Home Another Way (24 page)
“Then it’s yours. I have a bunch more at home. Sometimes I wear two,” I said, and before I tucked Zuriel’s hands under the stained blanket, she was asleep.
I drove straight to Doc’s office to find Patty Saltzman, boots on the desk, polishing her claws. “Stay away from me,” she said.
“I need a favor.” And, man, did it hurt to ask.
“Yeah, right.” She sniffed, shaking her hands through the air, blowing on her nails.
“Really. I’ll pay you.”
Her head popped up. “For what and how much?”
“Thirty bucks if you come with me when I visit one of Doc’s patients, and play the piano for her.”
She gingerly screwed on the polish cap. “When?”
“Tuesday.”
“Fifty, and I’ll do it.”
Greedy wench.
“Fine.”
I waited until ten-thirty to go to the skating pond—late enough, I figured, that anyone under twelve would be tucked in bed, and anyone over twelve would have better sense than to venture out on a moonless night to glide around a sheet of frozen water.
The air was mild, as mild as Jonah got in mid-March, in the low twenties, no wind. Even in the darkness, my eyes could make out the blanket of clouds above, several subtle shades of gray patchworked together. The bright days, when sunlight painted every surface with gold, and the perfect starry nights, those were the most frigid—no clouds to hold the heat against the earth.
Still, I wore tights and two pair of thermals under my clothes, gloves inside my mittens, and two scarves. I couldn’t double up on my socks; my feet didn’t fit inside the skates with more than one layer.
I parked as close to the pond as I could without driving on the ice, turned the cab light on, and fastened my skates as tightly as possible. Memory had helped me clean the blades last Sunday. Actually, she scoured both of them with steel wool until she could see herself in them. I had tried to scrub one blade, but the thin steel filaments hurt my hands, and I complained with each prick. Memory got tired of my whining, grabbed the steel wool, and told me to restring the laces. I also scrubbed the leather boots until they were a nice French vanilla color.
My ankles bent in and out as I walked to the rink. I sat down on one of the logs that had been strategically pushed around the pond for benches and pulled the laces taut enough to cut off my circulation in hopes of stabilizing my wobbly ankles. Then I stepped out onto the ice and lost my balance, jamming my wrists as I tried to break my fall.
I flopped over onto my knees and, digging the toe picks into the ice, struggled upright. I held my arms out and inched across the blackness. The blade caught on something, and I fell again, this time forward, chin kissing the ice.
Skating in the dark was, I decided, a bad idea, despite all the romantic notions I’d attached to it.
I half-crawled, half-wormed along the frozen surface until my hands touched snow. As I tried again to stand, I saw my shadow, at first a squatty pygmy near my feet, then stretching into an anorexic giant, all arms and legs, as a light swelled behind me. I turned my head; two headlights ogled me, yellow-white rectangles about fifty feet off in the distance.
And I fell.
“Sarah? Is that you?”
I cupped my mitten over my eyes, squinted into the severe brightness. “Jack?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Skating,” I said, but made no move to get off my butt. I didn’t want to look like an utter fool in front of him. Again.
“That usually requires standing.”
“I was fine until you came. And why are you here?”
He dropped his hockey skates—the ones that had been hanging over his shoulder, laces tied together—onto the ice. “To skate.”
“Now? In the dark?”
“You’re here.”
“Yeah, but you’re normal.”
He laughed. “I like to skate alone. It gives me time to think and pray. To shake off the day, so to speak. This is the only time I can do that. But I’m smart enough to keep my lights on. Only had my battery go dead on me once.”
“So, I’m interrupting?”
“I guess, technically, I’m interrupting,” he said, and pulled me up, steadying me as I tottered against him. “You were here first.”
“You can stay. I mean, the pond’s big enough for both of us, right?”
“I’d be afraid to leave. You might trip and split your skull open, and some poor kids would find you after school tomorrow, bleeding and unconscious.”
“Funny,” I said, shoving him, flailing as I lost my balance. He grabbed the front of my jacket.
“Not really,” he said. “Think of those poor, traumatized kids.”
He sat down on the ice, took off his boots. He wore striped socks, lime green and red and violet.
