Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  I WAS awake on the sofa when the phone erupted a few minutes before three.

  I was sober. The season’s first miller moth was flitting above me in the darkness.

  Lauren was asleep. The e-mail from Michael McClelland with the newspaper accounts of the shooting had indeed been in her in-box. Some police records that my mother had promised me would never be unsealed were the last things my wife read before she climbed into bed.

  Perfect.

  Digesting a decade of distrust—mine and hers—kept me awake. The exact same digestive process put her to sleep. We were different in many ways. I’d never considered that a problem and I still didn’t.

  We didn’t react to each other the way my parents had. That had always been enough for me.

  My cloud was gone. Its absence provided much less relief than I had hoped. Would it stay away? Would the wolves return when exhaustion slowed me? What would replace the cloud? I didn’t know.

  I pounced on the call, catching it after half a ring.

  Not much good news arrives at three o’clock in the morning. Most celebratory events that occur overnight—births, engagements, Vegas jackpots, whatever—can wait to be announced until after dawn. Three o’clock in the morning is for drunks on mobile phones, wrong numbers, and bad news.

  Caller ID read OUT OF AREA. I thought, Sam. He has bad news about J. Winter B.

  The voice I heard when I answered was foreign and female. “Alan Gregory?” The woman pronounced my name with accents on unfamiliar syllables.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You are…ice? For your…For…Sorry, sorry. For…I don’t have…Just…Uh, one…one moment.” I heard papers being shuffled. She placed the phone on a hard surface. Picked it back up. “Adrienne? Yes? Her mobile, you are Adrienne’s…You are ice? Yes? No? A moment please.” She moved more papers. I heard loud voices in the background. One of them was hers.

  My ears and my brain weren’t cooperating. My ears heard “ice.” They heard “eyes.” Neither made any sense to my brain. But she’d said “Adrienne.” Twice. Hearing my friend’s name spoken by a Middle Eastern–sounding woman in the middle of the night caused my pulse to accelerate from its torpor like a sprinter exploding from the blocks. Instinctively, I did the math. It was around noon in Israel.

  Noon is good, I thought. Bad things don’t happen at noon.

  “Eye, see, eee,” she said. “In case of emergency, yes? You? Alan Gregory?”

  I-C-E. In case of emergency. Oh dear God. In Adrienne’s cellphone directory she had listed me as her “ICE”—the person whom rescue personnel should contact in case of emergency. I knew I was her ICE. She had shown me the acronym in her cell phone.

  Adrienne didn’t keep secrets any more than she permitted them.

  I tried to leash in the panic that was ripping at my heart. “Yes, yes. This is Alan Gregory. I am Adrienne’s ICE. Is she okay? What happened? Is Jonas all right?”

  “A moment,” she said. Loud voices. Unfamiliar tongues. The woman was doing three things at once. Talking to me was only one of them.

  Lauren appeared at the end of the hall, the comforter from the bed covering her nakedness above her thighs. Her closed fists clasped the duvet in a fat knot between her breasts. I watched her mouth fall open. I watched her squint as she tried to make sense of what was happening in the dark room. She was bewildered. Frightened and bewildered.

  Emily poked her black nose and one pointed ear out from behind the comforter.

  The woman with the accent came back on the line. She began talking quickly. She had a story to tell me and she was in a rush to tell it.

  Within a few seconds—“There was a bombing” was all it took—I was crying. I cradled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and I tried to scribble words and numbers with my useless left hand. The woman talked for minutes. Three? Five? I couldn’t have said. She provided details that meant nothing.

  This town. Near that intersection. A plaza. The entrance to some café. She said the name of the café as though she thought I would recognize it. A checkpoint somewhere. Something about a bus stop.

  Lauren covered her mouth with her hand and her dark eyes became as big as egg yolks. Her chin quivered before she too began to sob.

  To the woman on the phone I said, “You are sure?”

  She was. She said, “Passport. Mobile. And…ICE.” She asked me if I would be able to come.

  “Yes, today,” I said. “As soon as I can get a flight.”

  She gave me addresses and phone numbers. I scribbled southpaw. I repeated the numbers to her.

