The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  Henry and I had rested on the porch steps when we walked over here on Saturday. He’d made several circuits of the lighthouse’s granite base, leaning into the brick structure to offset the sloping angle of the base’s topmost molding. I had only seen one ghost that day, on the upper of the two cast-iron balconies that encircled the beacon. I had pointedly ignored him, being preoccupied with thoughts of Henry and Vivi and worried about the presence of a lighthouse keeper, who might not appreciate strangers lounging on his or her steps. But we hadn’t encountered anyone (live). No one seemed to be around.

  Today, though, mesmerized by the sight of forty or fifty earthbound spirits, I barely heard Bert’s voice when he asked, “You want to stop?”

  The ethereal creatures were everywhere: pacing wretchedly on the rocks between the grass and the sea, ambling slowly around the beacon’s cast-iron balconies, lying motionless on the grass, oblivious to the clouds and the raindrops, staring up into the endless dome.

  “Anza?”

  “Sorry! What?”

  “You want me to stop?”

  I did and didn’t. These had to be ghosts from the Larchmont. Their clothing gave them away, as did the fact that they were all clumped together in little groups, as though still living out the shared tragedy of the lifeboats and rafts.

  Ghosts can see and speak with each other, but they almost never do. Just as we usually ignore the people we pass on the street every day and sit beside on buses and planes, ghosts live in their own little worlds, preoccupied with their own histories and memories. Just like us, they keep largely to themselves when encountering strangers in public, even if those strangers happen to share their existential predicament.

  But these ghosts, I knew, had banded together. If Baden Riegler had his story straight, at least some of these phantoms were united in a furious plot to try to drive Mark and Lauren off the island. If I had been alone, I might well have approached one or two of the spirits on the fringes, if only to learn the identities of the group’s ringleaders. But I wouldn’t do it with Bert here.

  “I should probably get back,” I said. “It’s beautiful, though.”

  Bert gave a little shiver. “It gives me the creeps. I don’t know why.”

  I did, but I kept the presence of so many ghosts to myself. “Well, lighthouses exist because of danger and shipwrecks. If I were a fisherman, they might give me the creeps, too.”

  “Maybe. I suppose that’s it.”

  “Do you ever go out at night?”

  “Sure, yeah. I mean, I don’t go out at night, but sometimes I am out at night. Tuna and swordfish are farther and farther out, these days. It’s barely worthwhile unless I’m out there for a couple of days.”

  “Really? Wow!”

  “Don’t be too impressed.”

  “I am! Are you all by yourself?”

  “All by myself?” He made a sad little face, teasing me for using such a childlike phrase. “Sometimes.”

  “Who steers? When you’re sleeping? I know that’s probably a stupid question.” The sky was growing darker and darker, gearing up for a storm. I heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, and this struck me as odd. I think of thunderstorms as phenomena of July and August, when scorching days just seem to heat up and burst.

  “It’s not stupid,” Bert said. “The boat’s got a lot of navigation gear. It’s not like in the old days.”

  The truck had rounded a bend, and my heartbeat was returning to normal. I was vaguely aware of the fleeting form of a ghost, beginning to run from a point to the right of us toward the road ahead. She seemed to be in her late twenties and she was barefoot and wearing a tattered nightdress. Her arms were outstretched and her expression was frozen in a mask of fear and horror. She was headed toward the corner our truck was about to turn.

  My gaze flew to the road before us.

  There, at a point we would reach in a matter of seconds, was a small child, a boy.

  I gasped instinctively and grabbed Bert’s arm.

  His gaze flew to my face. “What?”

  “Look out!” I screamed, realizing that it was already too late, we were too close, the child’s mother would never have time to reach him before the truck hit him. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away, my stomach muscles tight and braced for the sickening thud of an impact.

  The truck swerved slightly to the right, but I heard nothing: no squealing of brakes, no outcry from Bert, no sound of hurling metal colliding with vulnerable human flesh.

