Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [10]
“In the fifteen years I’ve been with the state police,” Warren says, “I’ve seen maybe twenty-five cases of abandoned infants. Three months ago, in Lebanon, a woman left an infant in a trash barrel outside her house. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. The baby was dead when we found him. Had Campbell’s soup up its nose.”
A technician interrupts Warren with a question.
“Last year,” Warren continues, “a fourteen-year-old girl threw her baby out a second-story window. She’s charged with attempted murder.” Warren studies a drinking glass and a plastic bag on the bedside table. “In Newport we found a newborn girl, alive, on a shelf at Ames. Over to Conway they found a newborn boy in a trash bin in the back of a restaurant. The mother was twenty. It was freezing outside. She’s charged with attempted murder.” The detective squats down to look under the bed. “What else? Oh, in Manchester an eighteen-year-old mother abandoned her baby girl in a park. She left the child in a plastic bag, and two ten-year-old girls discovered the infant when they were biking through the park. Can you imagine? The mother’s charged with attempted murder and cruelty.” Warren stands. He points under the bed and asks a technician a question. “And listen to this one: Two years ago, a high school senior discovered she was pregnant. She said nothing. She hid it by wearing baggy sweatshirts and pants, hoping all the while that she’d miscarry. But she didn’t. In the fall she went off to college. The day before Thanksgiving, after everyone had gone home, she delivered a baby girl on the floor of her dormitory room. She wrapped the infant in a T-shirt and sweater, put her in a plastic grocery bag, and carried her down three flights of stairs. She laid her in a trash bin just outside the dorm.”
Warren walks to the window and looks through it.
“But College Girl had a conscience,” he says. “She called in an anonymous tip to campus security, and they came and found the baby. Didn’t take them long to find the mother either. She pled to endangerment and was sentenced to a year’s house arrest.”
“How do you know it was a man who did this?” my father asks. “In all the other examples you’ve just mentioned, it was a woman who abandoned the baby.”
“Come with me,” Warren says to my father. “I want you to see something.”
The two men turn, and as they do they see me just outside the doorway.
My father moves to stand in front of me, as if to block my view of the room, but we both know it’s too late: I’ve seen what there is to see.
“I thought I told you to stay in the car,” my father says, both surprised and angry.
“It was cold.”
“If I tell you to stay in the car, I mean stay in the car.”
“It’s all right,” Warren says as he slides past my father. “She can come with us.”
My father gives me a stony look. He makes me walk in front of him, following the detective around the back of the motel. The snow is deep, and Warren motions for us to step in his slow and precise bootsteps. From a window at the back of the motel, another set of prints stretches into the woods. The lights are so bright I have to put up my hand. Fifty feet from where we stand, two policemen are bent over the snow.
“Bootsteps,” Warren says. “They go down two feet in some cases. Size ten and a half. Every twenty feet or so, the guy sank up to his knees in the snow. The tracks go way out, five hundred yards anyway, and then double back. You know how hard that is to do?”
My father says he knows how hard that is to do.
“You could break your leg doing that,” Warren says.
My father nods.
“City guy, wouldn’t you say?” the detective asks.
“Might be.”
“A woman who had just given birth couldn’t have done that.”
“I don’t think so,” my father says.
Warren turns toward my father and puts a hand on his shoulder. My father flinches. “Despite the fact that you won’t unzip your jacket,