The Melting Queen

by Bruce Cinnamon

  “Olechka’s pretty horrible, isn’t she? I mean it’s fun to play the most stereotypical Edmontonian possible—especially because most people are idiots and don’t realize that I’m making fun of their bullshit—but I’m still horrified. I didn’t think I had it in me to be the darling of these paleoconservatives. Believe me, I regret having to act like such a transphobe. It disgusts me. But if this is what I have to do to make some real changes to this shitheap of a city, then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll play Birch’s game for as long as I have to—he really hates you, I think he offered me the job just to spite you—because in the end the people of Edmonton deserve a Melting Queen who challenges the established order and fixes real problems, not just yet another figurehead who works on some decorative project.”

  “This isn’t about Edmonton,” I say. “This is about you, just like it’s always been. You don’t care about ‘the people’ at all. You don’t have any empathy.”

  “Oh come on River,” she rolls her eyes. “You know just as well as I do that you shouldn’t be the Melting Queen. You didn’t even want this job! And when someone shows up who actually wants to do this, then you have a change of heart? I’m giving you an out. I’m doing what you’ve wanted me to do from the start. That’s why you came to me first, and not Sander or anyone else. You know that I should do this, that I need this, and that you need to give it up.”

  A deeply concerned, sympathetic smile replaces the humour on Odessa’s face. Her emotions seem so manufactured, just like my mother’s always are. Was Odessa always this fake? Was she always putting on an act, trying to manipulate her audience? I don’t know how I never saw it before.

  “I don’t want to humiliate you,” she says, knitting her brows in a practised way that makes me want to rip her wig off. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I am really disgusted by some of the things that I have to say about you as I play Olechka Stepanchuk. It would be better for you to just step gracefully aside and not get in the way. Honestly, I think this is what’s best for both of us. We both know I’m going to beat you if we ever get to a vote.”

  “I don’t know how I was ever friends with you,” I say. “That’s how bad this is. I look at you and I can’t even see a trace of that person I used to like.”

  Odessa glances at her grandfather, who has rediscovered his butterscotch pudding and is wiping a dab of it off his vest.

  “So your plan was to come here and ambush me?” she says. “Which would make me realize the error of my ways?’

  Odessa is smiling wide again, as if this is all some big joke. I realize that I’m never going to get through to her by arguing with her. She thrives off confrontation.

  I take a deep breath and set my hands down on the tabletop. I look into Odessa’s eyes and feel my cheeks heat up as I force myself to say it.

  “You know I’ve always envied you. You know that, right?”

  It makes me ashamed to admit it. But this is my confession, to this false Melting Queen.

  “I always wanted your life. To be as bold and fearless and shameless as you, to travel the world like you do. But now the tables have finally turned and I’m the one who has something and you’re the one who’s jealous. I have one good thing. I didn’t like it at first. I didn’t want it. But now I know that it’s what I have to do. For Clodagh. It’s important to me. And as soon as you saw that, you decided to take it from me. Because I have to be your little audience and that’s all I’m allowed to be.”

  I look at Sander, whose eyes flick nervously between me and Odessa.

  “That was always the unspoken agreement between the three of us, wasn’t it? Sander and I would be your perfect audience and applaud you, and you would be the dazzling spectacle. You’d do dangerous, impressive things and we would gasp with delight and save you when you got in trouble. No matter how many other people got hurt, we would always be safe. We were always exempt from the chaos, shielded from the bomb we helped set off. But not anymore.”

  I look down at the table, shake my head in frustration.

  “You have everything, Odessa. Everything. Why do you have to have this too?”

  Odessa stares at me for a long time, smile frozen on her face. Then she turns and takes a napkin and wets it with her tongue and wipes at the pudding stain on her grandfather’s sweater.

  “Alright,” she says. “Fine. You’re right. I’m being really shitty to you. I’m letting these old conservative people tell me what to do. I’m opportunistic. I’m exploiting the situation to my own ends, and ultimately all I want is publicity and attention. I’m a terrible person. Is that what you want me to say?”

