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By Root 353 0

into the bedroom to lie down, and the radio was on. I remember this surprised me. I didn’t have the energy to walk around the bed and turn it off. I just climbed in and pulled the covers over my head. When the news came on, I heard something about an abandoned baby being in stable condition. I sat up. The announcer said Shepherd, New Hampshire. I hadn’t known the name of the town where the motel was. I had a map of New England in my car. I went out to get it. I looked up where Shepherd was. I ran back in and got my keys and drove to the store and bought a newspaper. There was a story in it about the baby. I was just so happy. So happy she wasn’t dead.” Charlotte pauses. “And that’s when it hit me. I realized what James had done. He’d left her to die. At first I couldn’t believe it. I told myself that he’d just made a horrible mistake. He’d thought she was dead but she wasn’t really. And then slowly I realized he had to have known she was alive, and still he’d traipsed out into the snow and left her there. I could hardly breathe. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t scream. It was just nothing.”

“He did it deliberately,” my father says. “He knew she was alive.”

Charlotte is silent.

“He planned it all along,” my father says.

“I don’t know,” Charlotte says. “Maybe he just panicked. I can’t believe he drove all that way, knowing he was going to kill her.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“I was afraid,” Charlotte says. “If I went to the police, I knew I’d be charged with attempted murder. I was scared. So I began to think, Well, it’s okay now, isn’t it? She’s alive, and someone will take care of her. I couldn’t take care of her. I had no money. I would have to leave James’s apartment. I couldn’t go home to my family with a baby. So it was all right, wasn’t it?”

My father is silent.

“I called James at his home,” Charlotte says. “He wasn’t there. His mother said he’d gone skiing with friends.”

“Skiing?” my father asks, incredulous.

“I was so dumbfounded I just hung up the phone.”

“Incredible,” my father says.

“I lay in bed for a week,” Charlotte says. “I hardly ate anything. I was so tired. Finally I got up and drove myself to the library and looked up all the back issues of the newspapers until I came to a story with your name in it.” She pauses. “And then I drove here.”

“Why?”

“I had to see you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What was my life worth if I didn’t thank you?” Charlotte says.

Her extraordinary question—almost more amazing than her confession, almost more astonishing than her terrible story—floats through the kitchen and out to the hallway. A pulse in my left ear begins to pound.

“I’d better go back to bed,” Charlotte says. I can hear rustling, a soft thump against the cabinet. “My leg has fallen asleep.”

“Give it a shake.”

“It must be hard for you to hear this,” Charlotte says.

“It would be a hard story for anyone to listen to,” my father says.

“Look, I’m really sorry about what I said about losing a child.”

“That’s all right,” my father says.

“I keep thinking I could have stopped him,” Charlotte says.

A bomb explodes, one without sound. I bring my hand to my eyes, temporarily blinded by the light. Our house begins to hum.

“Oh!” Charlotte says, startled.

“The power’s back,” my father announces, sounding a little stunned himself.

I squint in the overbright light. The wood floor shines, and there’s a glare off the painted wall. I want to shut my eyes. The world is harsh and ugly, and I hate it.

I scoot along the floor and crawl into my sleeping bag. When Charlotte enters the room, I prop myself up. “What happened?” I ask, squinting up at her.

“The power’s on,” she says. The palms of her hands are bright red. Her nose is pink and raw, and her voice is thick.

“Weird,” I say.

“It’s the middle of the night,” she says. “Do you want me to turn off the light so you can go back to sleep?”

“Where were you?”

“I got up to get some milk.”

“What happened to your hands?”

“I tripped over your father,” she says. She turns off the light and crawls into the sleeping bag beside me.

I slide back into my own bag. I press