.

“Your road is crap,” Sweetser says.

Sweetser has been saying our road is crap ever since we moved into town. For over a year now, he’s been sending people my father’s way. Only a half dozen so far have braved the miserable road, but by the time they make the trek, they almost always buy something.

“I need a level,” my father says.

“What happened to the old one?”

“I cracked the vial.”

“Hard to do.”

“Yeah. Well.”

My father moves to the shelf of levels. His old level, which worked perfectly well until he knocked the glass vial against the refrigerator, had metal rails. He picks up a wooden level. Some of the vials, I see, are oval, while others are arched. My father points out to me a level that reads in a 360-degree direction.

“Going to Remy’s for a coffee,” Sweetser says, sliding his arm into a yellow plaid jacket. “You want one?”

“No thanks,” my father says.

“A Drake’s?”

“No, that’s okay. I had breakfast.”

“Nicky, how about you?” Sweetser asks. “You want one?”

“A Drake’s coffee cake?” I ask.

“She wants one,” Sweetser says.

When Sweetser has left the store, I tell my father I need white paint. “I’m skiing Gunstock with Jo after Christmas.”

“How many now?” he asks.

“Seven,” I say, referring to the white peaks of my mural.

“When are you going?” my father asks.

“The day after Christmas.”

“Have you said yes definitely?”

“What’s wrong? Can’t I go?”

“Grammie will still be here,” my father says.

“So I can’t go skiing?” I ask, my tone immediately challenging. I can go from zero to all-out rage in less than five seconds now.

“No, you can go,” my father says. “You should ask first is what I’m saying. I might have had plans. We might have been going somewhere.”

“Dad,” I say, my voice notched up to incredulity, “we never go
anywhere.
”

I pick out a pint of linen white and walk over to study the antiques. There’s a maple bedroom set and a ratty green plaid sofa. A jukebox is in a corner. I wonder if it works.

Sweetser puts his shoulder to the door and enters bearing a coffee cup and a Drake’s cake. My father selects the level with the fixed vial. He brings it to the counter and pays for it. With my father’s change, Sweetser gives him a small rectangle of newsprint.

“Cut it out anyway,” Sweetser says.

My father pulls out of Sweetser’s parking lot, the level and the clipping on my lap. He heads in the direction of home. I take a bite of the Drake’s cake, the crumbs falling down the front of my parka. “Dad,” I say. “We need food.”

“You make a list?”

“No, but we need milk and Cheerios,” I say. “Bread for sandwiches. Bologna. Stuff for dinner.”

“I don’t want to go to Remy’s,” he says. “Enough of the local hero stuff.”

My father does a 180 and heads for Butson’s Market, a store further out of town that he can sometimes get in and out of without running into anyone he knows. We pass the Mobil station and the Shepherd Village School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1780. The school houses the town’s K-6; the playground is a gravel front yard. Older students are bused out of town to the Regional, a trip that takes, in my case, forty minutes each way.

Beside the school is the Congregational Church, a white clapboarded building with long windows and black shutters. The church has a steeply pitched roof and a tower with a bell. Neither my father nor I has ever been inside it.

We pass the three stately homes in town, one after another on a hill, two of which have seen better days. We pass Serenity Carpets, a beige house trailer, the volunteer fire department (Bingo Every Thursday Nite 6:30), and Croydon Realty, to which we drifted in a slow stop the first time we came into town—Croydon Realty, where it’s still possible to buy a house for $26,000; not much of a house, but a house. In the summers my father and I sometimes go for exploratory drives around the countryside, getting lost on backwoods roads, finding small pockets of surprisingly well tended houses. “How do they make a living?” my father will always ask. Once we came upon a moose ambling along in front of us, hogging the narrow road. We had to follow it for twenty minutes at five miles an hour, not daring to pass it, learning to like the gentle jog of the animal’s rump.

