Light on Snow by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page A

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?”
    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?”
    Even I remember Thibodeau. Officer Thibodeau came to our house the morning after the accident with the news we already knew. My father shouted at him to get off our goddamn steps.
    “A terrible thing,” Warren says. “I probably would have done the same as you—moved away, reinvented my life. Don’t know where I’d have gone, though. Maybe Canada, maybe the city. Anonymity in the city.”
    I have the orange tape wrapped around my mittens. I give it another tug.
    “I got two boys, eight and ten,” Warren