Read Light on Snow Page 4


  I walk into a front room that runs the width of the house and has two long windows to the south. When my father bought the place, the windows were painted shut, and two tarnished chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls were papered in a faded and peeling blue print, and the fireplace was boarded up. My father had picked the house solely for its isolation and the promise of anonymity, but after he spent two weeks sitting in a chair unable to do much but look out a window, he began to meander through the rooms. He decided to strip the house down to its bare bones.

  Starting in the front room, he plastered over the ceiling, an ugly expanse that looked like the hardened frosting of a day-old birthday cake. He stripped the walls and painted them white. He bought a sander and refinished the floors, polishing them to a warm honey stain. Sometimes he made me help him; most of the work he did himself. The room has nothing in it now but the pieces of furniture my father has made over the course of the past two years: tables and bookcases and wooden chairs with straight backs and legs. The room is clean and simple and resembles a schoolroom, a look I think my father was unconsciously trying to achieve all along, as if he wished to return to the blank rooms of his childhood. He sometimes uses the space as a showroom when Mr. Sweetser down at the hardware store sends customers his way. The carpentry is a kind of career for my father, though careers were for his previous life, not this one.

  In the room that was once a dining room, my father built floor-to-ceiling bookcases and filled them with his books. He put a leather chair, a sofa, two lamps, and a rug in it, and it’s the room we sometimes eat and read in. We call it the den. The transformation of rooms into something other than what they were—a parlor into a showroom; a dining room into a den; an old barn into a workshop—has given my father a kind of perverse pleasure. Just beyond the kitchen is a long hallway paneled in cream bead board with a row of sturdy hooks at shoulder height. Off another hallway is a small room that my father didn’t know what to do with. He cleaned it up and filled it with boxes that he didn’t want to open. As a result the room has become a kind of shrine. Neither of us ever goes inside.

  Upstairs there are three bedrooms: one for me, one for my father, and one for my grandmother when she comes to visit.

  The kitchen is the one other room my father hasn’t tackled. It has a red Formica counter and brown metal-framed sliders out to a redwood deck. Though it is the room that needs the most work, my father goes into the kitchen only to make a quick cup of coffee or a sandwich or a rudimentary dinner for the two of us. We never sit down to a meal there, but instead bring our food to the den when we eat together, or he to his workshop and me to my bedroom when we each eat alone.

  We never eat a meal in the kitchen because the kitchen of our previous life was at the heart of our family in New York. The two rooms do not resemble each other much, but the memories of that former kitchen can unravel either one of us in an instant.

  The table was always half-covered with magazines and mail. Neither my father nor mother was a fastidious housekeeper, and with Clara just a year old, a case of mild clutter was always turning into serious chaos. My mother made baby food in the Cuisinart on a counter usurped by appliances: a juicer, a blender, a microwave, and a coffee grinder that made a racket like a jackhammer and never failed to wake Clara. Between the table and a hutch was a baby swing, a contraption in which Clara, with drool sliding down her chin, would bounce happily and for long enough that my parents could get a meal on the table. During dinner my father sat with Clara in his lap, introducing her to foods she smashed into her mouth with a fat palm. When she fussed he jiggled her on his knee, and by the time dinner was over, his work shirt would be finger-painted with carrots and gravy and buttered peas.

  In my album there’s a picture of my mother trying to eat her dinner at the counter while she holds Clara on her hip. Clara has a finger in her mouth and is drooling, and my mother is slightly out of focus, her back to me, as if she might be jouncing Clara up and down to keep her quiet. In the kitchen window just beyond my mother, there’s a blinding reflection of a flashbulb. Inside the halo I can just make out my father, beer in hand, his mouth open, about to take a sip. I have no idea why I felt it necessary to take this photo in the middle of dinner, why I thought it important to capture my mother’s back or Clara with her finger in her mouth. Perhaps the camera was new and I was trying it out. Maybe I was trying to annoy my mother. I can’t remember now.

  I also have a photograph of my mother holding me as a baby under a snowball tree in our backyard. My mother’s hair is long and thick and light brown, waved in a style that might have been popular in 1972, when I’d have been a year old. She has on a plaid, open-necked shirt and a rust-colored suede jacket, and I am guessing that the month is September. She looks present in the picture, smiling slightly at my father, who’d have been behind the camera. I have on a silly pink hat and seem to be gnawing on my knuckles. I inherited my mother’s hair and wide mouth but my father’s eyes. After Clara was born, my mother cut her hair, and I never again saw her with it long.

  I walk out to the barn and find my father sitting with his coffee in the chair by the stove. On the floor are drifts of sawdust, and in the corners, plastic bags of shavings. The air is suffused with fine particles, like a dissipating fog on a summer day. I watch as he puts the mug on a windowsill and bends his head. He does this often when he doesn’t know I’m in the room. He folds his hands, his elbows on his thighs, his legs spread wide. His grief has no texture now—no tears, no ache in the throat, no rage. It is simply darkness, I think, a cloak that sometimes makes it hard for him to breathe.

