Light on Snow (20 page)

Don’t threaten me,
my father says, standing.

Sit down, Mr. Dillon. Why didn’t you pick up the phone?

I told you,
he says.
I wanted her to leave immediately. When she sensed I wasn’t going to take her to the place . . . in the woods . . . she said she was leaving. But then she fainted. I was worried. I said I’d call an ambulance, but she grabbed onto my arm. She said that if she went to the hospital, they—you—would arrest her. Which was true.

And?
Warren says.

And I couldn’t force the woman into the car. She wasn’t going to go willingly. On the other hand, I didn’t want her leaving the house because she might faint again.

So why didn’t you call the police?
Warren asks for the third time.

What is this?

Tell me why you didn’t pick up the phone.

I’m done here,
my father says.
I’m leaving.

What else?
Warren asks.

What else? I don’t know what you want. I remember thinking, If I take this woman to the hospital—assuming I can get her in my truck—it won’t be long before the police hear about the postpartum patient and the old beat-up truck she arrived in. And I’d be more implicated than I already was. Which, to be truthful, didn’t trouble me all that much. No, what troubled me was Nicky. If I were to be detained, or, worse, arrested, what was going to happen to her? Every decision I make now includes her.

My father leans toward Warren.
And there’s something else,
he says.
My daughter watches everything I do. She counts on me to do the right thing. It was possible Charlotte was innocent. I didn’t pick up the phone. I waited. And the longer I waited, the more complicated it got.

Warren continues to stare. My father has the distinct sense that he is setting his own court date, but still he feels the pressure to explain—to himself now, if to no one else.

I wasn’t willing to just walk away from her,
my father says.
To leave her to you, if you want to know the truth. Every time I thought about picking up that phone, a bad taste would rise in my throat.

My father stands up from the table again. He zips up his jacket.

She gave up the guy,
Warren says.

The news startles my father.
You’ve already talked to her?

He’s in Switzerland.

She’s already told you the whole story?

Skiing,
Warren says.

The detective and my father appear at the entrance of the cafeteria. I jump up when I see them. “It’s all right,” my father says.

“What about Charlotte?” I ask.

“She’ll be arraigned,” Warren says, “and then a court date will be set.”

“Can I go in and see her?” I ask.

“That’s not possible,” Warren says. He turns to my father. “Look, I’ve got some things I have to take care of, but you said you were going to be around.”

“Yes.”

“I may need to speak with you again.”

“How did you know to be at the house this morning?” my father asks.

Warren jiggles the change in his trouser pockets. “The owner of the hardware store said he’d seen only three new people in the store in the last day—a couple from New York and a woman asking where she could buy a table.”

The detective glances my way. He doesn’t mention that the reason he might have questioned Sweetser a second time was that I said the Kotex wasn’t for me, or that I lied about my father and the ax, or that a house far from town, dependent upon a well, might need electricity to power a pump to provide enough water for a shower during a power outage.

“It’s why the plow came so early,” my father says.

“Took all that time to get to your road. We’d just pulled up when we saw the Malibu.”

“It’s sad,” my father says.

“They’re all sad,” Warren says.

My father and I go out into the bright light. My father puts on his sunglasses. I hold up my hand to shade my eyes.

“What happened?” I ask.

“He asked me a lot of questions.”

“Did they have a two-way mirror?”

“Yes.”

“Did they have a bright light overhead?”

“It was just an ordinary room with a table and a couple of chairs.”

“And all you did was
talk?
”

“More or less,” my father says. He looks at me. “Why? What did you think was going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Something.”

We climb into the frigid truck. My father starts the engine and backs the truck out of the parking space. He merges cautiously into traffic. He pulls too late into the right-hand lane and cuts a driver off. The driver honks his horn, but my father seems not to hear it. His movements are slow, his eyes glassy. He stops at a red light.

“Do you think we’ll ever see Charlotte again?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” my father says.

The light changes but my father doesn’t move. The car behind us honks again. “The light’s green,” I say.

