The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  I could rely on Baden to make himself scarce while the TV guys were here, but I definitely couldn’t count on Vivi. She was probably furious, or scared, and either way, I could imagine her acting out defiantly, purposely doing the opposite of anything I asked her to do. I had to make a deal with her, but the only thing she seemed to care about was Jamey.

  I lay in the low light, listening to the sound of the waves from across Water Street. As I reached for Inn of Phantoms, longing for a break from my troubled introspection, I heard footsteps in the hall. Someone had paused outside my door, and I heard a quiet, tentative knock. I sat up, then got up and padded across the room in my stocking feet.

  “Hello?” I whispered through the door.

  “Hi,” came the quiet reply.

  I felt a little burst of happiness—not fireworks, exactly, but at least the lighting of a sparkler. I opened the door.

  It was Bert.

  “You weren’t asleep, were you?”

  I shook my head, thinking, And even if I were, I’d be thrilled to be woken up by you.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  “Henry asleep?”

  I nodded.

  “Kind of clips your wings, huh?”

  That was an understatement. “Depends on what you had in mind.”

  He did a Groucho Marx imitation, making his eyebrows flutter up and down.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Only kidding,” he insisted. With one hand, he held up a squat and unfamiliar bottle, and with the other, two brandy snifters. “Sit on the porch?”

  “It’s freezing!”

  “We could build a fire.”

  “And wake everybody up?”

  “I was thinking, on the beach.”

  I looked back at Henry and sighed. I’d been freewheeling it ever since I’d gotten here, leaving him on his own, entrusting him to other people, talking myself into believing that he really didn’t need me as much as he obviously still did. I didn’t want him waking up and finding me gone, again, down on the porch or on the beach. It didn’t make any difference that I wouldn’t be far away; he would still be upset to discover that I had left him all alone at night, when he had fallen asleep trusting that I would be here.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Okay.” Bert nodded toward the little sitting area at the end of the hall, and I pulled the door almost closed behind me. Fortunately, I was still dressed, and I hadn’t washed off the makeup I’d applied earlier, so I allowed myself to imagine that I resembled a sultry French starlet, the kind with long, mussy hair who lights cigarette after cigarette and drinks coffee from a cup that was somebody’s grandmother’s and who always seems to be just out of bed, or just about to fall in.

  Nah. I probably looked like—me.

  Two upholstered chairs formed an inviting reading alcove at the end of the hall, and Bert chose the one that looked less comfortable. He held up the bottle and I nodded.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Rémy Grand Cru. My weakness.” He poured about an inch into the bottom of a snifter and handed it to me. Then, with a surprising lack of self-consciousness, I mentally prepared to do what Earl, a pompous ass I once dated in college, had taught me to do with a snifter of brandy. Though I’d had several opportunities in the past ten years, I hadn’t actually gone through the steps of the ritual.

  I waited for Bert to pour his own glass and we clinked.

  “Sláinte,” I said, the Irish toast to good health.

  “Saúde,” he replied, which probably meant about the same thing.

  I wrapped my hand around the bowl of the snifter. This, I had been informed, allowed the cognac to be heated slightly from the radiant warmth of the palm. I held the glass up to the light, admiring the clarity of the amber fluid, and I sloshed it around gently, watching for what Earl had called “legs”—little rivulets that testified to the precious liquid’s age. I waved the glass under my nose and inhaled, then had a sip.

  This was where my cognac knowledge ended abruptly. It just tasted hot and strong and burny. But I could tell that Bert was impressed by my performance, and this made me want to confess to him immediately that it had all been for show, a hollow and affected act picked up from a hollow and affected blowhard, and that I knew absolutely nothing about Rémy Grand Cru or any other cognac. I didn’t even like it!

  But I didn’t get to say any of this, because I took another fraudulent sip, a much bigger one this time, and this one met an obstacle in my tense and overexcited throat and ended up going down the wrong way. What ensued was a coughing fit so severe that I was surprised, later, when I examined my appearance in the bathroom mirror, that I hadn’t managed to pop a couple of blood vessels in my eyes.

  It served me right.

  Bert hopped up, trying to help, but there was nothing he could really do. I wasn’t choking, so he couldn’t perform the Heimlich maneuver (though I was sure he would have known how, being the kind of guy who was comfortable with a harpoon). But my windpipe wasn’t obstructed. Even the water he hurried away to get me didn’t help, because it went down the right way, which was to say, down my throat.

  We just had to wait it out. It took almost five minutes before I returned to normal, the only upside of the whole, embarrassing episode being that my coughing extravaganza hadn’t woken up Henry.

  “Well,” Bert said, when I finally took a deep breath and wiped away the tears I had been unable to check.

  I smiled weakly.

  “Bet you’re glad I came by.”

