“You’ll have to give me directions,” Warren says. “I don’t have much call to come up here.”
“To where?” my father asks.
“To the motel,” Warren says.
We pass through the small town of Shepherd, New Hampshire, named after Asa Henry Shepherd, a farmer who came up from Connecticut to till the land in 1763. In the local phone book there are over thirty Shepherds listed.
“We’re getting some weather tomorrow,” Warren says. “Ice, according to the radio. I hate ice.”
My father says nothing. It’s freezing in the Jeep. I’m sitting in back. The detective drives with his coat open, the red scarf loose around his neck.
“Black ice is the worst,” Warren says. “Two years ago there was this family from North Carolina, coming off the exit ramp to Grantham. They were up skiing, had no clue about black ice. The Chevy they were in went airborne.”
I watch the rhythm of my father’s frozen breaths.
“A couple checked in to the motel over by you,” Warren says. “The owner gave a description of the man but says she didn’t see the woman. Male, Caucasian, five-eleven, twenty, twenty-one, black wavy hair, wearing a navy peacoat. She thinks he was driving a Volvo, six, seven years old. They’re supposed to get a plate number, but she didn’t.”
“A Volvo?” my father asks, surprised.
The detective bypasses our road, heading east toward the drive that will lead to the motel. The headlights provide small glimpses into the forest, the same woods that border our property. Through the windshield I can see a puzzling glow in the night sky, as if there were a small city waiting for us at the top of the hill.
Warren drives with a heavy foot. My father has never liked being a passenger, hasn’t been one in years. I can smell the detective in front of me—a mixture of wet wool and coffee, with a faint overlay of spearmint.
“Turn here,” my father says.
Warren makes a turn onto a paved driveway that runs up a short hill to a low red-shingled motel. There are two cruisers and three other cars in the parking lot. Behind the motel the woods are lit with a series of powerful spotlights.
Warren gets out of the Jeep and beckons to my father to join him.
“You stay here,” my father says to me.
“I want to come,” I say.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
The door to a motel room is open, and I can see two uniformed policemen inside, one of whom is Chief Boyd. My father follows the detective across the lot.
I draw up my knees and wrap my arms around them. The window next to me is smeary, but I can see my father stepping over the threshold and into the lighted room. I don’t understand why I’ve been left alone in the car. What if the person who left the baby to die is still around?
I lean to one side and let my weight topple me onto the cushion so that I am lying on the backseat in a fetal position. I am in a detective’s car. A small jolt of something like excitement mixed with fear tingles at the back of my neck.
I examine the floor of the Jeep in the light from the parking lot. There’s an empty Coke can on its side, a used tissue, and several scattered coins. In the pocket of the seat back, there’s an atlas and a tape cassette. And what’s this? I reach my hand out and touch a Snickers bar, unopened. I pull my hand back. There’s a long metal object that might be a tool tucked under the passenger seat. Other than that, the Jeep is fairly clean, not like the cab of my father’s truck, which is covered with rags, pieces of wood, sawdust, tools, jackets, and socks. It smells, too—like old apples. My father swears that there aren’t any apples in the truck, that he’s searched all through it, but I am certain there’s at least one rotten one back there somewhere.
I let myself cry for a minute. It feels good, though I have nothing but my sleeve to wipe my nose on. I remember the way my father cried in the parking lot. He seemed not to know I was even there.
My father and I saved a person’s life. I’ll be a celebrity at school in the morning. I hope my father doesn’t tell me not to talk about it. I wonder if I’ll be in the newspapers. My teeth begin to chatter, and maybe I help them along a bit. I think about our walk, about finding the baby in the woods, about the way my father fell to his knees. I wonder if being dangerously chilled is reason enough to get out of the car and go inside.
I sit up and peer out the window, which has steamed up a bit. How long has my father been gone? My fingers are cold. What happened to my mittens? I am starving. I haven’t eaten anything since school lunch at eleven thirty. I think about the Snickers bar. Will the detective notice if I eat it? And if he notices, will he care? I reach over to the seat back pocket and slip the bar out. I hold it in my lap for a moment, my eye on the door of the motel room. I will have to eat it fast and hide the wrapper. I don’t want to get caught with half a candy bar in my mouth.