  “Dad,” I say.

  “Yup,” he says, raising his head and turning toward me.

  “No school today,” I say.

  “I didn’t think there would be. What time is it?”

  “About ten.”

  “You slept late.”

  “I did.”

  Through his shop window and just beyond the pines, I can see a sliver of lake—green glass in summer; blue in fall; and in the winter, simply a wedge of white. To the left of the lake is an abandoned ski hill with only three trails. There are remnants of a chairlift and a small shack at the top. It is said that in years gone by, the operator, a jovial fellow named Al, always saluted each skier as he or she slid off the chair.

  Beyond the clearing my father has made, the woods grow immediately dense. In the summer they are full of mosquitoes and blackflies, and I always have to spray myself with Off. My father is thinking of screening in the porch, and I figure that maybe in a year or two he’ll get around to it.

  “You eat breakfast?” he asks.

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s English muffins and jelly.”

  “I like them sometimes with peanut butter,” I say.

  “Your mother would mix peanut butter with cottage cheese in a bowl,” he says. “It used to make me want to gag, but she liked it so much I never told her how disgusting it was.”

  I hold my breath and look down into my cup. My father almost never speaks about my mother unless to answer a direct question from me.

  I clamp my teeth shut. I know that if my eyes well up, it will be the last memory he’ll allow himself to share with me for some time.

  In my mind I see a small stone dislodged in a wall, one stone shoved forward until it falls. The other stones shift and settle and try to fill in the space, but still there is a hole through which water, in the form of memory, begins to seep.

  Seepage.

  In September I had the word in a spelling bee. A simple word, though I got it wrong, spelling it seapage, which, if you think about it, is not entirely illogical.

  “I bet we could find the spot,” I say, announcing the reason I’ve come to find him. “When we get close enough, the orange tapes will give the place away.”

  I have again an image of the baby still in the sleeping bag. What if we didn’t take that walk yesterday? I am thinking. What if we didn’t find her? Good luck, I’m beginn
ing to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it—no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is—the most incomprehensible idea of all.

  I wonder if there are still police guarding the site. I decide there won’t be: what reason would they have had to stay? The crime is over, all evidence surely collected. I imagine the sleeping bag and the bloody towel safely tucked away inside plastic bags on a shelf at a police station. I think of the detective with his scars. The detective, who will be busy now with a different crime.

  My father is silent.

  “Okay then,” I say. “I’ll just go myself.”

  In the back hallway, I take my jacket off the hook and put on my hat and mittens. Just outside the back door, I lace up my showshoes and take a step forward. The shoes have no traction on the ice. I lurch, flailing for something to hold on to. After a dozen steps and one hard fall, I slide backwards to the house, hugging the wall, trying to keep the shoes from skidding out from under me. I undo the straps. If my father has seen me slipping and sliding and has had a chuckle over it, he never says so.

  I go back inside the house. I make myself an English muffin with peanut butter and think about my mother with her cottage cheese. I walk upstairs to my room, which is decorated with a Yankees pennant and a poster of Garfield. On one wall I’ve been painting a multi-colored mural of all the ski hills in New England—Sunday River, Attitash, Loon Mountain, Bromley, Killington, King Ridge, Sunapee, and others. It took me all of Christmas vacation the year before to sketch the outline, and I think it’s quite a good map in geographical relief. All the mountains I have skied are capped with snow; the hills I have yet to ski remain green. Also in my room is the only radio allowed in the house. The deal my father and I have made is that I can listen towhatever I want, as long as it can’t be heard outside my room. Sometimes my father will ask me to go upstairs and get the weather report, but that’s all he ever wants to know from the radio.

  We don’t have a television, and we don’t get the newspaper. When we first moved to New Hampshire, my father tried the local newspaper. One morning there was a front-page story about a woman who had backed over her fourteen-month-old son with her Olds Cutlass. My father rose from the den, walked into the kitchen, stuffed the paper into the trash can, and that was that.

  I have an easel and paints in my room and a chair that can be made into a single bed on the rare occasion I have a friend come to visit. I make beaded jewelry on my desk and read on my bed. My father used to ask me to make my bed until I pointed out that he never made his, and so he stopped speaking to me about it. I hate going to the Laundromat and wish we had a washing machine. I have asked for one for Christmas.

  In the afternoon, while I’m reading, I hear a dripping that sounds like a summer rain. I go to the window and look out. The ice has begun to thaw. The world around the house is softening, the crust relenting.

  I walk out to the barn.

  “All right,” my father says, looking up. “Let’s go.”

  Walking on snowshoes in heavy melting snow, however, is nearly as difficult as walking on ice. Each footfall digs into the melted crust, shoving us off balance. My legs begin to ache before we’ve gone a hundred feet. The light turns flat, the worst sort of light for walking or skiing. I can’t see the bumps or the ruts, and sometimes it feels as though we’re coasting on fog. We cross the expanse of what in the summer would be lawn and then enter the trees.

