“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.
T
he 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.
“We’ll take my husband’s truck then,” Mrs. Knight decided.
The truck bounced up the drive, skidding when the snow gave way to mud. The cottage was set in a clearing that encompassed a barn as well. I knew as soon as I saw the house that this was the one my father would pick. The cottage was big enough for the two of us and was empty, a fact I knew my father would use to his advantage: we could move in right away. More to the point, it was isolated.
I had no bargaining chips. I couldn’t very well lobby for the house with the grotesque toilet, nor could I argue that we should live on a farm. Besides, if it wasn’t our old house in New York, did I really care anyway?
Within the hour my father had made a full-price offer, delighting the Realtor. My father and I stayed at a motel just outside of town for the ten days it took to complete the paperwork, my father driving me in the morning to the Mobil station for milk and doughnuts and after that to school, and then we moved in.
I complained incessantly. The school bus could make it only halfway up our road, and the walk was killing me, I said. My bedroom was freezing. The kids were all retarded, and the teacher was lame. There was no outlet for the hair dryer in the upstairs bathroom, and the shower had no pressure. One night, insisting that my father sit in the den with me while I completed my homework, I badgered him to help me and then interrupted him every time he tried to explain an answer. I mauled a math paper with the metal top of a pencil (popping the erasers off with my teeth was a habit I couldn’t break), tearing the paper and creating a furious scribble in the wood of the coffee table beneath it. My father stood and walked out to the barn. For a time I sat with my pencil in hand. I tried to cover over the gouges in the wood with my spit. I followed my father, preparing a defense as I went: it wasn’t fair; I had no friends; the kids were dorks; the house was spooky. I opened the door to the barn and at first couldn’t see a thing. My father hadn’t turned on the lights. But eventually, in the moonlight through the windows, I spotted him. He stood on the other side of the cavernous room, leaning against a wall. Maybe he was simply having a cigarette, but to my eye he looked exhausted and defeated, a man who knows he has lost everything.
I shut the door as quietly as I could and walked back into the house. I sat on the sofa and completed my homework easily, which I could have done all along. I searched through the cupboards and found a tin of cocoa. I boiled water in a saucepan and made two mugs of hot chocolate. I went out to the barn, carrying the mugs, loudly calling, “Dad,” as I went. Before I reached the door, the lights went on. I walked in as though nothing had transpired in the den barely an hour before. “You want some hot chocolate?” I asked.
Together we sat on a bench and blew over our mugs. “This hits the spot,” he said, the effort in his voice to sound cheerful nothing short of heroic. Neither of us made any mention of the fight we’d just had.
“It’s cold in here,” I said.
“I’m going to try to fix up that woodstove,” he said.
“I was thinking I might like to get some posters for my room.”
“There must be a store in Lebanon where you can buy posters,” he said. “We can check it out this weekend.”
“And the other thing I’m going to need,” I say, “is a desk.”
My father nodded.
“What are you going to do for a job?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe something with my hands.”
I wake to a hush. The wind has stopped; there’s no pinging against the windows, no whooshing against the glass. The world is completely still, as if resting after its long battle the night before. I hop on bare feet to the window because the floor is cold. The sky is gray, and snow still falls.
I put on my slippers and my bathrobe and open my bedroom door. From the kitchen I can hear the sound of the refrigerator closing. Dad must be up, I think.
But it is not my father I find in the kitchen that morning. Charlotte stands at the stove, spatula in hand. She has on the flannel pj’s with the pink and blue bears and her gray angora socks. I study the cables, and for a moment all I can see is the motel room with its bloodied sheets. I look up at Charlotte’s face.
“I’m making French toast,” she says. Her hair is wet and waved in single ringlets down the back of her neck. Her face is scrubbed and shines clean in the overhead light. “Do you drink coffee?”
“No,” I say. The change in Charlotte is unsettling. She seems rested, but it’s more than that. She’s somehow healthier, more robust.
