The Ice Queen (18 page)

Eliza telephoned Nina from the runway and then held the phone up to Ned’s ear. He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. I don’t know what Nina said to him, but she comforted him somehow, and he slept all the way to Eliza’s house in Monterey, a long trip, so tiresome I fell asleep myself, sitting up, my check against the window.

When I opened my eyes all I saw was green. And then the sky, and then the clouds.

“Almost there,” Eliza said cheerfully.

The ambulance pulled up in her driveway. I sat beside Ned while they got the stretcher ready. I could see Eliza’s husband come out to meet the EMTs. New ones now. The ones from the plane had disappeared.

“My fucking back,” Ned said. “It hurts.”

“Serves you right for being such a pain in the ass.”

A joke from a thousand years ago. He remembered.

“You’re the pain. You.”

***

I think Ned took the dishes off the table when he found them there that morning. I think he put them in the sink when he realized what it meant for our mother to have left breakfast for us. He did the logical thing in an illogical world. He cleaned up the mess.

I hopped out of the ambulance so Carlos and the EMTs could carry Ned inside. It was beautiful here, wherever we were. I blinked. A bat. There beyond the trees.

“Go to sleep,” Eliza told me. “We’ll wake you in a few hours, and then we’d better go right there.”

She was a nurse. She saw where my brother was. That he was leaving right now.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I said.

“An hour,” Eliza insisted. “Then we’ll be ready to go.”

They had a pullout couch made up for me. They were kind, and I accepted their kindness, even though I knew I’d never see them again, never be able to repay them.

When I woke up I could hear my brother and Eliza talking. She asked him if he wanted food, applesauce, or homemade vanilla pudding, or crackers softened in water.

“Nope,” my brother said. “I couldn’t stomach it. That’s a joke. Get it?”

I heard Eliza’s laughter. I got up, found the bathroom, washed my face. Today was the day. It was the start of the
ever after
. I ran a stranger’s brush through my hair. It was longer than it had been since I was eight years old. Black. Sticks. Crow-colored.

I went into the guest room. My brother looked happy. He looked like a cloud.

“Guess where we are,” he said.

“The middle of your dream?”

“Monterey, California,” my brother said.

He was still here. Right here with me. And I was grateful for that.

Carlos and Eliza took him out to their van, and rested him in the back. An ambulance might not want to go as far into the forest as we meant to go. I got in the front seat while Eliza hooked up Ned’s IV and gave him all his meds. It was another ride, but it wouldn’t be as long. Carlos got behind the wheel. He worked for the parks department.

“We try to keep this week secret,” he said. “So we don’t have tourists up the ying-yang. Plus we never know exactly. All fall they arrive in dribs and drabs and then all at once. They’re everywhere. That’s why it was all so spur-of-the-moment. But you made it in time, Ned,” he called to my brother.

It didn’t take that long to get there, but the road was curvy. It was the most beautiful place I had ever been. “Can you see out there?” I called to Ned.

Lying on his back, he could see the sky.

“Cirrus,” he called back.

His voice was a hundred years old. But he sounded happy. When I walked into the kitchen all those years ago, Ned was tossing something into the trash; he was piling the dishes into the sink. Our mother had left us two bowls of cereal, two glasses of juice, our vitamin pills, the sugar bowl, two spoons, blueberry muffins, cut in half.

My eyes were filled with sleep when I walked into the kitchen that morning. My brother had looked guilty because he knew something I didn’t know. He looked ashamed, as though he had a secret that was too bad to share.

It’s too early. Go back to bed.

Beautiful long, stretched-out clouds drifted all along the ocean. Big black rocks. The curving road. The smell of something. I stuck my head out the window, breathed deep.
The here
and
the now
of it blew me away. But I didn’t wish for anything. Not more. Not less. I was exactly where I was, head hanging out the window, feeling the wind, tears in my eyes. The scent of this place was amazing.

“Eucalyptus,” Carlos said. “It’s what attracts the butterflies. The groves.”

I had no sense of what time it was. I think we had traveled through a day and a night. It was still morning, Eliza told me. I felt more for her than I had for people I’d known for years.

“He’s holding up,” she said, but the way she said it made me know, not for long.

We pulled into a parking lot. There was the Santa Lucia Range in front of us. And nearer, Mt. Lion. All rocks and trees. The ocean was so blue I couldn’t believe it. We were in a picnic area, but it was early and the lot was empty. Luck for once. Pure luck.

“We’ve got it all to ourselves,” Carlos said. “And a day without fog. That’s a miracle.”

