The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “Wow,” Johnny said. And after a moment: “What are you getting out of that?”

  Tosh’s eyes narrowed. “Have you ever been to a Stones concert, friend?” he said incredulously.

  “No,” Johnny lied. He actually had been to see the Stones, with Corran ages ago in Edinburgh—’97, maybe; ‘98?—but he felt like being contrary. Pauline raised her eyebrows at him.

  “Then I’m sorry,” Tosh said. “But you wouldn’t understand.” The doctor sighed, and now Johnny was sorry to have annoyed him. But a tone pinged on the laptop, and Tosh bounced back quickly. “Well!” he said. “Pictures! And it’s about time!” He picked at the keyboard and then studied the screen intently. He was making small grunting sounds. Pauline tapped her fingernails on the arm of the sofa. On an end table next to her sat a framed photo of a somewhat younger Tosh alongside Mick Jagger. It looked like it might have been taken after a show; Jagger was wearing a tank top and tight red pants. He held a towel in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, and he was looking the other way, across the room. He’d retracted his elbow and shoulder in what looked like an attempt to elude Tosh’s touch. Tosh was seated in his wheelchair, beaming at the camera, his arm outstretched around Mick in a hug that ended up awkwardly encircling the singer’s thighs. The photo made Johnny sad. He looked away. Tosh was talking. He needed to pay attention.

  “So, he’s acting up,” Tosh was saying.

  “Who?”

  “Your tenant. Mr. Meningioma. He’s probably been there for years, and you never knew it. I just met him on the MRI. Left temporal lobe. You want to see?” He pivoted the laptop on its cart and pointed the situation out to Johnny and Pauline—the situation being a cloudy white blob floating in a lima bean of gray aspic. In Johnny’s brain. Pauline gasped.

  “A tumor,” Johnny said flatly. His chest tightened.

  “Weelllll …” Tosh said, drawing out the word. “More likely a benign cyst, from the looks of it. We see them quite frequently. People can walk around with them for a long time and never even know they are there, which is what you’ve been doing. But now …” He clicked his tongue. “He’s been misbehaving. I think it’s time your little stowaway was evicted.”

  “What do you mean?” Pauline said.

  “The fact that Johnny had a seizure indicates the cyst might be growing, pushing its limits. Creating symptoms. Not a malignancy, necessarily. But definitely a nuisance. And that means it needs to come on out.”

  “Surgery?” Johnny said.

  “That’s the only way I know of, friend.”

  “Christ,” Johnny said. Brain surgery! A vision of the procedure—or at least what he imagined the procedure to be—appeared in his mind, and he reflexively touched his forehead. “Christ,” he said again.

  “Oh, Johnny,” Pauline said. She reached for his hand.

  Johnny was mildly impressed, he had to admit, with his body’s capacity to surprise itself. Sneak attack! Here he’d been walking around in the old beast for fifty-three years, keeping reasonably fit, wearing his seat belt, watching his cholesterol, cutting the cigs down to just one or two a day, and though Pauline would tell him that right there was senseless, Johnny actually felt rather accomplished in curtailing the two-pack-a-day habit he’d practiced in his youth.

  He was far from perfect, but until today, he thought he knew everything there was to know about his own body’s weaknesses: bum hip, remnant of a car accident back in Glasgow; nagging tinnitus that got worse after too much time on the factory’s clanging shop floor; stubborn insomnia. But this! A brain tumor! It caught him broadside. Nobody in his family had ever had a brain tumor. His memory was still sharp. His wit was quick. He could think on his feet. He could no more have predicted an invading tumor in his left temporal lobe than he could have predicted he’d give birth to a litter of Angolan meerkats. But there it was, a fat white egg on a brain scan with his name on it. Brain surgery.

  “When?” he said to Tosh.

  “We’ll get some steroids going, get the swelling down. I’d say two weeks of that, then bam … in and out, no big deal. We’ll get you a consult with the neurosurgeon. Dr. Vogel. He’s the best. He’ll explain the drill. Ha. Pardon the pun!”

  “Can’t it wait?” Johnny said. “This isn’t really a good time. Our factory—we’ve got an OSHA mess going on.”

