Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [11]
We ride with Chief Boyd back to town. In the morning everyone will wake to the news. I try to picture again the man and the woman who went to the motel to have a baby and then kill it. Where are they now?
“That’s my truck over there,” my father says when we reach the hospital parking lot. Chief Boyd drives us to the truck and we get out. “Thanks for the ride,” my father says, but Boyd, still tight-lipped, doesn’t answer. He peels out of the lot.
We climb up into the truck and my father turns the key. The engine catches on the first try. Two for two. As we wait for the truck to warm up, I look out through a thin layer of frost crystals that shine under the lamplight of the parking lot. Beyond the frost is the front door of the emergency room, and beyond that is a cot in which a newborn girl is trying to start her life.
“You shouldn’t have had to hear all that,” my father says.
“It’s not that,” I say.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking about Clara.”
The truck jounces a little as it revs. There’s an empty Coke can under my feet that’s annoying me. My father guns the engine. He makes a sharp U-turn in the nearly empty lot, and we drive out into the night.
The skid marks were forty feet long. The tractor-trailer pushed the VW along the highway as if it were only so much snow to be plowed out of the way.
My mother died instantly. Clara, who was still alive when the medics got her out of the wreckage, died before the ambulance reached the hospital. It was ten days before Christmas, and my mother had taken the baby to the mall for Christmas shopping. For reasons we will never know—did Clara with her charm or her whining make my mother turn her head, even for an instant?—my mother glided onto the highway in the path of the oncoming truck. The driver, who emerged from the accident with only a dislocated shoulder, said he was traveling at just under sixty-five when the green VW floated across his path.
My father, who had stayed late at his office Christmas party in Manhattan and who was on his second martini when his wife and child were being dragged into oblivion, didn’t know about the accident until close to midnight. When he arrived home and found the house empty, he waited an hour or so and then began calling my mother’s friends and then the area hospitals and then the police, until finally he received an answer that even weeks later he was unable fully to comprehend. And for months he had the notion that had he not made the telephone call, he never would have heard the terrible news.
That night he drove to the hospital, his own ten-year-old Saab mocking him with its sturdiness. The interns made a grab for him when he went over, and they had to fight to get his tie off so that he could breathe. After he identified my mother, the staff gave him a minute with Clara, who was strangely intact apart from the purple oval bruise to one side of her forehead. The magnitude of the waste was unbearable, Clara’s perfect body a unique torment only a jealous god could have devised.
The accident happened on a Friday night when I was sleeping over at Tara Rice’s house. Mrs. Rice, who hadn’t heard the news, was surprised to see my father at her door so early on a Saturday morning. I was found amidst a scatter of sleeping bags on Tara’s floor and told to pack my things. When I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, I knew that something terrible had happened. His face, which had been ordinary enough just the day before, seemed to have been recarved by an inept sculptor, the features rearranged and misaligned. He helped me put my jacket on and walked me to the car. Halfway down the driveway, I started yipping at him, a dog at his heels.
“What, Dad? What’s the matter?
“Tell me, Dad. Why do I have to leave?
“What happened, Dad? What happened?”
When we reached the car, I tore my shoulder from his grip and began