The Ice Queen (14 page)

I drove along idly until I was on my brother’s street. This was often where the story went in a fairy tale. Sun and moon, brother and sister, the guardian and the guarded, opposites who gave each other form, guided each other until they stumbled home. Ned was at the university; I knew an emergency meeting of the lightning-research group had been called. There was a great deal of worry about the lawsuit Renny’s family was threatening. None of the experts had offered him counseling, taken note that he might be unbalanced. Well, weren’t we all? It was true for all of the members of our study group. We’d been turned inside out, picked up and dropped down, flattened, wounded, torn apart. I’d seen the Naked Man several times, wandering through the park, stopping to throw tennis balls for other people’s retrievers and poodles. I’d seen the young girl with the mismatched socks at the coffee shop in town, her hand held over a tabletop, trying to make a spoon turn in a circle.

Frankly, I thought if Renny’s family sued anyone, it should be me. Ignorant, selfish, greedy, blind, the friend who wasn’t there. Oh, definitely, it should be me, although what they might take in reparations was minimal: my cat, my car, my future, my past.

I got out of the car onto my brother’s street, and tossed the apple core away. I suppose seeing Renny’s sister and her devotion had made me think of Ned. I’d been a terrible sister; I should have told him about Nina and
A Hundred Ways to Die
. Now, I knocked on the door. The car wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe Nina walked to her classes; the mathematics building wasn’t far. It was such a beautiful day. It was getting dark earlier. That was the only thing that was the same here as it was in New Jersey. By now the maples would have begun to turn red with the first rush of cooler weather. Here there was just a slow bluing of everything. Birds sang in the darkening sky, and a few palm fronds, ones that had turned dry with the heat, rattled and shook in the breeze.

I made my way through the hedge of gardenia and peered into the window. A white sofa. A framed red heart on the wall. Nina opened the door and stood there. I think I’d woken her. Her hair was mussed. Her eyes were foggy. I wasn’t quite certain whether she recognized me. Even when she spoke, she wasn’t connecting in any way. I might have been the paperboy or a door-to-door salesman.

“Your brother’s not here. He’s at the Science Center. There’s some sort of alleged crisis.”

“Yeah, well, a friend of mine tried to cut off his hands. He was in the lightning study.”

“Some people make their own grief.”

Nina eyed me meaningfully. So it was true. She didn’t like me. She was wearing a smock with paint smeared over it. I noticed she didn’t invite me in.

“Are you painting?”

“Yes. Obviously.” The color was yellow. I could see that on her fingers, her blue jeans.

“Do you have any American cheese?” I said.

Nina laughed. A funny, broken sound, but light, like chimes. “You’re here for cheese?”

I took the mole out of my pocket. Nina took a step back, stunned.

“Jeez.” She nearly laughed.

“I’m taking care of it for my friend.”

Nina opened the door, and I followed her inside. We went through the living room, past the heart on the wall, into the kitchen. I could smell paint. I liked the smell: something covering up something, something brand-new.

I sat down while Nina rummaged through the fridge. I put the mole down and stared at it. It didn’t move. I hoped it wasn’t going to die on me.

“Please don’t put that thing on the table,” Nina said when she approached with a packet of orange cheese.

I lifted the mole, set my backpack on the table, then placed the mole atop it.

“Some things aren’t meant to be pets.” Nina sat down at the table. She gazed at the mole. “Fair creature who cannot see or hear or want or need.” She looked at me. “It doesn’t seem to like the cheese.”

She went to the pantry for some of the food my brother left out for bats at their feeder in the yard. Fruit and veggies pureed and stored in a jar. I took a spoon of the mush and placed it in a little plate. The mole took a mouthful of what appeared to be smashed grape. I had the book in my backpack.
A Hundred Ways to Die
. The mole was probably sitting on it right now. I saw the pulse at Nina’s throat, delicate, pale pink.

“What is it like to love someone?” I asked.

Nina laughed. At any rate, she made a noise. “Ridiculous question. There are countless answers to that one.”

“Then to you. What does it mean to you?”

I could see into the yard from where I was sitting. The sky was salmon, then gray, then dark and deep, a bluish color, one I hadn’t seen before. Nothing like New Jersey. Something infinite, hot, faraway.

Nina was gazing out at the yard.

“I thought you loved him,” I said.

Nina turned back to me, surprised.

“Ned,” I said. “I thought you truly loved him.”

Nina glared and went to the sink. She just stood there. Didn’t bother to turn on the water.
Oh,
she said. I think that’s what she said.

“Look, I was there in the library,” I told her. “That’s why I’m saying this to you. You think I want to get involved? I didn’t want to see you, but I did. I know you withdrew
A Hundred Ways to Die
. If Ned knew what you were planning, it would destroy him.”

Nina laughed, but the sound was dry. Nothing funny here.