  “Negative,” Tosh said. “Seizures are no joke. Watch-and-wait works for some people. Not for you. You’re what we call hit-and-run.” He mimed a handgun and pointed it at Johnny’s chart. “Ka-pow,” he said. Pauline stared at him.

  “I wouldn’t call it a seizure,” Johnny said.

  “Yes, but you haven’t been to medical school, friend,” Tosh said. “I have. And it was a seizure.” He looked over the top of his glasses at Johnny.

  The next hour was a bit of a blur. Prescriptions, instructions, and a raft of paperwork. An uncomfortable screening of an educational video: “Meningioma and You.” One horrific pamphlet depicting the actual steps involved in a craniotomy. Johnny caught the word “auger” in a photo caption. He closed the brochure and put it at the bottom of the pile of papers. When Tosh motored out to the hallway at one point to fetch a plastic brain model, Pauline grabbed Johnny’s arm and announced they would be getting a second opinion.

  “How do we know he’s right?” she demanded.

  Johnny looked back at the white blob on the brain scan and didn’t answer. He was no neurologist, but there was something in his brain that sure as shit wasn’t supposed to be there. That much was clear. He didn’t like it any more than Pauline did, but his instinct was that Tosh was right. They’d get a second opinion. But Johnny had a feeling they’d be back here.

  By the time they finished going over all the details, the shadows outside Tosh’s office window were growing long and the footsteps of the staff outside his doorway had quickened, the unmistakable sound of a shift of workers looking to shut down the day’s duties and go home. Johnny knew it well.

  “And now your lovely wife will take you home,” Tosh said. “And you will take your medications. And you will not work. And you will not drive. And you will not stress. For two weeks. Until we get the swelling down and get that bad boy out of there. Capisce?”

  Johnny looked at Pauline. Her eyebrows were knitted and she was staring back at him intently. They shook Tosh’s hand and walked, a little dazed, through the hospital.

  “Lord, honey,” Pauline said in the elevator. “This beats all.”

  The doors closed with a vacuuming shush. She pushed the button for the lobby, and they waited in silence for the lurch downward.

  “I didn’t see it coming,” Johnny conceded. “But then I don’t know how you would.”

  She leaned to the right until their shoulders touched, and she let her weight sink into his. When the elevator bumped against the ground floor, she lost her balance and stumbled a bit, until Johnny righted her.

  Johnny let Pauline take care of the details. She was good at it. And she was fast. She spent the next morning on the phone. By afternoon, Johnny had visited two more neurologists for a second—and then a third—opinion. Sure enough, all roads were leading back to the same “most likely benign” meningioma, so in the end they returned to the hospital and consulted again with Tosh, who put the ball into play. They met with Dr. Vogel, the surgeon. They met with the pre-op nurse. They met with the insurance coordinator. They met with the anesthesiologist. Then they met again with the surgeon, who said he wasn’t crazy about the quality of the MRI, said he wanted another done, this one with a contrast dye injection to better clarify the images. Could Johnny please submit to another MRI? He could. He did. Another visit to radiology, another gown, another awkward climb onto the sliding platform of the MRI table to submit to the immobilizing head coil again. This time, a nurse came over and injected a contrast solution into his arm. And then there was Kevin’s voice in his ear.

  “You already know the ropes,” Kevin said. “I need you to stay real still, all right, my man?”


  “All right.”

  “You good, Ice?”

  The machine began to ping, drone, lull.

  “I been better, Kevin.”

  On the ride home from the hospital, the skies finally opened up, and the rain arrived with a vengeance, rattling so hard on the roof of the Suburban that it was hard to talk. Which was okay by Johnny. Then the rain surprised them by turning to hail, and Pauline pulled the Suburban under an overhang at a defunct Waffle House, where they waited for the storm to pass.

  “Funny,” Johnny said. “Ice. We have to work so hard to make it. And here it is falling from the sky.”

