Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [53]
“Who took the baby out into the snow?” I ask, letting out a long breath.
It seems to me then, sitting on the stairs, that my future hangs upon her answer, that everything I will ever know or think about people forever depends upon what she says.
Charlotte is silent a long time. I poke my head around the corner. She is sitting with her back to the wall, staring straight out the window.
“We both agreed to go to the motel,” she says carefully.
It’s not the answer I wanted, but I am silent. I have asked my questions, and she has answered them. I stand, my legs weak. I press my hands against my thighs to steady them. I take another long breath and let it out.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll take you now.”
The evening Clara was born, my father appeared at my bedroom door to tell me I’d be spending the night at Tara’s. I’d been vaguely aware of small disruptions within the household—commotions of the magnitude of lost keys, say, or of a pet having an accident on the rug—minor calamities with which I didn’t want to become involved. Clara, as it happened, was three weeks early, and the sudden labor pains caught my parents by surprise.
I was reading on my bed. My father seemed frantic in the way that parents do when they don’t want to alarm a child but can’t help themselves. He pulled clothes from bureau drawers and stuffed them into a paper bag. I went in my pajamas, my jacket wrapped around me. I said good-bye to my mother, but she had left us already, focused intently on the earthquake inside her. I wanted a hug or a kiss, and I might have gotten one had I persisted, but my father, anxious to complete his errand and return to his wife, tugged at my sleeve.
Normally a relaxed driver, my father gripped the wheel. He answered my questions with the clipped sentences of someone whose attention is elsewhere. It was only a mile from my house to Tara’s, but the ride seemed to take forever. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is Mom going to die?”
“No. Everything’s fine. Just fine.”
When we arrived at Tara’s, Mrs. Rice’s exaggerated welcome worried me even more. “If there’s anything we can do . . . ,” she cooed to my father’s rapidly retreating back. I stood at the window and watched my father jog to his Saab. He peeled away from the curb like a teenager on a tear. Was the baby going to die? Tara stood beside me as I whimpered, and she bit her fingernails to the quick. “Now, now,” Mrs. Rice said before suggesting the American cure for all potential disasters. “Do you want something to eat?”
Within the hour I’d forgotten my distress. Tara and I stayed up late playing Dungeons and Dragons with her brother and then slept until ten the next morning, Thanksgiving Day. So I was surprised to hear, when I entered the kitchen, that I had a new baby sister and that her name was Clara.
Later I would learn the details. My sister, clamoring to get out, was born on the elevator, much to the horror of the hospital attendant who was accompanying my mother in her wheelchair up to Labor and Delivery. The attendant stopped the elevator at the first available floor, shouted for help, and my sister was technically delivered by an orthopedist in shirt and tie who was waiting to go home to his family after a long shift at the hospital. Everyone was frazzled, most of all my father, who had dropped to his knees to catch his daughter before she hit the floor.
My father came to fetch me to take me to the hospital. He was a different father than the one who had left me at the Rices’ the night before. He whistled as he drove with one finger on the wheel, and he related the story about the elevator, all the while chuckling to himself as if he’d just been told a terrific joke. He took me up to the nursery and pointed out my sister. I thought he’d made a mistake. I checked the name. No mistake. The small label above the cot read Baby Baker-Dillon.
Clara’s head was misshapen and her eyes were ratlike slits. Her skin was a mottled red and purple when she cried. She didn’t look