Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [63]
Charlotte climbs into her bag and adjusts her pillow. I sit to one side of the fire, poking it from time to time to make the flames burn brighter. I put on another log. I’m still not sleepy.
Charlotte falls asleep at once. I listen as she begins to snore lightly.
I work on Charlotte’s necklace until I’ve finished it. I set it in the box. In the morning I’ll insist she put it on. I climb into my sleeping bag and stare at the ceiling. I think about morning sickness and the pink doughnut. I wonder about a metallic taste at the back of the throat. I glance over at Charlotte and realize once again that she is the mother of a baby that was left to die. She is sleeping in our house, on the floor, right next to me. She might get caught and go to jail. My father and I might go to jail.
I roll over and watch the fire. I might have to lie awake for hours, I decide. I might have to go find my book and read it with the flashlight.
But after a time, I begin to picture a different future—one in which Charlotte doesn’t get caught; one in which she gets her baby back; one in which she and her baby live with my father and me.
I see this future in great detail. A white crib in the guest room; in the den, an old high chair with a red leather seat that I once saw at Sweetser’s. A blue stroller in the back hallway; in Charlotte’s car, a padded baby seat. I’ll go to school during the day, and when I get home Charlotte will be pacing the back hallway with the baby on her hip. She’ll have on her fuzzy pink sweater and a pair of jeans. She’ll have chocolate-chip brownies waiting for me, and she’ll ask me questions about my boyfriend. She’ll have an errand to do, or maybe she’ll go to school in the evenings, and she’ll ask me to babysit. At night, while we do our homework together, we’ll have to talk quietly so we won’t wake the baby up. Charlotte will take me to Hanover to get my hair frosted, and she’ll drive me and my friends to the movies.
There will be no James.
My father will come around.
I’ll make Charlotte an ankle bracelet, and I’ll knit a blanket for the baby out of the pastel multicolor yarn that Marion is always trying to palm off on me and I never take. No, I’ll make it out of the soft yellow yarn I once saw at Ames in Newport. Charlotte will take me to the store, and I’ll buy the yarn with my own money. I’m thinking about a basket-weave pattern when the warmth of the fire begins to work on me as it must have done on Charlotte. The last sound I hear is that of my father stomping the snow from his boots in the back hallway.
I wake once during the night—there’s a disturbance—but I’m so tired from the shoveling and the hiking and the nervous atmosphere in the house since Charlotte’s arrival that I go back to sleep almost immediately. I wake again, however, just a short time later, to the sound of voices from the kitchen. I don’t want the voices to be there, I want to slip back into my dream, but the fact of the voices makes me open my eyes. Voices? There are murmurs, long strings of syllables, clipped answers, but I can’t actually hear the words. The fire has mostly gone out, and only a few embers glow. Charlotte, I see, is not in her sleeping bag.
Later I will learn that Charlotte, waking during the night and wanting a glass of milk—and not knowing that my father would be sleeping in the kitchen—tripped over the sleeping bag (with my father in it) and smashed her palms hard into the grillwork on the stove. My father woke and examined Charlotte’s hands. He lit the kerosene lantern and made two ice packs with plastic bags. He told Charlotte to sit on the sleeping bag and lean her back against the cabinet and let the ice do its work on her bruised palms.
I squiggle out of the sleeping bag and walk down the hallway. I see Charlotte cradling the ice packs in her palms. My father is standing in the opposite corner, not far from her because the kitchen is so small. He has his back against the counters where they meet at a right angle. I can see them because of the light from the kerosene lantern,