The ribbon on the package is bright red, curled with a rip from the scissors.
He is on his knees, his head beneath the branches, looking for the socket.
I am thinking about Christmas trees and ornaments when I have a sudden realization: Did I really tell Marion the Kotex wasn’t for me? Did the detective, lurking in the aisles, hear that?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
My father parks in his usual spot at the far side of the barn. I look at the woman’s blue car as I open the door and head for the house. I find her sitting on the bench in the back hallway. She has on her white shirt and the bottoms of my flannel pajamas. They barely fit—the thighs tight with pink and blue animals, the cuffs just inches below her knees. Her legs are white to the tops of her gray angora socks. Her jeans, which she has washed, hang on a hook, drying.
She looks chastened and subdued, a student waiting outside the principal’s office. I hand her the paper bag. She says thank you and slips inside the bathroom. I take off my jacket and hang it on a hook not far from the one that holds her jeans.
Beyond the bathroom door, I hear a rip of cardboard, the rustle of paper.
The woman has had a baby. What does it feel like? I want to ask. I know where babies come from, but that doesn’t tell me what I crave to understand. Does it hurt? Was she frightened? Does she love the man who is the father? Is he waiting out of sight down the road for her to return? Is the ridiculously named Baby Doris the result of a grand passion? Does the woman behind the bathroom door cry for her lover and her lost child?
The woman emerges from the bathroom looking more careworn than passionate. We stand for a moment in the back hallway, and I’m not sure what to do with her. “Thank you,” she says again. “Was it bad out?”
“It was fine.”
My father brings a wave of cold air with him as he stomps the snow off his boots. He slips his sleeves from his jacket and puts it on a hook. “You should lie down,” he says to the woman.
I lead her past the kitchen and into the den. I point to the couch. She falls onto the sofa in a kind of loose collapse. Her stomach swells over the elastic band of the pajamas, visible where the white shirt parts at the waist. The shirt isn’t clean: rings of dust, like fine stitching, run along the inside edges of the cuffs. She lies with her eyes closed, and I examine her, this prize.
Her lips are dry, and she wears no makeup, a minor disappointment. Her eyebrows have been expertly plucked, however, suggesting prior care and grooming. Her eyelashes are thick and blond. There are blackheads on her nose and one or two faint depressions on her cheeks. Her hair falls over her face, and I think she must have fallen asleep already not to mind its touch on her skin. Her breasts are large and list toward the couch cushion.
I wait, as one might beside a mother’s bed, for her to wake up or to open her eyes. In the kitchen I can hear the electric whine of a can opener, the scrape of a saucepan against a burner. I cover her with an ugly black-and-red crocheted blanket my grandmother made and which my father refuses to throw out. I plump the pillows behind her head, hoping this will rouse her, and it does.
She sits up quickly, once again as if not knowing where she is—the beauty in the fairy tale who has slept a thousand years.
“I’ve left him,” the woman says.
I sit up straighter. Left him? The man? The one who took the baby into the snow?
She shivers.
“You’re cold,” I say. “I’ll get your jacket.”
“My sweater’s in the bathroom.”
I am up in an instant, eager to be of use. I find the folded pink cardigan on a corner of the sink. It’s made of a fleecy wool—not angora but mohair—and has large mother-of-pearl buttons down the front.
When I return the woman lifts herself up. I wrap the cardigan around her shoulders, trying to tug it down. She seems to have lost the use of her arms, and her body is heavy.
I sit on the floor next to her. The room is filled with bookcases that tower over us. Besides the couch there are only the two lamps, a coffee table, the leather club chair my father saved from our New York house, and one other chair. My father comes in with a tray: Chicken with Stars in a bowl, a fan of saltines hastily arranged on a plate, a glass of water. “You’re dehydrated,” he says, studying her.
She brings herself up to a sitting position. Her hand is shaky as she holds the spoon.