“Talk about trauma,” I said, pointing to his feet.
“They were a gift from a lovely elderly lady in my congregation. She’s worn glasses since 1926, and they don’t come much thicker than hers.” Jack tied on his skates, kicked his boots to the side of the pond, and looped around me. “So, are you going to stand there all night?”
Knees locked, I slid one leg forward from my hip, then the other, like scissors. My blades moved back and forth, cutting deeper into the ice.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “And the ice looks like it’s bending. I don’t want to fall through.”
“Green ice. It bounces like rubber, but don’t worry, it’s solid.” Jack came up behind me, wrapping his arm around my waist and taking my mitten in his glove. “Now,” he said, his words hot in my ear, “you have to bend your knees. And you can’t just move your blades in a straight line. Push off a little, to the outside.”
I did, taking short, choppy steps. Jack moved with me, held me. “Now, lengthen your stride,” he told me.
We looped the pond two, three times, picking up speed. I heard only our jackets rubbing against one another, and our breathing—mine raw and labored, his smooth, comfortable.
His touch lightened; I barely felt him.
“Let go,” I said, and he did.
My blades grated over the ice, making a
sha-sha-sha
sound. I listened more closely, and the scratching metamorphosed into my name.
Sarah.
I moved my feet faster.
Sarah.
Faster.
Sarah-Sarah-Sarah.
It chased me around the pond, the masked fiend in a bloody slasher flick. I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t escape myself.
The wind brushed over me. I took off my mittens and gloves, my two scarves, my hat, flinging them into the snow. Then I sailed from one end of the pond to the other, blades still, soundless, arms spread, fingers combing the air. I cut through the headlights, tilting my head back, up toward the bearded sky, and slowed to a standstill.
Jack sprinted past me, and as he approached the snowbank, he turned his hips and skidded, stopping on his edges. He crossed back to the other side. And again, and again—at least twenty times. Then he took a plastic five-gallon bucket and hockey stick from his truck. He set it on its side, mouth toward him, and dropped a puck onto the ice. I watched him slap the puck into the bucket, which clattered upright from the force.
“He shoots. He scores,” Jack said, raising the stick over his head.
I laughed, and he made several more goals from different areas of the pond. He’d taken off his hat and gloves, too, and his coat. He looked good in a fitted, black turtleneck sweater, his hair dark and feral.
I skated more, avoiding the whizzing pucks. I grew confident, daring, making wide figure eights and sharp turns, and bunny-hopping a couple inches off the ice.
“Not bad,” Jack said. “Want to take a few shots?”
“No, I want to do that sideways stop thing you do.”
“I don’t think you’re ready for that yet.”
“Have you seen me flying around here? Tell me how.”
“You have to build up some speed, then quickly twist your blades and dig into the ice.”
“Piece of cake,” I said, and started skating to the far side of the pond. About six feet from the edge, I tried to stop. My feet twisted together and I hurtled into the snowbank, shouting unintelligibly at the frigid wetness against my hands, down my collar.
Jack slid gracefully to a stop next to me, spraying me with a thin glaze of shaved ice.
“Show-off,” I said. “Go ahead, say it.”
“I told you so,” he said, laughing, reaching to pull me up.
“I can do it.” I shook off his hand and flailed around, trying to turn over. Instead, I kicked Jack’s legs out from under him. He fell, hard, next to me.
“Oops,” I said, now my turn to laugh. “Sorry.”
“I bet you are.”
Our faces were close; his Doublemint breath melted my frozen cheek. My hair fanned out over the snow, rivulets of lava in the otherwise unblemished whiteness. I closed my eyes and leaned into him, toward his face, his lips.
Suddenly, I felt myself yanked up by both arms. I opened my eyes and saw Jack skating off, collecting my abandoned woolens and stuffing them into my hat. “Your hands are freezing,” he said. “Come on. The diner’s open. Let’s get something to warm up with. My treat.”
I shook the snow from my hair and glided toward Jack, running my hand slowly up the front of my jacket to my neck, to the metal zipper, and pulling it down. “The rest of me isn’t cold,” I said.