  She told me I had them wrong. Forcing calm into her voice, she asked for my mobile number and my e-mail address. I gave her both. She said she would send me an e-mail or a text with the information. She could tell I was crying and she said she was sorry for my loss. “So many,” she said. “So many others.” She had to go. Her last words were in Hebrew. They sounded kind.

  I thanked her. Thanked her.

  Tremulous, Lauren said, “What?”

  “Adrienne,” I said.

  FIFTY-NINE

  LATER THAT day I flew Air Canada to Toronto from DIA then nonstop to Tel Aviv, arriving in Israel early the next evening. The trip took eighteen hours.

  I had no troubles for those eighteen hours, the same way I had no troubles on 9/11, or 9/12 or 9/13, no troubles for weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami, no troubles for a month after I realized what was really happening in Darfur, and no troubles on the many days after Katrina hit.

  Raw tragedy trumps personal drama every time.

  Adrienne and her second cousin were dead.

  Jonas was in good condition in a local hospital. He had been standing in the shadow of a concrete pillar that shielded his body from the nails imbedded in the explosive device worn by the suicide bomber. The bomber was a woman. The authorities thought she had worn the explosives over her chest in the shape of a vest or camisole. Jonas and his mother and his mother’s second cousin were outside a popular café in a resort on the Mediterranean, waiting to go inside for something to eat. Security at the café kept the bomber outside the door. The police thought that the bomber had waited until a bus was arriving at the nearby stop and the crowd on the sidewalk was dense before exploding her device.

  Seven people were killed, including the bomber. Thirteen others were injured.

  I was Adrienne’s ICE. As her ICE I would accompany my friend’s body home. I would wrap her son in all the love my heart could muster and I would bring Jonas home too. I would find the strength to do it because I had to. I was Adrienne’s ICE.

  Cold and hard.

  But not dry. If I were dry ice I would have been transformed from my solid state into a vapor long before I accomplished my required tasks. I needed to stay solid.

  For Jonas.

  I was sitting beside Jonas’s hospital bed envying his sleep when I read a text message from Cozy informing me that Adrienne’s will named Lauren and me as guardians of her son. It wasn’t news; I had already known we were Jonas’s guardians. Years before, after her husband Peter was murdered, Adrienne had told me that if she “kicked”—her word—she wanted Lauren and me to be Jonas’s “next parents.”

  Adrienne didn’t keep secrets.

  Two days later I returned from Israel with my son. We left Tel Aviv near midnight and after eighteen hours in the air and a blurry sojourn in Toronto’s airport we were back home in Spanish Hills for dinner.

  Lauren had spent the time I was away buying design magazines and sketching out plans for remodeling the basement for Jonas’s new room. Her energy and enthusiasm for the project surprised me. She wanted to gut the cranberry and pink bathroom and build something that was right “for our little boy.”

  I scanned her plans for a water feature. Nada.

  Lauren’s design was practical. She would move a couple of walls to steal space from our office and to give Jonas a larger room an
d a built-in desk for a computer. She wanted to frame-in a bigger closet and enlarge the basement window for better light and for better egress during emergencies.

  Lauren was making room for our expanded family. She was concerned with safety, and comfort, and light.

  I saw sublimation at work.

  Hers was going to be a big job. I knew that at least one of the walls she wanted to move was a foundation wall. It bore a lot of load.

  For a while Jonas would share a room with his new sister.

  SIXTY

  I DIDN’T start sleeping any better. For the first couple of weeks that Jonas was in our home I allowed him to stay up with me long after his bedtime. We’d watch TV and play cards, mostly gin, in the great room. Sometimes he’d ask questions about Adrienne and Peter. More often he didn’t. I told myself he was healing, even though I knew better.

  Even in the brightest sun the worst stains don’t bleach.

  Reruns of The Simpsons made us both laugh, though we laughed at different parts.

  One night we wandered the house where he’d lived with his parents. I held his hand as he padded slowly through every room. He was, I think, making sure his mother wasn’t really there. I swallowed tears the whole time.

