Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [45]
Charlotte perches at the edge of the bed, the only place to sit apart from the desk chair.
“Have you ever worn your hair in a French braid?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say.
“I think you’d look good in a French braid. Do you want me to make you one?”
“Sure.”
“Sit here with me,” she says. She lifts her hands to my hair and draws it back over my ears. The delicate drift of her fingers makes me close my eyes. No one has touched me this way since my mother died.
“I’ll need a brush,” she says.
“It’s on the sill.”
I move to my desk and Charlotte stands behind me. She brushes my hair upward. The brushing, like the drift of the fingers, is soothing and maternal, and I fall into a dream state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. For a time she works without talking.
“Are you an only child?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I have two older brothers. My parents are French Canadian, very strict, very religious. My brothers are protective.”
“Do they know?”
“Oh God, no,” Charlotte says. “They’d kill me. For sure, my brothers would kill . . . well, you know, my boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. The word sends a charge through me, much as accomplice did.
“Where did you live before?” she asks, drawing my hair into sections.
“New York.”
“So why did you move up here?”
“My father wanted to. He says he had to, to get away from the memories. He says he couldn’t live in our house anymore.”
“Didn’t you mind?”
“I was angry at first. But then, I don’t know, I guess I just realized it was something he had to do. I just got used to it.”
I pat the beginnings of the braid she’s fashioning. Expertly executed, without a misplaced hair, it makes a perfect curve against my head. “Wow,” I say.
“I didn’t see a TV,” Charlotte says as she draws a hank of hair on my left side.
“We don’t have one,” I say. “I have a radio, but my father didn’t want a TV. He and my mother didn’t believe in letting kids watch too much TV anyway, but after the accident, I think he was afraid all he’d see on the television would be accidents and disaster.”
“When did your mother and sister die?”
“Two years ago.”
“You haven’t had anyone fix your hair since then, have you?”
“No,” I say.
Charlotte lets go of my hair. I can see her in the small round mirror over the desk. She closes her eyes. Periodically, that night and the next day, the realization of what she’s done, of what happened to her in the motel room, will blow through her.
I know precisely what that feels like. When I first moved to New Hampshire, sudden gusts of grief would overtake me on the soccer field or in the band room. Even when I wasn’t actively thinking of my mother, I’d be blindsided at odd intervals. My mind would wander to a thought of her, only to find that where I used to picture her standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, or driving around in her VW, or knitting in front of the TV while I watched a Disney video, there was empty space. It hurt every time, and still does, like a severed nerve exposed to air.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” she says. I watch as color returns to her cheeks. “The nap helped. And the food.”
“You haven’t been eating?”
“Not much,” she says.
“We can go down later and have hot chocolate,” I say. “I practically live on hot chocolate.”
I hear footsteps on the landing, and a second later, a knock on the door.
Charlotte sets the brush on the desk and stands away from me.
My father enters. He looks at me and then at Charlotte and then back at me. “What’s going on?” he asks.
The evidence of what we’ve been doing is perfectly obvious on my head.
Charlotte steps forward and around me. She doesn’t glance back as she slips past my father and walks out of the room.
“Do I have to lock her in her room?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He shakes his head. “The storm’s