The Ice Queen (9 page)

“Well, this one’s alive,” Renny said of today’s mole. He put it in his jacket pocket. “I’ll bet that one was alive, too. Just playing dead. It’s difficult to tell, you know.”

I was still the death-wish girl. Touch you once and you turn to ice. Twice and you might disappear.

“Did you check to make sure before you threw him away?” Renny asked.

After all I’d done for him tonight Renny seemed to be accusing me of murder, or, if not that, thoughtlessness. Same difference. I had glue on my hands and my numb fingertips were raw from attaching those damned bamboo sticks. It was never going to work, not my life or his. I was annoyed and I couldn’t hide it.

“Maybe we’d better call it quits on the project,” I said. “If I do everything wrong, how am I going to construct a temple?”

“So, you’re done with me now? Is that it? Why not? Everyone else wants to get rid of me.”

He was so sensitive a single drop of poison could affect him, a word, a look, one sliver of ice. He had his head down. He was checking on the mole. I saw what I didn’t want to see: Renny was brokenhearted. Like and like. I knew how he felt.

“I don’t mean it that way, Renny.” I came up beside him, close. My only friend. I could see that the mole was breathing softly. Now I noticed that one of its ears had been torn in half.

I told Renny about Lazarus, not everything, of course, not the way I felt inside, just how I arose from bed at odd hours, compelled to drive out there; I revealed the corners of what was happening. Yet I said too much. Be careful whom you tell your story to. As we sat on my porch, both of us feeling the change in the weather, knees touching knees, I made the mistake of mentioning that Lazarus and I were always together in the dark. I suppose it was something that nagged at me. As soon as I’d said it I knew that I should have kept my mouth shut.

“And that doesn’t worry you? You’re suspicious about everything else, but not that? Clearly, there’s something this Lazarus doesn’t want you to see. Hell, I wish I could do the same with Iris. But even in the dark, I wouldn’t be able to trick her. What’s wrong with me would be even more obvious. The dark makes it worse for me.”

Renny decided he would show me this final effect of his strike. The one he kept from everyone. I had the feeling this might be the deep secret, the riddle of who he was. I wasn’t certain I wanted to know. But there was no stopping him.

The whole thing was much too personal. I wanted out. I wanted solitude. I wanted to tell him not to show me. I wanted to say I only appeared to be someone who was interested and concerned. But I just sat there next to him. Frozen.

Renny took off his gloves. I could hear him doing it; he grunted with the pain, the rub of the leather against his ruined skin. And then I saw. Amazing. Bits of yellow and green glowed on his skin. It was so strange, and in some way quite beautiful. You could see it only in the dark, the gold in his skin had been woven into him, as though he were a tapestry. The gold went beyond the area where his watch and ring had branded him, as though the metal had been splattered over his hands. But I understood why he feared love as much as he wanted it: he didn’t look quite human.

“They did a biopsy to see if it could be extracted, but the gold is mixed in with the fat and tissue under the skin. I’ll never get rid of it.”

I gently took his hands in mine. I felt like crying. I wondered if damaged people ever got over what had damaged them.

“So you’re made out of gold. It’s better than plain flesh.”

“Yeah, right. I’m a freak.” Renny went to put the porch light on. He kept his back to me and pulled his gloves on. “And so is he, I’ll bet. Your friend Lazarus.”

Like understands like. I believed that. Renny turned back to me.

“He’s hiding something,” my friend said.

I never should have told him. Never talked to him. Never gotten involved. “Well, then, I hope it’s something as beautiful as your hands.”

Renny looked at me as though I were a total fool. “Don’t you get it? You don’t hide what you think is beautiful. You hide what’s broken. You hide when you’re a monster.”

We dropped the subject, but it was too late. Certain ideas, once they’re planted, grow in spite of you. I had begun to think about broken things.

“What do you think moles eat?” Renny asked when I drove him back to the university.

Of course he was going to keep the mole, turn this blind, wounded creature into a pet. What then? Would the mole speak to him? Would he grant Renny three wishes?
Take the gold from my skin, the ring from my fingers, the watch from my wrist?

“Grubs?” I guessed. “My brother would know, but he’s too busy to talk to me.”

“Grub stew.” Renny grinned. “Grub cakes.”

“They probably sell mole food in the pet store. Or try Acres’ Hardware. They seem to have everything.”

I was thinking of how Ned used to leave out food for the bats that nested in our roof. He’d set a mixture of suet and honey and fruit in the rain gutters. I’d hide my head under my pillow, but he’d watch from the window.

They can find it without seeing where they’re going,
my brother told me.
That’s how defined their senses are. They fly blind through the dark.

At night the quad at Orlon University was quiet. I felt as though I were delivering Renny to the wrong place, though. It was his brokenness. The campus was so groomed, so perfect, and he was falling apart. A true friend would have been able to weave gloves out of reeds and moleskin for Renny; when he wore gloves such as those for three days in a row, he’d be cured. The first girl who passed by him in the cafeteria would fall in love with him, and it would be Iris. Iris McGinnis would truly look at him, she’d look inside him, and when she saw the way he loved her, she’d be so moved she’d begin to weep.

Renny reached into his pocket for the mole. He was right about me. I probably would have assumed it was beyond help and tossed it into the shoebox with its predecessor to become skin and bones, another curled-up leaf. I wouldn’t have even checked for a heartbeat.

“Still alive,” Renny said.

“Can’t ask for more than that. Can we?”

“Forget what I said about Lazarus. Maybe I was jealous that you’ve found someone.”

As if I could forget. If there was a negative point, I clung to it. A life raft of doubt and fear.

“Sure. Don’t worry about it.” I was trying for cheerful ease. “And it’s not like we’re running off to the chapel anytime soon. It’s not love, Renny. It’s nothing like that.”

