Light on Snow (14 page)

“The snow’s stopping now,” she says.

“So?”

“It’ll be easy to retrace our steps. We’ll make plenty of tracks.”

“There’s nothing there, Charlotte. Just some orange tape.”

Again she says nothing, and in the extended silence I make a proposition I know is wrong, that I’ll almost certainly regret. But recklessness is alive in me and pushing to get out. “All right,” I say. “I’ll make a deal.”

“What deal?”

“You answer my questions, and maybe I’ll take you,” I say, knowing I’m on treacherous ground. If I ask a question and she answers it, I’ll have to fulfill my part of the bargain.

“Okay,” she says.

I let out my breath in a rush. “Who is he?” I ask.

“His name is James,” Charlotte says without hesitation.

James,
I think. “How did you meet him?” I ask.

“At college,” she says. “How many questions are you going to ask me?”

“I don’t know. A few. Which college?”

There’s a pause. “I can’t do that one,” she says. “Ask me something else.”

“Do you love him still?” I ask, certain she can hear the quaver in my voice.

She hesitates. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. “I did love him very much.” She pauses. “I was crazy about him.”

There is something in her voice that reminds me of the way people talk about someone who has died. Or someone loved a long time ago; still loved, perhaps, in secret.

“Does he know where you are?” I ask.

“No.”

I’m relieved at this answer. I didn’t like the idea of his waiting for her, out of sight, at the B&B in town perhaps.

“He was gorgeous,” she adds quietly.

I have never heard a man or a boy described as gorgeous. “What does he look like?” I ask.

“He has very black curly hair that falls over his forehead. He pushes it back a lot—it’s this thing that he does. And green eyes. His teeth are capped in the front from playing hockey. He’s not real tall.”

“Who took the baby out into the snow?” I ask, letting out a long breath.

It seems to me then, sitting on the stairs, that my future hangs upon her answer, that everything I will ever know or think about people forever depends upon what she says.

Charlotte is silent a long time. I poke my head around the corner. She is sitting with her back to the wall, staring straight out the window.

“We both agreed to go to the motel,” she says carefully.

It’s not the answer I wanted, but I am silent. I have asked my questions, and she has answered them. I stand, my legs weak. I press my hands against my thighs to steady them. I take another long breath and let it out.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll take you now.”

T
he evening Clara was born, my father appeared at my bedroom door to tell me I’d be spending the night at Tara’s. I’d been vaguely aware of small disruptions within the household—commotions of the magnitude of lost keys, say, or of a pet having an accident on the rug—minor calamities with which I didn’t want to become involved. Clara, as it happened, was three weeks early, and the sudden labor pains caught my parents by surprise.

I was reading on my bed. My father seemed frantic in the way that parents do when they don’t want to alarm a child but can’t help themselves. He pulled clothes from bureau drawers and stuffed them into a paper bag. I went in my pajamas, my jacket wrapped around me. I said good-bye to my mother, but she had left us already, focused intently on the earthquake inside her. I wanted a hug or a kiss, and I might have gotten one had I persisted, but my father, anxious to complete his errand and return to his wife, tugged at my sleeve.

Normally a relaxed driver, my father gripped the wheel. He answered my questions with the clipped sentences of someone whose attention is elsewhere. It was only a mile from my house to Tara’s, but the ride seemed to take forever. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is Mom going to die?”

“No. Everything’s fine. Just fine.”

When we arrived at Tara’s, Mrs. Rice’s exaggerated welcome worried me even more. “If there’s anything we can do . . . ,” she cooed to my father’s rapidly retreating back. I stood at the window and watched my father jog to his Saab. He peeled away from the curb like a teenager on a tear.
Was the baby going to die?
Tara stood beside me as I whimpered, and she bit her fingernails to the quick. “Now, now,” Mrs. Rice said before suggesting the American cure for all potential disasters. “Do you want something to eat?”

Within the hour I’d forgotten my distress. Tara and I stayed up late playing Dungeons and Dragons with her brother and then slept until ten the next morning, Thanksgiving Day. So I was surprised to hear, when I entered the kitchen, that I had a new baby sister and that her name was Clara.

Later I would learn the details. My sister, clamoring to get out, was born on the elevator, much to the horror of the hospital attendant who was accompanying my mother in her wheelchair up to Labor and Delivery. The attendant stopped the elevator at the first available floor, shouted for help, and my sister was technically delivered by an orthopedist in shirt and tie who was waiting to go home to his family after a long shift at the hospital. Everyone was frazzled, most of all my father, who had dropped to his knees to catch his daughter before she hit the floor.

My father came to fetch me to take me to the hospital. He was a different father than the one who had left me at the Rices’ the night before. He whistled as he drove with one finger on the wheel, and he related the story about the elevator, all the while chuckling to himself as if he’d just been told a terrific joke. He took me up to the nursery and pointed out my sister. I thought he’d made a mistake. I checked the name. No mistake. The small label above the cot read
Baby Baker-Dillon.

