Under Shifting Glass (16 page)

“But they're going to do it later?” I say. “As soon as everyone's there?”

“No,” says Si. “They're going to delay it. They have to have everyone and they have to start on time. Can't start late and work through the night. It's a long, long process, Jess.”

“But what about Clem?” I burst out.

“He's stabilized, much to everyone's astonishment. Didn't I say that? That's the good news, Jess.”

Of course he has, because of the building, because of not destroying, but . . . but . . .

“When's it going to be—the operation—when's it going to be?”

“Tomorrow,” says Si. “We hope.”

“The snow babies!” I cry.

“What?” says Si.

“The snow babies have to last another twenty-four hours!”

“What are you talking about?” says Si.

I'm talking about marching straight to the park and standing over the snow babies with Si's large socket wrench. If anyone comes within a foot of them . . .

But what if they just melt? What if the God that let Clem's candle gutter in the church just parts the clouds and the sun comes out? What then? I rush to the window. No sign of a thaw. On our garden table the snow is still piled four inches deep at least. And it's cold, bitingly cold. Even Gran, who likes to tell you that she was a War Baby, and War Babies know about hardship, is standing next to the stove with a gas ring lit to provide the warmth that the heater seems to be struggling to achieve.

I go straight upstairs and get dressed so fast I forget the flask. I don't put on my shoes because I'm going to be
wearing boots, and I'm down to the porch in less than two minutes.

But so is Gran.

“And what exactly do you think you're doing?”

“I'm going out.” I just have to be there, with the snow babies. That's all there is to it. I will defend them to the death.

To the life.

“Have you gone crazy?”

Yes. I think so.

“Did you listen to anything I said last night?”

Yes. All of it.

“You will be ill. You are ill.”

“I am not ill.”

“You will be ill if you don't stay in today. You need to rest.”

“I don't need to rest. I can't rest.”

“Besides,” says Gran, “you haven't had breakfast.”

I don't take on the breakfast issue. I just say, “No one stays in when it snows, Gran. Everyone goes out. They play.”

“You played last night,” says Gran grimly. And then she takes the large brass key that fits the bottom lock on our front door, the deadbolt, and slots it in. She turns her wrist with something like triumph.

She is locking me in.

She is locking me into my own house.

“You can't do that,” I say.

“Can't I?” she replies, and she drops the key in the pocket of her apron.

There's only one thing to do—I'll have to make a run for it. I don't have time for a jacket, I don't have time for boots, or a scarf, or a hat, or gloves. I just run, in my socks, down the hall and through the kitchen and I unlock the back door (which does not have a deadbolt) and I tear out into the garden—nearly stopping immediately as my feet land in the freezing wet snow—and around the side of the house and into the street.

“No!” shouts Gran.

But she isn't even close to being behind me.

Running isn't exactly an option, what with the thick wet of the snow and the surprisingly hard and uneven sidewalk below, but I'm still moving fast. As fast as I can. At the bottom of the cul-de-sac I pass the ice mermaid. Her proud, beautiful head and carved ice eyes watch me pass. She is intact, so the snow babies must be, too.

I'm glad for my jeans and my shirt and thick fleece hoodie, but my feet are already in pain and so are my hands. The wind is managing to find the gap around my throat and send icy blasts down my chest, but I just stumble on, not caring. At least the speed is helping, the stumble-running is warming my core, that space around my heart.

I pass the electrical junction box at the edge of the park. It's still humming, though you can hardly hear it over the
shouts and yells and laughter coming from the park. The park is full of brightly colored people shrieking as they speed down slopes on sleds and tin trays and flattened cardboard boxes. There are mothers and fathers and tiny children all muffled up and dogs barking. One little gray dog has a series of tiny snowballs attached to all four paws which he's trying, in vain, to bite off. I think I recognize some people from school at the top of the hill by the chestnut tree, though everyone is twice their normal size in ski jackets and snow boots. Closer to me, in the playground, a child is eating snow from a swing and being reprimanded.

It's all so very ordinary.

