Light on Snow Read online

  “No,” my father says.

  The receptionist’s face goes still. She sets her pen down and folds her hands together in a slow, controlled manner, as if she were afraid of sudden movement. “Take a seat,” she says. “Someone will be right with you.”

  I sit next to a man with a doughy face who coughs quietly into the collar of a quilted parka the color of weeds. The light is harsh and unflattering, making the elderly look nearly dead and even the children blotchy with imperfections. After a time—twenty minutes? half an hour?—a young doctor in a white coat steps into the room, a mask loose around his neck, a stethoscope anchored in a breast pocket. Behind him is a uniformed policeman.

  “Mr. Dillon?” the doctor asks.

  My father stands and meets the men in the center of the room. I get up and follow. The doctor is pale and blond and looks too young to be a doctor. “Are you the man who found the infant?” he asks.

  “Yes,” my father says.

  “I’m Dr. Gibson, and this is Chief Boyd.”

  Chief Boyd, one of only two police officers in the town of Shepherd, is, I know, Timmy Boyd’s father. They are both overweight and have the same rectangular black eyebrows. Chief Boyd pulls a notebook and a short pencil from a uniform pocket.

  “Is she all right?” my father asks the doctor.

  “She’ll lose a finger, possibly some toes,” the doctor answers, rubbing his forehead. “And her lungs may be compromised. It’s too soon to tell.”

  “Where’d you find her?” the chief asks my father.

  “In the woods behind my house.”

  “On the ground?”

  “In a sleeping bag. She was wrapped inside a towel inside the bag.”

  “Where are the towel and bag now?” Chief Boyd asks, licking the tip of his pencil, a gesture I’ve seen my grandmother make when composing her shopping lists. He speaks like most of the New Hampshire natives do—with broad a’s, no r’s, and a slight rhythm to the sentences.

  “In the woods. I left them there.”

  “You live on Bott Hill, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen you around,” Chief Boyd says. “In Sweetser’s.”

  “I think it was near the motel up there,” my father says. “I can’t remember the name.”

  The chief turns away from my father and speaks into a radio he has clipped to his shoulder. I study the paraphernalia attached to his uniform.

  “How long was she there?” the doctor asks my father.

  “I don’t know,” my father says.

  I have then an image of the baby still in the snow in the dark. I make a sound. My father puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Tell me how you found her,” Chief Boyd says to my father.

  “My daughter and I were taking a walk, and we heard these cries. We didn’t know what it was at first. We thought it might be a cat. And then it sounded human.”

  “Did you see anything? Anyone near the baby?”

  “We heard a car door shutting. Then an engine starting up,” my father says.

  There’s a squawk on Chief Boyd’s radio. He speaks into his shoulder. He seems agitated, and he turns away from us. I hear him say twenty-eight years’ experience and he’s here.

  I hear him swear under his breath.

  He turns back to us and puts away his notebook and pencil. He takes a long time doing this. “Is there somewhere I can put Mr. Dillon?” the chief asks the doctor. “I’ve got a detective from the state police major crimes unit coming up from Concord.”

  The doctor pinches the bridge of his nose. His eyes are pink-rimmed with fatigue. “He can sit in the staff lounge,” the doctor says.

  “I can run the girl home,” Chief Boyd says as if I’m not even there. “I’m headed that way anyway.”

  I lean into my father. “I want to stay with you,” I whisper.

  My father examines my face. “She’ll stay with me,” he says.

  We follow the doctor to a lunchroom not far from the waiting room. Inside are tall metal lockers, a pair of cross-country skis propped in a corner, a pile of jackets on a Formica table against the wall. I sit at another table and study the vending machines. I realize that I’m hungry. I remember that my father doesn’t have his wallet.

  I think about the baby losing her finger and possibly some toes. I wonder if she’ll have a handicap. Will she have trouble learning to walk without her toes? Will she be able to play basketball without a finger?

  “I can call Jo’s mother,” my father says. “She’ll come get you.”

  I shake my head.

  “I could pick you up after this is all over,” he adds.

  “I’m fine,” I say, not mentioning my hunger, a fact that is sure to get me sent to Jo’s. “Will the baby be all right?” I ask.

  “We’ll have to see,” my father says.

  “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “It was weird, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  I shift in my seat and sit on my hands. “Scary, too,” I say.

  “A bit.”

  My father takes his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket but then thinks better of it.

  “Who do you think left her there?” I ask.

  He rubs the stubble on his chin. “I have no idea,” he says.

  “Do you think they’ll give her to us?”

  My father seems surprised by the question. “The baby isn’t ours to have,” he says carefully.

  “But we found her,” I say.

  My father bends forward and folds his hands together between his knees. “We found her, but she doesn’t belong to us. They’ll try to find the mother.”

  “The mother doesn’t want her,” I protest.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” my father says.

  I shake my head with all the certainty of a twelve-year-old. “Of course we know for sure,” I say. “What mother would leave her baby to die in the snow? I’m hungry.”

  My father pulls a Werther’s out of his parka and slides it across the table.

  “What will happen to the baby?” I ask, unwrapping the cellophane.

