Sometimes I’d wander into my father’s office and pretend to be a secretary while he was on the phone or at his drawing table. At noon he would slide his arms into the silky lining of his jacket and we’d go to lunch. We ate at a deli where I could order cheese blintzes and a bowl of coleslaw. The desserts rotated in a glass case, and I remember the agony of trying to choose among the cherry cheesecake or the éclairs or the chocolate cream pie. My father, who normally never ate dessert, would get one for himself so that I could at least taste two. After lunch we’d go to the zoo in Central Park or to a bookstore where I was allowed to pick out a book. My father would be Rob in the office, Mr. Dillon in the deli, and a freshly minted Dad to me, sophisticated and fascinating in his white shirts and suits, his overcoat swinging open as we walked the sidewalks, his arm up, finger pointed, signaling for a taxi.
By three thirty a slight sensation of fatigue and boredom would begin to overtake me, but my mother was usually prompt at four o’clock. She’d arrive, shopping bags in tow, flushed and slightly breathless from her day out. I always had the sensation she’d been running. The shopping bags would be exotic: some had shiny pink and white stripes; others were black with gold lettering. My father would pretend horror at the excess, but I knew he didn’t really mind. Once, when they thought I’d left the room to go to the bathroom and were standing with their backs to the door, my mother took an item out and slipped it from its tissue wrap. I saw a fold of blue silk, a swath of delicate lace. My father goosed my mother, causing her to feint away and laugh.
When it was time to leave, my father would give me a tight hug, as if we were flying to Paris and he might not see us for months, even though he’d be right behind us on the six twenty. My mother and I would have to run to the train, and she would invariably fall asleep before we’d even emerged from the tunnel. I would peek into the shopping bags, taking tops off shoeboxes and fingering wool and silk and cotton. More often than not, I would fall asleep, too, resting my head on her shoulder or collapsing entirely onto her lap.
At dinnertime Charlotte appears wearing the jeans and the white shirt and sweater. She hugs her arms at the threshold of the kitchen. Her eyes look tired, and her nostrils are pink.
“Hi,” I say.
I am fighting with a loose potato peeler. Potatoes and salad are my jobs. My father stands over the stove, frying up three chicken breasts. He has his back to Charlotte and doesn’t turn when I say her name. His hair is standing up at the crown of his head, stuck that way when he pulled off his woolen cap. For most of the afternoon, he has been shoveling, racing and losing against the snow.
After leaving Charlotte’s room, I went downstairs to see what my father wanted, which was simply to make sure I wasn’t in Charlotte’s room. Then I went to my own room to wrap the couple of Christmas presents I had to give: a hat of blue and white stripes with a rolled edge for my father, and a pair of mittens for Jo, with whom I’d shortly go skiing. I still had to finish the beaded necklace for my grandmother. Bored, I wandered into the den, where I made a fire, feeding it with bits of wood from my father’s shop. The fire made me think of marshmallows, and I found a bag half-opened in a kitchen drawer. They were left over from the summer and were as hard as cardboard. I unwound a coat hanger and toasted a dozen, making myself slightly sick and spoiling my dinner. I had a rest on the sofa, legs splayed, staring at the fire until I didn’t feel sick anymore. I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make. What if, that December afternoon ten days earlier, when my father had looked up from his workbench and said Ready? I’d answered No. That I had to go inside. That I was hungry or that I had to start my homework. If we hadn’t gone on that walk, there would be no Baby Doris now. She’d have died in the snow. We’d have heard about it from Marion or Sweetser, and I imagine we’d have been kind of horrified and saddened, the way you are when a crime takes place near where you live. Maybe my father and I would have felt guilty at not having taken a walk in the woods that day. There would be no Charlotte or Detective Warren, not in our lives anyway.
“Is Nicky your real name?” Charlotte asks me now in the kitchen.
I wait for my father to answer, to say something, and when he doesn’t, I say, “It’s short for Nicole.” My father still has his back to Charlotte, as if he doesn’t know she’s in the room. “Isn’t it, Dad?” I ask pointedly.
My father says nothing.
“Can I help?” Charlotte asks.
“Probably not,” I say.
“I’ll set the table then,” she says, looking around for a table.
“We don’t do it that way,” I explain quietly.
“Then . . . then I’ll just sit down.” Seemingly baffled by the exchange, Charlotte leaves the room.
“Why are you being this way?” I ask my father when she is gone.
“What way?” he replies, taking the chicken out of the pan with tongs.
“You know . . . rude,” I say.
“How are you doing with those potatoes?”
“Fine,” I say, gouging into the white flesh.
Beyond the kitchen windows the wind whistles. The snow falls steadily for a minute and then whooshes hard against the glass. I think of Warren and wonder if he made it home to his two boys. I think of Baby Doris and wonder if she was collected as planned and where she is spending her first night away from the hospital.