  I opened my eyes. It had all happened so fast that I’d been unable to make my usual distinctions. The figure had not been a child, but a ghost, and I believed I knew who he was.

  Jamey.

  “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Let me guess,” Bert responded. “You saw a ghost.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or not. “We drove right through him.”

  Bert’s eyebrows shot up. He gave a long, low whistle and appeared to be trying to take this in. “So you can’t tell the difference between a ghost and a live person?” he finally asked.

  “No, no, I can! Ghosts are transparent: you can see right through them. But it all happened too fast.”

  “What happened too fast?”

  “The little boy ran into the road. I mean, the ghost. My mind couldn’t make the adjustment quickly enough.”

  Bert cleared his throat and stared straight ahead. He was silent for several moments, concentrating on the road. He turned on the windshield wipers.

  “The little boy,” he finally stated flatly.

  “Yeah. I know you don’t believe in ghosts, but—well, there was just a little kid, a ghost boy, in the road.”

  “Okaaaay …”

  He looked over at me. I smiled apologetically.

  “But he’s all right,” I went on. “We didn’t hurt him or anything. I mean, he’s already dead. But we didn’t make him—any deader.”

  “Awful glad to hear it,” he drawled.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I WISHED I COULD have just sneaked out of the Grand View with Henry, dropped him off at Caleb’s house, and gone to the senator’s cocktail party without getting into it all with Lauren, but there was no way I could do that. This is one of the trade-offs of the intimate B and B experience, especially when your hosts are warm and welcoming: you don’t feel right treating the place like a hotel and coming and going without offering explanations.

  Besides, this was a very small island. Given Lauren’s friendship with Aitana and Mark’s with Bert, word was sure to get back to my hosts that I had been at the party. I didn’t see any alternative to handling it directly.

  Lauren was sitting on the front porch having a cup of tea when I climbed the steps. It was a little after three thirty and I had done everything I could possibly do at the Historical Society, at least until our samples arrived. I was hoping to squeeze in a quick nap before picking up Henry at five. I was still trying to recover from that night of no sleep.

  “Cup of tea?” Lauren asked.

  “No thanks.” I sat down beside her. “Listen, I hope this isn’t a problem, but I don’t think we’ll be having supper here tonight. You haven’t already started anything, have you?”

  “No, no, but …” She was probably wondering where we were going to eat.

  “Henry’s spending the evening with Caleb’s girls, and, well, to tell you the truth, it feels a little like a command performance, but the senator asked Caleb to bring me.”

  “To the party?”

  I nodded. “I can’t get out of it. I tried.”

  “Why would you want to get out of it?” Lauren asked.

  Because he didn’t invite you guys, I thought. I would have loved to have said this aloud, but drawing attention to my hosts’ exclusion was almost as insensitive as the omission itself.

  “I’d kill to see the inside of that house,” Lauren continued.

  I was vaguely curious, I supposed, but Rawlings had struck me as arrogant and entitled,
and I really hadn’t liked the way he’d given me the once-over, as though I was a horse he was contemplating buying. To top it all off, I strongly disagreed with him about the windmills.

  “I’m not a big cocktail party person,” I said, though this wasn’t entirely true.

  “Oh, I love them!” Lauren responded. “Or at least the idea of them. Martinis and Manhattans and perfume and cigarette smoke—it’s so romantic and glamorous. So … fifties!”

  “I won’t stay long,” I said. “I’ll have one drink to be polite and get out of there as fast as I can.”

  “You may not be able to,” Lauren said. “You’ll probably have to listen to a speech. I’ll bet you anything that he wants something from you.”

  “What could he want from me?”

  “It’s just how he is.” She sniffed. “He’s not the type of guy who gives a party to be nice.”

  I’m partial to old houses. I love worn floors and antique wainscoting, and I’ll happily tolerate the wind whistling through cracks and crevices and windows that rattle and stick. I admire modern residences, with their lines all elegant and sleek, but I can’t really see myself living in one. If there were ever a house with the power to change my mind, though, it looked to be the house we were now approaching.