“As soon as the storm stops . . . ,” he says, gesturing toward the window.
As soon as the storm stops, what? I’d like to know. Wrestle the woman to the truck? Make her drive her blue car down an unplowed road?
My father sits and assumes his usual position: head bent, legs spread, his elbows on his knees. The room darkens, and my father reaches over to turn on the lamp. “How did you find me?” he asks.
“I read about you in the newspaper,” she says. “Your name was there. It was easy enough to find out where you live.”
Beyond the windows the snow falls in fat flakes. “Have you seen a doctor?” he asks.
She looks up.
“While you were pregnant,” he adds.
“No.”
“You never saw a doctor?”
“No,” she says again.
“That was foolish,” my father says.
She opens her mouth to speak, but he holds up his hand, cutting her off. “I don’t want to know,” he says, standing. “Nicky, I want you to start shoveling.”
“Now?” I ask.
“Yes, now,” he says. “I have to go over to the barn and finish that bureau.”
“But —”
“No buts. If we don’t keep up with the storm, we’ll never get out of here.”
I stand reluctantly with a parting glance at the woman on the couch. She doesn’t look up at me. I drag myself to the back hallway, sit on the bench, and put on my boots. What if she needs me? I think. I put on my jacket and hat and mittens. Should she be left alone? I go outside and bend my head against the snow. What if something happens to her and I’m not there?
I use a wide shovel and push it forward like a plow. Of all my chores I hate shoveling the most, particularly when it’s snowing and it’s clear that in a couple of hours I’ll have to do it all over again. I make rows, pushing the snow to the far edge of the top of the driveway. I’m impatient, and I do this in record time. After twenty minutes, I survey my work. It’s sloppy, but I can’t bear to be outside a minute longer. I lean the shovel by the back door, step inside, and undress quickly. I walk to the den.
The woman is still sitting on the couch with the tray on her lap. She has left the stars to float in an oily golden puddle at the bottom of the bowl. I always eat the stars first. She leans over to set the tray aside, but I take it from her. Clara Barton. Florence Nightingale.
Again she lies down. The light from the lamp falls on her hair and her face. I sit once again on the floor and lay my arm against the piping on the cushions. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Your father doesn’t want to know,” she says. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“I won’t tell him,” I say.
She says nothing.
“We have to call you something,” I point out.
The woman thinks a minute. Two minutes. “You can call me Charlotte,” she says finally.
“Charlotte?” I ask.
She nods.
Charlotte, I repeat silently. I don’t know any Charlottes, have never known a Charlotte. “It’s a pretty name,” I say. “Is it your real name?”
“It is,” she says.
I want to know so much then. How old is she? Where is she from? Who is the man? Did she love him very much?
“The baby’s doing fine,” I say instead.
Sobs—a gulp, a second gulp—escape her. Her eyes scrunch up and snot runs down her upper lip. She is not a delicate crier. She wipes her nose with a pink sleeve. I run to the bathroom and come back with a wad of toilet paper.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t h
ave said anything.”
She waves my apology away.
“Tell me about it,” I plead.
“I can’t,” she says, blowing her nose. “Not now.”
But the now is everything, isn’t it? Now implies a future, a time when she will confide in me and tell me her tale—if only I can wait, if only I can be patient. I am dizzy with the promise of the word.
“I think I really need to sleep,” she says, giving her nose a final tidying.
“We have a guest room,” I say. “For my grandmother. She’s coming for Christmas. You can close the door and sleep there.”
“Your father won’t mind?”
“No,” I say with no authority whatsoever.
She rises up from the couch, sloughing off the sweater and the throw. I lead her to the back stairs. She walks haltingly and uses the banister to pull herself up. She follows me to a room with a double bed covered with a white spread that used to be on my parents’ bed years ago. I take a quilt from the closet and lay it as best I can over the coverlet. Beside the bed is a small table with a lamp on it, and to its right a bureau with a mirror. In another corner is a rocking chair, and beside that an especially bright lamp that my father set up so that my grandmother can sit and read when she visits. The woman moves directly to the bed, draws back the covers, and lies down at once.