“I’m happy for you. Whatever it is. I mean it.”

He was. He could be brokenhearted and still be happy for someone else.

“I’m going to forget about Iris. It was a stupid idea to give her the temple. Or to ever think she would want me. What would she want with a monster?”

“You’re not a monster.”

I could feel something hot behind my eyes. It was compassion. Something I didn’t want to feel.

“Look, Renny, even if it’s not Iris, someone will think you’re perfect the way you are.” He looked at me and I could tell, no matter what he might say, he still had hope. He wanted to believe. “Trust me,” I said.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

“You know it.”

I had almost convinced myself. Renny got out of the car and walked backward so he could wave to me.

“Monsters of the world, unite.” He raised his gloved fist in the air.

“Go study, or something,” I called to him.

He walked into his dorm. He was gone, but not completely. For there it was, still with me: Renny’s idea, replaying itself, getting bigger. What if Lazarus was hiding something? What if he was indeed a monster? The man I thought I knew could easily be a figment of my imagination, a bear, a snake, a spiny toad. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. Was it possible to know anyone, truly? Could knowledge hurt, pierce your heart, break your bones?

Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I’d always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood. I let myself in the back entranceway with my key, then locked the door behind me. It was hot and damp in the library; no wonder the pages of the older editions were turning brown. I switched on the desk lamp. A small circle of yellow light. Frances left the desk tidy and well organized, so I was careful not to displace anything. There was a peculiar heaviness in the room; during the day we kept the old air conditioner on, now the dust had settled. I coughed and the sound echoed.

Frances had photographs of nieces and nephews displayed, of a black dog called Harry, of the canals of Venice, where she’d vacationed last year. Beside my desk, nothing. Nothing obvious, at least. Just the invisible picture I always brought with me, the one of myself, the girl who stomped her feet on the porch, breath billowing out like smoke, little beast, long dark hair falling down her back, the stars in the black sky forever set in place, the ice forever shining, brighter than the stars.

I could hear beetles hitting against the screens in the windows. I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived. Everything else that had happened or would happen was a dream of some sort. Then I heard a thud. I took in my breath. A real live noise. That woke me up. Maybe I wanted to be alive, after all. Maybe I wanted to be in the world. I was afraid that a thief was trying to enter the library. Everything was free here; there was nothing to steal. Whoever was crazy enough to break in might also be crazy enough to do more.

I shrank back into the dark. There was a clanging then, and I breathed easier. Not a break-in, a return. I realized that someone had slipped a book through the night drop. Nothing more. I pinched myself for being an idiot and went to the door. Nothing to be afraid of. I could see someone dressed in white walking down the path. She was barefoot on the concrete. Her hair was pale and she was in a hurry. There was a car parked in the street, left running. The night was dark, black as beetles. I couldn’t make out any features until the car door opened and there was a flash of light. The woman was my sister-in-law.

I stood watching until the car disappeared. My heart was pounding. Too fast. Too hard. I had spent my life feeling as though I were an accomplice to a crime. It was nothing new to me. Death-wisher, betrayer, liar, secret-keeper. I was death’s assistant, with no great skill of my own. A lackey, a fool, the helpmate whose every move had resulted in tragedy. One step, one wish, one mistake, one icy night. And now I had seen my sister-in-law, Nina, rushing to her car, driving off into the dark. I realized the white thing she was wearing was her nightgown.

The book she’d left was in the night-drop bin; when I picked it up it was still warm from her touch. I took the book with me, out the back door, where my car was parked in the shadows. I drove back through the campus, and it was probably no accident that I wound up on my brother’s street. Maybe I wanted to be reassured that it hadn’t been Nina at the library, only someone who looked like her. I could see into some of the houses, filled with yellow light, with life. My brother’s house, however, was dark. Everyone asleep. Everyone safe inside. The car I’d seen at the library was parked in the driveway. Maybe she hadn’t driven it tonight; all the same, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I didn’t dare get out and touch the hood of the car to see if it was still warm.

There was a streetlight above me; when I flipped over the book that had been returned I saw the title:
A Hundred Ways to Die.
It was the instruction manual for suicide I’d often referred to in New Jersey when Jack Lyons phoned me for information. I felt something close up in my throat. I’d thought that like always recognized like, but it seemed I’d been completely mistaken about Nina.

I watched the beetles fly through the dark above their lawn. I wondered if Nina had reached home and had crawled into bed beside my brother, if he hadn’t even noticed she’d been gone, noticed her pale feet were cold. Now I remembered that the day before my mother died, my brother had spent all day making her a present. It was a book made of construction paper, bound with shoelaces. When I’d asked him what it was, he’d said it was the story of his life.
That’s stupid,
I’d said. I didn’t look at his face to see if I’d hurt him.
Who cares about that?
I was jealous. I knew a book could make something real. In this case, it was his love right there on that paper, tied with laces, given over freely to our mother. That’s why I’d been so mean to Ned. I had nothing. I hadn’t even thought to give her a present. I hadn’t thought at all.

The house we’d lived in, in New Jersey, could have easily fit into the living room of the house where my brother lived now. It was a beautiful structure, even in the dark. Before tonight I had imagined that Ned and Nina slept well at night, logical sleep, dreamless and sweet. Now I looked through the shadows to see there was a woman on the lawn. My brother’s wife. In her nightgown she was almost invisible. But she was there. It was Nina. She didn’t move at all. I tried to get away quickly, before she could see me. I began to drive away, headlights switched off. Maybe this had never happened, maybe I’d been all wrong, but when I turned to look out the rear window I saw that she had spied me, not that she seemed to care. She looked right through me, as if this world no longer concerned her, as if everything that mattered could no longer be seen with the naked eye.