Light on Snow (6 page)

T
hat night the snow freezes again, and a ferocious wind blows. I wake to the sound of limbs snapping under the weight of the ice. The cracks resound like gunshots—some muffled, some as sharp as fireworks. The noise rouses me from my bed at daybreak, and I wait at my bedroom window for the light to come up. The woods beyond the cleared lot is littered with broken trees, their branches bent to the ground, as though a hurricane had come and gone.

I hear my father on the stairs. I put on my bathrobe and slippers and find him in the kitchen standing beside the Mr. Coffee, waiting for the machine to fill the pot. He’s leaning against the sink in his stocking feet, his arms crossed against yet another flannel shirt. His jeans are the same ones he’s been wearing for a week, and I note that his beard can no longer be called stubble.

“Dad,” I say, “maybe you should shave.”

“I’m thinking of growing a beard.” He rubs his chin.

“Maybe you should shave.”

A trickle of coffee emerges from the coffeemaker.

“Trees keep you up?” he asks.

“They woke me up.”

“Lot of clearing in the spring.” He bends slightly to look out the window. “I’m worried about the roof with all this heavy snow and ice. The pitch is too shallow in the front. I should have done the roof in the fall. I hate roofing.”

“Why?”

“I get vertigo.”

“What’s vertigo?” I ask.

“Fear of heights. I get dizzy.”

This is a fact I haven’t known about my father. I wonder what else I don’t know. He pours himself a cup of coffee. I open the fridge and take out the milk.

“I should get up there and shovel,” he says.

“I’ll help you,” I say with enthusiasm. The idea of being able to climb onto the roof and survey our little kingdom is an exciting one.

“I hate roofing,” he says, “but on the other hand, I don’t relish the idea of a crew hanging out here for the duration of the job.”

This goes without saying.

“Another week,” he says, “and then you’re out for Christmas vacation.”

At Christmas, my grandmother will come, as she always does, and cook for us and put up stockings and “make a good Christmas,” as she likes to say. My father will go through the motions, but I like the cookies and the cloved oranges and the sight of presents scattered around a tree.

“You’d better get dressed,” he says, “or you’ll miss the bus.”

“You think we should check first? That maybe it’s another snow day?”

“I think you should get dressed,” he says.

At school, I am famous. Though the papers haven’t mentioned my name, everyone seems to know that I was there when the baby was found. I am asked for details, easy to deliver. I tell about hearing the cries and finding the infant and going to the hospital and being questioned by a detective.

“The sleeping bag was bloody?” Jo asks me at my locker. Jo is nearly as tall as my father. She has blond hair that streams back from her face, like the goddess at the prow of a Viking ship.

“A little,” I say. “It was mostly the towel that was bloody.”

“So when you give birth, there’s blood?” she asks.

“Of course,” I say.

“Where does the blood come from?”

“The placenta,” I say, banging my locker shut.

“Oh,” Jo says, puzzled.

The fact that I’d come from New York was regarded as exotic when I first arrived in New Hampshire. And it was certainly in my favor that I wasn’t a Masshole, which is how some of the locals refer to the people who live one state south. Still, I’ve worked it out that it will take at least two generations, maybe three, before the natives stop referring to my father and me as newcomers.

I have two friends at school—the Viking goddess and Roger Kelly. The three of us eat lunch together and share some classes, and Roger and I are in the school band. Making arrangements to see Jo or Roger after school or on weekends is difficult, however: everything has to be thought about in advance. Jo’s mother has made no secret of the fact that she hates the long drive up to our house, and I think she regards my father as suspicious. If there’s to be a sleepover, I usually stay at Jo’s. I don’t have sleepovers with Roger, of course, but we sometimes play basketball after school, and I come home on the late bus.

When I lived in New York, I had more than two friends. There were four fourth-grade classes in my elementary school alone, and there were three elementary schools in our town. I went to sleepovers often and had them at my house as well. I took dance lessons and gymnastics and was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I had a lavender-and-white bedroom with a canopy bed, and I could fit six or seven girls and their sleeping bags on the thick carpet. We watched movies in the living room and then went upstairs at eleven, which is the latest my parents would let us stay up. We did our nails or played Truth or Dare until after midnight, learning how to fall down giggling without waking my parents.

