Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [23]
At Butson’s Market, my father searches for dishwashing liquid while I stand in front of the refrigerated shelves that hold the bunches of flowers. There are daisies and carnations, baby’s breath and roses, and even though the bouquets are all more or less alike, I spend a lot of time trying to decide which is best. The carnations look fake pink and bother me. One bouquet, almost entirely yellow, has a long creepy-looking flower in its center that might be a lily.
“That one’s pretty,” my father says, pointing to a bouquet that is mostly lavender and white.
“What are those bluish-purple flowers?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Mom would like them?”
“I think she would,” he says.
I clutch the bouquet all the way home, trying to decide where to put it. We have a Mason jar in a cabinet in the kitchen. I’ll arrange them in that, I think, but I won’t leave them in the kitchen. I could set them on the coffee table in the den, though that seems a little ordinary to me. If I put them in my father’s room, I won’t be able to see them. In the end, I set them on the shelf in the back hallway. I sit across from the flowers on the bench and admire them. My father says, “They look nice,” as he goes out to the barn.
But something is still bothering me. They don’t seem right inside the house, and more important, I’m afraid my mother and Clara won’t be able to see them. It’s illogical, of course—if Clara and my mother have become spirits who actually can see down to Earth, then surely they can see through houses—but I can’t shake the notion. I put on my jacket and walk the Mason jar to the edge of the clearing before the woods begin. I set the jar in the snow.
I stand back. The flowers seem more alive in the sunshine. I know they’ll die before morning, but I am oddly satisfied.
I think about my mother and Clara. I shut my eyes. I imagine them vividly. I do this periodically in order to keep the images clear and sharp. The pictures in my mind have warmth and smell and movement, treasures I cannot afford to lose.
On the last day before Christmas vacation, we have a party in our homeroom at school. In New York we had combined Hanukkah-Christmas celebrations, but in New Hampshire it is simply a Christmas party, there being no one in our school in need of Hanukkah. Gifts are exchanged, and the boys are annoyingly manic because of the half day. I’ve drawn Molly Curran’s name and have given her, in keeping with a lifelong propensity to give gifts I really want for myself, a kit with twenty different colors of nail polish in it. I’ve gotten a tape of the Police from Billy Brock, who’s clearly operating on the same principle and, worse, doesn’t know me very well, since I don’t own a tape player. On the bus on the way home from school, I debate asking my father for a tape player instead of a washing machine for Christmas. Is it too late, I wonder, to ask for both?
After I hang up my jacket, I find my father in his shop. He’s consumed with preparations for a glue-up, a precise and panicky procedure that in fifteen minutes can ruin weeks of painstaking woodwork. One has to set the glue, bring the components together, apply suitable clamping pressure, test the squareness, and then clean up the excess—all in about a minute and a half. My father is making a drawer, the first of two that will be fitted into the openings of a small sideboard he has to finish before Christmas. It is his first commission.
“How was school?” he asks.
“Good,” I say.
“Last day.”
“Yup.”
“How was the party?”
“Good.”
“What did you get?”
“A tape of the Police.”
I look him in the eye and hope he is thinking, Tape player: good idea for Nicky for Christmas.
The day marks a week and two days since my father and I walked into the woods and found a baby. I’ve been unable to keep from thinking about what might have happened to Baby Doris had we not found her. I’ve imagined