“I’ll come back in a while and see if you’re all right,” I say.
The woman’s eyes are closed, and she seems already to have fallen asleep.
Reluctantly I turn and leave. I shut the door with exaggerated care. I sit on the bottom step for a time—for the time it would take to give the area nearest to the house a really good shoveling—and then I walk over to the barn.
“I’ve put her in the guest room,” I say.
My father stands back from the table saw. “I don’t want you talking to her,” he says, lowering his safety goggles. “I thought I made that clear.”
I shrug.
“As soon as this lets up, I’m going to insist that she leave. You can’t be part of this, Nicky.”
“You mean you can’t be part of this.”
“No, I mean you,” he says, pointing a finger. “This is serious business. And you’re not to say a word to anyone. Not now. Not ever. Do you understand?”
I turn and leave my father’s shop before he can get going on a lecture. I fetch the tray from the den, take it into the kitchen, and wash the dishes. I finish off the soup, spooning it directly from the saucepan. I climb the stairs and stand outside the guest room, listening for a telltale sound, any sound with which to weave a story. Disappointed, I walk into my room and sit at my desk and try to work on the beaded necklace for my grandmother—a complicated and ambitious project with a sculpted pendant—but I am jumpy and can’t make my fingers do what I want them to do. From time to time I move to the window and look out at the snow and am comforted by the whiteout and the wind that has come up, signaling a blizzard. Clothes might be a problem, I am thinking, but she can wear my father’s shirts. Her jeans will dry soon enough. Fitful, I lie on my bed and stare up at the ceiling and imagine a week during which Charlotte will stay with us. I see the two of us sitting in various cozy positions, my father conveniently gone, while she tells me her fabulous and lurid tale.
I sit up. I have an idea.
I collect the hair dryer from the upstairs bathroom and take it downstairs. I lift the jeans from the hook in the back hallway and hang them instead on the hook on the back of the bathroom door. The jeans are wet all along the inner thighs. I hold out the legs and aim the dryer the way I’ve had to do with T-shirts, the ones that come back from the Laundromat slightly damp because of my father’s impatience to “get going.”
The heavy denim takes longer to dry than I think it should, and I hope I’m not waking Charlotte with the sound. I don’t want her to catch me doing this; I simply want her to find her clothes warm and nicely folded.
When I turn off the hair dryer, I hear knocking at the back door.
Another customer? Impossible, I think. We barely got up the road ourselves.
I step out of the bathroom and see a flash of red in the window of the door. I freeze in place, like a statue in a child’s game. I suck in my breath. I have no choice but to walk forward and open the door.
“Nicky,” Warren says, stepping inside.
There’s a staccato of stomped feet, snow falling to the floor. “Your father around?” he asks.
A silent screech rings in my ear. “No,” I say.
“I just had one or two questions for him,” Warren says, beginning to melt on the welcome mat. “I wanted to get over here before the storm does its worst.”
For a moment I can’t speak.
“Where is he?” Warren asks, studying me.
“Um . . . he had to go into the woods to find his ax,” I say. “He left it in the woods. He wanted to find it before it gets buried in the snow.”
I feel dizzy. The lie is huge. Magnificent.
“Really,” Warren says. He opens his coat and shakes it out, a winged bird.
From the back hallway, through the kitchen, I have a view of the den, the couch, and the ugly red-and-black crocheted throw.
“Wicked out there,” Warren says.
A pink mohair sweater with mother-of-pearl buttons is lying against the pillows. It is spread open, as if a woman had just risen from it.
Warren wipes his feet a dozen times on the mat. “Could I get a glass of water?” he asks, looking over at the coats on the hooks.
“Um. Sure,” I say.