When Clara was six months old, she was moved into her own bedroom next to mine. My friends liked to play with her when they came to visit. They tried to braid her hair, but she never had enough hair for any braid to be satisfying. Her room was yellow and orange and blue, largely because I’d painted one wall with yellow and orange and blue fish, in different shapes and sizes, fish such as you’d never come across in a lifetime, even in the Caribbean. I sometimes used to wonder, after we moved to New Hampshire, what the new owners did with that room, if they left the yellow and orange and blue fish swimming through the water, or if they painted the wall white, erasing my artwork the way our family seemed to have been erased—with one large roller.

When I first moved to Shepherd, I was ragged and raw and prone to sudden fits of weeping, difficult to hide in a one-room schoolhouse. To compensate for my lack of emotional control, I pretended to an air of weariness and disdain, as if as a New Yorker I was so far ahead of my peers that I hardly need bother to pay attention in class. I was disabused of this notion in a gradual way, and by May I’d finally caught up in math.

In the scrub on our land were dozens of raspberry bushes that my father and I stumbled across one July day the first summer in New Hampshire. We picked the berries and brought them back to the house and, for a time, ate them with everything (on cereal, on ice cream, with steak). Because there were more raspberries on the land than he and I could consume, I decided to sell them at the end of the road. My father encouraged me to ask Sweetser if he knew where I might come by a few dozen wooden fruit boxes. Sweetser, who seemed to be able to procure almost anything on demand, sold me several tall stacks for five dollars, waiving the payment and calling it a loan, which I repaid with pride at the end of the first week.

Each morning, in my denim shorts and pastel T-shirts, I would pick the raspberries in the brush and put them in a basket that hung from my shoulder. When I had enough berries, I’d ride my bicycle the length of our dirt road to its entrance. There I had a card table and a plastic lawn chair set up. I’d fill the fruit boxes with the raspberries and then sit and wait. I could count on at least four customers a day: a woman whose name I never did learn, but who seemed to have a lot of houseguests; Mrs. Clapper, who was a visiting nurse and who used to take a box each day to one of her patients; Mr. Bolduc, who went by every morning to get the newspaper and his mail in town; and Mr. Sweetser, who had no reason that I could ever see to drive by our road, but there he was (I don’t believe he ever missed a day). I might have four or five other customers who were doubtless so surprised to see a girl selling raspberries on that remote wooded road that they felt a moral obligation to stop. Altogether I would spend an hour picking the berries, twenty minutes riding to and fro on my bike, and three or four hours at the stand—an approximate total of six hours. I sold the berries for seventy-five cents a box, and if lucky I’d make six dollars a day. Six days at the stand (some days spent under a rigged umbrella when it rained) might yield thirty-six dollars a week, which, when I was ten and eleven years old, seemed a small fortune. I would sit in my chair and sometimes read, but mostly I’d stare off into space, occasionally noticing the way a pair of monarchs folded into each other when they mated, or the way the Queen Anne’s lace seemed to have popped open overnight. I learned to daydream that summer, and it was then that I conceived of the idea of Clara as still growing. She’d have been almost two years old that first summer and probably a nuisance, but I imagined her wandering into weeds and wildflowers, the top of her head lost below the yellow and magenta blossoms, or reaching for a raspberry and tipping over a pint box. I imagined her on her tummy on top of my card table taking a nap while I stroked her back.

Sunday is the anniversary of my mother’s and Clara’s deaths. I know it and my father knows it, but neither of us speaks of it all day. I know my father remembers, because he keeps walking from the barn to the house and back to the barn again, as if he can’t decide what to do with himself. He looks at me when he thinks I’m not aware of it. He wants to say something but is unsure of what will happen to both of us if he does. He takes a shower at midday, which he almost never does, and spends a long time in his bedroom, where I know there is a picture of my mother and me and Clara. I am twelve and keenly aware of milestones and anniversaries, and I think the day should be marked.

“Dad,” I say when he finally comes out of the bedroom. “Can we go to Butson’s Market?”

“What for?” he asks.

“I think they sell flowers there.”

He doesn’t ask me what the flowers are for.