After Croydon Realty, there are four miles of nothing—just woods with a stream that parallels the road. My father slows as he passes Mercy, the first set of buildings after the gap, the hospital housed in what was once a brick, four-story hotel, converted in the 1930s. Though it has since sprouted modern wings, the words
De Wolfe Hotel
1898
are still inscribed over the front door of the original building.

“Dad, let’s stop,” I say. “I want to see her.”

My father stares at the hospital. I know that he would like to see the baby, too. But after a few seconds, he shakes his head. “Too much red tape,” he says, accelerating.

Beyond the hospital is a strip mall into which my father turns. He stops in front of a sign that reads
Liquor Outlet, Butson’s Market, Family Dollar, Frank Renata D.D.S.

Milk, I think. Cheerios. Coffee. Chicken with Stars. American cheese. Hamburger meat. Maybe some Ring Dings.

With a week’s worth of groceries, my father makes the reverse trip—past the hospital, through the gap, then the Realtor, the three stately homes, and Remy’s and Sweetser’s right across the street from each other. Our own road is six miles out of town. Along the way we pass houses with front porches filled with couches and plastic toys and empty propane tanks. One of these houses is a small white clapboard cottage with a tiny fenced-in backyard. The front porch is neatly crowded with bicycles and tricycles, baseball bats and hockey sticks. Evidence of boys can also be found in the wash on the line: T-shirts in varying sizes, jeans, and hockey shirts or bathing suits depending on the season. In the middle of the wash I sometimes see a bra or a slip or a pretty nightgown. When we drive by in the winter, we occasionally see the mother struggling with large, unwieldy frozen sheets. They look like cardboard and blow with the wind. I always wave at the woman, who smiles and waves back. Sometimes in the summers I have an urge to stop my bike and say hello and enter that house and meet the boys and see the chaos I imagine there.

My father pulls the truck into our driveway. “You bought spaghetti?” he asks.

“And Ragú sauce,” I say.

He parks in his usual spot beside the barn. He turns off the engine. “That okay for supper?”

“It’s fine.”

“I bought Breyers,” he says.

“I saw.”

“Butter pecan. Your favorite.”

“Dad?” I say.

“What?”

“How did the baby get named Doris?”

My father reaches for his cigarettes, a nervous gesture, but then he decides against it with me in the truck. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe it was the name of one of the nurses.”

“It sounds like the name of a hurricane.”

“They probably have a system,” he says.

“You think they get that many babies?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“It’s an old-fashioned name,” I say. I am leaning against my door. My father has his hand on his door handle, as if he were anxious to get out of the truck.

“It’s a strange name to give a baby these days,” he concedes.

“What will happen to her?” I ask. “Did Dr. Gibson tell you?”

“She’ll go into social services,” my father says. He puts his hand on the door handle and opens the door a crack.

“She’ll get a new mother and father and new brothers and sisters?”

“Most likely.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” I say.

“What doesn’t seem right?”

“Us not knowing where she is.”

“That’s the way it has to be, Nicky.” He opens his door, signaling the end of the conversation.

“Dad?” I ask.

“What?”

“Why can’t we have her? We could go get her and have her with us.”

The idea is both appalling and sublime. In my twelve-year-old mind, I have conceived the notion of supplanting one baby with another. As soon as I say the words and catch a glimpse of my father’s face, I see what I’ve done. But as a twelve-year-old will do, I become defensive. “Why not?” I ask with the petulant tone of the aggrieved and misunderstood, a tone I will shortly learn to master. “Didn’t it make you feel like maybe Clara had come back to us? That maybe we’re supposed to have her?”

My father steps out of the truck. He takes a long breath. “No, Nicky, it did not,” he says. “Clara was Clara, and this baby is someone else. She is not ours to have.” He looks over at the barn and then back at me. “Help me get these groceries in the house before the ice cream melts.”

“Dad, it’s
twenty
out,” I say. “The ice cream isn’t going anywhere.”

But I am saying this to my father’s back. He has shut the door and taken a bag of groceries from the back of the truck. I watch him walk toward the house, grief a hard nut inside his chest.