Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [67]
“He helped me up. I was sore and could hardly move. ‘Walk like there’s nothing wrong,’ he said. He locked the door of the motel and kept the key. He put me in the passenger side. He opened the back door and bent over the basket like he was tucking the baby in, checking on her, and he said, ‘She’s sleeping now.’ And I said, ‘I have to feed her.’ And he said, ‘When she wakes up.’ I remember I turned around, and I saw the basket mounded up with the blankets we’d brought, and I thought she was in there. I had to reach around to put my hand on the blankets. James put the key in the ignition and started the car. I drifted off again. I woke once, I don’t know how far we’d gone, and I said, ‘She’s still sleeping?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ That was all. Just ‘Yes.’
“And then I fell asleep again.”
“You never saw her,” my father says.
“Just that one time when she was on my stomach,” Charlotte says.
“Then what happened?” my father asks, his voice steady, even a little relentless.
“When we pulled into the driveway of our apartment, I woke up. I said, ‘Get the baby. Maybe something’s wrong. I don’t hear her.’ And James said, ‘She woke up once. You were sleeping. She’s fine.’ And I said, ‘She did?’ And he said, ‘Let’s get you in first. Then I’ll get the baby.’
“So he came around to my side and helped me out and up the steps and into the apartment, and all the time, I’m saying, ‘I’m fine, just get the baby.’ He helped me get my coat off and I sat down on the sofa, and he went out to get the baby, and that was that.”
The silence is long, and I think that maybe Charlotte has finished her story.
“I must have drifted off again for a few minutes,” Charlotte says after a time, “because when I woke up, James was sitting across from me, and he was crying.”
Charlotte’s voice is so low now, I have to strain to hear her.
“I knew right away it was terrible. I started saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ And James told me the baby had died. ‘It’s not true!’ I said. ‘I heard her cry.’ He said she was alive for a few minutes, but that she died. He said he tried to revive her, he did CPR or something, but that she was dead. He said he panicked and wrapped her up in a towel and took her out behind the motel and left her body in a sleeping bag he had in the trunk.
“I went crazy. I hit him in the face. I fell on the floor. ‘She might have been alive,’ I kept screaming.
“‘No,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t.’
“‘Then what was in the basket?’ I yelled. And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘I thought you’d go crazy and I wouldn’t be able to get you into the car. I wanted to get you home first.’
“And I said, ‘Home? I’d rather be dead.’”
In the hallway I bend my forehead to my knees.
“And then I realized that James was crying, too, just as much as I was, and that really scared me because then I believed him. I knew it was all true, and, oh God, I was so sad. . . .”
I wrap my arms around my head.
“‘It’s punishment,’ I said to James,” Charlotte continues. “‘Punishment for what?’ James said. ‘For doing it the way we did. For not telling anyone. For not going to a hospital. If we’d gone to a hospital, she’d be alive.’ He said we didn’t know that. But I was sure of it. It just made it all so much worse.
“He stayed with me that night and most of the next day. But then he said he had to go home to his parents. It was Christmas break, and he’d already had to make too many excuses why he wasn’t home yet. I said I’d be fine. I wanted him to go. I just wanted to be alone. James packed his duffle bag and said good-bye, and I remember that we didn’t even kiss. I remember thinking, This means something. I knew he wanted to get away from me just as much as I wanted him to go.” She pauses. “He didn’t love me, did he?”
“No,” my father says.
“You wouldn’t do this to someone you loved, would you?”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Charlotte begins to cry again. After a time, I hear her blow her nose. “About an hour later, I walked