  “I’m not exactly sure. We can ask the doctor.”

  I stick the candy into my mouth and tuck it into my cheek. “But Dad, let’s say they let us have the baby. Would you take her?”

  My father unwraps his own candy. He balls the cellophane and slips it into his pocket. “No, Nicky,” he says, “I would not.”

  The minutes pass. A half hour passes. I ask my father for another candy. Overhead, on a TV screen, a newsreader announces budget cuts. Three teenagers from White River Junction have been arraigned following an attempted robbery. A storm system is moving in. I study the weather map and then glance at the clock: six-ten.

  I get up and walk around the room. There isn’t very far to go. At the end of the row of lockers is a mirror the size of a book. My mouth protrudes because of my braces. I try not to smile, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I have smooth skin, not a pimple in sight. I have my mother’s brown eyes and wavy hair, which at the moment is kinked up on top of my head. I try to straighten it out with my fingers.

  A man in a navy overcoat and a red scarf enters the room without knocking, and I guess that he is another doctor. He unwinds his scarf and lays it over a chair. I can see that my father wants to unzip his jacket, but he can’t. He has no buttons on his shirt.

  The man takes off his coat and sets it down on top of the scarf. He rubs the palms of his hands together as if anticipating a good time. He has on a black cabled sweater and a blazer, and his face is gravelly with acne scars. To the right of his chin is an extra flap of skin, as if he’d been in a car accident or a knife fight.

  “Robert Dillon?” the man asks.

  I am surprised that this other doctor knows my father’s name, and then I realize he isn’t a doctor at all. I sit up straighter in my seat. My father nods.

  “George Warren,” the man says. “Call me Warren. Want a coffee?”
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  My father shakes his head. “This is my daughter, Nicky,” my father says. Warren holds out his hand and I shake it.

  “She was with you when you found the baby?” Warren asks.

  My father nods.

  “I’m a detective with the state police,” Warren says. He takes some change from his pocket and inserts it into the coffee machine. “You told Chief Boyd you found the baby on Bott Hill,” he says with his back to my father.

  “I did,” my father says.

  A heavy paper cup tumbles into place. I watch the coffee run from the spigot. Warren picks up the cup and blows over the top.

  “The sleeping bag and the towel should still be there,” my father adds. “I found her in a sleeping bag.”

  Warren stirs the coffee with a wooden stick. His hair is gray but his face is young. “Why’d you leave it there?” he asks. “The sleeping bag.”

  “It was too slippery,” my father says. “I was afraid I’d drop the baby.”

  “How did you carry her?”

  “I put her inside my jacket.”

  Warren’s eyes slide to my father’s jacket. The detective draws a chair back from the table with the toe of his Timberland boot. He sits down. “Can I see some ID?” he asks.

  “I left my wallet at the house,” my father says. “I was hurrying, trying to get the baby to the hospital.”

  “You didn’t call the police? An ambulance?”

  “We live at the end of a long hilly drive. The town doesn’t maintain it very well. I was afraid an ambulance would get stuck.”

  Warren eyes my father over the rim of his cup. “Tell me about the sleeping bag,” he says.

  “It was shiny blue on the outside, plaid on the inside,” my father says. “Cheap, like you’d buy at Ames. There was a towel, too. White and bloody.”

  “You’ve lived on Bott Hill a long time?” Warren takes another tentative sip of coffee. His eyes are both alert and distant, as if all the important stuff were going on somewhere else.

  “Two years.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in Indiana, but I came here from New York.”

  “The city?” Warren says, pulling on an earlobe.

  “I worked in the city, but we lived just north of it.”

  “If it hadn’t been for you, Mr. Dillon,” Warren says, “we’d have found a couple of bones in the spring.”

  My father looks at me. I hold my breath. I don’t want to think about the bones.

  “You hot?” Warren asks my father. “Take off your jacket.”

  My father shrugs, but anyone can see he’s sweating in the overheated room.

  “What were you doing when you found the infant?” the detective asks.

  “We were taking a walk.”

  “When?”

  My father thinks a minute. What time was it? He no longer wears a watch because he catches it too often in his tools. I glance up at the clock over the door. Six twenty-five. It feels like midnight.

  “It was after sunset,” my father says. “The sun had just set over the top of the hill. I’d say we found her maybe ten, fifteen minutes after that.”

  “You were in the woods,” Warren says.

  “Yes.”

  “You often go walking in the woods after sunset?”

  The detective sets the coffee cup on the table, reaches into the pocket of his overcoat, and takes out a small notebook. He flips it open and makes a notation with a short pencil. I want one of those short pencils.

  “On good days,” my father says. “I usually quit working around three forty-five or so. We try to take a walk before it gets completely dark.”

  “You and your daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?” the detective asks me.

  “Twelve,” I say.

  “Seventh grade?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Regional?”

  I nod.

  “You get off the bus what time?”

  “Three fifteen,” I say.

  “It takes another fifteen minutes to walk the rest of the way up the hill,” my father adds.

  Warren turns back to my father. “How’d you find the baby, Mr. Dillon?”

  “With a flashlight. We’d heard her crying. We were looking for her by then. Well, for a baby.”