Charlotte and my father and I sit in the den, with trays balanced on our knees, a skill my father and I have mastered but which seems to confound Charlotte. Her chicken skids across her plate, and her salad lies in bits on her lap. She picks the lettuce leaves off with delicate fingers. My father eats with determination, his face set in a mask. He will not acknowledge Charlotte’s presence beyond the absolutely necessary. I eat, torn between rapt attention for Charlotte and growing impatience with my father. Charlotte, defeated by dinner, eats little and seems the most uncomfortable of the three of us, her eyes barely rising from her plate, each swallow an effort. Color rises to and recedes from her face as if she were periodically flooded by waves of shame. I think that she will bolt from her seat. My father’s rigidity silences me as well. We dine to the sounds of the wind outside, and once or twice the lights flicker, reminding us that we could lose the power at any minute. After two winters in New Hampshire, my father and I have a sizable stash of candlesticks, half-burned candles, and flashlights at the ready. I like losing the power, because my father and I move into the den with its fireplace for the duration of the storm. We sleep in sleeping bags, and our ingenuity is tested in the areas of amusing ourselves and preparing meals. These episodes are cozy and warm, and I am always a little dismayed when the power—in the form of lights you’d forgotten had been left burning—comes back on with all the charm of a police spotlight.
“We’re definitely going to lose our power,” I say. “Charlotte and I can sleep in here. In sleeping bags.”
My father gives me a frosty look.
“I’ll be fine upstairs,” Charlotte says.
“No you won’t,” I say. “There won’t be any heat. The only heat will be from the fireplace. This one here.”
My father rises from his seat and carries his tray out to the kitchen. Charlotte sets down her knife and fork, clearly grateful to be done with the charade. She lays her head against the chair back and shuts her eyes. I stand and take her tray and mine and follow my father. He and I share dish duty—I one night, he the other—and I’m pretty sure it’s my night. But he’s already begun the chore.
“You’re being horrible,” I say.
“This is a fiasco,” he says.
When I return to the den, Charlotte still has her eyes shut, and I think she’s fallen asleep. I sit across from her in my father’s chair and study her. Her eyelids are bluish, and her mouth falls open slightly. I wonder where she’s been and what she’s been doing over the last ten days.
I think about how my father could so easily have told Warren that Charlotte
was sleeping upstairs when Warren came to visit. And that would have been that. Charlotte, in my pajamas with the pink and blue bears, would have been handcuffed in our back hallway, walked out to the Jeep, and taken away. We might never have seen her again. My father would always tell me it was for the best, and I would always know that he was wrong.
I wonder where Warren keeps his handcuffs. I wonder if he wears a gun.
I pick up a book I’ve been reading off and on, more off than on, a sign that I’ll probably abandon it soon. I find my place and try to absorb a few sentences, but I can’t concentrate. I drop the book hard onto the table.
Charlotte opens her eyes.
“Do you want to see my room?” I ask.
She sits up, slightly dazed and blinking.
“I could show you a picture of my mother,” I add.
“Uh, sure,” she says.
We climb the stairs and enter my room, which I tidied while Charlotte was asleep. My pajamas and the empty Ring Ding package are nowhere to be seen. Charlotte seems to relax as soon as she crosses the threshold, as if my room were more familiar territory. She stands and admires the mural, or at least pretends to, and, oddly, it doesn’t seem quite as amateurish as it did earlier. I think of Steve with his fictitious phone number and wonder whom he surprised with a call.
“This is great,” Charlotte says with her hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans, a posture that accentuates the bulge of her tummy. I scan the room and see it from the fresh eyes of a stranger: the desk with its shoebox of beads and coils of rawhide; the bed with the lavender-and-white quilt I brought with me from New York; the shelves of games I no longer play; the table beside the bed with its reading lamp and radio. To Kill a Mockingbird is on the floor. I have to read it for school.
Charlotte perches at the edge of the bed, the only place to sit apart from the desk chair.
“Have you ever worn your hair in a French braid?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say.
“I think you’d look good in a French braid. Do you want me to make you one?”
“Sure.”
“Sit here with me,” she says. She lifts her hands to my hair and draws it back over my ears. The delicate drift of her fingers makes me close my eyes. No one has touched me this way since my mother died.
“I’ll need a brush,” she says.
“It’s on the sill.”
I move to my desk and Charlotte stands behind me. She brushes my hair upward. The brushing, like the drift of the fingers, is soothing and maternal, and I fall into a dream state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. For a time she works without talking.
“Are you an only child?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I have two older brothers. My parents are French Canadian, very strict, very religious. My brothers are protective.”
“Do they know?”
“Oh God, no,” Charlotte says. “They’d kill me. For sure, my brothers would kill . . . well, you know, my boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. The word sends a charge through me, much as accomplice did.
“Where did you live before?” she asks, drawing my hair into sections.
“New York.”
“So why did you move up here?”
“My father wanted to. He says he had to, to get away from the memories. He says he couldn’t live in our house anymore.”