We leave the city of Concord, my father driving like a senior citizen, to go back to our remote house at the edge of the woods. My father is lost in thought or replaying scenes in his head or thinking about what Detective Warren once said about needing to return to the places that moved us. I watch the road the way you might with a driver who seems likely to fall asleep. Both lanes are open, and the traffic is moving at a good clip. It is Christmas Eve, and everyone has somewhere to be.

W
e drive through town on our way home from Concord. I no longer have to tell my father to pay attention to the lights. He stops in front of Remy’s and says he has to get a few items on Grammie’s list. Each year, my grandmother calls ahead to tell my father what ingredients she’ll need for the Christmas Eve meal. When she arrives she hits the ground cooking.

I wait in the truck for the six or seven minutes it takes my father to find what he needs. He’s the fastest shopper in southern New Hampshire. I still have sleep on my face and I need a shower. I haven’t brushed my teeth since breakfast the day before. But I am content to sit in the truck, my feet upon the dash, and watch people scurry to Remy’s or to Sweetser’s or to the basement of the church where the Congregationalists are holding their annual Day-Before-Christmas Fair. Even men are taking baby steps on the slippery sidewalk, holding their arms out for balance. I see Mrs. Kelly, the mother of my friend Roger, on her way to the post office. I see Mrs. Trisk, my Spanish teacher, and I take my feet off the dash. My father comes out of Remy’s, paper bag in hand, the minor miracle of a newspaper sticking out of the top. He sets the groceries on the seat between us and tosses me a devil’s food whoopie pie. Muriel’s sister makes them in the mornings, and they’re usually gone by ten a.m. My father unwraps one for himself and bites into it as he backs the truck into traffic.

“Can we visit Charlotte in jail?” I ask, licking the cream that has squished out the sides of the pie.

“We’ll try,” my father says.

“Can I bring her the necklace?”

“I don’t know the rules.”

We pass the three stately houses, Serenity Carpets, the fire department.

“Listen,” my father says. “I’m going to tell you two rules that you must never break.”

I stop all movement, my tongue attached to the whoopie pie as if frozen to it.

“Never have unprotected sex,” he says, pausing a moment to let this sink in. “And never, ever get into a car with a driver who’s been drinking, including yourself.”

These rules are spoken in a stern parental voice. I’m positive that the word
sex
has never before been said between us.

I slip my tongue back into my mouth. What brought this on? I wonder. And then I get it. That my father has delivered this pronouncement less than three hours after I revealed I got my period cannot be coincidence.

In years to come, through all the noise, these are the two rules I will remember.

My father stares straight ahead, as if he hadn’t said a word.

“Okay,” I say in a small voice.

His face visibly relaxes. After a minute I dare to take another bite of the whoopie pie. When I’m finished, I glance out the window and see that something has happened to the snow. It has melted and then frozen again into fine crystals that sparkle on every surface. I lick my thumbs and forefingers, put them together, and make a clicking sound.

“What are you doing?” my father asks.

“I’m taking pictures,” I say. “I’ve been doing it all day.”

“What are you photographing?”

“Just the snow,” I say. “The shapes it makes. The way it lies on things. Like trees. And fences. The way it twinkles. The way it looks like diamonds.”

We pass the cottage with its evidence of boys. A sled is propped against the front porch. I notice a wreath on a door. I peer into the windows. I think I see a fireplace, though maybe I only imagine it. In the driveway at the side of the house, a small gray car is stuck. A woman is inside it, and with her is a boy who looks about eight years old. As we pass by I can hear the engine revving, the wheels spinning.

My father pulls to the side of the road and stops. He opens his door and steps down onto the road. His hands in his pockets, he walks to the gray car. I lean over the seats and roll down my father’s window.

“Hello there,” my father says.

“Hi,” the woman says.

“Want a hand?”

“I backed up, and now my car is stuck,” she says apologetically.

“Let me give it a try,” my father says.

The woman gets out of the car. She has on a green parka, and her jeans are tucked into rubber boots that come almost to her knees. A navy knitted hat covers her hair. The boy gets out of the car, too.

We listen to my father rev and spin, rev and spin, until finally my father gets out of the car. “You have a shovel?” he asks.

“I don’t want to put you out,” the woman says, squinting into the sun.

“No trouble.”

“Well . . . all right . . . thank you,” she says haltingly. She takes a step forward and puts out her hand. “I’m Leslie, by the way.”