  Sander looks back and forth between us, holding his breath, a biscuit held forgotten in his fingers. I can tell that he’s hoping we’re on the cusp of a ceasefire.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t want you to say something just because you think I want to hear it. I want you to tell the truth. I want some honesty for once.”

  I look at Ludlow Spetnik, Odessa’s only point of vulnerability. He’s been picking at the scab on the back of his hand, totally engrossed, ignoring all of us.

  “Why don’t you tell him what you’ve been telling everyone? About your loving parents and your gorgeous husband. About your sudden love for Edmonton—a place you never seemed to give a shit about before last week.”

  Odessa’s smile has hardened on her face. She’s adopting it as a defensive posture now, clinging to her “I’m-above-all-this” humour. But I can tell I’m finally getting through to her.

  “Lie to him,” I say. “Lie to his face.”

  Odessa’s rigid smirk remains, but she blinks a few times as she looks at her grandfather.

  “But I do lie to him,” she says. “I have to lie to him.” Her voice cracks and she looks away. She pauses, takes a breath, then forces a smile and looks back at Ludlow Spetnik.

  “Gido,” she says, placing her hand gently over her grandfather’s. “The nurse said you should not scratch at that. Or it will never get well.”

  “Ah, Alina!” Ludlow looks up and smiles at Odessa, then glances at Sander and I. “These people, they are friends of yours?”

  “No, Gido. They used to be but not anymore.”

  “Why you say ‘Gido?’” he asks, grinning bemusedly. “Your Gido, he is not living through the dark time you know. He is still in Ukrayina, beneath the ground.”

  “No, Gido. That was Alina’s grandfather. I am Alina’s daughter. So you are my Gido. You are my grandfather.”

  Ludlow frowns at Odessa, wets his chapped lips with his tongue, stares at her for several long seconds.

  “You are not Alina?” he says, his voice laced with doubt.

  “No, Gido. I am Odessa,” she says. “Alina was my mother. You are my Gido.”

  She pats her grandfather’s hand reassuringly, but he draws it back from her, frowning in confusion.

  “Where is Alina? You are Alina. I know you, I know your face. My dochka. My Alinushka.”

  “No Gido,” repeats Odessa, softly but firmly. “I am Odessa. Alina was my mother.”

  “You are not Alina? Where is Alina?”

  “Alina is dead Gido,” says Odessa. “We buried her. Beneath the ground. You just don’t remember.”

  Ludlow stares at his granddaughter with disbelief written across his face. Then his sagging skin crumples and he lets out a low groan and looks down at the table.

  Odessa turns back to me, and this time she doesn’t bother to hide her pain and sadness.

  “I am my mother,” she says. “When I am here, I am Alina. Because he doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t remember that I was ever born.”

  She turns back to her grandfather, who’s rubbing his dribbling nose with the back of his hand. She pulls his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and offers it to him.

  “So I lie,” she says quietly, turning back to me. “Because otherwise I have to have this conversation every time, a dozen times. And hurt him every time.”

  Her eyes shimme
r with tears and she wipes them away angrily.

  “So don’t say that I don’t have any empathy. That I don’t care about my family. Because I do. And don’t say that I have everything and you have nothing. Because you have a family, you have a whole community of your university friends, even if you’ve chosen to cast them all aside. This is all the family I have. I do everything I can to keep it safe, but I know that any day I’m going to see the nursing home number on my phone, and they’re going to tell me that I don’t have a family anymore.”

  Our eyes meet and I see her in there for the first time, huddling behind her bravado. I know she’s surprised too—she didn’t ever want to show that to anyone and here it is. I open my mouth but I don’t know what to say. I feel my hand sliding across the table towards her.

  Her pupils swell and consume me and everything is blackness.

  All the grown-ups look angry. I stand in front of them on the hill and they look at me like I did something bad. I know they’re supposed to put the flowers on my head soon and I’m supposed to sit on that old tree stump. But they all look so mean. So angry.

  I’m scared. I want to go back to mummy but I’m not supposed to. I’m supposed to say some special words but I don’t remember what they are.

  One of the grown-ups shouts something, and then they’re turning their backs one by one. They’re not leaving the park, they’re just standing there. Facing away from me. Because I’m the wrong one. I shouldn’t be here. I made a mess of everything.

  I feel a wave of nausea strike me and I see Sander Fray’s face looming over mine. I’m mesmerized by the blackness of his eyes and the yellow shirt he’s wearing and the painful brightness of the ceiling light. I’ve never noticed the details of Sander’s face like this: the tiny blackheads that pepper his nose, the chip in one tooth, the couple stray hairs that he failed to shave off at the corner of his mouth.

  “What happened?” he asks. “Who were you?”

  I look around me. I’m lying in a hospital bed.

  “Where am I? How long was I out? Where’s Odessa? Where’s her grandfather?”

  “You’re still at the nursing home. We had to move you.”

  “And Odessa?”

  “She’s gone. Ludlow is back in his room. But Isobel let us stay here until you woke up.”

  “What are you talking about? Who’s Isobel?”

  Sander looks toward the armchair in the corner, where what I thought was an old orange blanket is thrown across the faded flower-print brocade. But now I see that my eyes lied to me. It’s an old woman, as tiny and thin as anyone I’ve ever seen.

  “You asked me why I was here,” says Sander. “I came here to visit her. River Runson, meet Isobel Fraser. Melting Queen number eight.”

  The old woman raises a couple fingers in greeting. She looks like E.T.

  “I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” she says. Her voice is thin and strained, but she sounds happy. “I never thought you’d come to see me.”

  I prop myself up against the headboard, and Sander sits back down on the end of the bed.

  “I’ve been coming to visit Isobel since I decided to write a book about the Melting Queens and their Intrusions,” he says. “There are countless stories about the Melting Queens performing miracles: summoning rains in times of drought, turning back crop-destroying hail storms, bringing dead people back to life. ECHO and Birch want everyone to think that the Melting Queen is magical, a goddess in human form. So why does nobody know about the Intrusions? It’s a whole chapter of our history that’s been covered up. And I’m going to find out why. I’m interviewing every Melting Queen who’s still alive. People deserve to know the truth. If ECHO won’t tell this story, then I will.”

  Sander looks to Isobel, who squints at us through her thick glasses.

  “Isobel has been helping me. She’s kept an eye on all the Melting Queens over the years, and she’s almost as old as the tradition itself. She just turned one hundred and ten. We celebrated her birthday last Wednesday.”

  “It was lovely,” says Isobel. “The cake was heavenly. They say I’m not supposed to have so much sugar. But I say: ‘I’m a hundred and ten, I can eat whatever I want.’ And Sander brought me this wonderful gift, here, let me show you.”

  Isobel reaches for a photo album on the table beside her, but it’s too heavy for her to lift. Sander hops up and opens the album for her, placing it in her lap so she can flip through its pages. Isobel looks up at Sander with such palpable affection, and I feel a pang of bittersweet happiness for both of them.

  “Come and see,” says Isobel, so I get up off the bed and perch on her chair’s armrest.

  “Sander took all my old photos and organized them. I just had them in drawers and in boxes, I never took the time to arrange them all nicely like this. Look, there’s me when I was crowned as Melting Queen.”

  She’s standing on the hill in Coronation Park, a shy-looking girl in blurry black-and-white.

  “Isobel was Named when she was four years old,” says Sander.

  “I was you,” I say. “Just now, when I had the Intrusion. It was your coronation. Everyone turned their backs on you.”

  “They hated me at first,” says Isobel. “They all said I would lead the city to its doom. Because I was from the wrong side of the river.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Edmonton used to be two cities,” says Sander. “The City of Edmonton was on the north side of the river and the City of Strathcona was on the south side.”

  Isobel laughs creakily.

  “Everybody in Edmonton was so angry,” she says. “Melting Day was their tradition. Not ours. We could come across the river and celebrate, just like the people who started coming up from Calgary. But we were visitors. We were guests. We weren’t part of their sacred tribe.”

  She touches the old photo of herself, in her coronation best.

  “My project was to unite Edmonton and Strathcona into one. We had a referendum, which everybody thought we would lose because everyone was so furious.”

  She turns over the page and I see another photo of her, noticeably bigger, riding a horse down Jasper Avenue.

  “But we won. And then we weren’t two cities anymore. We were one city, with a river running through it.”

  She brushes her fingers across a couple other photos on the page, a man and a woman who I assume are her parents, then sighs and closes the photo album. Sander helps her lift it up and put it back on the table. I go back to Isobel’s bed and sit down on the end, watching as Sander brings the old Melting Queen another blanket.

  Just like with Victoria and Iris and Clodagh, I can feel my connection to Isobel. As she moves her frail arms and slowly pulls the blanket up over herself, I feel it covering me too. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I feel as small and light as a feather, as if a strong gust of wind could blow me away. And, just like the others, I feel the weariness, the deep-seated fatigue.

  “What did you do after you were Melting Queen?” I ask. “What was your life like?”

  “Oh,” says Isobel, “it wasn’t a special life. I went to school, I was a secretary for a while, then I got married and had a family.”

  She places her hand back on the photo album but doesn’t open it.

  “I had some problems with my health,” she says after a moment. “Well, I guess nowadays you’d say, I had some problems with depression. I wasn’t a good wife. I wasn’t a good mother. I did my best, but it wasn’t good enough.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” I say. “And I’m sure your family loves you, no matter what. They probably told you as much at your birthday last week, right?”

  Isobel sighs and looks out the window.

  “All of them are dead,” she says. “My husband, my children, my granddaughter. They all died, and I just kept living. I’m the only one left.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, not knowing what else to say.

  “You know, before Sander came, no one had been to visit me in twenty-th
ree years.”

  Isobel smiles sadly at Sander. He takes her hand in his and gives it a gentle squeeze. It feels like a deep, loving hug from an old friend you haven’t seen in years.

  “It makes no sense to me that Birch and ECHO would just abandon Isobel here,” he says. “She’s such a valuable source of information. She remembers everything. But nobody has ever come to ask her anything.”

  “Until you,” says Isobel, smiling at Sander. She looks at me. “And you’re the first Melting Queen who’s visited me since Alma Lake, back in the early ’50s. I’ve been watching the Melting Queens for a hundred years, but I’ve only met five.”

  “Victoria Goulburn told me that none of the Melting Queens would ever agree to a reunion, because our connection made things too uncomfortable,” I say.

  “That may be true,” says Isobel. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looks at me like she’s peering into my soul.

  “There’s something rotten at the heart of Melting Day,” she says. “I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been watching the Queens for a hundred years, and I’ve seen it over and over. Being the Melting Queen changes you, makes you less than you were before.”

  I feel the hairs rise along the back of my neck, a familiar sense of panic swelling up in me from somewhere deep below the surface. Sander nods in grim agreement with Isobel.

  “I’ve been visiting the Melting Queens one after another,” he says, “interviewing them and learning about their lives. I’ve met divorced Melting Queens and depressed Melting Queens and even one homeless Melting Queen. Some of them go on to brighter and better things after their terms are done. But most of them retreat from public life and struggle to recover from the intense psychological double whammy of Intrusions and Confessions.”

  “I don’t want to blame being Melting Queen for every problem I had,” says Isobel. “But not a day goes by where I don’t wonder what my life would’ve been had I not been Named. Whether I would’ve had a normal, happy life. And I had it quite easy as Melting Queen. Edmonton didn’t like me at first, but by the end of my term everyone was on my side. That hasn’t been true for everyone.”