  I was glad! I just couldn’t talk yet. But I started to laugh. It was ridiculously funny, when you came right down to it, how one minute we were living out a romantic French movie, and the next, we were washed up on the shores of a cheesy cable melodrama. It must have been nerves, because once I got started, I couldn’t stop laughing, and soon Bert was laughing with me, and before I knew it, we were back in Paris and my hair was all mussy and we had to keep stopping to listen, to make sure that in all our laughing and moving furniture and getting down to some serious hanky-panky, we hadn’t awakened Henry.

  Chapter Nineteen

  FRIDAY

  HENRY WAS POURING way too much syrup onto his French toast, but I was far too blissful to interfere. I dawdled over my coffee and toast, reliving every delicious detail of the minutes between eleven or so last night and 12:07 this morning. Had Bert and I really been together for only an hour?

  “Mama?” Henry looked up.

  I hit the Pause button on the delectable little film that had been playing in my mind.

  “What?”

  “Can we call Daddy?”

  “Right now?”

  Henry nodded. He looked a little glum.

  “How come you want to talk to Daddy?”

  “Because I do.”

  I glanced at my watch. I knew Declan’s schedule, and I knew that if we caught him on his cell phone right now, he wouldn’t be able to talk. It would be frustrating for both of them.

  “Well the thing is, sweetie,” I launched in, “Daddy’s on the day shift today, so he’s probably still at roll call. He wouldn’t be able to pick up right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he can’t be talking on the phone while his boss is talking.”

  “Why not?”

  I sighed and had a sip of my coffee. “What does Miss O. do when you guys interrupt her?”

  “She gets mad.”

  I smiled and nodded. “That’s what happens at roll call, too.”

  Henry took a minute to chew and to absorb this. Then he put down his fork. “Daddy’s coming to my play, though, right?”

  Oh. I sighed. There was no way to soften the blow, so I didn’t try.

  “No, honey. He isn’t.”

  A look of surprise appeared on his face, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Declan came to everything: every T-ball practice, teacher conference, end-of-something picnic. It had never occurred to me th
at Declan would come to see Henry in Grease, but it had probably not occurred to Henry that he wouldn’t.

  Or maybe it had.

  “It’s a pretty long trip,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, on the boat.”

  I nodded. “I brought my camera. I’ll take a ton of pictures.”

  “Okay,” he said sadly.

  “And we’ll call Daddy tonight. I promise.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want him to get in trouble.”

  I gave him a puzzled look.

  “For talking out,” he explained.

  I dropped Henry off at a quarter of nine, walked to the Historical Society, and sat for a moment in the cool sea air, waiting for Caleb to arrive. My time here today was going to be brief. Caleb was bringing packing materials and we were going to spend the morning preparing all the documents and photographs so that I could transport them safely back to Cambridge, where all the work would be done.

  Over the next few weeks, I would chip away at all the binding and matting. I would come back to the island sometime this summer, whenever the Larchmont Collection was ready to be unveiled. Maybe I could unveil to Bert a whole new me then, too; somebody a little better dressed, with a much better haircut, and—at least temporarily—without a five-year-old in tow.

  As I sat on the porch steps, I took up the thoughts I had abandoned last night. As I lay in bed trying to fall sleep, after Bert left around midnight, I still had no idea what to do about the ghost detectives and the ghosts who planned to wow them. Or about the volatile Vivi, or the understandable desire of the lighthouse spirits if not to be actually commemorated, then at least to be protected from an undignified disinterment.

  As for Baden, who knew what he wanted or what would make him happy? I could only offer him what I offer every other earthbound spirit I try to help: a sincere effort to resolve the problem that’s keeping him or her connected to earthly life, and one more chance to walk through that bright, shining doorway.

  But now, thanks to the miraculous three-pound organ that had worked the night shift while I slept, I had some answers. Well, maybe not answers, but at least ideas.

  The first involved the ghost detectives. They were after ghosts, right? Well, I’d give them ghosts! Just not at the Grand View! If I could somehow redirect the attention of the TV guys with persuasive stories of the haunted lighthouse, then maybe I could get them to do their segment on that, rather than on the Grand View. For that to work, though, I’d need the cooperation of the ghosts at the lighthouse. I didn’t know if my next idea would appeal to them, enough to get them on my side and off Mark’s case, but it was worth a try.

  I doubted they really wanted to derail the wind farm. They didn’t care about politics or piping plovers or property values or historic vistas. Their problem was with the proposed location. But the reason the location was so important to them was because it was all they had to commemorate their lives.

  What if I offered them something else? After all, I was the person putting together the Larchmont Collection. What if I found a way to commemorate each and every person who went down with the ship? Hadn’t the tens of thousands of names chiseled into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial done much the same thing? Maybe we could get a grant for some kind of wall, with every single name engraved in granite, or build a meditation garden or plant a grove of trees or construct a walk that ended at a beautiful private place, where the families of the victims could pause and linger. Something like this might not satisfy each and every disgruntled spirit, because spirits are just like the people they were, and you can’t please everybody. But maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to take the focus off Mark and Lauren and the Grand View. And that’s what I had to do.