“Robert,” my father says, shaking her hand. He turns and points to me in the truck, my cue to get out. “My daughter, Nicky.”

“And this is Jake,” the woman says, putting a hand on her son’s shoulder.

I move to my father’s side as the woman fetches the shovel from her garage.

My father accepts the shovel from the woman, who laughs a little when she hands it to him. Over my father’s shoulder, I can see an older boy, maybe ten or eleven, looking out of a window.

Jake moves closer to me. “You’re the one who found the baby,” he says. He has a round face with a receding chin. Snot has frozen on his upper lip, and he’s a candidate for braces. I notice that the top of his mitten is chewed through. Who would want to chew on yarn?

“My father and I did,” I say.

“And it was alive?”

“She’s still alive.”

“It was a girl?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“And it didn’t have a finger?”

“No, she had all her fingers,” I say. “It’s just that one finger froze, and they had to take it off.”

“Yuck,” he says.

“Yeah, well.”

I peer into every window of the house, cataloging white ruffled curtains, a flowered print wallpaper, a roll of silver wrapping paper, a lamp in the shape of an airplane. I note that there’s a fireplace after all. From where I’m standing, on a snowbank, I can see into the kitchen, its light still on. Someone has made a terrific mess on a table. There are bits of dough and a thin layer of flour, a crumpled bag of King Arthur. On the kitchen counter is an economy-sized bottle of orange soda and next to it a mug with a tea bag draped over it. On a door that might lead to a cellar or to a pantry is a Santa done in needlepoint.

“You want to make a snowman?” the boy asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

Jake and I step-fall, step-fall into the snow in opposite directions. I roll the bottom of the snowman while Jake rolls the top. We make jerky swaths across the front yard. I push my monster snowball to his more modest one. From time to time I glance up to see my father shoveling out the back wheels or taking a quick breather.

“All right,” I say, “let’s put your ball on top of mine.”

The two of us struggle to get the snowman’s middle onto its bottom. I roll another quick ball for the head. We gouge out eyes. “We need a carrot,” I say. “And two stones.”

“Mom,” the boy yells, “do we have a carrot?”

“In the fridge,” she says.

The boy heads for the house, and I follow, uninvited. I stomp my boots in the back hall, but Jake runs directly for the fridge, leaving small grids of snow across the floor.

The older boy I saw in the window and now a younger one, maybe six or seven, come to stand at the threshold of the kitchen. The older boy has on a Bruins shirt. The younger has thick glasses that make his eyes bug out.

“You live up the hill,” the older boy says. “You found the baby.”

“It had a frozen finger,” Jake announces, slamming the vegetable drawer.

“I know, stupid,” the older boy says.

The kitchen is painted yellow and is smaller than I imagined. A jar of jelly with a knife sticking out of it sits beside a toaster. A box of Cocoa Puffs is on the floor. I see what the mess on the table was for: two plates of cookies, snug in plastic wrap, are on top of the fridge.

“We need stones,” Jake says.

“What for?” the older boy asks.

“The eyes.”

The older boy scans the kitchen. He settles upon a box of Whitman’s. He tears the cellophane, lifts the lid, and reveals twelve dark round chocolates inside.

Perfect,
I am thinking.

He passes the box around, and we each eat one. I take two and lay them on the palm of my hand. The boys put on jackets and boots. The older boy finds an extra hat and scarf for the snowman. “What’s your name?” I ask.

“Jonah,” he says. “And he’s Jeremy,” he adds, pointing to the little boy with glasses. They all look like the mother, with small upturned noses and wide cheekbones, though only Jonah and Jake are brunets. Jeremy has nearly white hair.

We dress up our snowman. The carrot and the chocolates give him a good-natured but dopey personality. When we’re not looking, Jonah eats one of the eyes. Jake, furious and near tears, throws a hastily made snowball at his older brother. Instantly I am part of a snowball fight, though it’s not clear whose side I am on.

“Boys,” the mother calls wearily, as if she’s said it fifty thousand times.

Jonah falls onto the snow and makes an angel with his arms. I can’t resist and fall backwards, too. The snow gets up and under my jacket and my shirt. I remember that I just got my period and sit up. I’m too old for this, I think.

