Light on Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

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