The three of us got Ned onto the stretcher, into the fresh air. I carried the IV pole.

“Green,” Ned said.

It was. It was a eucalyptus grove. So delicious. Like the world was brand-new. We went up a path, slowly; pine needles make you slip, so carefully, carefully. The air was cold and warm at the same time — cool in the shadows, lemony in the sun. We crested a ridge. I thought there were falling leaves at first. All those orange things. Everywhere.

But no.

I leaned down and whispered to my brother, “You won’t believe this.”

We went into the sunlight and they were everywhere. In front of us were several picnic tables made of redwood, and we hauled the stretcher up on one. Settled it down, slowly.

“My, my, my,” my brother said.

There was a whirlwind of monarchs. You could hear the beating of their wings. I stood there with my arms out and they lit upon me, everywhere; they hung on my fingers, walked in my hair.

Carlos and Eliza were standing on a picnic bench, arms around each other.

“More,” they both said, and they laughed and drew each other near so that the butterflies swirled between them.

There were too many to count, everywhere, thousands of them, sleepy, slow, whirling. It was the height of their migration, and they were exhausted and beautiful. So orange they were like rubies, red, red, red.

I borrowed Eliza’s cell phone. The service was bad, but when I put the phone up to my brother’s ear he could hear Nina. He knew it was her.

“Everything has just changed a thousand times over.”

It took all of his effort to say that. When he had, we turned off the phone and waited. I had the desperate urge to turn my brother around.
Quick,
I would say,
we have to do it now. Put your feet where your head is resting. Play the final trick. Let Death pass over; let it pass by. Please, let us try.
But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.

Eliza unhooked the IV right before it happened. There was a click, and then quiet. You wouldn’t think there could be so many butterflies in the world. You wouldn’t think everything could change in an instant. But there are, and it does.

There were whirling clouds above us, brought in from the cold ocean air. Nimbus. Fast moving. Flying. Good to lift your spirit. Good for everything. Good for him.

II

Nina named their daughter Mariposa. She was born in January on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I noticed. I was keeping track of such things. I was there with Mariposa when she was born; I was the coach who said,
Breathe
and
Push
and
Oh my God, there has never been anything so beautiful
. I was watching over her from the beginning, so I was made her godmother, which meant I had to watch over her forever more. It turned out to be something I was good at. Something I was meant to be. I stayed on for several months, babysitting, helping out, nearly learning to cook, until Nina was ready to go back to work, ready to have her daughter go to the day care center at the university while she taught her classes. I left Giselle with them. It just made sense. She was a Florida cat now. She’d have howled if she’d been made to put a paw into snow and ice. Besides, I’d never thought she was mine, so I wasn’t really giving anything away.

A godmother’s role is to send gifts, and I do that — too much, probably. Every year on Mariposa’s birthday, I go for a visit. I don’t despair over that time of the year anymore. It’s my favorite month, just as it used to be. I’ve given Mariposa a dozen volumes of fairy tales. Her favorites are the Andrew Lang books, with all those pretty covers, filled with stories that feel illogical and true at the very same time. She and I are both partial to the Red Book.

Once I read Mari her father’s favorite, “Godfather Death.” “That’s not funny,” she said to me.

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “But your father liked that story. He was a scientist like the doctor.”

“They don’t all have to be funny,” she said after thinking it over. “But tell me the one about a girl who climbs a mountain that no one has ever climbed before.”

“I don’t know that one. I only know the one about the girl who was turned into ice.”

“Make it up.” Mariposa had a solemn face that reminded me of Ned. Ned, who was a good secret-keeper. Ned, who never believed in perfect logic. Ned, in the
ever after
.

It was difficult for me to say no to Mariposa. I wanted her to have everything. So I made up the story for her. It turned out to be a good one. Better than the story I used to tell myself. It was the same girl, in the same icy land, but this time she thought to climb over the mountain instead of standing in place and freezing. She was smarter now, less likely to give in. As soon as she got to the place on the other side of the mountain, she started to melt; she left a blue river behind her, one that is always cold, always pure, always true.

The last time I visited Orlon, I took Mariposa out to the orange grove. I was babysitting. Nina was at class, and Mariposa had turned six. That’s the way it happened. Time kept moving forward. We sang songs as we drove, ones I thought I would have forgotten by now. Mariposa made me remember things. She liked my horrible voice and applauded. Everything she did was a treasure in my eyes. I was the godmother, after all. She belonged to me, too.

When we got to the orchard I pulled into the driveway, parked, and took Mari for a walk. She wore her hair in a pixie cut. Nina had told me she refused to let her hair grow; she hated to have it brushed and braided and fooled with.