My father gets back into the car, guns the engine, and shoots forward. The woman named Leslie takes off her hat. Brown curls fall to her shoulder. Her bangs are stuck to her forehead. My father gets out of the car and says something. I can’t hear what it is. The woman points toward the house, and I guess that she’s inviting him inside for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. My father looks at me and gestures toward the truck.
Groceries,
he must be saying to her.
My mother at the airport.
The woman smiles at my father, and I know she’s thanking him profusely. He shakes his head.
It was nothing.

“Nicky,” he calls.

“See you,” the boys say to me.

My father and I climb into the truck. I’ve got snow in my socks and down the waistband of my jeans. The woman waves us all the way to the turnoff.

“So,” my father says.

While my father fetches my grandmother from the airport, I sort out the decorations for the tree. I’m working with the second-string ornaments. The box containing the “best” decorations is missing, and neither my father nor I know what happened to it. Among the ornaments we have left are six hand-painted wooden cutouts of snowmen. It’s immediately obvious which ones I painted and which my mother did. There are five silver balls with fake jewels stuck to them, the result of another crafts project when I was eight. I remember the smell of the glue, the way the glitter fell onto the table, and how months later you could still see sparkles in the rug. There are a dozen small red wooden apples, most of them covered with a fine crackling from the changes in temperature in the attic. There’s a paper plate with gold macaroni stuck to it and a picture of me at six in its center. My mother said it was the best present she got that year. Some of the ornaments have proper hooks and some don’t. I construct makeshift hangers out of paper clips. I pull silver pieces of last year’s icicles from the strings of lights and plug in the lights to see if they work. They do, but they’re a mess. Every year we say we’re going to wind them carefully before we put them back in the box, but we never do. We just dump them in.

In the car my father tells my grandmother about finding the baby and about the detective and about Charlotte coming to our house. He tells her about his visit to the police station, about Charlotte’s being in jail. My grandmother is shocked and a little frightened. My father must also tell her that I got my period, because when she comes in, she gives me the kind of hug I haven’t had in a long time, with a little rocking back and forth. She has fragile white skin with spots on her cheeks and forehead. She smells like the lavender sachet she will put in my stocking. I think her teeth are false, but I don’t know for sure. She’s a good person to hug, because her body fills up all the empty spaces.

She hardly has her coat off before she’s looking inside the cabinets and the fridge to see if my father has bought all the right ingredients for the Christmas Eve dinner. I can hear her ticking items off under her breath:
pearl onions; nutmeg; beef broth.
She has brought her own apron, her own potato peeler. She gives me the job of peeling the potatoes with the new peeler, which works so well I don’t mind the chore. I keep the water running at a slow trickle from the tap because it makes the peeling and the cleaning easier. Beside me my grandmother is cutting the tough skin off the turnips. She has a blade that’s about a foot long, the kind that might figure in a horror movie. She digs into the turnip with both hands on the back of the blade and pushes down. The knife makes a hard thwap against the cutting board. I’m surprised at the strength in her arms. From behind, my grandmother is one large mass with a small head of tight gray curls. From the side, she is almost pretty.

“I got my period,” I say.

My grandmother sets the knife down and wipes her hands on her apron. She pretends she doesn’t already know. She envelops me in her arms. I still have a peeler and a potato in my hands.

“How do you feel?” she asks, holding me at arm’s length.

“Good,” I say. “I had cramps, but I don’t now.”

“Do you have pads?”

I nod.

“Do you need any help?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

She puts her fingers under my chin and raises my face to hers. “If you ever want to talk about anything, you just have to ask me. It’s been a long time since I had any bother with that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know all about what to do.”

She gives me another hug, and I feel in her squeeze a reluctance to let me go.

“Grammie,” I say after a time.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Do you know what pfeffernusse is?”

While my grandmother cooks, my father and I go out into the woods to cut down a tree. I worry that we’ve waited too long; it’s late afternoon, and the sun is about to set. We have hundreds of trees to choose from; the problem will be clearing away the snow around it so that we can bring it inside. We both carry shovels, and my father has an ax.