He walks with me to the kitchen. He glances up the stairs as he goes. “I’ve got snow tires, but even so,” he says.
In the kitchen he studies the dishes in the dish drainer. I fetch a glass from the cabinet, fill it from the tap, and hand it to him. I can smell spearmint on his breath. I try not to look at his scar.
“We found a flashlight,” he says. “Wanted to know if it was your father’s or if it belonged to the guy.”
“It’s probably my father’s,” I say quickly. “We lost one in the snow that night.”
“Thought it might be,” Warren says, looking over my head toward the den. “You put your tree up yet?”
“We’ll do it Christmas Eve,” I say.
Warren takes a long swallow. “How old are you again?” he asks.
“Twelve,” I say.
I hear the back door open. “Dad,” I say, looking just past the detective.
I am dead.
“What’s going on?” my father asks. The vertical lines on his forehead are pronounced.
“Came to see if you lost a flashlight the night you found the baby,” Warren says. “You find your ax?”
My father says nothing.
“Remember, Dad, how you said you were going into the woods to find your ax?” I say, meeting his eyes.
“We found a flashlight,” Warren says. “Nicky said you lost one that night.”
“I did.”
“What brand?”
“Don’t know. Black with a yellow switch.”
“Yeah, the same,” Warren says.
I let a hand fall to just below my waist. I shut my eyes and wince slightly, the way I’ve seen the girls at school do, as if waiting for a cramp to pass.
“So you guys getting ready for Christmas?”
My father unzips his jacket.
“We got our tree up already,” Warren says, taking a sip of water. “One of my boys—the eight-year-old; he’s autistic—likes having it up.”
My father nods.
“There’s a specialist in Concord,” Warren says. “Supposed to be the best in New Hampshire. It’s why we moved into the city.”
I hear a slight creak along the upstairs hallway. I glance at Warren to see if he has heard it, too.
From a hook I snatch a rag and begin to skate with the cloth, drying the floor, the way my father is always trying to get me to do.
“Still, though,” Warren is saying, “hard on m
y wife, hard on Mary. Tommy, that’s my son, he doesn’t like being touched.”
A murmur from my father. A pause and then another string of words. I skate my way to the bottom of the stairs and glance up. Charlotte, her face creased with sleep, is on the upstairs landing.
“We’ve got a clan coming,” Warren is saying. “We’ll have nineteen, twenty anyway, for Christmas Eve.”
With a quick glance to see that Warren isn’t looking, I shake my head once, an emphatic No.
“Mary and her sister will do up three hundred pierogies,” Warren is saying. “My wife’s Polish.”
I pick up the rag and reach forward to wipe a step. Silently I beg Charlotte to understand.
Her head tilts then, and I see the way her eyes begin to listen, the moment that she registers the foreign voice. She holds her arms out like a ballerina, and I think for a moment she might fly off the top step. Pirouetting on her toes, she retreats from the landing.
Very carefully, I step away from the stairs. I let out a long breath.
Through the window I can see that the snow has turned icy. It pings against the glass.
“I’ll bring you some,” Warren is saying. He sets the water glass on a shelf. “Looking bad out there. Better get yourself another flashlight.”
“Plenty where that came from,” my father says.
“You could lose your power in this,” Warren says.
“We could.”
The detective glances my way as he pushes open the door against an inch of snow. Warren gives a small wave and bends into the storm, holding his overcoat closed with one hand. He trudges, collar up, across the drive. He wipes the snow off his windshield with his gloves and climbs into his Jeep. As he does he glances at the muffled maze of tracks in the snow. The truck and the blue car cannot be seen from where he is standing. He would have to walk further toward the woods to get the right angle. He does not. I watch him reverse, make the turn, and finally leave.
My father shuts the door. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he says to me.
I stare at the floor.
“You’re going to get us in more trouble than we’re in already.”
I look up. “I was just trying to get rid of him,” I say.
This is true and not entirely true.