  Twice he asked if we could play cards in the barn. Those evenings we sat on stools at Peter’s wood-carving bench. He wanted to know what his father’s power tools were for. I tried my best to explain the difference between the jointer and the planer. A length of hickory Peter had been turning was still in the lathe. I let Jonas flip it on to watch the wood spin. He wondered if Peter and I had been friends.

  “The best,” I said.

  He cried that night in the barn. It was the first time. He allowed me to hold him while he shook. His body melded to mine like memory foam.

  Each of those nights we went out to the barn he ended the visit by peeing in the Good Head.

  With Jonas up late to provide company the hours when the house was quiet and dark were shorter each night, but they were just as quiet and just as dark as they had been before the bomb in Israel.

  In my grief it was always three A.M.

  Seventeen days after Adrienne’s death—fifteen days after the simple wooden box containing her body was lowered into the ground at Green Mountain—a woman from New Mexico I didn’t know called Adrienne’s cell phone while I was driving to get Grace from school. I had chosen to carry Adrienne’s phone with me for a while. Every few days I ended up giving some ignorant stranger news about the tragedy in Israel. I hated having to do it but reminded myself that was the point—that was why I was answering her phone.

  I was heading north on 28th Street just past Arapahoe when the phone started to buzz. Adrienne’s cell didn’t ring, it buzzed. I’d found the noise annoying when she was alive. I found it comforting after she died. I made a quick right off 28th into the redevelopment of Crossroads and stopped the car in a loading zone before I answered the call. Experience had taught me that the conversations I had on Adrienne’s phone required all the concentration I could muster.

  I explained to the woman that I was a friend of Adrienne’s and was about to relay the bad news about her death when she informed me that she knew what had happened. She said she was calling to find out if Jonas still wanted the puppy.

  “Puppy?” I said.

  Adrienne, she explained, had arranged to get Jonas a dog as a birthday gift. A surprise.

  I was parked facing away from the mountains with the monster Twenty-ninth Street redevelopment all around me, and I was lost. The new Crossroads was not quite Boulder, and not quite suburbia. I was in the middle of the town where I’d lived for twenty years and I didn’t really know where I was.

  “It’s a Havanese,” she said. “The litter is ready. Adrienne has been waiting over six months for this little darling.”

  “A Havanese,” I repeated. I couldn’t have picked a Havanese out of the jumble of dogs at the Dumb Friends League if my life depended on it. Twenty-ninth Street? Havanese? So much unfamiliarity. I wondered if I’d descended into a fugue and then watched that question segue into another: Could a person in a fugue wonder if he was in a fugue?

  I checked the rearview mirror and spotted the mountains. It’s okay, I thought. Boulder is Boulder.

  “It would be my gift to Jonas,” the breeder said. “Callie’s a wonderful little girl. The only bitch in the litter. She has more spunk than all her brothers combined. She’s just what Jonas needs.”

  I liked that she thought she knew what Jonas needed. I sure didn’t.

  Jonas and I drove to New Mexico to pick up his Havanese puppy. We talked a lot about names as we headed south. He was still trying to decide what to call me and Lauren—Jonas had called us by our first names since he’d learned to talk, but it was clear that option didn’t feel quite right to him anymore. “Mom” and “Dad” weren’t on his radar yet.

  It was important that his dog’s name feel perfect to him.

  Much of psychology isn’t complicated. It’s just stuff grandmothers know.

  Our route took us on I-25 through Pueblo. Just before we got there he announced that the name “Callie” was officially out of the running.

  Pueblo. I still held out hope that Michael McClelland wouldn’t be returning to the nearby Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. Despite a failed suicide attempt in the infirmary at New Max—Michael had tried to slice an artery in his neck with a blade he’d fashioned from a sliver of a credit card—the state continued the interminable process of evaluating his competency to proceed.

  Smith, the assistant warden, had personally called to tell me the news about McClelland’s suicide attempt. “You blew that call,” he said. “About his suicidal risk.”

  There had been no recrimination in his tone. “I guess,” I’d said. Bummer. Referees aren’t perfect. I suspected that the assistant warden knew that if I’d blown that particular call, I’d done it with my eyes wide open.