  Timing would be everything. Before the midday boat arrived tomorrow, I had to visit the lighthouse. I had to locate Vivi and find a way to keep her far away from the Grand View, and that would probably involve the ghost of Jamey and the desperate earthbound spirit who’d taken him. I definitely had to enlist Baden’s help because there was no way I could take on the dozens and dozens of spirits I’d seen hanging around the lighthouse. He would have to agree to be my go-between, and I hoped I could get him to do it, because I couldn’t imagine any other way of pulling this off.

  And there was Henry. And Bert. It wasn’t as though I had nothing to do but solve everybody else’s problems.

  I felt tired and overwhelmed just thinking about what I was going to try to do in the next two days, much of it in secret, but I didn’t have time to be tired. I didn’t have a minute to lose.

  I found Baden in the room with the evergreen wallpaper, sitting by the window in the bentwood rocker. Caleb had driven me back to the inn with all the boxes we had packed, and together, he and I had lugged them up to my room. Mark had left for Boston on the early ferry, and Lauren was down at the kitchen table paying bills, so as soon as I bid good-bye to Caleb, I went looking for Baden and Vivi. It was Baden I came upon first.

  “Hello,” he said politely.

  “Hi.” I closed the door securely behind me. “How are you?” I asked, not anxious to get to the reason for my visit.

  “Very well, thank you. And you?”

  “Fine. Looks like we’re going to get some rain.”

  “It does, yes.” There was an awkward pause. Baden ended it by indicating the only other chair in the room. “Sit, please.”

  “I don’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Not at all.”

  I sat down in the chair. “I need to talk to you about something, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know where to start.”

  “The beginning?” he suggested.

  “Well, I suppose that would be—your brother’s building this house.”

  Baden stopped rocking and appeared to give me his full attention.

  “And his great-grandson’s deciding to restore it,” I continued. I thought I saw a flash of relief cross his features. I suppose he’d been worried that I was going to grill him about his love affair.

  “Please, continue,” he said.

  “Mark and Lauren need our help.”

  “What can I do?”

  “It’s kind of complicated,” I said.

  “Most things are.”

  I smiled and sighed. “So, the ghost detectives are arriving tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the ghosts still coming?”

  He nodded dejectedly. “I’ve attempted to dissuade them. I’ve been unsuccessful.”

  “Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. What if I were to commit to building them another memorial. Something real and permanent, like a wall with all their names, or a garden.”

  “And move their bones?”

  “Do you think the bones are that important? The bones themselves?”

  “We have no way of knowing what is important to another human being.”

  “Yes, we do. We just have to ask.”

  “You’re intending to do that?” Baden said. “Ask dozens of ghosts if a memorial on the island could take the place of … of what they have now?”

  “Not me.”

  Baden frowned. He didn’t understand.

  “You?” I whispered.

  “No.”

  “Please?” I begged.

  “No. Three times I have tried. Three times I have failed. That’s enough.”

  “But you had nothing to offer them before. Now you do!”

  “What? A promise? From someone they do not know?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Look, I’m not asking for myself. It’s for your great-great-nephew and his wife! I thought you cared about them.” My voice was rising.

  “I do care. Very much.”

  “Well so do I, and I’m not even related to them!” I was trying not to get angry, but I could feel myself becoming tenser and more annoyed.

  Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

  We both froze. I watched the doorknob turn slightly and then the door squeaked open. Outside in the hall stood Lauren.


  “Anza?”

  “Hi!” I said, way too brightly. I glanced at Baden. He looked paralyzed.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Oh, I thought, just having a fight with myself in this empty room.

  I sighed. I had been hoping to manage all this without having to have the ghost talk with either Mark or Lauren, but now I had to rethink my strategy. Lauren had just heard me having what must have seemed to be a one-sided conversation.

  “I’m talking to a ghost,” I admitted.

  She smiled, obviously not believing me.

  “Really.”

  Her smile faded.

  “Sit down,” I suggested, motioning to the bed.

  “It’s nothing to be afraid of,” I began, “but you do have a couple of ghosts in this house.”

  “We do?” The color seemed to drain from her cheeks. “How do you know?”

  So I told her. Everything. I started with the four-year-old me, and Nona, and Vinny Sottosanto and his dog, Lola. I answered all the usual questions about what I can do and what I can’t, what ghosts can do and what they can’t, then I moved on to what I know and what I don’t, and finished up by explaining the white light. All of this took close to an hour. When she seemed not to have any more questions, I asked, “Does this frighten you?”

  “No, not really, not the way you explain it.”

  “Good. Because there’s no reason to be afraid.”

  She nodded. “Who are they?”

  “Who are who?”

  “The ghosts we have in the house.”

  “One is a little girl. Her name is Viveka—Vivi for short.”

  “Oh my God! How old is she?”

  “Six or so, I think.”

  “The poor little thing! What happened to her?”

  “I think she went down on the Larchmont.”

  “That’s so sad. But why is she here? I mean, if she was with her parents on the boat, why didn’t she … what did you call it?”