Most people are busy with what they are doing, but some turn as I pass and one child even points, maybe because I'm stumble-running still, maybe because I don't look dressed for the snow.

Soon I'm at the bowling green. I can no longer feel my feet. I think they have joined some other body. Or maybe they've become part of the frozen earth; they certainly don't seem to be mine anymore. My head takes no responsibility for them. Or for my hands.

The gate of the bowling green is wide open.
No Dogs. No Games
.

It doesn't say anything about the Sidewalk Crack Game.

There are four dogs in the area and a huge snowball fight in progress, right at the center of which is beach-ball-grinning Paddy. Sam is with him, and Alice. And also Em. Em is back.

Do I care?

No. I don't care about Em or Alice. I don't even care about Zoe, who now I see is crouching, face to the ground, gathering snow. Whether Zoe's smiling, whether she's read the letter—it all seems totally unimportant. The only thing that matters now is the babies. Protecting them.

You can't see the bench from the gate, so I know nothing until I turn in and pass the shivering palm tree.

There they are: Snow Richie, Snow Clem, just as I left them.

No, not just as I left them. They are slightly more slumped, slightly closer together, their little heads gone crystalline.

I will sit with them all day if I have to.

All night. All day again. As long as it takes.

“Jess, is that you? Jess. Jess!” Em is coming over. “Yay—Jess!”

“Hey, what's with the footwear, Jess?” Paddy is coming, too.

“Bombs away,” shouts Zoe. Now she's looking up, standing up, and she is smiling, widely, broadly. Grinning like a
lunatic. She lobs a snowball at Paddy, which catches him right on the side of his head.

“Hey!” he yells. He's less than an arm's length away from me, and to retaliate, I think he's just going to bend down and scoop snow from beneath his feet. But he doesn't. He's in a rush so he just leans forward and grabs Clem's already neatly balled head.

“No!” I scream.

But he's already done it. He's taken Clem's head and he's lobbing it at Zoe. It flies through the air, but his aim is wide and he misses her.

Zoe does her tribal victory dance. She's stamping and yelling and whistling and GRINNING.

“No! No! NO!” I cry.

“What is up with you?” says Paddy.

I could hit him, push him, kill him, put the whole force of my body between him and what remains of the babies. But I do nothing. I just stand there, completely unable to move, staring at headless Clem and also the join. The join—the babies are still joined. Maybe that's enough. Could that be enough? It's my game, my Sidewalk Crack Game; it wouldn't be changing the rules to say,
It's the join that matters, if the join survives, then
 . . .

“Bombs away,” shouts Zoe again. And it's coming at me this time, a huge white ball of snow flying through the air alongside Zoe's ecstatic GRIN. I observe myself stepping aside; I do it instinctively, so as not to be hit.

So the biggest snowball in the world makes a perfect arc over the bowling green and lands smack between the babies, right on the join.

Splitting them asunder.

I don't know why or how I move after that. There is no part of my body I can feel, my bones are solid ice, yet I'm moving.

I brought it on myself, didn't I? The death of Clem, of Zoe and me, of everything I've ever wanted. If I were looking for a message—what could be clearer? Headless Clem. Smashed-up join. If I believe in pictures and symbols and things without words, what more is there to say?

“Jess?” Someone is behind me. It isn't Em or Alice or Paddy. They're all still screeching in the park. “Jess. Jess!” It's Zoe. Screeching Zoe.

Her voice is just one of many because no one's laughing anymore. All the mothers and all the fathers and all the children are screeching, they're screaming, wailing, crying,
their noise like fingernails down a chalkboard in my ears, because there can never be any happiness.

Not now.

Not ever.

“Jess!”

“Leave me alone.”

But she doesn't.

Haven't we played this scene before? Jessica Walton fleeing the park pursued by her friend Zoe? And it doesn't end well. It ends with Jess screaming:
I'll never tell you anything ever again
. Only this time Zoe's still coming.

“It's over. It's all over. Can you see that? I've lost, you've lost, the babies have lost—”

“Lost what?”