  Let’s say it was a make-up call.

  If there were any justice Michael McClelland would never get to enjoy the modern facility the recalcitrant Colorado legislature had recently approved to replace the ancient dungeon of a structure in Pueblo. Instead, if there were any justice, McClelland would soon get sent back to Pitkin County for trial, he’d finally be convicted—by an Aspen jury, no less—and he’d spend the rest of his life in the sterile, dangerous confines of New Max.

  Or he’d kill himself first. That would be fine with me, too.

  If there were any justice.

  Jonas and I stopped in Pueblo, filled the car with gas, and picked up lunch at a local burger place. I still had half a tank of fuel but I needed an excuse to scrape bug exoskeletons and their splattered innards off the windshield. Lauren phoned just as we were climbing up the on-ramp onto I-25. She asked where we were. I told her.

  Her tone changed. “The sheriff found that woman’s body,” she said. “I thought you would want to know.”

  “What woman is that?” I asked pleasantly. Please, I thought. Let it be her. Let this be the end.

  Lauren knew I was in the car with Jonas and that I couldn’t ask any revealing questions.

  “Justine…Brown.”

  J. Winter B. “Okay.” Yes.

  “She’d been living in a rented cottage on a ranch near Frederick. Looks like suicide, though she was apparently pretty ambivalent about the whole question of method. She had a pile of drugs and a bottle of whiskey on her kitchen table. She had a tub full of water in the bathroom and a fresh razor blade on the sink. But she ended up shooting herself below her chin—it went right through her brain stem. Dead a few days, at least. A guy servicing her propane tank reported the smell.”

  That’s not right.

  “What was it on her kitchen table? Specifically?”

  “Jack Daniel’s and…amitriptyline,” Lauren said. The unfamiliar word caused her to stumble—she’d put the accent on the wrong syllable and pronounced the final one “li
ne,” not “lean.” The innocuous mispronunciation yanked me back to the indelible memory of the night I was Adrienne’s ICE. I fought reflex tears.

  She continued, “A pile of pills. Maybe twenty.”

  Amitriptyline—the accent goes on the “trip”—is a pre-Prozac antidepressant. Its most common brand name is Elavil.

  Elavil? Damn.

  “No bottle?” I asked.

  “For the Jack, yes. For the drugs, no.”

  Holy shit. Holy…shit. “Thank you…for the news. You and Grace are good?”

  “We’re fine,” Lauren said. “Can I talk to Jonas?”

  While Jonas got acquainted with his puppy and her brothers at the breeder’s home outside Los Alamos, I walked a quarter of a mile down her rural lane until I was in sight of the town. I had two bars on my cell. Good enough. But not wise. I kept walking until I saw a shuttered structure that was sufficiently antiquated that I would call it a “filling station,” not a gas station. I used a Costco calling card to call Sam from a phone booth. The phone was battered. The booth was nothing more than an aluminum lattice. It had no door and no glass.

  The PAY PHONE identifier on Sam’s caller ID told him all he needed to know about why I was calling. It was about our newest secret.

  His greeting was, “I was hoping you’d be smart enough…not to want to have this conversation.”

  “I’m not that smart.” Sam knew I wasn’t that smart.

  “Give me the number of your pay phone. I’ll call you right back.”

  He did, less than five minutes later. It was just enough time for him to get the few blocks from his house down to Broadway and the closest public phone.

  We were talking pay phone to pay phone. Serious subterfuge. “That digital camera?” he said. “The one from the Royal Arch Trail? Had a big memory card in it.”

  Ah. “You’ve known this for a while.”

  He didn’t answer. “Go on,” I said, but the single clue was all that I needed to guess the broad outlines of what Sam was going to tell me. I was aware that he’d been spending much of his time on suspension in a fruitless search for Currie—J. Winter B. I didn’t know exactly what Sam found on her camera’s memory card; I’m not that prescient. But I knew his megapixel story was going to speak volumes about Sam’s motivation for his protracted search and for what I was thinking he’d done on that ranch near Frederick.