Three plates and silverware have been placed on the counter near the stove. Charlotte covers one of the plates with two pieces of the toast. “I don’t know if you like syrup or not,” she says, “so I’ll let you do it for yourself.”
“You seem a lot better,” I say.
The golden-tinged toast swims in melted butter. I pour a glass of juice and take my tray to the den. After a couple of minutes Charlotte follows me.
She sits on the sofa and I in my chair, as if we had already established our familial positions. Her tray tilts for a second and the syrup drips onto the flannel of the pj’s. “Sorry,” she says, licking it off with her finger.
She holds her hair back with one hand as she bends over her plate. She cuts her toast with her fork in a frantic motion, scraping the plate. She has the slovenly ease of someone who’s eaten breakfast in the den with me for years.
“How many inches do you think we got?” she asks.
I glance out the window. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe three feet?”
“Good for the skiers,” she says.
“I’m going skiing after Christmas,” I say.
“Where?”
“Gunstock.”
“You’ll get to paint another mountain,” she says.
“I already bought the paint.”
Charlotte sits back, the tray still balanced on her knees. I look at my breakfast, hardly touched. My appetite has deserted me. I’m not used to this creature who can be heartbroken one minute and bursting with life the next.
“How long will it take to get plowed out?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “We’re just about the last road the town gets to. It could take a day, maybe more.”
“That long,” she says, gazing out the window.
I don’t know whether this is good news or bad. I am curious about where Charlotte will go when she leaves us.
Without explanation, I stand and take my tray to the kitchen. I feel nervous in the room with Charlotte, worried that my father will come down and find Charlotte so at ease in our house. I climb the stairs and pause at my father’s door. I put my ear to the wood and can hear nothing. “Dad?” I call softly.
“Come in,” he says from the other side.
He is sitting fully dressed at the edge of the bed. He has on jeans and a navy sweater over a flannel shirt. He’s been pulling on his socks. His hair is matted at the sides and peaked at the top, like a screwy-looking bird in a Saturday-morning cartoon.
In the dim light I can see his bureau, covered with magazines, loose change, a balled handkerchief, a lone leather glove, and his wallet. In the corner is a chair that functions as a closet. It is piled high this morning with flannel shirts and jeans and a towel. On his bedside table are an alarm clock, a white mug, and a book about the Civil War. Also on the table are a candle in a candleholder and a flashlight. Just in case.
I take a step closer. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“Sure, why?”
“You didn’t come down.”
“I was up late last night.”
My eyes adjust to the gloom, and I notice that my father has little thickets of gray hair over his ears. Is this new?
“Still snowing?” he asks.
“Yup.”
My father stands, massaging his lower back. “I want to keep the path to the woodshed clear in case the power goes out.”
“I’ll do it,” I say.
My father raises an eyebrow. I never offer to help with chores I hate. He walks to the window and snaps up the shades. Though the light is still the dull gray of a storm, it reflects off the surface of a small photograph on the bureau. I take a step into the room so that I can see the picture.
It is of Clara, just a year old. It would have been taken shortly before the accident. In the picture she has on a royal blue sweater, but someone, possibly me, has wrapped my father’s navy scarf around her neck and put his ski cap over her head. An uneven fringe of bangs peeks out under the hat, and hair sticks out over her ears as well. Her eyes, unnaturally large, have taken on the color of the sweater. The light from the flash has caught her broad cheeks and nose, and they glow as if with an inner light. Her lower lip glistens pink. She seems delighted with her new getup and is smiling so that her top two teeth are showing. On her right eyebrow is a tiny red scab, the size of a pea.
It is a new photograph, which is to say an old photograph that has recently been put on the bureau. Though I seldom go into my father’s bedroom, I am certain it was not there the night we found the baby.
Something inside me squeezes up tight, like a sponge that is being wrung out.
“She was beautiful,” my father says behind me.