“Smart girl,” I said. I told her that a lot.

“It smells good here,” Mari said as we walked in the grove.

She was right about that, too. The land had been sold at auction, and all the trees were in bloom. We walked down the road and waved to some of the workers.

“Hello!” Mariposa called to one of them who was pruning the branches. “Do you live in a tree?”

I have thought of Lazarus Jones, but he’s like a story I heard long ago. A story where I turned the pages even though I knew how it would end. Some things are like that, chaos theory aside. Turn left or turn right, you come to the same conclusions about certain things, the very same results. A young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, who wasn’t afraid of death, who, when he got a chance to be someone else, had to take it.

By now the hole in the ground had been filled in with stone and rock. I suppose the new owner hoped to cover it with fertilizer and sod, maybe reclaim the soil. All the old trees had been cut down. I thought I saw a red orange on one of the trees, but it was just the slant of sunlight, turning a piece of orange fruit crimson.

My mother’s secret was that she never planned to meet her friends. The riddle of who she was. It was her thirtieth birthday. It was her least favorite month of the year. I had always liked January. I liked ice. It was beautiful, like diamonds, the brightest thing in the world. I liked to write my name in the cold, foggy window of my bedroom with my fingertip. I liked how black the sky was, how the stars seemed to hang down lower in the sky. It was before I cut off all my hair, froze my heart, blamed myself for everything that had ever happened. I was thinking about the future back then. I was looking forward.

My mother had something else in mind. Ned didn’t want me to know, so he hid the dishes she’d set out before she got in her car. He hid the fact that our mother hadn’t intended to come back. But maybe I knew anyway. Maybe I saw it on her face, in the sadness of the days before her birthday. I had caught her crying in the bathroom on more than one occasion. Our mother was the sort of person who didn’t do well alone, and even though she was with us, she was alone. She’d never heard the story of the girl who climbed up the mountain no one had ever climbed before. I hadn’t thought it up yet. She didn’t have any wishes left, or at least that’s what she must have believed, so the idea of a birthday might have stopped her cold. Nothing had turned out right. Except maybe us, maybe that’s why she left us breakfast, so we wouldn’t be worried and hungry. She probably didn’t even consider the way we would miss her. Each and every minute of each and every day.

I wondered if my mother’s last thoughts had been of us. Her children, home and safe. If her heart broke, it wasn’t because of the ice but because of us. Good-bye to us. Me on the porch, my brother at the window, the bats in the eaves of the roof. Good-bye. Good-bye. This last moment, that last moment. The ever after. The swirl of the sky.

If someone had told me of her plan, I could have chased after the car for miles. But it wouldn’t have mattered. She had already decided. She took one last moment of care to make certain we wouldn’t be hungry when we woke. When she saw the ice she probably felt she was lucky. Maybe that was her final wish. Some luck for once in her life. The life she’d had enough of. When she leaned down to kiss me good-bye maybe I heard it in her voice. She said,
Good-bye, my darling girl
. It may have been easier to blame myself than to think she would leave us that way. If she came back now, I do think she would know me; she’d still recognize me.

I have become the head of the reference desk in the library in Red Bank. Back where I used to be. A citizen of New Jersey. I never miss a day of work, and I’m a careful driver. I do check my tires in the fall, so they’ll be ready for the winter to come. I have now counted thirty-two colors of ice, from indigo to scarlet. Maybe it’s the chemicals they use to salt the road, maybe it’s the way the light filters through the bare trees, maybe I’m just more sensitive to color than most people. In our house, every room is red, each a different shade: ruby, scarlet, cherry. Some people think it’s all the same, but the tones couldn’t be more different, as much so as black from white. Jack says I see what I want to see and hear what I want to hear and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Paint the ceiling red, if that’s the way you want it.
He’ll be surprised when and if I do. He doesn’t seem to mind surprises. One time, when I drove back from Florida I had the Newfoundland, Harry, in the car. Frances had retired, off to France as she’d planned, and I was always one to adopt a pet.

“Did you meet a bear on the road?” Jack asked me when I let Harry out of the car.

“I met you,” I said.

“You’re trying to flatter me so I don’t see how huge that dog is.” Jack had laughed. “He’ll take up half the living room.”

And that was the end of the conversation. Jack just whistled for the dog. He had faith in me and in my choices. We left it at that.

This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you’re living, even here in New Jersey. Even for someone like me. You’d laugh to know how long it’s taken me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you’re not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don’t mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I’m seeing is the ever after. I hope it’s you.