Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [3]
The baby snorts and startles me. She gives a wail, and even in the weak light from the dashboard, I can see the angry red of her skin. My father puts his hand out to touch her. “Atta girl,” he whispers in the dark.
He keeps his hand lightly on the soft mound of flannel shirts. I wonder if the motion of soothing Clara is coming back to him now and hurting his chest. The road down the hill seems longer than I remembered it. I hope the baby will cry all the way to Mercy.
My father guns the engine when he hits the pavement, and the truck fishtails from ice in the treads. He pushes the speedometer as high as he can without losing control. We pass the Mobil station and the bank and the one-room elementary school from which I graduated just the year before. I wonder if my father will stop at Remy’s and hand the baby over to Marion, who could call for an ambulance. But my father bypasses the store, because stopping will only delay what he’s already doing—delivering the infant to someone who will know what to do with her.
We drive past the small village green that is used as a skating rink in winter. In the middle is a flagpole with a spotlight on it.
Who left the baby in the sleeping bag?
My father turns at the sign for Mercy. The driveway to the hospital is lined with yellow lights, and I can see the baby, scrunching her face, ugly now. But I remember the eyes looking up at me in the woods—dark eyes, still and watchful. My father pulls up to Emergency and leans on the horn.
The door on my side swings open, and a security guard in uniform pushes his face into the truck.
“What’s the horn for?” he asks.
I watch the baby disappear behind massive automatic doors. My father puts his head back and closes his eyes. When we hear the distant wail of a siren, he sits up. He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. How long has he been crying? He turns the key in the ignition, stripping the starter because the motor is already on. He drives as if he were new at the wheel, following signs to the parking lot. When we get out of the car, he looks down, only then realizing that his shirt is still unbuttoned beneath his jacket.
At the curb in front of the emergency entrance, my father hesitates.
“Dad?”
He puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk toward the entrance, our boots coasting on the salt pellets.
The beige-and-mint entryway is empty, and there seems to be a lot of metal. I squint in the overbright lights that flicker like a strobe. I wonder where the baby is and where we should go. My father follows signs for Triage, each step forward on the tiles an effort. We don’t belong in here. No one does.
We turn a corner and see a small room in which a half-dozen people sit on plastic chairs attached to the walls. A woman in jeans and a sweater is pacing, her yellow hair still bearing the imprint of her rollers. She seems impatient, annoyed with a sullen boy who might be her son. He sits in his plastic chair, his coat still on, his chin besieged with angry pimples. I think I see the reason for the visit in the way he cradles his right hand: a finger? a wrist? My father walks toward the Triage window and stands at its opening while a woman speaks into a telephone and ignores him.
I put my hands into the pockets of my jacket and look down the hallway. Somewhere there is a room and a cot and a doctor working on a baby. Is she still alive? The receptionist taps on the window to get my father’s attention.
“I brought in a baby,” my father says. “I found her in the woods.”
The woman is silent a moment. “You found a baby?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says.
She writes