  I squint into the ugly light, trying to follow the thin imprints on the snow of yesterday’s trek. Occasionally we have to guess at the precise route because a layer of blown snow covered the tracks before the freeze. I see the trail in reverse, and I remember our frantic run of the day before with the baby in my father’s arms. My breath comes hard and fast, and I see that my father has increased his pace as well. We search for the place where we stopped climbing and veered sideways around the hill, lured on by the baby’s cries. I can’t shake the notion that she was calling out specifically to us.

  Come get me.

  Above us a thin wind begins to whine through the pines, bending the tips and sending small clumps of snow to the ground, dotting the surface of the crust with baseballs. I am wet with sweat inside my parka. I unzip it and let the frigid air cool my skin. I take off my hat and stuff it into a pocket. I brush away the low boughs with my hands. I think that we have lost the tracks, but my father just keeps pushing forward.

  My father owns twenty acres of rock, hardwood, and sloped fields. All the wood for his furniture comes from his acreage: walnut and oak and maple; pine and cherry and tamarack. The local lumberyard sawed and planed the lumber, laying in a supply of smooth planks that my father won’t use up for years.

  After a time, my father finds our earlier tracks, and we follow them at a slower pace. When we’ve gone for about fifteen minutes, I see, in the distance, a sliver of orange tape. “There it is,” I say.

  We make our way to the place that has been cordoned off. A circle of tape has been threaded through the trees. It funnels off into a path back to the motel, as if for a bride returning from an outdoor wedding. Within the circle is the soft place where the sleeping bag was, a print of my father’s snowshoe outlined in a thin stream of red spray paint, and, similarly outlined, a size ten and a half bootprint. Neither of us noticed the bootprint the night before. I wonder if the police found my father’s flashlight, if it’s worth trying to get it back. Did my father tell Detective Warren about the flashlight? I try to remember. Will they think it was the other guy’s and waste a lot of time trying to track it down?

  We walk around the circle and stand with our backs to the motel. I examine the soft place where the sleeping bag was.

  “Dad,” I say. “Why did he put the baby in a sleeping bag if he meant to kill her?”

  My father looks up at the bare tree limbs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess he didn’t want her to be cold.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

  “None of it makes any sense.”

  I pull on the plastic tape, seeing if it will stretch. “What do you think they’ll call her?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Maybe they’ll give her our last name,” I say. “Maybe she’ll be called Baby Dillon. Remember how they called Clara ‘Baby Baker-Dillon’?”

  We stand for a time in silence, and I know that my father is thinking about Baby Baker-Dillon. I can feel it coming off him in waves. I have the tape looped around my mitten now.

  “Dad,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Why was there so much blood and stuff in the motel room?”

  My father picks up some soft wet snow and starts to fashion it into a ball. “There’s some blood when a woman gives birth,” he says. “And there’s something called the placenta, which is full of blood and which is the thing that nourishes the baby. It comes out after the birth.”

  “I know about that,” I say.

  “So all of that blood was natural. It doesn’t mean that the woman was hurt or injured.”

  “But it does hurt, right?”

  In the flat light my father looks old. The skin beneath his lower lids is almost lavender in color and loose with wrinkles. “It hurts,” he says carefully, “but every birth is different.”

  “Did Mom hurt when I was born?”

  My father whacks the ball against the tree. “Yes, she did,” he says. “And if she were here, she would tell you that every minute was worth it.”

  A crunch of snow startles both of us. We turn to see Detective Warren, with his crimson-muffled neck, not twenty feet away. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says.

  “Like hell,” my father says under his breath.

  Warren stands with his hands in his overcoat pockets, a man out for an unlikely stroll behind a motel in the dead of winter. “Went to your place, no one answered the door. Drove over here on a hunch.” He moves a step closer. “You had to see the spot again, didn’t you?”

&
nbsp; He is walking in the prints made by the technicians the night before, placing each Timberland boot into a hole.

  “People are predictable, Mr. Dillon,” he says. “We go back to the places that once gave us a jolt. Lovers do it all the time.”

  He keeps moving toward us, one careful footfall at a time. “You’re all over the papers today, Mr. Dillon. I’m surprised I didn’t see Channel 5 at your place. Your house is wide open, by the way.”

  “You went inside,” my father says.

  “I was looking for you to tell you about the girl. I drove all the way up your road, and I wasn’t going to leave without seeing if you were in. You make nice stuff, by the way.”

  My father is silent, refusing to be drawn in by the compliment.

  “The baby’s doing fine,” Warren says.

  My father bangs a snowshoe against a mound of hardpacked snow.

  “We’re on the same side here, Mr. Dillon,” Warren says.

  “What side would that be?”

  “You found the baby and saved her life,” Warren says, shooting a cigarette from a pack of Camels. He lights it with a lighter. “You smoke?” he asks.

  My father shakes his head, even though he does.

  “Then I find the guy who did it,” Warren says. “That’s how it works. We’re a team.”

  “We’re not a team,” my father says.

  “I called down to Westchester,” Warren says, “and spoke to a guy named Thibodeau. You remember Thibodeau?”