Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [14]
I also have a photograph of my mother holding me as a baby under a snowball tree in our backyard. My mother’s hair is long and thick and light brown, waved in a style that might have been popular in 1972, when I’d have been a year old. She has on a plaid, open-necked shirt and a rust-colored suede jacket, and I am guessing that the month is September. She looks present in the picture, smiling slightly at my father, who’d have been behind the camera. I have on a silly pink hat and seem to be gnawing on my knuckles. I inherited my mother’s hair and wide mouth but my father’s eyes. After Clara was born, my mother cut her hair, and I never again saw her with it long.
I walk out to the barn and find my father sitting with his coffee in the chair by the stove. On the floor are drifts of sawdust, and in the corners, plastic bags of shavings. The air is suffused with fine particles, like a dissipating fog on a summer day. I watch as he puts the mug on a windowsill and bends his head. He does this often when he doesn’t know I’m in the room. He folds his hands, his elbows on his thighs, his legs spread wide. His grief has no texture now—no tears, no ache in the throat, no rage. It is simply darkness, I think, a cloak that sometimes makes it hard for him to breathe.
“Dad,” I say.
“Yup,” he says, raising his head and turning toward me.
“No school today,” I say.
“I didn’t think there would be. What time is it?”
“About ten.”
“You slept late.”
“I did.”
Through his shop window and just beyond the pines, I can see a sliver of lake—green glass in summer; blue in fall; and in the winter, simply a wedge of white. To the left of the lake is an abandoned ski hill with only three trails. There are remnants of a chairlift and a small shack at the top. It is said that in years gone by, the operator, a jovial fellow named Al, always saluted each skier as he or she slid off the chair.
Beyond the clearing my father has made, the woods grow immediately dense. In the summer they are full of mosquitoes and blackflies, and I always have to spray myself with Off. My father is thinking of screening in the porch, and I figure that maybe in a year or two he’ll get around to it.
“You eat breakfast?” he asks.
“Not yet.”
“There’s English muffins and jelly.”
“I like them sometimes with peanut butter,” I say.
“Your mother would mix peanut butter with cottage cheese in a bowl,” he says. “It used to make me want to gag, but she liked it so much I never told her how disgusting it was.”
I hold my breath and look down into my cup. My father almost never speaks about my mother unless to answer a direct question from me.
I clamp my teeth shut. I know that if my eyes well up, it will be the last memory he’ll allow himself to share with me for some time.
In my mind I see a small stone dislodged in a wall, one stone shoved forward until it falls. The other stones shift and settle and try to fill in the space, but still there is a hole through which water, in the form of memory, begins to seep.
Seepage.
In September I had the word in a spelling bee. A simple word, though I got it wrong, spelling it seapage, which, if you think about it, is not entirely illogical.
“I bet we could find the spot,” I say, announcing the reason I’ve come to find him. “When we get close enough, the orange tapes will give the place away.”
I have again an image of the baby still in the sleeping bag. What if we didn’t take that walk yesterday? I am thinking. What if we didn’t find her? Good luck, I’m beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it—no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is—the most incomprehensible idea of all.
I wonder if there are still police guarding the site. I decide there won’t be: what reason would they have had to stay? The crime is over,