  Caleb, Sally, and I had decided to walk the half mile or so to the Rawlingses’ beachfront estate. Henry had immediately joined in a badminton game in the Wilders’ side yard, a loose jumble of flailing arms and flying racquets that involved, counting Henry, six children and at least twice as many shuttlecocks. Players on one side of the net were volleying randomly with kids on the other, and a babysitter who appeared to be of college age had hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on a gas grill off the back porch.

  I had an immediate fantasy of moving here. Bert and I would get together, and Henry would suddenly have a childhood like mine—better than mine, in that it would include a mother. A few seconds later, I came to my senses. Bert and I hadn’t even had a date yet. And how in the world would I earn a living here? Working in a restaurant or a hotel five or six months a year? Not likely. Besides, Declan wouldn’t be keen on the idea. Not the me-and-Bert part—Dec was in no position to object to that—the part that involved living eighty miles and an expanse of the Atlantic Ocean away from his son. And what Dec didn’t like, Henry didn’t like.

  Oh, well.

  The driveway and walkways leading to the Rawlingses’ house were lined with little gold bags stabilized with sand and enclosing flickering candles. We tried this back in Cambridge two years ago, when the pumpkins we had carved were stolen and smashed by local ne’er-do-wells the night before Halloween. We didn’t have time to carve any more, so Ellie, the arts-and-craftsy septuagenarian from whom we rent our apartment, came roaring to the rescue with an issue of Martha Stewart Living, a stack of brown paper lunch bags, and a tray holding what appeared to be every votive and pillar candle in her cozily cluttered house.

  We cut faces into the bags and made up for in volume what we lacked in pumpkins, and in the end, even tearful Henry had been dazzled by the flickering brown goblins that lined our sidewalk and porch. Then, alas, it started to pour.

  There were no clouds in sight tonight, though, so the dozens and dozens of bright gold bags with little star cutouts appeared to be in no danger of being reduced to pulpy piles. Set back from a rocky bluff, against which the waves were crashing, sending up sprays of fine mist, the house simply glowed. I was surprised that the senator, reputed to be an ardent conservationist, didn’t object to what seemed like every light inside and out radiating brightness and warmth at the environmental cost of zillions of megawatts, but this made the residence a sight to behold. That, I suppose, was the point.

  Massive panel windows revealed that inside, dozens of guests were already happily chatting and drinking cocktails out of festive flutes and martini glasses. The deep, wide porch was dotted with revelers in twos and threes, seated in teak armchairs facing the ocean or leaning against the slim columns that supported the porch’s graceful roof.

  “I’m underdressed,” whispered Sally.

  “You look fine,” Caleb responded unreassuringly.

  Easy for you to say, I thought. Men are lucky to have a basic uniform. Add a tie or a jacket, change to nicer shoes, and they can go almost anywhere. As far as I could tell, Caleb had simply put on a fresh shirt, traded his Top-Siders for loafers, and slipped on a sports jacket. Sally, on the other hand, had clearly put time and effort into her choice of outfit, and I thought she looked really pretty in her flowered blouse, coral cashmere sweater, black linen slacks, and black satin ballet flats. But glancing around, I could see her point: we were in the land of heels and silk.

  As for me, I had only brought one dress, and it was black and polyester, so even though I had gotten it at TJ Maxx for $19.99, it passed for dressy. My relative good luck ended at my hair, though. Not only had I forgotten conditioner, I’d neglected to pack the round hairbrush that was the one beauty tool I owned. Without aggressive subduing with this brush and a hair dryer, my bangs crimped up in a wavy little curtain. I tried to smooth them down, but they sprung resolutely back. Then I tried to think like a person who might style her hair that way on purpose—say, a performance artist who lived in Brooklyn and wore pigtails and Doc Martens and looked cute in bright lipstick. That didn’t work, either. This left only the deflating consolation of the phrase Nona used to fling at me whenever I went on ad nauseam about my appearance: Nobody’s going to be looking at you.