“Everything.”

The snow mermaid is still outside Bruno Teisler's garage. It remains proud, beautiful, and intact. I punch that mermaid's head off.

“Jess?” It's difficult to hear Zoe's voice above the screeching, but I do hear it. It's full of horror. And fear. “What's gotten into you?”

“Go away, Zoe. Forget it. Forget everything I wrote in that letter. It's over. Finished.”

Zoe does not go away. “What letter?” she says.

“The one I wrote last night, and put in your mailbox last night.”

“So what if I came out my back door this morning?”

“Did you come out your back door?”

“Why are we even having this conversation? Jess—”

“Just Go Away!”

But she's still right by me when I arrive at my own back door. I expect to see the towering figure of Gran, but there is no Gran. Gran must be wandering the park, the streets. Gran must be saying to every passing stranger:
Have you seen my granddaughter? She's lost. Lost. You must have seen her, she went out without shoes, without boots. Have you seen her? Have you seen her lying in the snow?

I go into the house and Zoe follows.

“Jess, please, tell me, just tell me.”

Zoe is back in my house.

“Whatever it is,” Zoe says, “we can work it out.”

We.

We
can work it out.

“Look, okay, I know I haven't exactly been, well, oh, Jess . . . you know what? You scare me. You're so wrapped up in yourself right now. I can't reach you anymore. I don't know who you are anymore, Jess. Are you hearing me? Jess!”

I'm hearing her and the other noises, the screeching ones, they're getting a little quieter. She's come. She didn't get the letter and she's come. Anyway.

I stop running.

She puts out her hand, touches me on the shoulder.

“Jeez,” she says, “you are so cold.”

She slips off her boots and her jacket and pushes me through to the kitchen.

“How can anyone be that cold?”

I stand there and suddenly, like Roger the Wreck, I just rattle. My teeth rattle, my bones rattle, my mind rattles, and shivers go up and down my body in continuous waves.

“You've got to get warm,” Zoe says, and she tries to hold my hands in hers, but even the faint difference in temperature (Zoe's hands are not warm, but they're warmer than mine) makes me cry out with pain.

“Get those clothes off,” says Zoe. “Get those stupid socks off.”

But I can't bend and my fingers won't work.

She makes me lie down, right there on the kitchen floor, and she pulls at all the wet clothes and still I shiver.

“Rug,” she says. “You need a rug. Where's a rug? No, bed. You'd be better off in bed. Or a bath. Yes, that's it. You should go in the bath.”

I don't resist. I just let her push me up the stairs and I sit on the bathroom stool while she runs the water. I notice I still have my underwear on, but that seems wet through, too.

“Take it off,” she says, nodding at my underwear, and when I just continue to sit there, she comes to help me.

And then I'm naked.

Which is okay.

With Zoe.

“Get in.”

I try my toe in the water and shriek with pain.

“What is it?”

“Too hot.”

She puts her hand in the water, stirs it about. “It's not that hot. It's fine.” But she puts some more cold in anyway. “Maybe your body . . .” She doesn't finish the sentence.

And then I get in. Then I lie in the warmish water and let my body thaw.

Tears well out of my eyes.

“Don't cry,” says Zoe. “Why are you crying?”

And I don't know if it's the warmth of the water or the warmth of
we
, or whether it's just my body giving up, giving in.

“I don't know,” I say.

She sloshes some water over my stomach. “It's not about Easter, is it?” she says. “Or Paddy. It's not about any of that stupid stuff, is it?”

I look right into her mirror eyes.

“Did you like going to the movie with him?”

“With who?”

“Paddy.”

“When did I go to a movie with Paddy?”

“Yesterday. When you couldn't come with me—to the Buddhist Center.”

“Who said I went with Paddy? I went with my cousin—Savvy. I went with my family.”

The water is lap-lap-lapping around my body. Or slap-slap-slapping. Stupid, stupid, stupid Jess. Jumping to conclusions—that's what Si calls it. Sensible people, says Si, do not jump to conclusions.