Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [38]
“I’ll bring you some,” Warren is saying. He sets the water glass on a shelf. “Looking bad out there. Better get yourself another flashlight.”
“Plenty where that came from,” my father says.
“You could lose your power in this,” Warren says.
“We could.”
The detective glances my way as he pushes open the door against an inch of snow. Warren gives a small wave and bends into the storm, holding his overcoat closed with one hand. He trudges, collar up, across the drive. He wipes the snow off his windshield with his gloves and climbs into his Jeep. As he does he glances at the muffled maze of tracks in the snow. The truck and the blue car cannot be seen from where he is standing. He would have to walk further toward the woods to get the right angle. He does not. I watch him reverse, make the turn, and finally leave.
My father shuts the door. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he says to me.
I stare at the floor.
“You’re going to get us in more trouble than we’re in already.”
I look up. “I was just trying to get rid of him,” I say.
This is true and not entirely true.
“She came to the top of the stairs,” I add.
“I know she did. I heard.”
“You heard?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he heard?”
“I don’t know,” my father says. “But I hope for your sake he didn’t.”
My father closes his jacket with an angry zip. “I’ll be in the barn,” he says.
The day we left New York, my father packed up a trailer with boxes and tools and suitcases, bicycles and skis and books. He tied a blue plastic tarp over all of it, bent his head to the plastic, and stood for so long I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
All that morning I’d been expected to help with the packing. The movers would come to get the larger items after we left. My father had put me in the kitchen with a stack of old newspapers and a dozen fresh cardboard boxes and had asked me to see to the dishes. But I was lost in the fatigue of anger and inertia: I didn’t want to be packing up to leave. I would lift an item up and look at it and set it down and then pick it up again and think, How am I supposed to pack a pressure cooker? What do I do with a Cuisinart? My legs hurt, my arms hurt, my head hurt from crying. This is the last time I’ll ever see my hallway at night, I’d been saying to myself for the last twenty-four hours. This is the last time I’ll ever sit on my swing. This is the last time I’ll ever reach for the Cheerios in this particular cabinet. Leaving was a weight upon the entire house and its contents, so that it seemed a Herculean task simply to lift a glass. I packed indifferently, tumblers and plates in the same box, more plates in another box, and I forgot to label the cartons. For months after we moved into the new house, we had to unpack six or seven boxes to find the toaster or the measuring cups or the wooden spoons.
I wouldn’t go when my father said it was time to get into the car. He let me be for an hour as he checked and rechecked rooms and closets, looking into cabinets and under beds. In the end, he had to take me bodily from the only home I’d ever known, the one that still had surfaces my mother and Clara had touched. I sobbed all the way to the Massachusetts Turnpike.
The drive from New York to New Hampshire can be done in three hours, but it seemed to take far longer than that to reach our destination. My father drove up Route 91, the highway that runs between New Hampshire and Vermont, not even knowing which state we’d eventually settle in. Exhausted, he stopped in White River Junction, where we ordered a late-night supper neither of us could eat. We asked directions to the nearest motel, where I fell onto my bed fully clothed, meaning to get up and brush my teeth and undress, but I never did. I woke the next morning disoriented and dirty. I felt as though I’d slipped through a hole in time, caught between life as it had been and life as it would be. I had no enthusiasm for the future, and I knew my father didn’t either.
In the morning I whined all through the blueberry pancakes, and my father