  “Hope it didn’t dent the car,” Pauline said. She touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Johnny looked at his phone and saw he’d missed another call from Sharon. He’d nearly forgotten she called yesterday. She hadn’t left a message. It was nearly midnight in Scotland now, too late to call. He sent her a text: I’ll call you tomorrow. He turned the phone off and sat with Pauline in the dark car. She took his hand. They watched the pavement beyond the overhang, where the ice pellets bounced like popcorn in the glow of a nearby streetlamp. Johnny took stock of the moment: It was raining ice on an eighty-degree evening in Northeast Florida. He had a bruise the size of a baseball on his forearm, left over from the fall in the men’s room. The factory was in an unsettling limbo. His name was the latest entry on a neurosurgeon’s schedule: craniotomy with resection, two weeks from today. And under all of this: Corran.

  One of the few passions that incline men to peace is fear of death. Thomas Hobbes said that; Johnny had read it somewhere. It’s a pity, he realized now, that we don’t think of it sooner.

  Three

  Of all the many wonderful and terrible things that had happened to Pauline MacKinnon during her fifty years on this planet, this was the one that seemed to come back to her most frequently in dreams. In the dream-memory, she was fourteen, and an immature fourteen at that, still a child at a time when many of her peers—taut, angular girls with shimmering hair and tanned skin—were honing a craft of coy bewitchery that left Pauline puzzled and cowed. She was awkward among the sophisticates, shy around boys. She could still be convinced, very easily, to run after the ice cream truck, to play with her sister’s Barbie dolls, to watch cartoons.

  It was summer. She’d gone with her father to the ice factory, where Packy Knight had a meeting, some distributor or other. She liked going out with Packy; his big wide car smelled of leather and smoke, and the clatter of tools in the trunk made a simple song. Sometimes Packy was in a low mood, and she knew to keep quiet and small. But sometimes he was like a party—playing Johnny Cash on the eight-track and banging his knuckles against the dash in time to the music. That day, he’d promised a stop at the Dreamette for ice cream after they left the factory. Pauline had brought her roller skates to pass the time, but the meeting was taking forever, and she was becoming impatient. She rolled up and down the ramp of the loading bay for a while. The sun was blistering hot, the white sizzle of a Florida August, with no shade in the factory yard. Across the street, a breeze stirred the trees over the tight, shaded streets of Little Silver.

  She skated into the neighborhood, past crumbling wooden cottages, broken curbing, a dilapidated concrete-block house collapsing upon itself. An overturned grocery cart rusted on an empty lot. An old woman sat on a porch, humming, rocking a baby, and she raised her hand at Pauline as if benediction. Pauline dropped her eyes and skated on. If Packy saw her here, he’d make her come back. Brown town, he’d say. You stay out of Little Silver. She turned a corner to break the line of sight to the factory and found a long stretch of smooth enough roadway with a wooden fence running along one side. The sun was low behind the oaks, and the hanging tongues of Spanish moss made lacy shadows on the ground. They were mesmerizing. She skated into the shadow web, threading needles. Around. Through. Back. She imagined red bugs in the Spanish moss, watching her.

  Four men came up behind her on bicycles. Two were black and two were white. They were shouting to one another, laughing, and they carried tall cans of beer inside sweating paper bags. They rode quietly behind her until one whistled and the others laughed. Pauline pulled over near the fence to let them by, but they hovered behind and one came up alongside her on his bicycle. She shrank away, but he pulled her hair, and she stumbled on her skates, had to grab the man’s bicycle to keep from falling. He smelled like sweat and beer. He kept his hand in her hair and she was forced to stand still. She was wearing a black polka-dot halter top that tied at the neck. The man pulled at the string and untied the halter, and Pauline struggled to hold up her top with one hand and grope for the fence with the other. She tried to scream but the effort came out a piteous whimper. Two of the other men whistled, but the fourth, a wide-faced black man with hair graying at the temples, didn’t. “Leave her, Billy, she’s a baby,” he said.

  “Baby doll,” Billy said. He still had one hand in her hair. “She’s Packy Knight’s baby, that’s who she is. You want a ride, ice baby?” he said. He put his other hand on his crotch and made a pumping motion with it. The men hooted.

  “Billy, leave her,” the older man said. He was angry. He rammed Billy’s bicycle with his own. Billy laughed and pushed Pauline away. The force of Billy’s shove knocked her off balance again, and she scraped her hands against the wooden fence, feeling the splinters pierce like fire before she fell to her knees. The older man got off his bike and tried to help her up, but she recoiled from his touch. The rest rode off, and the older man looked at her sadly, then gazed up at the sky and shook his head.

