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

says.
    “Let’s go, Nicky,” my father says.
    “I want this guy,” Warren says.
    “I think we’re done here,” my father says.
    The detective drops the barely smoked butt onto the snow. He pulls his gloves out of his pocket and puts them on.
    “No one’s done here,” Warren says.

W hen we return to the house, my father calls Dr. Gibson. I hang around in the den so that I can hear him in the kitchen.
    “I just wondered how the baby was doing,” I hear my father say into the phone.
    “That’s good, right?” my father says.
    “Where is she now?” he asks.
    “She’ll be there how long? . . .
    “Does she have a name yet? . . .
    “Baby Doris,” my father repeats. He sounds surprised, taken aback. “You say she’ll go into foster care? . . .
    “It seems so —”
    Dr. Gibson must make a comment about foster care and adoption, because my father says, “Yes, cold.”
    I can hear my father pouring himself a cup of coffee. “When the system doesn’t work, what happens? . . .
    “She’d be prosecuted, though. . . .
    “Thanks,” my father says. “I just wanted to know that the baby was okay.”
    My father hangs up the phone. I move into the kitchen. He’s sipping the lukewarm coffee and looking out the kitchen window. “Hey,” he says when he hears me.
    “She’s all right?” I ask.
    “She’s fine.”
    “They’ve named her Baby Doris?”
    “Apparently.” He sets the mug down. “Going to Sweetser’s,” he says. “Want to come?”
    I don’t have to be asked twice to accompany my father on a trip to town.
    My father holds the door for me when we enter the hardware store. Mr. Sweetser looks up from the paper he has spread across the counter next to the register. “Our local hero,” he says.
    “You heard,” my father says.
    “Front page. See for yourself.”
    My father and I make our way to the counter. In a newspaper known for its high-school sports news, Sunday comics, and coupons, I can see a headline that reads INFANT FOUND IN SNOW. Below that is another, smaller headline:
Local Carpenter Finds Baby Alive in Bloody Sleeping Bag.
I bend closer to the counter and read the paper with my father. The reporter has largely got the story right. There is mention of the motel, the Volvo, and the navy peacoat. There is no mention of me.
    “Got your name spelled wrong,” Sweetser says.
    “Yeah, I saw that,” my father says.
    Dylan.
It happens all the time.
    “You want me to cut it out for you?”
    My father shakes his head.
    “So what happened?” Sweetser asks.
    My father unzips his jacket. The store is heated by a fickle woodstove in the corner that makes the temperature fluctuate between ninety degrees and sixty. Today it feels like eighty. “Nicky and I were taking a walk when we heard a cry,” my father says. “We thought it might be an animal at first. And then we heard the sound of a car door shutting.”
    “The baby was in a sleeping bag?” Sweetser asks.
    My father nods.
    “Weirdest thing,” Sweetser says, smoothing the pink strands of hair over his head. He has recently shaved his beard, revealing a sunken chin and strange pale skin like a new layer on an animal that’s just molted. “You wouldn’t think.”
    “No, you wouldn’t think,” my father says.
    “It’s like those fairy tales my wife used to read the kids,” Sweetser says. “Carpenter goes into the woods and finds a baby.”
    “In a fairy tale it would be a princess,” my father says.
    “You should be so lucky,” Sweetser says.
    For a hardware store in the no-man’s-land between Hanover and Concord, Sweetser’s carries an impressive array of tools. Sweetser likes their heft and shape, he says, much as my father does. Beyond the shelves of tools are other shelves, of Pyrex dishes, boxes of Miracle-Gro (dusty now in the off-season), and cans of Sherwin-Williams paint. Attached to the store is a smaller, shedlike annex in which Sweetser sells antiques, the word
antiques
used loosely. Much of the