  Sadly, this was probably true.

  As we climbed the front steps and opened the door, I heard slow, sexy jazz that turned out to be live: a man in a tux was playing a concert grand piano on the far side of an expansive room that stretched out widely on each side of the front entrance. To our right was the living room, lined with built-in walnut bookshelves and decorated in shades of cream and rose, and to the left, the living room’s mirror image: a dining room with a glossy walnut table that looked long enough to seat twenty. Huge black urns of pink peonies, purchased and transported to the island at a breathtaking sum, no doubt, since peonies wouldn’t be blooming for months, adorned the table. The decorator is really good, I thought. Despite its ultramodern design, the house was warm and inviting, and the antiques scattered throughout the rooms looked as comfortable in the space as did the sleek modern chairs and minimalist silver fixtures.

  A woman dressed in black stepped forward to take our coats, but Sally and I had only worn sweaters and we both decided to keep them on. Sally helped herself to a glass of wine delivered by a waiter with a tray and drifted into the living room, where she had spotted some friends. I gazed longingly at the martini glasses held by some of the guests, obviously filled with drinks that looked like Cosmopolitans or those trendy “-tinis” made with vodka or gin and fruit liqueur. I really wanted one of those. And I had to remember to eat. I always came home starving from parties like this; I’d get talking to somebody, have a drink or two, and completely forget to hit the hors d’oeuvre table.

  I reached for a plate. There were scallops in broiled bacon, runny cheeses with seeded flatbreads that looked homemade, and bowls of macadamia nuts and Marcona almonds. There were bite-sized pieces of the onion tart we’d been warned not to touch yesterday, tiny quiches in puff pastry, and polished silver bowls filled with strawberries and grapes.

  My plate was half covered and my mouth completely full when I heard a voice behind me.

  “I’m glad you could make it.”

  I turned around. It was Senator Rawlings.

  I nodded brightly, trying to gulp down the little quiche I had just popped into my mouth.

  “Take your time,” he said as I struggled to swallow, then to have a sip of wine, in case there was egg or crust in my teeth.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For inviting me.”

  “My pleasure. I hear you’re from Cambridge.”

  Where had he heard that? �
�I didn’t grow up there, but I live there now.”

  “I did my undergraduate at Harvard.”

  “Really? I thought you went to Brown.” Oops! I immediately realized that perhaps I shouldn’t have said this.

  “For my PhD,” he explained. “But I’m curious—how’d you know that?” He attempted a disarming smile, but it was anything but disarming.

  I couldn’t think of a plausible bluff, so I had to go with the truth. “Someone was talking about the local school, and how it was designed by a friend of yours from Providence who’s an architect.”

  “Yes. Adrian Gerstner. He did this house, too.”

  “It’s gorgeous. Really beautiful.”

  “Thank you. But I can’t take any credit. Adrian and Helen really did it together.”

  “Helen?”

  “Mrs. Rawlings.” He glanced around, apparently looking for his wife, but she wasn’t in sight.” She’s here somewhere.

  “Caleb tells me you’re pulling together the Larchmont papers. How long do you think it will take?”

  “Yes, I am. The volumes themselves are pretty straightforward, but a lot will depend on some other decisions we have to make.”

  “What kind of decisions?” He took a sip of his drink, which was one of those appletinis, or whatever they were.

  I didn’t know whether I should tell him anything about my high-flying ideas. The conversations I’d had with Caleb were just that, conversations.

  “There’s a lot of material,” I commented vaguely. “If the money were available, the Society could do some really great things.”

  “Like what?” he pressed.

  I glanced around for Caleb, but I didn’t see him nearby. Rawlings had fixed me with a disconcertingly direct stare, and I found myself bumbling ahead like a child being grilled by the principal. After all, he was the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee.