Alice Hoffman

by The Ice Queen

  “You’re sorry that you disappeared and never bothered to write? Or you’re sorry that you never gave a shit about me and how I felt?”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted.”

  “As opposed to now.”

  I laughed. Maybe he did know me.

  “So, what is it you want to talk about?” Jack went on. “Or let me guess. What did we always have in common? Oh, yeah. Death.”

  He sounded different, or maybe I’d never listened to him before. Maybe those times in his car and in the parking lot weren’t exactly what I’d thought they were. Maybe he’d noticed the ice, the stones, the way I believed I deserved to be hurt.

  “Are you making fun of me?” I wasn’t used to feeling this way when I talked to him. It had been a long time, after all.

  “Hey, baby, I am Mr. Death. Ask me your questions.”

  I’d called to ask him about Lazarus, about how I could help him if he was accused of murder. Should I help him flee, or tell him to stand up to everyone? But as it turned out, that’s not what I really wanted to know.

  I hesitated. That wasn’t like me, I was overwhelmed with feeling.

  “Go on. Shoot,” Jack said. “Make it a good one. Give me a what-if.”

  So I did. I made it the only one.

  “What if your brother is dying and you can’t stop it. What do you do?”

  All I could hear were the trucks. The gears grinding. So many people going somewhere. I was standing in a gas station in the middle of the night in Florida. It was as though I’d never talked to anyone before. I could hear Jack breathing. I wanted to cry. I’d never even really given him a chance. Dealing with so much death had given him the ability to find logic in an irrational world.

  “You help him find something that makes him feel that he still wants to be alive. Only thing to do.”

  “Maybe you should have been the one at the reference desk.”

  I could have been anywhere on earth. I was that lost.

  “Not me,” Jack said. “It was always you.”

  When I got home, I knew someone was there. Giselle was on the lawn and I had left her inside. There was a spare key under my mailbox. Not very hard to find; when I slid my hand under the metal, it was no longer there. I crouched down beside the cat and rubbed under her chin and left her out a while longer. She didn’t hate me as much, or maybe she’d grown used to me. Lazarus was asleep on the couch, one foot planted on the floor. He looked young, and tired, like a man who’d hitchhiked and walked all night. I locked all the doors, unplugged the phone. He had a duffel bag with him, which I took into the kitchen. You shouldn’t do these things, I know, but I did it anyway. I unzipped the bag, looked through it. I suppose I was just making sure he was who I thought he was. There were some clothes, a wallet with a few hundred in cash, a plane ticket to Italy, a passport with Seth Jones’s name and Lazarus’s photo; at the very bottom I found the wooden box filled with ashes.

  I replaced everything and put on some coffee. I got a new bag of coffee beans from the freezer, and I noticed the electricity must have gone out sometime during the night. My house was a mess. I’d paid no attention to it; but then, I’d never felt as though it belonged to me. I’d never really lived here. The closest thing to something familiar, something that belonged to me, were the few pieces of Renny’s Doric temple still on the table. Giselle liked to play with the columns, batting them around until they fell on the floor.

  I went to the back door to call her in now, but she wouldn’t come. I had to go to her, out by the hedge. The sky was inky. The center of the horizon was the color of the bats I’d seen in pure daylight, deep blue, streaks of black and purple. When I bent down I saw that Giselle had gotten Renny’s mole. I recognized it because of the bite out of its ear. We’d tried to save him and we couldn’t. The little pet who had cheated death; it wasn’t moving now.

  “Bad girl,” I scolded Giselle.

  I sat cross-legged and picked up the mole and held him in the palm of my hand.

  By the time Lazarus woke up I had buried the mole, made coffee, and telephoned my sister-in-law. My brother was still recovering from our trek to see the Dragon, but he was happy that we’d gone. Ever since, he’d been dreaming of bats and butterflies, Nina told me. He was writing a paper on chaos theory in fairy tales. He was writing like mad, up half the night. Things had become clear to him and he wanted to get it all down before it was too late. The tiniest action, the smallest creature, the most minute decision had huge ramifications. One mole dies, one is saved, only to die again. One word is spoken aloud and the world changes. An arm becomes a wing, a beast becomes a man, a girl is silent for a hundred years — frozen in place and in time — a young man has to search the world before he discovers who he really is.

  I lay down beside Lazarus on the couch. His eyes opened. Ashes to ashes. They were so dark.

  “Hey,” he said to me. He was about to embrace me, kiss me, then he thought better of it. “I’ll burn you.”

  I shook my head. I remembered what the Dragon had told us about fire. I handed Lazarus two cloves of garlic that I’d peeled in the kitchen. “The remedy,” I told him.

  Another man might have questioned me, might have failed the test. Lazarus looked at me, then ate the garlic. I put my head against his chest. I didn’t feel the same heat from inside him.

  Lazarus had seen the delivery truck from his window and he’d also recognized the driver, Hal Evans. He knew him because they’d had an altercation when they were working together at the feedstore. Hal had come in drunk and had been saying this and that, goading Lazarus. Lazarus had left some bags of fertilizer in the other man’s path and Hal had stumbled. Hal Evans was the worst of all people to come sniffing around the orchard. Maybe he’d heard the rumors the farmworkers had spread, that they worked for a monster, a man who refused to be seen, that there was something not right in the house where all the window shades were drawn.

  Lazarus packed a bag as soon as Hal’s truck pulled out. He’d been waiting for something like this for a while; now he waited for what came next. Later that day, someone he didn’t recognize was talking to the workers in the field. He saw them looking at the house, conversing with the men he employed. That afternoon he walked out the back door. He figured any phone calls he made would be traced, but walking, he knew what that did: it made you a free man.

  Lazarus was shivering, so I covered him with a blanket. The morning was bright. We blinked in the light of it. I told myself not to make a wish, or if I did, if I had to, if I just couldn’t stop myself, then to make one for him. Lazarus fell back asleep; he was exhausted and couldn’t wake up. I wanted to let him dream for as long as he could. He had walked for miles. I looked at him. I could taste the garlic, the cure, the end of everything, the beginning of everything.

  I got dressed and went to the bank. Peggy, my physical therapist, was there on line and she congratulated me on how good I looked. “You worked hard,” she said to me. “The comeback kid.”

  Had I? I suppose I had. Those exercises that made me want to cry, dragging my left side along. It felt almost normal now, only not quite; there was still a metallic feeling along my ribs, around my heart. You couldn’t see it, but it was there, just as surely as Renny’s hands were filled with strands of gold.

  I withdrew everything in my account except for a hundred dollars.

  “Big purchase?” the teller asked me. Everybody knew everybody in this town. Even me.

  I smiled. Very big. I said I wanted cash because I was buying a used car. An old Corvette.

  “I’m jealous,” the teller said.

  I had fifteen thousand dollars left from the sale of my grandmother’s house, but it fit neatly in my backpack.

  “It’s red,” I said.

  “The best,” the teller said to me.

  I walked to the parking lot. There was my Honda. The one with the good tires, the safe tires my brother had chosen before we left New Jersey. When I got home, Lazarus was still asleep. I understood.
He didn’t want to wake up. I sat in a chair. Maybe I cried. I loved him in a way that was over. A way that was the beginning of something. The sort of love that opened you up for more.

  When it was late afternoon I got onto the couch beside him. I whispered that it was time for him to go.

  I won’t, he said.

  You will, I thought. You want to.

  This would be the moment I would never let go of, even though it caused me the greatest pain. When I was old, when I couldn’t walk or talk or see, I would still have this.

  He assumed I was going with him. We’d leave the cat outside and someone would find her, care for her. Wasn’t that the way it went? Cats made their own homes, found their own way. I could send my brother a note, mail it from the road, not until we got where we were going, all those places, Venice and Paris, everywhere I’d ever wanted to go.

  He packed the cash into his duffel bag. I watched his hands. I couldn’t look at anything else.

  This was what it was. The ruin of it. The depth of it. Have it once and you can have it again. That’s the riddle. That’s the truth.

  ***

  Lazarus took a shower, drank iced coffee, had a bowl of cold tomato soup. It was humid outside and when the day was over, the night was sticky hot. It was late when we left and the sky was dark. We drove to Jacksonville, on the side roads. I knew the way there. A place where no one would recognize us. We drove for an hour, then two. It seemed that we were going somewhere together. His hand on me as I drove. I could feel him, but it wasn’t enough. He should have known I wasn’t going with him: he should have noticed I left the cat in the house, something I would have never done if I hadn’t been coming back. I wasn’t somebody who left that way.

  I took him to the bus station. All he needed to do was find someone who could change the date of birth on his passport and then he’d be Seth Jones. But for now, he needed to get out of Florida. I bought one ticket for the next bus; it was headed to Atlanta.

  We sat at the bus station together till five in the morning. That was when the bus was leaving. And here’s the thing: We didn’t look at each other. We didn’t beg each other for anything. We’d already given each other all that we had.

  “So, this is the way it ends,” he said.

  People around us were sleeping. They had their own stories; they weren’t listening to us. There was a child in a red sweater in her mother’s arms. There was the sun through the dirty foggy window.

  Not at all, I thought. This is the way it begins.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Brother and Sister

  I

  We knew it was getting closer because my brother was dreaming of butterflies. Even in the daytime, he was dreaming. At first the meteorology society had refused to accept his paper, “Chaos Theory and Fairy Tales.” I had to stay with Ned overnight while Nina flew up to speak to the head of the society. When she came back she reported that the decision had been changed.

  By the time Ned went to Washington DC to deliver his paper, he was in a wheelchair; the moderator had to lower the microphone and ask for complete silence so that Ned’s reedy voice could be heard. At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory — if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can’t understand or explain.

  He got a standing ovation, Nina told me. We were setting up the nursery together now that they were back from DC, painting a watercolor mural on the wall. Nina was supposed to take it easy — she had preeclampsia, high blood pressure brought on by pregnancy — but she painted flowers and trees in the baby’s room after she came home from classes. Sometimes Ned would watch us, and then we’d turn around, ready to joke with him, and he’d be asleep. We kept painting. Nina was at work on the sun. My job was the moon.

  Sometimes my brother cried out in his sleep, sometimes he called out.

  “Butterflies,” Nina said. “In his dreams.”

  Nina had dark circles under her eyes. Now, when my brother went to all his medical appointments, they let him have whatever he needed to kill the pain. That should be a good thing, but it’s not, because then you know you’re nearing the end.

  I offered to help out full-time, and Nina let me. They had closed the library, just as Frances had suspected. I had no job and was collecting unemployment benefits. I didn’t think about what I would do when my money ran out. I could always get a job as a cashier at Acres’ Hardware. People would still ask me questions there. Reference me a saw, a hammer, a can of paint, an apron, an anvil. I would learn it all, recite it by heart.

  But for now, I was available. I did the food shopping and the laundry. I felt useful for once. I began to paint butterflies on the wall. I began to dream of them, too. I thought of Lazarus, surely halfway across the world by now. I dreamed of him as well, but only occasionally. I was too busy for that now.

  My brother had started to age, the way ill people do. He was a hundred years old when he slept in his wheelchair; he was breaking our hearts. When he napped, Nina and I sat out on the grass, even when it was hot. There was a hedge of boxwood. We sat in its shade. Nina cried; I watched her. Once, I went into the kitchen to fetch some ice water for Nina and found my brother at the window.

  “Do you think we all have something we dream of doing?” my brother said. At that moment he was perfectly alert.

  I sat down at the table. “Such as?”

  “The thousands of monarch butterflies. In migration. The thousands of changes. All chaos. All one moment. That’s what I’ve always wanted to see. I want to see that.”

  He sounded upset. I’d never heard my brother want something quite so deeply, so much. This was far beyond his desire to see the old man in Jacksonville. That was a lark; this was the heart of the matter. The end of his life.

  We hadn’t heard, but Nina had come in, looking for me. She was still crying, but she looked like stone, the way she had when I spied her in the yard. There were bits of grass on her clothes. She smelled like boxwood and evergreen. She was stronger than you’d think. She simply didn’t give away who she was to just anyone. She probably started to plan it out then. When she heard his dream.

  A nurse came in once a week while I went with Nina to her Lamaze classes at the health center at the university. The other women were younger, graduate students, wives of young professors, two lesbian couples. Everyone seemed so sure of the future. They had potluck dinners together on the weekends. We never went to those. Maybe everyone thought Nina and I were a couple. I suppose for those hours of class we were.

  “She’s the best breather in the class,” I told Ned.

  “Of course. Naturally.” He was proud of her. He was in love with her. But he was also in the process of leaving. He often sat at the window and stared at the yard and I wasn’t quite certain he was seeing what we were seeing.

  I did get a card from Seth Jones. The postmark was Florence, so he’d made it there. He wrote, Plan to take the ashes to Venice. Wish you were here. SJ.

  I didn’t. I wanted to be exactly where I was, sitting with my brother in the afternoons, fixing dinner and washing up afterward, playing cards with Nina in the evenings. One day a package arrived for my brother; it was a bathrobe, sent by Jack Lyons.

  “Who the hell is Jack Lyons?” Ned asked. He liked the bathrobe but felt odd accepting a gift from a stranger.

  “You went to high school wit
h him in Red Bank. And I used to sleep with him.”

  “He has good taste,” Ned said.

  “Shut up.”

  “I meant in bathrobes.”

  Jack knew what the dying needed. He was far more of an expert than I’d ever been. Even when I didn’t contact him, he continued to send my brother gifts. As for Ned, he’d started to wait for the packages. Look forward to them. One week there was a tape of birdcalls that my brother liked to have played while he napped. Another time there were two pairs of heavy woolen socks. And then came a huge box of fudge, the old-fashioned kind. My brother couldn’t eat it, but he loved the smell.

  At last I called New Jersey. “You don’t have to send my brother anything,” I told Jack.

  “I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he said back.

  There wasn’t much of an answer for that.

  “He loves the birdsong tape. And the fudge.”

  I was glad it was impossible for Jack to see me. I was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Giselle curled on my lap. I had all the lights turned off to cut down on my electricity bills. I had recently applied for a job at Acres’ Hardware Store, only to be told I was unqualified.

  I had my hand over the phone receiver. I was crying.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Jack said.

  “You’re such an expert.” I sounded snotty and bitter and desperate.

  “About some things. Most people cry for good reason. Most people smile for good reasons, too.”

  The next package he sent contained wind chimes. My brother had us put them up by the window. He smiled whenever he heard them. It was a gift for my brother, but it was also a message to me. There was something still worth having in his world.

  “Did I know this guy Jack?” Ned asked. He was at the point of repeating all of our conversations. His memory was gone, and the here and now was going as well.

  “No,” I said. “Nobody did.”