I tear the wrapper open. The bar is hard from the cold, but the candy is delicious. I eat it as fast as I can, wiping my mouth with my fingers and stuffing the wrapper in the pocket of my jeans. I sit back, slightly breathless.
With shoulders hunched, waiting for a reprimand, I step out of the Jeep and shut the door. I walk across the plowed parking lot. I can hear voices now—the deliberately calm voices of technicians at work. I hesitate on the steps, expecting a bark.
It’s a small room and would be depressing even without the bloody sheets or the soiled covers ripped from the bed. The walls are paneled in thin wallboard meant to look like pine. The room has a bureau and a TV and smells heavily of mildew. A bloodied sheet lies just below the lone window, which is open. Through that window I can see the spotlights on the snow.
A technician is working over the bed.
“A woman gave birth in here,” Warren is saying.
On a side table is a glass of water, half full. A sock lies on the rug. “There’ll be fingerprints,” my father says.
“There’ll be fingerprints all over the place,” Warren says, “but none of them will do us any good unless one of them has a record—which I sincerely doubt.” The detective takes a handkerchief from his back pocket and blows his nose. “That tiny girl you found?” he asks. “She started life in this room. And then someone, most likely the father, went out that window there and tried to kill her. No one put that baby in a warm place where she’d be found. No one called in a tip. A man took that infant, minutes old, walked her out into the woods on a December night, temps in the single digits, and laid her naked in a sleeping bag. If you hadn’t found her, we’d have come across her, when? March? April? If even then. Most likely a dog would have gotten to her first.”
I think about a dog dragging a bone across the snow with its teeth. My father stands near the detective while he confers with a technician. Chief Boyd is leaning against a wall, his lips pressed hard together. From where I’m standing he can’t see me. I try to picture what went on in this room. I don’t know much about giving birth, but I can feel hysteria in the walls, the wrinkled sheets, the clothes left behind. Did the woman know what the man would do with the infant? The sock is pearl gray, angora maybe, with a cable knit up the side. A woman’s sock to judge from the size of it. A technician picks it up and sticks it in a plastic bag.
“In the fifteen years I’ve been with the state police,” Warren says, “I’ve seen maybe twenty-five cases of abandoned infants. Three months ago, in Lebanon, a woman left an infant in a trash barrel outside her house. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. The baby was dead when we found him. Had Campbell’s soup up its nose.”
A technician interrupts Warren with a question.
“Last year,” Warren continues, “a fourteen-year-old girl threw her baby out a second-story window. She’s charged with attempted murder.” Warren studies a drinking glass and a plastic bag on the bedside table. “In Newport we found a newborn girl, alive, on a shelf at Ames. Over to Conway they found a newborn boy in a trash bin in the back of a restaurant. The mother was twenty. It was freezing outside. She’s charged with attempted
murder.” The detective squats down to look under the bed. “What else? Oh, in Manchester an eighteen-year-old mother abandoned her baby girl in a park. She left the child in a plastic bag, and two ten-year-old girls discovered the infant when they were biking through the park. Can you imagine? The mother’s charged with attempted murder and cruelty.” Warren stands. He points under the bed and asks a technician a question. “And listen to this one: Two years ago, a high school senior discovered she was pregnant. She said nothing. She hid it by wearing baggy sweatshirts and pants, hoping all the while that she’d miscarry. But she didn’t. In the fall she went off to college. The day before Thanksgiving, after everyone had gone home, she delivered a baby girl on the floor of her dormitory room. She wrapped the infant in a T-shirt and sweater, put her in a plastic grocery bag, and carried her down three flights of stairs. She laid her in a trash bin just outside the dorm.”
Warren walks to the window and looks through it.