Clara’s head was misshapen and her eyes were ratlike slits. Her skin was a mottled red and purple when she cried. She didn’t look at all like the babies in the magazines, and when my father said to me, “Isn’t she beautiful?” I was speechless.

I was taken to visit my mother, who was loopy and bloated. She echoed my father—“Did you see her? Isn’t she beautiful?”—which I found deeply upsetting. What was wrong with my parents? Didn’t they see the same things I did? “We have a Thanksgiving baby,” my mother crowed.

I was returned to the Rices, where I was to have my Thanksgiving dinner. Few events in a child’s life are as subtly unsettling as a holiday dinner with a family not one’s own. The food was all wrong—the Rices served peas and Jell-O salad and scalloped oysters, which I mistook for stuffing and had to spit out—and the kids’ table was in the kitchen, my head level with congealing gravy in a pan on a counter. Throughout dinner, I would suddenly remember—like a leftover wisp of nightmare—that I had an ugly baby sister, a truth that rattled me and made me furtive.

My mother and the baby went home the next morning, and once again my father came to fetch me. I collected my clothes in the wrinkled paper bag and followed him to the car. He was white-faced, ashen from exhaustion, and he didn’t whistle. Feeling gypped and betrayed, I asked no questions and stared out my window.
I don’t have to like this,
I kept reminding myself.

Once inside the house, my father tossed his keys on the kitchen counter. I set down my paper bag and let my jacket slip to the floor. I could hear my mother calling my name from her bedroom.

“Go ahead,” my father said, sensing my reluctance.

Slowly I climbed the stairs. I hesitated at the bedroom door. My mother looked soft and lumpy in a silk kimono my father had given her. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she had short red socks on. “Come in,” she said, waving me toward her. “Come sit with us on the bed.”

I climbed onto the high white bed and knelt in front of my mother. She was holding Clara, who was sleeping. Already my sister had lost the mottled coloring of a day earlier. She made tiny kissing motions with her mouth, a delicate and pouty bow. “You want to hold her?” my mother asked.

I did not want to hold her, just as I would not, years later, want to sit behind the wheel of a car for the first time or traverse a glacier, clipped to a guide wire. I was afraid; I didn’t know what to do. I thought that I might smother Clara or break her. At the very least I’d make a fool of myself. But my mother persisted, gently encouraging me. “Go on,” she whispered, as if my holding the baby were a secret just between us. “You can do it.”

I turned and braced my back against the headboard. My mother slid the baby carefully into my arms. Clara was wrapped like a papoose, and I was instantly amazed by her weight and her warmth. She didn’t look like a rat anymore, more like a pig. She opened one eye, looked me straight in the face, and then closed it. I laughed. I was sure that she was saying,
Hey Sis—catch you later when I can see and talk.

My father stepped into the room. He held the camera up and took a picture. For all the time that we lived in New York, the framed photograph sat atop the mantelpiece in the living room. When we moved to New Hampshire, I insisted that my father unpack it and put it on a shelf in the den. In the photograph I look giddy, as if I’d just been tickled from inside with a feather.

I dress as if preparing for a mission in Alaska. I lend Charlotte mittens and a scarf and a better hat, all the while expecting my father to appear, bark at us, and send me to my room. There isn’t much I can do about Charlotte’s leather boots. She wears a size nine; I am a size six and a half; my father wears a twelve. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I don’t care about the boots.”

Once outside I give her a crash course in snowshoeing. “There’s not much to it,” I say. “You strap them on and start walking. Like this,” I add, demonstrating.

“I know how to do this,” she says.

Charlotte climbs up onto the snowbank and moves as if her legs are blocks of wood she needs to haul around. I tell her to relax, all the while casting quick glances toward the barn. I think I hear the sound of a saw, or at least I hope I do. We might make it to the edge of the woods without his noticing us. I can’t ever remember a time when I’ve had to sneak away from my house; for the last two and a half years, there hasn’t been anywhere to go.

Charlotte is panting by the time we reach a spot where we can stop to catch our breath. She bends over and puts her hands on her knees, a runner after a marathon. I ask her half a dozen times if she’s okay, and finally she tells me to quit it, she is fine. I know that if my father catches us (actually, I already know that it’s
when,
not
if
), my most flagrant transgression will not be having taken Charlotte to see the place where her baby was left to die, but rather that I risked her life in getting her there. I am trusting in Charlotte, a person I hardly know, to warn me if she’s in serious trouble.

“You’re sure you can do this?” I ask.

“I’m positive.”

The snow, dislodged from pine boughs above, falls in delicate showers. Charlotte begins to sweat. She unwinds the scarf and unzips her jacket to her stomach. Her jeans are wet to her knees, and I don’t want to think about her leather boots. I feel each footfall as a step toward disaster, but pride or inevitability or simply forward momentum keeps me going.

After a time I stop thinking about disaster and my father and Charlotte and begin to concentrate on navigating. I can see the path clearly in my mind’s eye; finding it from the forest floor is another matter. I recognize a rocky outcropping and locate the place where my father and I veered right, but after that I move more by instinct than by certain knowledge. Were we climbing as we moved sideways around the mountain to the right? I try to remember and wish I’d paid more attention during our second hike to the spot the day we ran into Detective Warren.

Charlotte and I fall into a routine. I walk a hundred feet, turn to see that she’s behind me, and wait for her to catch up. She doesn’t look quite as ungainly as she did when we set out, and she’s making better progress. As I wait for her, visions of catastrophe begin to crowd the edges of my thoughts, but I push them away. Jeopardizing Charlotte’s health will not be the worst crime my father will accuse me of, I now realize. The worst crime will be getting lost and forcing others to come find us.
If
they can find us.

We walk until we come to a clearing I have never seen before. I try to convince myself that my father and I simply bypassed it during our earlier treks, but I know that isn’t so. I hate telling Charlotte I’ve taken a wrong turn almost as much as admitting it to myself, but I have no choice.

Charlotte, too winded, says nothing.

“We’ll find it,” I say.

We retrace our steps, easy to follow in the pristine snow. Tiny V’s of bird tracks make faint impressions on the surface, and occasionally I can see the small scuff marks of an animal on the run. The challenge, I know, is to find the place where I went wrong. I walk slowly, like a hunter, examining every tree, every lower branch for some sign of breakage, but the bushes my father and I might have disturbed are mostly covered with snow. It is as if Charlotte and I are floating atop the forest floor.

I’ve already admitted defeat to myself, if not to Charlotte, when I see, in the distance, the tiniest blot of raspberry. “Wait here,” I say.

I move as quickly as I’m able. When I come within thirty feet of the reddish color, I see that it’s the item I hoped it was: my hat, the one I lost on the first night. It’s caught within a tangle of brush, possibly blown there by the winds of the night before. It might not mark the trail precisely, but I know that the path can’t be too far away. I yell for Charlotte to join me.

I reach for my hat in the brush. I’m glad to have it back. I hate losing anything I’ve knit.

“My hat,” I say to Charlotte when she reaches me. “The path has to be near here.”

The trail my father and I made, twice coming and going, has created a faint depression, as if a brook were running beneath the snow. I motion to Charlotte to follow me. I keep to the muffled trail. We hike for another fifteen minutes until I see, in the distance, a telltale sliver of orange tape.

I wait for Charlotte to catch up. “That’s it,” I say, pointing.

Charlotte stands a minute, trying to slow her breathing. I wait to see what she will do. My job is done. I am simply the guide. I have no place here except to show her the way home.

Charlotte moves forward and I follow, our positions now reversed. A wind bends the tops of the pines, sending snow dust to the ground.

Charlotte slips under the orange tape.

The footprints with their outlines of red paint have been erased. The mound of snow might be a bed for a burrowing animal. I refuse to think about how a baby might have lain here covered, as if with a heaping pile of quilts.

Charlotte walks to the center and kneels. She has on the purple-and-white-striped hat I gave her; she’s taken off the mittens already. Kneeling in the snow in snowshoes is always awkward at best. They bend her feet and dig in at the small of her back.

She scoops up snow and brings it to her face. She covers her mouth and nose and eyes. She holds it there for what seems like minutes. It begins to melt from the warmth of her face and dribbles off her chin. She is crying, her shoulders shaking. She makes a quick feline movement and lies over the snow, her face buried.

I stand outside the enclosure. When she has not moved in some time, I say her name. “Charlotte?”

She snaps back up onto her knees and begins to cuff the snow. First with her right hand and then with her left. Right, left. Right, left. Right, left. Angry swipes accompanied by words I can’t at first make out. I think she’s simply groaning or crying, but then I hear the word
stupid.
And after that, the words
could I.
She bends forward and slaps at the snow in a frenzy. I hear her say,
God, God, God.

I did not imagine this. I pictured a quiet scene, satisfying and healing. Not this fury. Not this hurtling grief.

Charlotte turns and sits on the snow, her legs to one side, her hands braced behind her. Her face is crimson and wet.

I wait, feeling as helpless as I ever have.

“God,” she says. Not to me, and not to any god she might or might not believe in. She lifts her face to the sky.

She leans forward and crosses her arms over her chest. She bends her head, as if closing in on herself. She remains that way for five, maybe ten minutes, without moving.

“Charlotte?” I ask.

She glances up and seems surprised to see me there. She pushes her hair off her face.

“I think we’d better go back,” I say.

With difficulty, she stands. She stumbles on the snowshoes. She leaves the enclosure, slipping under the tape. I see that she has left the purple-and-white hat behind, but I don’t want to ask her to go back for it.