My body moved instinctively—chest out, stomach in, a bit more sway in the hips—but my mind churned in protest. I felt as if I’d been sliced in two, the woman in the magic show whom the illusionist lays in the box and saws through, the halves placed side by side so her feet wiggle next to her head. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t want an empty fling. But I didn’t know how to stop.
Jack did. He skated away, picked up the hockey stick and bucket. “You can come or not. It’s up to you.”
“Why don’t we go to your place?” I purred.
“We could go to the inn. Mom’s always up late. I’m sure she’d be glad to see you. It’s been—what? A couple weeks?”
“I was just hoping we could, you know, talk. Alone.”
He tugged on his hat and gloves. “About what?” he asked, zipping and snapping his coat closed. A message to me.
Don’t
touch.
“About Luke.”
My answer was ninety percent manipulation, designed to stall Jack, to force him into giving me more of his time. It worked. He sat on the log, untied his skates and put on his boots. “What do you want to know?”
I sat on the log, too, at the other end. “What was he like?”
“Quiet.”
“Not like me.”
Jack laughed, just a bit, more of a sniffle. “We played chess together, almost every day. He was terrible. Four, five moves and I’d have him in check. We used to talk theology during the game, and I think that distracted him. He’d be the first to admit, he couldn’t do two things at once.”
“What else?”
“You really want to know?”
I nodded. The nonmanipulative ten percent did, honestly, want to know.
“He loved books. He’d read anything, from John Calvin to Stephen King. And he’d do anything for anyone. He was great with his hands, always fixing something, building something. Always had time for a friend. Or a stranger.”
I snorted a little. “So, you think he was a saint.”
“I think he was a man who tried to serve God the best way he knew.” Jack stood, stomped his feet on the ground. “I’m cold now. But that offer for cocoa at the diner still stands.”
“I think I’ll stay.”
“I’ll see you, then, I guess,” he said, and he walked across the ice to his truck, dumping his hockey gear in the back.
“Hey,” I called. My voice echoed around me. “What if he just did all that good stuff to make up for what he did—you know, like trying to balance the scale? Karma or whatever. He wouldn’t be such a great guy then, huh?”
A shadow passed over Jack’s face, and for a moment, I thought my question had angered him. He kicked some sooty icicles from the underside of his truck, blinked his eyes a few times, and slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think Luke was like that.”
He left, taking the light with him. And I stepped back onto the pond, and skated, snuggled against the dark.
Jack opened his freezer and spotted the box of waffles crushed under two pizzas and a gallon ice cream tub filled with turkey soup. He grabbed the box and shook it, open end down. Two pale waffle squares tumbled onto the kitchen counter, glued together with frost and age. He tried to twist them apart. Couldn’t. So he took a butter knife from the draining rack and jammed it between them. The waffles split, one falling onto the floor. He picked it up, wiped it on his T-shirt, and stuck it in the toaster with the other.
He tried to remember the last time he skipped breakfast at the diner on a weekday. It had to be two years. But he’d slept terribly the night before—if tossing and pacing and brooding could be called sleep—and wasn’t in the mood to deal with people this morning. He told himself that even Jesus retreated from the crowds to be alone. Of course, Jesus spent that time in prayer, not moping in his pj’s hoping no one would bother him until noon, at least.
The waffles popped up from the toaster. Jack sprinkled powdered sugar on them, folded them in half, and ate them standing over the sink. Usually, he liked them with syrup, the artificial kind, like Aunt Jemima—much to the horror of his mother and dozens of his congregants who tapped the maples yearly during sugaring season—but he didn’t want to dirty a plate, or knife and fork, for that matter, because, quite honestly, he hated touching the leftover food on used dishes. And he refused gloves. Every time he saw someone wearing that squeaky yellow rubber, he remembered how his brother had teased him because he said he’d only get near chewed-up food with gloves on. Timothy called him a wimp.
Maybe he’d been right.
For once, Jack wished he had a television, so he could simply plop in front of it and let the box do the thinking for him, distracting him with images of toothpaste, luxury automobiles, and sugared breakfast cereals. He didn’t want to use his brain at all this morning, and even the most mindless activity he could engage in—those time-devouring computer games like Minesweeper or Hearts—still required some effort on his part.