“I’m the one destroyed,” she said.

“You’re planning to kill yourself.”

“Oh, far worse.”

Nina turned and left the room, so I followed her. I went down the dark hall. Nina was standing in the study, now cleared of furniture. She had painted one wall yellow. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the overhead light, but the room was glowing. Yellow did that. This yellow.

“Nice color,” I said.

Nina sat down on the floor, legs crossed. She’d covered the carpet with a drop cloth. I sat across from her and watched her cry. When she was done she wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands.

“You want to know what love is? It’s the thing that ruins you.”

Nina looked straight at me. She reached out and for a second I thought she meant to hit me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. I was rude, asking too many questions, insinuating myself where I wasn’t wanted, spying on her. Instead, she took my hand and put it on her stomach. She was farther along than anyone would have guessed. She’d kept her secret well. I could feel the baby moving.

“This isn’t ruin. This is wonderful. Why would you ever take out that book?” I said.

I looked right into her, and I saw what love was to her.

“The book was for him. In case it got too hard for him and he didn’t want to live through it. In case I couldn’t stand to watch his pain.”

I didn’t want to understand what she was talking about. It was ruin; she was right. It was opening yourself to be destroyed. One minute you have everything. And then the next it’s all gone.

This was that time.

“He has pancreatic cancer. He wants to work as long as he can, which they say is less than a month. The baby will be here after the first of the year. The book was in case he wanted it. To go as he chose. It’s his right, after all. It’s his life. But then I couldn’t go through with it. Even a minute less time of him in the world would be too hard. I returned it.”

Nina’s face was blotchy; the rims of her eyes were a pale red. Even I could see that color.

“I can paint the room and you can watch me,” I said.

“We can paint tomorrow,” Nina suggested. “At least there’s time for that.”

We sat there in the dark, holding hands. And then I knew the answer to my question.

This is what it was.

II

As soon as it was strong enough, I set the mole free in the yard at dusk. I put it on the grass near the hedge and it disappeared. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. I suppose this was familiar territory, the scent of the hibiscus, the feel of the dried grass. The mole didn’t leave any tracks; it just vanished.

I thought about the way old blind women in stories found their lost loves and recognized them even though fifty or a hundred years had passed, even if their husbands or lovers had been turned into stags or monsters. I thought about how the familiar imprinted itself on you — a hedge, a scent, a touch. If someone had taken a photograph of Lazarus and me together and pinned it to a wall, anyone who’d seen it would have thought,
They aren’t meant for each other. They don’t belong together
. So we didn’t take any photographs. I had questioned how it was possible for this man to love me all along, but I had finally begun to understand the reason: I knew him. If he came to me as a bear or a deer, I would still know him. If I were blind, if it was at dusk, if a hundred years had passed, I’d still know.

That couldn’t be taken away, despite ruin, despite time.

That night I drove out and we went walking through the orchard in the dark. During the day, the workers Lazarus had hired called to one another and the picking machinery was noisy. But at night you could hear every breath, every beetle.

I told Lazarus about my brother. I looked for blame everywhere: if we’d never lived in New Jersey, if we’d breathed different air, if he’d had a different diet, had never come to Florida, if we’d had different parents, grandparents, a different genetic makeup, maybe his cancer wouldn’t have happened. There was another, earlier theory my brother had told me about, the uncertainty principle, a theorem that predated and informed chaos theory. The simple fable to illustrate it explains that a cat will live or die depending on the utterly random decay of a single atom. And so it was for Ned. One cell affected another; one bloody random cell utterly defined everything. Why it should happen to him, it was impossible to know. There were not hundreds of possible answers, but thousands. All unknowable and random. All out of reach.

“What do I do for him?” I asked Lazarus. I thought a dead man would know such things.

Lazarus laughed. He rarely did. “You’d have to ask him. It’s different for everyone.”

“If you had a few weeks to live, how would you want to live it?”

I wanted him to say,
Like this, walking with you in the dark.
I wanted him to help me through, but Lazarus wasn’t like that. It wasn’t his fault. He was too trapped in his own life to really think about someone else’s.

“If it was me, I’d want to be free. Like I used to be. I thought my life was nothing, until I lost it. If people knew who I am, they’d want to know what happened to Seth, and I doubt they’d believe me. They’d think I killed him, took his money. So here I am. Stuck.”

Trapped in the wrong shoes, in the woods where every path led back to the exact same place. I understood how Lazarus might want to be in his own skin again. This wasn’t his life. That was why I wanted to remember everything about this night. I was going to lose it, all of it, I could tell standing there. Sooner or later. Ruin. I looked at every leaf, every star.

“I think I’ll be found out anyway,” Lazarus said. “I think people are starting to realize I’m not the right Seth Jones.”