“Didn’t you mind?”
“I was angry at first. But then, I don’t know, I guess I just realized it was something he had to do. I just got used to it.”
I pat the beginnings of the braid she’s fashioning. Expertly executed, without a misplaced hair, it makes a perfect curve against my head. “Wow,” I say.
“I didn’t see a TV,” Charlotte says as she draws a hank of hair on my left side.
“We don’t have one,” I say. “I have a radio, but my father didn’t want a TV. He and my mother didn’t believe in letting kids watch too much TV anyway, but after the accident, I think he was afraid all he’d see on the television would be accidents and disaster.”
“When did your mother and sister die?”
“Two years ago.”
“You haven’t had anyone fix your hair since then, have you?”
“No,” I say.
Charlotte lets go of my hair. I can see her in the small round mirror over the desk. She closes her eyes. Periodically, that night and the next day, the realization of what she’s done, of what happened to her in the motel room, will blow through her.
I know precisely what that feels like. When I first moved to New Hampshire, sudden gusts of grief would overtake me on the soccer field or in the band room. Even when I wasn’t actively thinking of my mother, I’d be blindsided at odd intervals. My mind would wander to a thought of her, only to find that where I used to picture her standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, or driving around in her VW, or knitting in front of the TV while I watched a Disney video, there was empty space. It hurt every time, and still does, like a severed nerve exposed to air.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” she says. I watch as color returns to her cheeks. “The nap helped. And the food.”
“You haven’t been eating?”
“Not much,” she says.
“We can go down later and have hot chocolate,” I say. “I practically live on hot chocolate.”
I hear footsteps on the landing, and a second later, a knock on the door.
Charlotte sets the brush on the desk and stands away from me.
My father enters. He looks at me and then at Charlotte and then back at me. “What’s going on?” he asks.
The evidence of what we’ve been doing is perfectly obvious on my head.
Charlotte steps forward and around me. She doesn’t glance back as she slips past my father and walks out of the room.
“Do I have to lock her in her room?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He shakes his head. “The storm’s worse,” he says.
Good, I think. My father can’t make Charlotte leave, and Detective Warren can’t get to the house. I wish it would snow for weeks.
“You have your flashlight?” my father asks.
“Yes.”
“Batteries?”
“Yup.”
“From the sound of this wind, we’re going to need them.”
“What about her?” I ask, tilting my head in the direction of the guest room.
“I put a flashlight on her bedside table.”
“What time is it?” I ask.
“About nine thirty,” he says.
“You didn’t say anything about my hair.” I mean it as a challenge.
“What do you call it?”
“French braids.”
“They’re pretty.” My father looks exhausted, older than his forty-two years.
He sighs. “Go to sleep,” he says.
I undress and climb into my bed. I turn off my bedside light. I finger my tight new braids and listen to the moan of the wind. From time to time I imagine I hear cars in the driveway. I listen for the sound of an engine. I think about Detective Warren. Did he believe me about the ax? I don’t know. Maybe he was glad my father wasn’t there: easier for him to get a look around without my father watching him.
I fall asleep to the sounds of a shovel scraping against the granite steps.
The Realtor with the scarf and the fur boots showed us three houses the March day we coasted into town. The first was a cape on Strople, not far from Remy’s. A fixer-upper, Mrs. Knight explained. I was horrified by the toilet in the garage, a stained bowl in which an unidentifiable animal had perished. The kitchen had green Formica counters and brown floor tiles, and it seemed unlikely I’d ever be able to eat a meal in there. I expressed my distaste by standing beside the front door and refusing to go upstairs. I needn’t have worried. The house, on one of the town’s most public streets, was too exposed for my father, who was looking for a cave in which to hide himself for years.
/> The Realtor was nosy. Where were we from? Why were we interested in Shepherd? Did we have relatives in the area? What grade was I in? My father and I were at least united in our silence: we didn’t give her a thing. Had he been able to, my father would have made up the details of a life, simply to shut her up, but his imagination, like his heart, had deserted him.
The second house we visited was called Orchard Hill Farm and stood amid twelve acres of apples. It was a simple but well-kept building with a bright lemon-yellow kitchen that smelled like apples, even in March. I went upstairs and discovered four bedrooms with white curtains at the windows and high mounds of quilts on the beds. I wanted to lie down and go to sleep and wake up in New York.
My father walked through the house as a courtesy only, because next to it was a farm stand. Although we would not sell apples or whatever products had issued from that lemon-yellow kitchen, it might take a year or two before previous customers stopped coming to the house and ringing the bell. I could not imagine my father’s having to go to the door time after time and explain that no, there wouldn’t be any cider this year.
“I have something else,” Mrs. Knight said, “but it’s a bit out of town.”
Magic words to my father. “I’d like to take a look,” he said.
“Quite a long drive off the main road to get to it,” she said, eyeing the Saab and the small trailer. “Might be inconvenient with your daughter in school.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a look,” my father repeated.