Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [7]
“A truck? A sedan?”
“Couldn’t tell.”
“After you found the infant?”
“No. Before.”
“Before or after you heard the first cry?”
“After,” my father says. “I remember thinking it must be a man or a woman taking a walk with a baby.”
“In the woods? In the winter?”
My father shrugs. “I was headed up the back of Bott Hill. There’s a stone wall there. We often make it a kind of destination.”
I think of all the times my father has sat on the wall and had a cigarette. Will we ever go there again?
“Could you find it?” Warren asks. “The place where you found the baby?”
“I’m not sure,” my father says. “There might be shallow tracks. We were on snowshoes, but the crust was hard. I might be able to show you approximately in the morning.”
Detective Warren sits back in his chair. He glances at me and then away. “Mr. Dillon,” he says and then pauses. “Do you know anyone who could have given birth to this infant?”
The question startles my father—because of its content, because it has been asked in front of me. “No,” he says, the word barely slipping through his lips.
“You married?”
I glance away from my father.
“No,” he says.
“Other children?”
A hot wind blows through my chest.
“My daughter and I live alone,” my father says.
“So what made you move up here?” the detective asks.
There’s a small silence, and I’m wishing I hadn’t been allowed to stay in the room. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I hear my father say.
“Didn’t like the pressure?” Warren suggests.
I look up. My father is staring at the skis in the corner. “Something like that,” he says.
“What did you do in the city?”
“I worked for an architectural firm.”
Warren nods, absorbing the facts. “So what do you do now?” he asks. “Up on Bott Hill?”
“I make furniture,” my father says.
“What kind of furniture?”
“Simple stuff. Tables. Chairs.”
Behind me, I hear the door of the lounge open. Dr. Gibson enters, peeling off his white coat as he does so. He tosses it into a bin in the corner. He nods a hello to the detective. Either the two know each other, I am thinking, or they spoke before the detective came into the lunchroom. “I’m off now,” the doctor says, clearly exhausted.
“How’s the baby?” my father asks.
“Better,” Dr. Gibson says. “She’s stabilizing.”
“Could I see her?” my father asks.
Dr. Gibson takes a yellow-and-black parka out of a locker. “She’s asleep in the ICU,” he says.
I see a look pass between the detective and the doctor. The doctor checks his watch.
“Okay,” Gibson says, “a quick peek. Can’t see the harm in that.”
We follow Dr. Gibson through a series of corridors, all painted the same dispiriting mint and beige. The detective falls behind, and I imagine him studying my father and me as we walk.
The pediatric ICU has been built in the shape of a wheel, with the nurses’ station the hub and each patient room a spoke. I pass parents sitting in plastic chairs, staring at dials and flickering red lights. I am waiting for someone to start screaming.
Dr. Gibson motions us into a room that seems enormous compared with the tiny infant in the plastic box. He gives us masks and tells us to hold them over our mouths.
“I thought she’d be in the nursery,” my father says through the blue paper.
“Once the infant has been outside of the hospital, she can’t go back into the nursery. Might infect the other infants,” the doctor explains. He leans over the cot, adjusts a tube, and examines a screen.
The baby lies inside a heated Plexiglas case. A bandaged hand and foot stick out doll-like from the scrawny body. The hair, black and feathery, covers the wrinkled scalp like a bird’s crown. She makes delicate sucking motions as we watch.
I want to put my cheek close to the baby’s mouth and feel the warm breath against my skin. Finding her might be the single most important thing my father and I have ever done.
“What will happen to her?” my father asks.
“The Division of Youth Services and Families will take care of her,” Dr. Gibson says.
“And then what?”
“Foster care. Adoption if she’s lucky.”
The four of