The feedstore had balked the last time he’d tried to make a transaction over the phone. Why didn’t he ever come in to place his order? He’d had to talk to the manager, who had known the real Seth Jones and who said, “What’s wrong with you, Jonesy? Frog in your throat?”

“Flu, damn near pneumonia,” Lazarus had answered. But he was worried. The year of their bargain had passed. Come and gone. He’d been thinking about leaving, and now he thought harder. Maybe he would already be gone if he hadn’t made a promise to the old man. If I hadn’t driven out, wearing that red dress. Filled my mouth with ice and kissed him.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn’t that the point? Happily ever after doesn’t mean happy forever. The
ever after,
what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?

So now. So here. So him. The heat, the black night, the stars, the moment, the
ever after
floating inside of us.

There was something wrong with the crop. That was the other reason he didn’t feel right about taking off. He led me out to the place where lightning had struck. A few cars passed on the road, but no one paid any attention. We were a man and a woman walking through the past. The hole in the ground had widened greatly, the earth was falling in on itself, inch by inch, revealing a rocky, hard core. At the outer circle more and more trees were dying. One day they were filled with fruit, the next they were leafless and black.

Around the circle, there were still a few trees with red oranges. Now I saw it. Not icefruit or snowballs, but ruby red. Red worlds, red globes, beautiful in the dark. How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.

“I want to pick some,” I said.

We took one of the ladders and set it against a tree; I climbed up and tossed the oranges to Lazarus.

“Enough,” he said. “We’ll never eat them all.”

But I couldn’t stop. More and more. I’d been starving; not anymore.

It was a cool night, but these oranges kept in heat. Little globes of burning sunlight. We carried the basket together. For this one night, in love, in love. Everything meant something to us. Black sky, black trees, red oranges, sweet smell of the earth, the heat when he whispered to me, the sound of our feet on the dirt paths, the sprinkler system switching on, water falling.

We took off our clothes in the orchard and went under the sprinklers. In the night air, under water, we could embrace each other any way we wanted to. There was no one for miles around. No one else at all. I loved the way he felt, so real, so
here,
so
now.
I loved his muscles under his skin, the heat from his body, the way his kisses burned. I loved the way it hurt, the way it made me know I was alive,
now
and in the
ever after,
seeing red, wanting to go down on my hands and knees, not caring if there was another person in the universe. No wonder people did this however and with whomever; with strangers, in parking lots, desperate, greedy; joined together, you can imagine you’re not alone, the only one. So different, because when you are in love, that’s the joke: you feel your aloneness so deeply it hurts.
When I’m not with you
.

“Stop thinking,” Lazarus said to me.

I was freezing, without clothes, soaked by all that cold water, the sprinklers, the starlight, the
now,
the
now
.

I kissed him and let the rest fall away. He sat on the ground, pulled me down. I was in his lap with him inside me, able to look right into his eyes, the way they were like ashes. I ran my hands down his back. I felt everything. There wasn’t another man, shadowgraph or not. It was just him. Skin, muscles, bones, heart, blood, red, heat.

I just let go. I gave up, gave in: I stopped fighting being alive.

It was the time I would remember, more than the fish, tub, ice, pond, fast, hard, slow, baby; it was this, drowning while I knew he was thinking about leaving. We were a human example of chaos theory, thrown together by circumstance. We didn’t belong together, I knew that. But for one night we were perfect.

When we went back to the house I took a hot shower. I was shivering, even when I got dry and had dressed. I took a sweater from the bureau drawer in the bedroom, then went into the kitchen. Lazarus was wearing the clothes he’d had on before; he still had mud on him. He was sitting at the table. He looked at me when I came into the room. I could tell from his expression that there was always a price to pay. The ruin. The sorrow. The
ever after
.

“Without you I would have been completely alone,” he said.

I looked at his mouth, the bones of his face, his ashy eyes, his wide hands, and the way his veins roped through his arms. Blue and red. Alive. I looked hard. I wanted to remember that he’d wanted me once. I put this moment into the
ever after,
the core of everything I’d ever known.

He had cut all of the oranges I’d picked in half. It looked as though there was blood on the table, but it was only juice. These were the oranges that had been bringing the most profit at market. People liked how rare they were, the splash of color in a fruit bowl, in their mouths. He’d been getting double the price, but not anymore.

The ones he’d cut in half were black in the center. All that sweet red fruit that tasted like a surprise, that was gone. The oranges were rotting from the inside out. I’d heard about such occurrences. A tree that had been hit would stand for months and no one would guess it was dying at its center until it fell to the ground. Effects took time; you looked away, you thought you were safe, then they happened. Before you knew it, everything had changed.

The story is always about searching for the truth, no matter what it might bring. Even when nothing was what it appeared to be, when everything was hidden, there was a center not even I could run from: who I truly was, what I felt, what I was deep inside.