“But College Girl had a conscience,” he says. “She called in an anonymous tip to campus security, and they came and found the baby. Didn’t take them long to find the mother either. She pled to endangerment and was sentenced to a year’s house arrest.”
“How do you know it was a man who did this?” my father asks. “In all the other examples you’ve just mentioned, it was a woman who abandoned the baby.”
“Come with me,” Warren says to my father. “I want you to see something.”
The two men turn, and as they do they see me just outside the doorway.
My father moves to stand in front of me, as if to block my view of the room, but we both know it’s too late: I’ve seen what there is to see.
“I thought I told you to stay in the car,” my father says, both surprised and angry.
“It was cold.”
“If I tell you to stay in the car, I mean stay in the car.”
“It’s all right,” Warren says as he slides past my father. “She can come with us.”
My father gives me a stony look. He makes me walk in front of him, following the detective around the back of the motel. The snow is deep, and Warren motions for us to step in his slow and precise bootsteps. From a window at the back of the motel, another set of prints stretches into the woods. The lights are so bright I have to put up my hand. Fifty feet from where we stand, two policemen are bent over the snow.
“Bootsteps,” Warren says. “They go down two feet in some cases. Size ten and a half. Every twenty feet or so, the guy sank up to his knees in the snow. The tracks go way out, five hundred yards anyway, and then double back. You know how hard that is to do?”
My father says he knows how hard that is to do.
“You could break your leg doing that,” Warren says.
My father nods.
“City guy, wouldn’t you say?” the detective asks.
“Might be.”
“A woman who had just given birth couldn’t have done that.”
“I don’t think so,” my father says.
Warren turns toward my father and puts a hand on his shoulder. My father flinches. “Despite the fact that you won’t unzip your jacket,” the detective says, “that you have blood on your collar, that you’re looking a little rough around the edges, and that you live on a deserted road near the motel, you’ll be happy to know I don’t think you did this.”
We ride with Chief Boyd back to town. In the morning everyone will wake to the news. I try to picture again the man and the woman who went to the motel to have a baby and then kill it. Where are they now?
“That’s my truck over there,” my father says when we reach the hospital parking lot. Chief Boyd drives us to the truck and we get out. “Thanks for the ride,” my father says, but Boyd, still tight-lipped, doesn’t answer. He peels out of the lot.
We climb up into the truck and my father turns the key. The engine catches on the first try. Two for two. As we wait for the truck to warm up, I look out through a thin layer of frost crystals that shine under the lamplight of the parking lot. Beyond the frost is the front door of the emergency room, and beyond that is a cot in which a newborn girl is trying to start her life.
“You shouldn’t have had to hear all that,” my father says.
“It’s not that,” I say.
“What is it?”
“I was just thinking about Clara.”
The truck jounces a little as it revs. There’s an empty Coke can under my feet that’s annoying me. My father guns the engine. He makes a sharp U-turn in the nearly empty lot, and we drive out into the night.
The skid marks were forty feet long. The tractor-trailer pushed the VW along the highway as if it were only so much snow to be plowed out of the way.
My mother died instantly. Clara, who was still alive when the medics got her out of the wreckage, died before the ambulance reached the hospital. It was ten days before Christmas, and my mother had taken the baby to the mall for Christmas shopping. For reasons we will never know—did Clara with her charm or her whining make my mother turn her head, even for an instant?—my mother glided onto the highway in the path of the oncoming truck. The driver, who emerged from the accident with only a dislocated shoulder, said he was traveling at just under sixty-five when the green VW floated across his path.
My father, who had stayed late at his office Christmas party in Manhattan and who was on his second martini when his wife and child were being dragged into oblivion, didn’t know about the accident until close to midnight. When he arrived home and found the house empty, he waited an hour or so and then began calling my mother’s friends and then the area hospitals and then the police, until finally he received an answer that even weeks later he was unable fully to comprehend. And for months he had the notion that had he not made the telephone call, he never would have heard the terrible news.
