Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [71]
Clara was in the hospital for three days, during which my mother never left her side. My father went to work in the mornings only, so that he’d be home when I got off the bus. Together we’d travel to the hospital, more relaxed the second day than the first, more relaxed the third day than the second. On the third night, we came home with Clara, who weighed two pounds less than she had when she’d left the house. She looked scrawny, like a plucked bird. Every so often during that week and the next, my mother and father would look at each other, sigh, and then shake their heads, as if to say, That was a close one.
“You may have saved your sister’s life,” my mother said once to me.
I wake at daybreak. From my vantage point on the floor, I see something I haven’t seen in days, a powder-blue sky shot through with pink silk. Beside me, Charlotte sleeps. Even my father seems not to be up.
Daybreak comes fast in northern New England. I know that the sun will rise within minutes if not seconds. I wait, snug in my bag. I remember the events of the night before. A story was told. In the daylight it seems impossible.
The sun rises over the top of Bott Hill and lights up the snow-covered woods and meadows with such an intense pink light that I slide out of my sleeping bag to see. The color spills slowly across the landscape, and for the first time in my life, I wish I had a camera. I know that we once owned one—I can remember my father taking that picture of me holding Clara on my mother’s bed, and there are certainly many other photographs in my album to prove it—but I haven’t seen it out since we moved to New Hampshire. Like everything else from our former lives, the reminder of family photographs has been too difficult for my father to manage. But that morning, for the three or four minutes that the snow is on fire, I want one. I make a square with my thumbs and forefingers and stand at the window framing shots and making barely audible clicks with my tongue. Then so fast that it seems like a trick, the lovely pink is gone, and the snow is white and bright and hard to look at. The sky deepens to the chrome blue of postcards. Only the tall pines show green.
Charlotte is still snoring lightly on the floor. Maybe everybody snores. I think it amazing that she can sleep at all—the den is lit brighter than it has been in weeks, maybe a year. And lit bright, it shows its dust: the dust of ashes on the hearth; a fine layer of ordinary dust on the coffee table; a weird, weblike dust on the lamp shades. The sun makes oblongs of high reality on the floor and rug and on Charlotte, who rolls over and turns her face away.
In the kitchen I find cornmeal and flour and baking powder and eggs. I mix the ingredients in a bowl and wait for the pan to heat up. I move easily between counter and stove. I wonder if dark stories can be told with the sun streaming through the windows. I sprinkle raspberries, like seeds, onto the circles of batter. The raspberries were frozen in the summer, and we have bags and bags of them in a freezer in the basement. I’ll mash and mix some of them with sugar and serve them in a small pitcher to pour over the pancakes.
I fetch the trays from the top of the fridge and begin to set them up. The batter sizzles in the hot oil. My pancakes are always crispy; the secret is the cornmeal.
Finding room to lay the trays down is a problem as usual. I set one across the sink, another on