Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [16]
My father owns twenty acres of rock, hardwood, and sloped fields. All the wood for his furniture comes from his acreage: walnut and oak and maple; pine and cherry and tamarack. The local lumberyard sawed and planed the lumber, laying in a supply of smooth planks that my father won’t use up for years.
After a time, my father finds our earlier tracks, and we follow them at a slower pace. When we’ve gone for about fifteen minutes, I see, in the distance, a sliver of orange tape. “There it is,” I say.
We make our way to the place that has been cordoned off. A circle of tape has been threaded through the trees. It funnels off into a path back to the motel, as if for a bride returning from an outdoor wedding. Within the circle is the soft place where the sleeping bag was, a print of my father’s snowshoe outlined in a thin stream of red spray paint, and, similarly outlined, a size ten and a half bootprint. Neither of us noticed the bootprint the night before. I wonder if the police found my father’s flashlight, if it’s worth trying to get it back. Did my father tell Detective Warren about the flashlight? I try to remember. Will they think it was the other guy’s and waste a lot of time trying to track it down?
We walk around the circle and stand with our backs to the motel. I examine the soft place where the sleeping bag was.
“Dad,” I say. “Why did he put the baby in a sleeping bag if he meant to kill her?”
My father looks up at the bare tree limbs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess he didn’t want her to be cold.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.
“None of it makes any sense.”
I pull on the plastic tape, seeing if it will stretch. “What do you think they’ll call her?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Maybe they’ll give her our last name,” I say. “Maybe she’ll be called Baby Dillon. Remember how they called Clara ‘Baby Baker-Dillon’?”
We stand for a time in silence, and I know that my father is thinking about Baby Baker-Dillon. I can feel it coming off him in waves. I have the tape looped around my mitten now.
“Dad,” I say.
“What?”
“Why was there so much blood and stuff in the motel room?”
My father picks up some soft wet snow and starts to fashion it into a ball. “There’s some blood when a woman gives birth,” he says. “And there’s something called the placenta, which is full of blood and which is the thing that nourishes the baby. It comes out after the birth.”
“I know about that,” I say.
“So all of that blood was natural. It doesn’t mean that the woman was hurt or injured.”
“But it does hurt, right?”
In the flat light my father looks old. The skin beneath his lower lids is almost lavender in color and loose with wrinkles. “It hurts,” he says carefully, “but every birth is different.”
“Did Mom hurt when I was born?”
My father whacks the ball against the tree. “Yes, she did,” he says. “And if she were here, she would tell you that every minute was worth it.”
A crunch of snow startles both of us. We turn to see Detective Warren, with his crimson-muffled neck, not twenty feet away. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says.
“Like hell,” my father says under his breath.
Warren stands with his hands in his overcoat pockets, a man out for an unlikely stroll behind a motel in the dead of winter. “Went to your place, no one answered the door. Drove over here on a hunch.” He moves a step closer. “You had to see the spot again, didn’t you?”
He is walking in the prints made by the technicians the night before, placing each Timberland boot into a hole.
“People are predictable, Mr. Dillon,” he says. “We go back to the places that once gave us a jolt. Lovers do it all the time.”
He keeps moving toward us, one careful footfall at a time. “You’re all over the papers today, Mr. Dillon. I’m surprised I didn’t see Channel 5 at your place. Your house is wide open, by the