That night he drove to the hospital, his own ten-year-old Saab mocking him with its sturdiness. The interns made a grab for him when he went over, and they had to fight to get his tie off so that he could breathe. After he identified my mother, the staff gave him a minute with Clara, who was strangely intact apart from the purple oval bruise to one side of her forehead. The magnitude of the waste was unbearable, Clara’s perfect body a unique torment only a jealous god could have devised.
The accident happened on a Friday night when I was sleeping over at Tara Rice’s house. Mrs. Rice, who hadn’t heard the news, was surprised to see my father at her door so early on a Saturday morning. I was found amidst a scatter of sleeping bags on Tara’s floor and told to pack my things. When I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, I knew that something terrible had happened. His face, which had been ordinary enough just the day before, seemed to have been recarved by an inept sculptor, the features rearranged and misaligned. He helped me put my jacket on and walked me to the car. Halfway down the driveway, I started yipping at him, a dog at his heels.
“What, Dad? What’s the matter?
“Tell me, Dad. Why do I have to leave?
“What happened, Dad? What happened?”
When we reached the car, I tore my shoulder from his grip and began to run back to the house. Perhaps I thought that by reentering Tara’s house I could stop time, that I would never have to hear the unspeakable thing he had come to tell me. He caught me easily and pressed my face into his overcoat. I began to sob before he said a word.
My grief, which I could not articulate beyond a string of helpless words within an open-mouthed wail, showed itself, as the days wore on, in short, violent squalls. I would bend over and pound the floor or rip the covers from my bed. Once I threw a paperweight against my door, cracking it down the center. My father’s grief was not as dramatic as mine, but instead was resolute, an entity with weight. He held his body with an awful rigidity, the jaw tight, the back hunched, his elbows on his knees, a posture most easily achieved in a chair at the kitchen table, where water or coffee and occasionally food were brought to him.
For days, my father sat in our house in Westchester,
unable to go back to the office. After Christmas vacation, I was made to return to school on the theory that it would distract me. My grandmother came to care for us, but my father didn’t like having her there: she reminded him only of happier times when we’d visited her in Indiana in the summer. There we’d spent lazy mornings with Clara in a plastic wading pool and my mother lounging gratefully in a slim black tank suit. In the heat of those afternoons, with my grandmother watching Clara and me, my father and my mother would sometimes slip away to his old childhood bedroom for a nap, and I’d be glad that I’d escaped that dreaded camplike fate.
One day several weeks after the accident, I came home from school on the bus and found my father sitting in the same chair in which I’d left him at breakfast, a wooden chair next to the kitchen table. I was sure that the cup of coffee on the table, with its dark sludge on the bottom, was the same one he’d poured himself at eight a.m. It frightened me to think that all the time I’d been in school—all during math and science and a movie called Charly that we’d watched in English class—he’d been sitting in that chair.
In March my father announced that we were moving. When I asked where, he said north. When I asked where in the north, he said he had no idea.
I sit up in the bed and see light at the edges of the curtains. I push the covers away and step onto the cold floorboards. I raise the shades and put a hand to my eyes. Every twig and late-to-fall leaf is coated with an icy shine. I am giddy with this news. Even in New Hampshire, the school buses won’t risk the ice. I turn on the radio and listen to the school closing announcements. Grantham public schools, closed. Newport public schools, closed. Regional High School, closed.
I take a shower, towel off, and dress in jeans and a sweater. I make myself a cup of hot chocolate. Looking for my father, I move, mug in hand, through the rooms of the house, a long, narrow Cape turned sideways with a porch to the west. The house is painted yellow with dark green trim, and in the summer a wild vine grows along the porch railing, creating a kind of trellis. The paint job is ancient and needs to be seen to, and my father plans to tackle it in the summer. Last summer, our second in the house, my father made a small patch of lawn that I was periodically asked to mow. The rest of the property he let go. Where it isn’t woods, it’s bush and meadow, and on summer evenings we sometimes sit on the porch, my father with a beer and me with a lemonade, and watch birds we can’t identify skit along the tips of the overlong grasses. Occasionally, we’ll each read a book.