Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [78]
“I just got my period,” I say.
To get to the highway that leads south to Concord, my father and I have to drive through the town of Shepherd. Few cars are out, most not willing to risk the slick roads even though the town plow has been by. Because it’s Christmas Eve day, all of the stores and some of the houses have Christmas lights on. They twinkle weakly in the bright sunshine. My eyes are slits in the glare.
“Are you all right?” my father asks.
“I’m fine,” I say, stabbing my feet into my boots.
“You need to stop at a store or something?”
“No, I’m okay,” I say quickly.
I can almost hear my father searching for the right words to say to his daughter. In the last hour I’ve berated him, I’ve made him sad, I’ve chastised him, I’ve made him angry. And now I’ve given him this startling piece of information with no forethought and no preparation. My news has left him speechless.
“Will he talk to you?” I ask in the truck when we hit Route 89.
“I think so,” my father says.
“Will they send her to jail?” I ask.
“If she’s convicted, she’ll probably go to jail.”
“What will the charges be?”
“I don’t know, really. Reckless abandonment? Endangering a child’s welfare?”
He doesn’t say, Attempted murder.
“It’s all bad,” I say.
“It’s all bad,” he agrees.
He drives slowly, his posture more alert than usual. The highway has only one lane open, which is slick in the shade, slushy in the sun. On the other side of the highway, traveling north, a car spins off the road into the median, creating a high tail of bright crystals that drift into the wind.
I sit forward, anxious and impatient. Will Charlotte still be at the station, or will she have been sent somewhere else? I’m hunched with my hands in my pockets. The truck’s heater is pathetic.
Beside us, the snow rises ten, twelve feet in banks. Cars are buried in drifts and pine trees dip heavily toward the ground. When the snow melts or breaks apart, the boughs will snap upward, one by one, relieved of their burden.
“Will we be arrested?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
We kept a criminal in our house. Warren will argue that we had ample opportunity to call the police, that it was our duty to do so. He as much as told us that already. And having not done it, we’ll be found guilty.
“Are you scared?” I ask.
My father glances over at me and then back at the road. “You’re a brave girl,” he says. “Like your mother.”
My eyes well up. I squeeze my hands together until my knuckles are white. I won’t cry, I tell myself.
At the outskirts of the city, we take an exit off a second highway and find the street that the state police station is on. At the corner we pass the national guard building and then the Department of Transportation and the Supreme Court. My father makes a right and enters a parking lot behind a building that is large and square and modern and reminds me of the Regional.
“I’m going in with you,” I say. I have the door open before my father stops the car. I’m ready to hop out at the slightest hesitation in his voice.
“You’ll freeze out here,” he concedes. He has on a brown knitted cap. Warren will think the man never shaves. The stains on his parka—that humpy, beige, shapeless jacket I’m so used to that it hardly registers anymore—are vivid in the bright sunshine.
I follow him along a shoveled path and into the police station.
My father frowns. We seem to be in the motor vehicles department. He checks the address he’s written on a slip of paper. He asks a clerk where he might find Detective Warren. “That elevator there,” the man says, pointing. “Third floor.”
We take the elevator up. The floor is wet, and the elevator smells of cigarettes. On the third floor we find only a series of polished corridors, a row of wooden doors. My father sticks his head inside one of them and asks for Detective Warren.
“Oh,” a young woman says. “You want the basement.”
My father looks puzzled.
“Wait a