Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [64]
I stop.
“It was all my idea,” Charlotte adds. “I begged her.”
“She should have known better,” my father says. “You both should have known better.”
I turn away from the kitchen and put my back to the wall.
“It was awful,” Charlotte says.
“I imagine it was,” my father says.
I’m not sure what surprises me more—that my father and Charlotte are in the kitchen together or that they’re actually talking.
“How’re the hands?” I hear my father ask.
“A little numb,” she says.
“Keep the ice on them. I should have told Nicky I was sleeping here before you both went to bed.”
“I didn’t see you.”
I slide down the wall and sit on the floor. I draw my knees up to my chin.
“You warm enough?” my father asks.
“I’m all right,” Charlotte says.
I imagine Charlotte with her head tilted back against the cabinets, possibly with her eyes closed.
“You’ll be going tomorrow,” my father says after a time. “The plow should get here in the afternoon.”
There is a long silence in the kitchen.
“It was never our plan to abandon the baby,” Charlotte says. “I want you to know that.”
My father says nothing.
“James just kept saying, ‘We’ll take it one step at a time.’ That’s what he’d say whenever I’d mention the future. I thought he would know what to do when the time came. He’d worked in a hospital for a semester, and he was going to medical school.”
I hear the clink of ice cubes in a plastic bag. I’m breathing so shallowly I have to take a gulp of air.
“I suppose you thought you loved him,” my father says.
“I did love him,” she says.
“You’re how old?” my father asks.
“Nineteen.”
“Old enough to think for yourself. Didn’t it ever occur to you that you might be endangering the life of the child by not telling anyone beforehand?”
“You mean, like, a doctor,” Charlotte says.
“Yes, a doctor.”
“I thought about it,” Charlotte says. “I went to the library and read about pregnancy and birth. I was sick during the early part of the summer. Morning sickness, except that it lasted all day. I was worried about that. But if I went to a doctor, I was afraid either my parents would find out or the school would.”
“There are clinics,” my father says.
It’s cold in the hallway, and I don’t have the sleeping bag. I draw myself together in a ball.
“I worked as a temp with an insurance agency,” Charlotte says. “I moved from office to office, subbing for people who went on vacation. I was living with James by then. My parents thought I was sharing an apartment with another girl. Once they came to visit, and we had to put all of James’s stuff in his car for the weekend. My father found an issue of Sports Illustrated in the bathroom, and I had to go on this riff about how I’d just become a baseball fan.”
Charlotte pauses.
“In the fall,” she continues, “I pretty much stopped going to my classes. I took long walks, and I learned to cook a couple of things.”
“You were playing house,” my father says dismissively.
“I suppose.”
“Where do your parents live?”
Charlotte doesn’t answer.
“I’m not going to call them, if that’s what you’re worried about,” my father says.
“No, it’s just that . . .”
“I’m not going to call in the police either,” he adds. “If I were going to do that, I’d have done it already. That’s a decision you’re going to have to make.”
In the hallway I begin to shiver from the cold. I want to blow on my hands, but I don’t dare for fear of giving myself away. My father will be furious if he finds out I am listening.
“They live in Rutland,” Charlotte says.
“Vermont?”
“Yes. They worked in a paper mill,” Charlotte says. “They got laid off. Now my mother works at a drugstore, but my father’s still unemployed.”
“Paying for school must have been a struggle,” he says.
“One of my brothers is helping. Was helping. And I had loans, though I probably don’t anymore.”
“And the car?”
“It was my brother’s. His old one. He gave it to me.”
“Where’s the school?”
“UVM.”
“You’re a long