Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [12]
My grief, which I could not articulate beyond a string of helpless words within an open-mouthed wail, showed itself, as the days wore on, in short, violent squalls. I would bend over and pound the floor or rip the covers from my bed. Once I threw a paperweight against my door, cracking it down the center. My father’s grief was not as dramatic as mine, but instead was resolute, an entity with weight. He held his body with an awful rigidity, the jaw tight, the back hunched, his elbows on his knees, a posture most easily achieved in a chair at the kitchen table, where water or coffee and occasionally food were brought to him.
For days, my father sat in our house in Westchester, unable to go back to the office. After Christmas vacation, I was made to return to school on the theory that it would distract me. My grandmother came to care for us, but my father didn’t like having her there: she reminded him only of happier times when we’d visited her in Indiana in the summer. There we’d spent lazy mornings with Clara in a plastic wading pool and my mother lounging gratefully in a slim black tank suit. In the heat of those afternoons, with my grandmother watching Clara and me, my father and my mother would sometimes slip away to his old childhood bedroom for a nap, and I’d be glad that I’d escaped that dreaded camplike fate.
One day several weeks after the accident, I came home from school on the bus and found my father sitting in the same chair in which I’d left him at breakfast, a wooden chair next to the kitchen table. I was sure that the cup of coffee on the table, with its dark sludge on the bottom, was the same one he’d poured himself at eight a.m. It frightened me to think that all the time I’d been in school—all during math and science and a movie called Charly that we’d watched in English class—he’d been sitting in that chair.
In March my father announced that we were moving. When I asked where, he said north. When I asked where in the north, he said he had no idea.
I sit up in the bed and see light at the edges of the curtains. I push the covers away and step onto the cold floorboards. I raise the shades and put a hand to my eyes. Every twig and late-to-fall leaf is coated with an icy shine. I am giddy with this news. Even in New Hampshire, the school buses won’t risk the ice. I turn on the radio and listen to the school closing announcements. Grantham public schools, closed. Newport public schools, closed. Regional High School, closed.
I take a shower, towel off, and dress in jeans and a sweater. I make myself a cup of hot chocolate. Looking for my father, I move, mug in hand, through the rooms of the house, a long, narrow Cape turned sideways with a porch to the west. The house is painted yellow with dark green trim, and in the summer a wild vine grows along the porch railing, creating a kind of trellis. The paint job is ancient and needs to be seen to, and my father plans to tackle it in the summer. Last summer, our second in the house, my father made a small patch of lawn that I was periodically asked to mow. The rest of the property he let go. Where it isn’t woods, it’s bush and meadow, and on summer evenings we sometimes sit on the porch, my father with a beer and me with a lemonade, and watch birds we can’t identify skit along the tips of the overlong grasses. Occasionally, we’ll each read a book.
I walk into a front room that runs the width of the house and has two long windows to the south. When my father bought the place, the windows were painted shut, and two tarnished chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls were papered in a faded and peeling blue print, and the fireplace was boarded up. My father had picked the house solely for its isolation and the promise of anonymity, but after he spent two weeks sitting in a chair unable to