  “Come now, Jesus, where you at?” he said. “Wasn’t nothing right about that.” It was such an odd phrase—Come now, Jesus, where you at?—that Pauline remembered that even in her terror she’d felt a bit envious that the man seemed to enjoy so casually companionable a relationship with Jesus that he could even chide Him for negligence. The man rode away. Pauline retied her top, took the roller skates off, and ran in her socks back to the factory. She locked herself in the women’s washroom and stayed there until she stopped shaking and crying. She said nothing to her father about what had happened. In the car, she told him she had a headache and wasn’t in the mood for the Dreamette after all. She closed her eyes and rode in silence until they arrived home, where she went to her room and pitched the roller skates into the back of her closet. She spent the evening picking wooden slivers out of her palms with her mother’s eyebrow tweezers.

  “What happened?” her sister Caroline said.

  “I fell,” Pauline said.

  Why that memory came back to her so frequently in dreams she’d never know. She had the dream again last night, and the memory of it lingered under her skin this morning, even after a decently paced run at low tide and a long, hot shower. She should have been feeling pretty good after the run, but any valiant endorphins that might have been trying to elevate her mood were being summarily crushed by two competing distractions: one, a throbbing right knee; and two, the heart-stopping terror of Johnny’s impending brain surgery.

  The knee pain, at least, was nothing new. After one meniscus surgery, one ACL repair, one eroded kneecap, and enough osteoarthritis to sink a ship, it was a wonder she could still walk, let alone run. “You runners are what keep me in business,” the orthopedist, shaking his head, said after the first ACL post-op visit, when she asked how long it would be before she could run a 5K. “Why don’t you take up swimming?”

  But Pauline didn’t want to swim. She didn’t want to go to a spin class or dance Zumba or strike a downward dog. She wanted to run, and she’d been secretly thrilled when the knee doctor had called her a “runner,” enjoying his unquestioning appraisal of her as an athlete. An athlete! She, Pauline, who hadn’t even started running until she was in her mid-forties, who hadn’t even exercised regularly since the collapse of the aerobics madness in the 1980s! She’d grinned stupidly at the doctor and lumbered awkwardly out of the
exam room, her leg encased in a brace the size of a small cannon. “Four months,” the doctor called after her. “Don’t even think of it before that.” She’d waited two and a half, then pulled out her Nikes.

  No, the knee pain was bearable. She could live with that. It was rather the dream of Billy and its attendant lack of sleep, plus the memory of the near-hysterical tone of some of the posters on MeningiomaMeetUp.com, that was going to get to her today. She’d spent an hour on the site last night, reading about brain tumors, until Johnny looked over her shoulder, saw what she was doing, and told her she was going to make herself a nervous wreck, and him by extension. Don’t believe what you read on the Internet, he’d said. Half of it’s rubbish. The other half’s trash.

  Brain tumors. Her stomach swiveled again like it had been doing since the other day, when Dr. Tosh pulled up the brain scan on the laptop. In the twenty-five years of their marriage, she’d never seen Johnny so clearly frightened. And the fact that he was afraid was rendering her nothing short of terrified. The anxiety was coming in waves—thick marmalades of fear. She’d just get one wave stilled when another would come blobbing in, slow and wicked. Because maybe the doctors were wrong! What did they know, really? Maybe the cyst wasn’t benign. Maybe it wasn’t a cyst at all, but rather a ravenous malignancy, spreading right this minute through the most tender crevices of Johnny’s brain. Maybe it had already spread beyond his brain. Maybe it was creeping down his spinal cord by now, a cancerous kudzu, reaching long tentacles around his vertebrae and into the trembling chambers of his heart. Maybe it had infiltrated his bones. Maybe his blood. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  She’d been hovering over Johnny for two days now, trying to bring him tea and convince him to nap. Nap! As if he was a nap-and-tea kind of guy. She couldn’t get Johnny MacKinnon to keep still if she sat on him. Already this morning he’d spent two hours in the garage machining a new part for one of the ice machines. With a tumor in his skull! She finally went out to check on him.