Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [54]
I was taken to visit my mother, who was loopy and bloated. She echoed my father—“Did you see her? Isn’t she beautiful?”—which I found deeply upsetting. What was wrong with my parents? Didn’t they see the same things I did? “We have a Thanksgiving baby,” my mother crowed.
I was returned to the Rices, where I was to have my Thanksgiving dinner. Few events in a child’s life are as subtly unsettling as a holiday dinner with a family not one’s own. The food was all wrong—the Rices served peas and Jell-O salad and scalloped oysters, which I mistook for stuffing and had to spit out—and the kids’ table was in the kitchen, my head level with congealing gravy in a pan on a counter. Throughout dinner, I would suddenly remember—like a leftover wisp of nightmare—that I had an ugly baby sister, a truth that rattled me and made me furtive.
My mother and the baby went home the next morning, and once again my father came to fetch me. I collected my clothes in the wrinkled paper bag and followed him to the car. He was white-faced, ashen from exhaustion, and he didn’t whistle. Feeling gypped and betrayed, I asked no questions and stared out my window. I don’t have to like this, I kept reminding myself.
Once inside the house, my father tossed his keys on the kitchen counter. I set down my paper bag and let my jacket slip to the floor. I could hear my mother calling my name from her bedroom.
“Go ahead,” my father said, sensing my reluctance.
Slowly I climbed the stairs. I hesitated at the bedroom door. My mother looked soft and lumpy in a silk kimono my father had given her. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she had short red socks on. “Come in,” she said, waving me toward her. “Come sit with us on the bed.”
I climbed onto the high white bed and knelt in front of my mother. She was holding Clara, who was sleeping. Already my sister had lost the mottled coloring of a day earlier. She made tiny kissing motions with her mouth, a delicate and pouty bow. “You want to hold her?” my mother asked.
I did not want to hold her, just as I would not, years later, want to sit behind the wheel of a car for the first time or traverse a glacier, clipped to a guide wire. I was afraid; I didn’t know what to do. I thought that I might smother Clara or break her. At the very least I’d make a fool of myself. But my mother persisted, gently encouraging me. “Go on,” she whispered, as if my holding the baby were a secret just between us. “You can do it.”
I turned and braced my back against the headboard. My mother slid the baby carefully into my arms. Clara was wrapped like a papoose, and I was instantly amazed by her weight and her warmth. She didn’t look like a rat anymore, more like a pig. She opened one eye, looked me straight in the face, and then closed it. I laughed. I was sure that she was saying, Hey Sis—catch you later when I can see and talk.
My father stepped into the room. He held the camera up and took a picture. For all the time that we lived in New York, the framed photograph sat atop the mantelpiece in the living room. When we moved to New Hampshire, I insisted that my father unpack it and put it on a shelf in the den. In the photograph I look giddy, as if I’d just been tickled from inside with a feather.
I dress as if preparing for a mission in Alaska. I lend Charlotte mittens and a scarf and a better hat, all the while expecting my father to appear, bark at us, and send me to my room. There isn’t much I can do about Charlotte’s leather boots. She wears a size nine; I am a size six and a half; my father wears a twelve. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “I don’t care about the boots.”
Once outside I give her a crash course in snowshoeing. “There’s not much to it,” I say. “You strap them on and start walking. Like this,” I add, demonstrating.
“I know how to do this,” she says.
Charlotte climbs up onto the snowbank and moves as if her legs are blocks of wood she needs to haul around. I tell her to relax, all the while casting