Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [2]
He kneels again in the snow. He sets his bundle down, unzips his jacket, and tears open his flannel shirt, the buttons popping as he goes. He unwraps the infant from the bloody towel. Six inches of something I will later learn is cord hang from the baby’s navel. My father puts the child close to his skin, holding the head upright in the palm of one hand. Without even knowing that I’ve looked, I understand the infant is a girl.
My father staggers to his feet. He wraps his flannel shirt and parka around the child, folding the jacket tight with his arms. He shifts his bundle to make a closed package.
“Nicky,” my father says.
I look up at him.
“Hold on to my jacket if you need to,” he says, “but don’t let yourself get more than a foot or two behind me.”
I grab the edge of his parka.
“Keep your head down and watch my feet.”
We move by the smell of smoke. Sometimes we have the scent, and sometimes we don’t. I can see the silhouettes of trees, but not their branches.
“Hang in there,” my father says, but I don’t know if it is to me or to the infant against his chest that he is speaking.
We half slide, half run down the long hill, my thighs burning with the strain. My father lost the flashlight when he left the sleeping bag in the snow, and there isn’t time to go back for it. We move through the trees, and the boughs scratch my face. My hair and neck are soaked from melted snow that freezes again on my forehead. From time to time I feel a rising fear: We are lost, and we won’t get the baby out in time. She will die in my father’s arms. No, no, I tell myself, we won’t let that happen. If we miss the house, we’ll eventually hit the highway. We have to.
I see the light from a lamp in my father’s workshop. “Dad, look,” I say.
The last hundred yards seems the longest distance I have ever run in my life. I open the door and brace it for my father. We wear our snowshoes into the barn, the bamboo and gut slapping as we make our way to the woodstove. My father sits in a chair. He opens his jacket and looks down at the tiny face. The baby’s eyes are closed, the lips still bluish. He puts the back of his hand to the mouth, and from the way he closes his eyes I can tell that she’s breathing.
I unlace my snowshoes and then undo my father’s.
“An ambulance won’t make it up the hill,” my father says. Holding the child against his skin, he stands. “Come with me.”
We move out the barn door, along the passageway to the house, and into the back hallway. My father takes the stairs two at a time and turns into his bedroom. Clothes litter the floor, and a fan of magazines is on the bed. I hardly ever go into my father’s bedroom. He snatches up a sweater but tosses it away because of the roughness of the yarn. He gathers up a flannel shirt and realizes that it hasn’t yet been washed. In the corner is a blue plastic laundry basket that my father and I take to the Laundromat every week or so. Between times he uses it as a kind of bureau drawer.
“Hand me that,” he says, pointing.
With one arm, he sweeps the magazines from the bed. I set the laundry basket on the mattress. He takes the baby out, wraps her in two clean flannel shirts, front to back, the small face above the folds. He makes a nest of sheets in the basket, and then he lays the infant gently in.
“Okay then,” he says to steady himself. “Okay now.”
I climb into the truck. My father sets the basket on my lap.
“You all right?” he asks.
I nod, knowing that no other answer is at all possible.
My father gets into the truck and puts the key into the ignition. I know he’s praying that the engine will start. It catches the first try only half the time in winter. The engine coughs, and he coaxes it to a whine. I’m afraid to look at the infant in the plastic basket, afraid I won’t see the tiny puffs of breath in the frigid air, mimicking my own.
My father drives as fast as he dares. I grit my teeth in the ruts. The frozen lane is ridged up from the early snows and thaws of the fall. In the spring, before the town comes by to grade it, the road will