Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [34]
She puts the baby ornament on the tree.
The ribbon on the package is bright red, curled with a rip from the scissors.
He is on his knees, his head beneath the branches, looking for the socket.
I am thinking about Christmas trees and ornaments when I have a sudden realization: Did I really tell Marion the Kotex wasn’t for me? Did the detective, lurking in the aisles, hear that?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
My father parks in his usual spot at the far side of the barn. I look at the woman’s blue car as I open the door and head for the house. I find her sitting on the bench in the back hallway. She has on her white shirt and the bottoms of my flannel pajamas. They barely fit—the thighs tight with pink and blue animals, the cuffs just inches below her knees. Her legs are white to the tops of her gray angora socks. Her jeans, which she has washed, hang on a hook, drying.
She looks chastened and subdued, a student waiting outside the principal’s office. I hand her the paper bag. She says thank you and slips inside the bathroom. I take off my jacket and hang it on a hook not far from the one that holds her jeans.
Beyond the bathroom door, I hear a rip of cardboard, the rustle of paper.
The woman has had a baby. What does it feel like? I want to ask. I know where babies come from, but that doesn’t tell me what I crave to understand. Does it hurt? Was she frightened? Does she love the man who is the father? Is he waiting out of sight down the road for her to return? Is the ridiculously named Baby Doris the result of a grand passion? Does the woman behind the bathroom door cry for her lover and her lost child?
The woman emerges from the bathroom looking more careworn than passionate. We stand for a moment in the back hallway, and I’m not sure what to do with her. “Thank you,” she says again. “Was it bad out?”
“It was fine.”
My father brings a wave of cold air with him as he stomps the snow off his boots. He slips his sleeves from his jacket and puts it on a hook. “You should lie down,” he says to the woman.
I lead her past the kitchen and into the den. I point to the couch. She falls onto the sofa in a kind of loose collapse. Her stomach swells over the elastic band of the pajamas, visible where the white shirt parts at the waist. The shirt isn’t clean: rings of dust, like fine stitching, run along the inside edges of the cuffs. She lies with her eyes closed, and I examine her, this prize.
Her lips are dry, and she wears no makeup, a minor disappointment. Her eyebrows have been expertly plucked, however, suggesting prior care and grooming. Her eyelashes are thick and blond. There are blackheads on her nose and one or two faint depressions on her cheeks. Her hair falls over her face, and I think she must have fallen asleep already not to mind its touch on her skin. Her breasts are large and list toward the couch cushion.
I wait, as one might beside a mother’s bed, for her to wake up or to open her eyes. In the kitchen I can hear the electric whine of a can opener, the scrape of a saucepan against a burner. I cover her with an ugly black-and-red crocheted blanket my grandmother made and which my father refuses to throw out. I plump the pillows behind her head, hoping this will rouse her, and it does.
She sits up quickly, once again as if not knowing where she is—the beauty in the fairy tale who has slept a thousand years.
“I’ve left him,” the woman says.
I sit up straighter. Left him? The man? The one who took the baby into the snow?
She shivers.
“You’re cold,” I say. “I’ll get your jacket.”
“My sweater’s in the bathroom.”
I am up in an instant, eager to be of use. I find the folded pink cardigan on a corner of the sink. It’s made of a fleecy wool—not angora but mohair—and has large mother-of-pearl buttons down the front.
When I return the woman lifts herself up. I wrap the cardigan around her shoulders, trying to tug it down. She seems to have lost the use of her arms, and her body is heavy.
I sit on the floor next