The sun has been out for two days. I wear my jacket open. My father has on only a sweater. He’s shaved, and his hair is clean, and he’s not an embarrassment to be with, which is an improvement over the previous year. On the first anniversary of the accident, my father sat in the barn all day and didn’t move. I felt lonely and sad and in need of comfort, but I didn’t have the courage to walk to the barn and see what I might find there: my father in the Dad position, his mouth open as if his nose were stuffed, his eyes vacant, seeing only images from the past. Instead I looked through my album, made a beaded necklace, answered the phone when my grandmother called, and then I cried for so long that she finally insisted I go get my father.

At Butson’s Market, my father searches for dishwashing liquid while I stand in front of the refrigerated shelves that hold the bunches of flowers. There are daisies and carnations, baby’s breath and roses, and even though the bouquets are all more or less alike, I spend a lot of time trying to decide which is best. The carnations look fake pink and bother me. One bouquet, almost entirely yellow, has a long creepy-looking flower in its center that might be a lily.

“That one’s pretty,” my father says, pointing to a bouquet that is mostly lavender and white.

“What are those bluish-purple flowers?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Mom would like them?”

“I think she would,” he says.

I clutch the bouquet all the way home, trying to decide where to put it. We have a Mason jar in a cabinet in the kitchen. I’ll arrange them in that, I think, but I won’t leave them in the kitchen. I could set them on the coffee table in the den, though that seems a little ordinary to me. If I put them in my father’s room, I won’t be able to see them. In the end, I set them on the shelf in the back hallway. I sit across from the flowers on the bench and admire them. My father says, “They look nice,” as he goes out to the barn.

But something is still bothering me. They don’t seem right inside the house, and more important, I’m afraid my mother and Clara won’t be able to see them. It’s illogical, of course—if Clara and my mother have become spirits who actually
can
see down to Earth, then surely they can see through houses—but I can’t shake the notion. I put on my jacket and walk the Mason jar to the edge of the clearing before the woods begin. I set the jar in the snow.

I stand back. The flowers seem more alive in the sunshine. I know they’ll die before morning, but I am oddly satisfied.

I think about my mother and Clara. I shut my eyes. I imagine them vividly. I do this periodically in order to keep the images clear and sharp. The pictures in my mind have warmth and smell and movement, treasures I cannot afford to lose.

On the last day before Christmas vacation, we have a party in our homeroom at school. In New York we had combined Hanukkah-Christmas celebrations, but in New Hampshire it is simply a Christmas party, there being no one in our school in need of Hanukkah. Gifts are exchanged, and the boys are annoyingly manic because of the half day. I’ve drawn Molly Curran’s name and have given her, in keeping with a lifelong propensity to give gifts I really want for myself, a kit with twenty different colors of nail polish in it. I’ve gotten a tape of the Police from Billy Brock, who’s clearly operating on the same principle and, worse, doesn’t know me very well, since I don’t own a tape player. On the bus on the way home from school, I debate asking my father for a tape player instead of a washing machine for Christmas. Is it too late, I wonder, to ask for both?

After I hang up my jacket, I find my father in his shop. He’s consumed with preparations for a glue-up, a precise and panicky procedure that in fifteen minutes can ruin weeks of painstaking woodwork. One has to set the glue, bring the components together, apply suitable clamping pressure, test the squareness, and then clean up the excess—all in about a minute and a half. My father is making a drawer, the first of two that will be fitted into the openings of a small sideboard he has to finish before Christmas. It is his first commission.

“How was school?” he asks.

“Good,” I say.

“Last day.”

“Yup.”

“How was the party?”

“Good.”

“What did you get?”

“A tape of the Police.”

I look him in the eye and hope he is thinking,
Tape player: good idea for Nicky for Christmas.

The day marks a week and two days since my father and I walked into the woods and found a baby. I’ve been unable to keep from thinking about what might have happened to Baby Doris had we not found her. I’ve imagined the sleeping bag a frozen cocoon with long icicles falling like daggers all around her. In a second call to Dr. Gibson, my father learned that the baby’s toes would not have to be amputated. “She’s a fighter,” the doctor told my father, a comment which, when relayed to me, filled me with pride. We also learned that she is to be collected today by social services and delivered to a temporary foster home. This information upset me greatly when I heard it, since I liked having the baby in the hospital, having her contained there. We won’t be told where she is going. The whole process strikes me as being a lot like the witness protection program, with its anonymity and its new cast of characters: new mother, new father, new brothers and sisters. We won’t even be told the baby’s new name. Forever, to us, she will have to be Baby Doris.