Light on Snow Read Online Free PDF

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.

T he 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