Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [29]
I decide she’s too embarrassed to ask about prices, so I volunteer the list. “We have a price list,” I say.
My father gives a quick shake of his head.
The woman tosses her hair out of her face. “Yes,” she says. “Sure.”
Ignoring my father I take a pamphlet from the mantel and hand it to her. I watch as she reads it. “What’s this made of?” she asks my father, pointing to a small cabinet.
“It’s walnut,” my father answers, failing to add that it has paneled doors, inset hinges, and a beeswax finish as well. He’s hopeless as a salesman.
The woman walks around to the back of the chair. She puts a hand out and leans on it. “This is really beautiful,” she says.
She takes a step sideways and catches the hem of her jeans under her foot. She bends and rolls the hem into a cuff. I watch her as she does this. She rolls the other pant leg and stands, but I am still looking at her feet. In the moment that my mind registers the socks with the cable knit up the side—pearl-gray angora socks—she says to my father, “I didn’t come here to buy a piece of furniture.”
My father looks confused for a moment. He thinks her a reporter, come to interview him under false pretenses.
“I don’t understand,” he says.
But I do, and how is that? The socks, of course, with their angora cable, frayed slightly at the heel. I see it in her face as well, even though I shouldn’t be able to see—I’m too young; I’m only twelve—the puffiness, the bluish commas under the eyes, the skin like something wet.
Her hand on the chair presses down, and I worry that she’ll fall. “I’ve come to thank you,” she says to my father.
“For what?” my father asks.
And now it’s she who seems surprised. “For finding the baby,” she says, her voice light on the word baby, as if she hardly dared to say it, as if she might not be allowed to say it now.
But still my father, who always seems to understand everything, doesn’t understand.
“For finding her,” she repeats.
He frowns and gives a quick shake of his head.
I whisper to him, “The mother,”and his head shoots back in sudden comprehension.
“You’re the mother?” he asks, astonished.
Her cheeks pinken, making her eyes look as blue as the fish I once painted in Clara’s bedroom.
The snow at the windows makes no sound. The woman’s hand, on the rung of the chair, is as white as a pearl.
“You’re the mother of the infant who was left in the snow?” he asks.
“Yes,” the woman says, pressing her lips tightly together.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” my father says.
“I just wanted to say —”
“Save it,” he says curtly.
She is silent, but she doesn’t move.
“You can’t be here,” my father says. “You left a baby to die in the snow.”
“I need to see the place,” she says.
“What place?”
“Where you found her,” she says.
My father seems bewildered by her request. “You ought to know the place.”
But how can she know the place where her child was left to die, I want to ask, if she didn’t take the baby there herself? Wasn’t it the detective who said it was a man who put the baby in a sleeping bag?
“I should never have come,” the woman says. “I’ll go now.”
“Please,” my father says.
The woman begins to zip up her jacket. She moves sideways around the furniture.
“You should leave this area,” my father says. “They’re looking for you.”
“I know,” she says.
“Then what are you doing here?” he asks.
“Will you turn me in?” she asks.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Do you want to know it?” she asks, offering herself up to my father, to this stranger, to this man to whom she owes everything.
“I don’t even want to know you exist,” my father says.
The woman shuts her eyes, and