  “How long had you been walking?”

  A voice over the loudspeaker, asking for Dr. Gibson, interrupts them. I wonder if there’s an emergency with the baby. “About thirty minutes,” my father says.

  “You hear anything unusual?”

  “I thought it was a cat at first,” my father says. “I heard a car door shutting. And then a car engine being turned on.”

  “A truck? A sedan?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  “After you found the infant?”

  “No. Before.”

  “Before or after you heard the first cry?”

  “After,” my father says. “I remember thinking it must be a man or a woman taking a walk with a baby.”

  “In the woods? In the winter?”

  My father shrugs. “I was headed up the back of Bott Hill. There’s a stone wall there. We often make it a kind of destination.”

  I think of all the times my father has sat on the wall and had a cigarette. Will we ever go there again?

  “Could you find it?” Warren asks. “The place where you found the baby?”

  “I’m not sure,” my father says. “There might be shallow tracks. We were on snowshoes, but the crust was hard. I might be able to show you approximately in the morning.”

  Detective Warren sits back in his chair. He glances at me and then away. “Mr. Dillon,” he says and then pauses. “Do you know anyone who could have given birth to this infant?”

  The question startles my father—because of its content, because it has been asked in front of me. “No,” he says, the word barely slipping through his lips.

  “You married?”

  I glance away from my father.

  “No,” he says.

  “Other children?”

  A hot wind blows through my chest.

  “My daughter and I live alone,” my father says.

  “So what made you move up here?” the detective asks.

  There’s a small silence, and I’m wishing I hadn’t been allowed to stay in the room. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I hear my father say.

  “Didn’t like the pressure?” Warren suggests.

  I look up. My father is staring at the skis in the corner. “Something like that,” he says.

  “What did you do in the city?”

  “I worked for an architectural firm.”

  Warren nods, absorbing the facts. “So what do you do now?” he asks. “Up on Bott Hill?”

  “I make furniture,” my father says.

  “What kind of furniture?”

  “Simple stuff. Tables. Chairs.”

  Behind me, I hear the door of the lounge open. Dr. Gibson enters, peeling off his white coat as he does so. He tosses it into a bin in the corner. He nods a hello to the detective. Either the two know each other, I am thinking, or they spoke before the detective came into the lunchroom. “I’m off now,” the doctor says, clearly exhausted.

  “How’s the baby?” my father asks.

  “Better,” Dr. Gibson says. “She’s stabilizing.”

  “Could I see her?” my father asks.

  Dr. Gibson takes a yellow-and-black parka out of a locker. “She’s asleep in the ICU,” he says.

  I see a look pass between the detective and the doctor. The doctor checks his watch.

  “Okay,” Gibson says, “a quick peek. Can’t see the harm in that.”

  We follow Dr. Gibson through a series of corridors, all painted the same dispiriting mint and beige. The detective falls behind, and I imagine him studying my father and me as we walk.

  The pediatric ICU has been built in the shape of a wheel, with the nurses’ station the hub and e
ach patient room a spoke. I pass parents sitting in plastic chairs, staring at dials and flickering red lights. I am waiting for someone to start screaming.

  Dr. Gibson motions us into a room that seems enormous compared with the tiny infant in the plastic box. He gives us masks and tells us to hold them over our mouths.

  “I thought she’d be in the nursery,” my father says through the blue paper.

  “Once the infant has been outside of the hospital, she can’t go back into the nursery. Might infect the other infants,” the doctor explains. He leans over the cot, adjusts a tube, and examines a screen.

  The baby lies inside a heated Plexiglas case. A bandaged hand and foot stick out doll-like from the scrawny body. The hair, black and feathery, covers the wrinkled scalp like a bird’s crown. She makes delicate sucking motions as we watch.

  I want to put my cheek close to the baby’s mouth and feel the warm breath against my skin. Finding her might be the single most important thing my father and I have ever done.

  “What will happen to her?” my father asks.

  “The Division of Youth Services and Families will take care of her,” Dr. Gibson says.

  “And then what?”

  “Foster care. Adoption if she’s lucky.”

  The four of us go down the elevator in silence. I realize that my father stinks. When we step off, Dr. Gibson puts out his hand to my father. “I’m in the back,” he says. “I’m glad you found her, Mr. Dillon.”

  My father shakes the doctor’s hand. “I’d like to call you tomorrow,” he says. “To see how she is.”

  “I’m on all day,” Dr. Gibson says. He hands my father a card, and we watch him walk away.

  “Where’s your car?” Detective Warren asks my father.

  My father has to think a minute. “In the front lot,” he says.

  “I’d like you to come for a ride with me,” Warren says. “I want you to take a look at something.”

  “My daughter’s tired,” my father says.

  “We can leave her here,” the detective says. “Pick her up when I drop you off. This won’t take long.”

  “No, Dad,” I say quickly.

  The detective opens his mouth to speak, but my father cuts him off. “She’ll come with us,” my father says.

  Warren drives a red Jeep, which seems an odd choice for a state policeman. I decide he probably doesn’t do too much undercover work. Maybe he needs the truck for chasing criminals on back roads.