Free Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

Christmas.
    The day marks a week and two days since my father and I walked into the woods and found a baby. I’ve been unable to keep from thinking about what might have happened to Baby Doris had we not found her. I’ve imagined the sleeping bag a frozen cocoon with long icicles falling like daggers all around her. In a second call to Dr. Gibson, my father learned that the baby’s toes would not have to be amputated. “She’s a fighter,” the doctor told my father, a comment which, when relayed to me, filled me with pride. We also learned that she is to be collected today by social services and delivered to a temporary foster home. This information upset me greatly when I heard it, since I liked having the baby in the hospital, having her contained there. We won’t be told where she is going. The whole process strikes me as being a lot like the witness protection program, with its anonymity and its new cast of characters: new mother, new father, new brothers and sisters. We won’t even be told the baby’s new name. Forever, to us, she will have to be Baby Doris.
    I leave my father and walk back into the house and into the kitchen, where I make myself a cup of hot chocolate. I stick an English muffin into the toaster and have an image of my mother mixing up a bowl of cottage cheese and peanut butter. Just the day before, I had a memory of my mother in her garden, bent straight over, her legs tanned, her shorts riding high on her thighs. My father was on the John Deere, headed toward my swing set. Because he was staring at my mother (trying, I think now, to get a good look at her from the front), he mowed right into the swing set, the prow of the John Deere catching on a swing and riding it up into the air. My father leapt off backwards and rolled out of the way. The engine cut out as he fell, but when he stood the mower was still stuck in the swing, its nose pointed skyward. My mother began to laugh, putting the back of her hand to her mouth.
    And last night I had a memory of my mother lying beside my father on their bed, the loose strap of the slip in which she slept revealing part of an engorged breast. They were talking softly so as not to wake Clara, barely a week old, in a cot next to the bed. What had they been talking about? Why had I gone into the room? I can’t remember. As they whispered, a stain began to blossom on my mother’s slip, the milk leaking with surprising fluidity, an enormous flowering. I remember my mother’s hand going to her breast and her whispering to my father,
Oh, Rob; oh, look.
    In the kitchen I smell smoke. The English muffin is stuck in the toaster. I pull the plug, remove the muffin with a fork, and Frisbee the charred puck into the sink.
    I hear a knock then, and I think it’s a branch tapping against the side of the house. Then I hear the human rhythm: three taps, a pause. Another three. Another pause. I think it might be the detective again, and I wonder if I should say my father isn’t home. But what if the detective just barges through and finds out I am lying? Can I be prosecuted for lying to an officer of the law? I move to the cloakroom and open the door.
    A couple stands on the steps, and I see behind them that it has begun snowing lightly. The woman has large, square glasses with blue-tinted frames and a hairdo one can’t come by in the entire state of New Hampshire: sleek and thick and blunt cut. She wears glossy lipstick the color of cherries that matches her leather gloves. She has on a white down jacket she clearly hasn’t bought at L. L. Bean. The man unzips his black ski parka, smiles, and says, “We heard down at the antiques store that someone called Mr. Dillon makes furniture that looks like Shaker. Are we in the right place?”
    I say, yes, they are, but I am puzzled. Hasn’t it been more than a week since Sweetser told the couple about my father’s furniture? Where have they been in the meantime? In a time warp? I tell them to come inside because of the