The Ice Storm (32 page)

Authors: Rick Moody

BOOK: The Ice Storm

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So, after spending an hour stripping the emblems off of expensive cars in front of the train station, Paul Hood wasn't surprised to see his family's red Firebird ease into the parking lot. The Firebird. His face flushed. His heart was stuck up in him somewhere where he couldn't ignore it. He had a heart. When his mother got out of the car, he remembered that timeâwhen he was a kidâwhen they had gone away for a week and left him and Wendy with a battle-ax whose only defense for her cooking was that her husband, rest in peace, had had no sense of smell. Paul saw his mom and he remembered when they had finally come home, when Daisy Chain wouldn't shut up for half an hour barking and climbing all over the furniture. For a couple of hours everyone had been laughing.

His dad climbed out of the car, and Wendy pushed forward the bucket seats, with the dog slobbering behind her, and they were all standing out there smiling these strange half-smiles. His family. His mom was his mom and his dad was his dad and he was stuck with that, whatever became of them. Like Darien was stuck with the Long Island Sound, like the Cambodians were stuck with the Mekong, like Concord was stuck with the Merrimack. It was better than spending the rest of your life on Conrail. Home was where they had to take you in. Language was for praising home, for praising home and God and rivers. God and language and rivers and home were elastic. Everything stretched around the surface of family.

But these weren't smiles, really. His family wasn't smiling. Smiles were cheap jewelry. They were looking down, his family, scuffing the snow and ice in the parking lot. It wasn't as good as all that. It wasn't a romance. It was enough that he dropped the emblems. Just unloaded those elaborate bits of chromium right on the cracked pavement there. He threw his arms around his puffy dad. And then he threw his arms around his icy mom. Kissed Wendy. Kissed the dog.

âWell, we are glad
you
are okay, his father said. How long have you been here?

Paul just threw up his hands.

âHave a lot to tell you, Benjamin said.

Everyone tried to laugh.

âAnd it's not all good.

It was all quiet again. They buckled themselves into the car, heat on high, as if they had all been deprived of heat lifelong. Daisy Chain scrambled over Wendy's back to get his humid dog tongue all up in Paul's face.

Then Paul's dad just put his head down on the steering wheel and sat that way for a while. This went on for a long time. And then he started to choke or something. Paul had never heard anything like it. He thought it might be a joke. Or a medical emergency. He didn't know what to do. His mom's gloved hand wavered in the air at his father's back as though she were going to set it there. She didn't. His father turned back to look at him, to look at Wendy, smiling, not saying anything, his cheeks shiny with some dew.

âSomething I have to tell you two, he said.

And right then there was a sign in the sky. An actual sign in the sky. The conversation stopped and there was a sign in the sky and it knotted together everything in that twenty-four hours. Above the parking lot. A flaming figure four. And it wasn't only above the parking lot. They saw it all over the country, over the Unitarian Church of Stamford, over New Canaan High School, over the Port Chester train station and up and down the New Haven line, over emergency vehicles in Greenwich and Norwalk, over the little office where Wesley Myers was trying to write the next day's sermon, for the first Sunday in Advent. In halls devoted to public service, in private mansions and dilapidated apartments. The heavens declared: the flaming figure four.

They saw it from the Firebird. They did, and it stayed with them all that fall, that apotheosis.

Or that's how I remember it, anyway. Me. Paul. The gab. That's what I remember. And this story really ends right at that spot. I have to leave Benjamin there with that news, with a wish for reconciliation that he will bury in himself; I have to leave Elena, my mom, whom I have never really understood; I have to leave Wendy, uncertain, with one arm around the dog, and I have to leave myselfâPaulâon the cusp of my adulthood, at the end of that
annus mirabilis
where comic books were indistinguishable from the truth, at the beginning of my confessions. I have to leave him and his family there because after all this time, after twenty years, it's time I left.

Finis.

About the Author

Rick Moody (b. 1961) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Brown University and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from Columbia University. His first novel,
Garden State
, won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award, and his memoir of his struggles with alcoholism and depression,
The Black Veil
, was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir. His 1994 bestseller,
The Ice Storm
, was adapted into a film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Moody's writing has appeared in the
New Yorker
,
Esquire
,
Harper's Magazine
,
Details
, and the
New York Times
. His work has also been selected for the
Best American Stories
,
Best American Essays
, and
Pushcart Prize
anthologies. His story “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” won the
Paris Review
's Aga Khan Prize. Moody currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at New York University.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I need also to acknowledge some people and institutions who have made the composition of this book possible: Fishers Island Colony, Yaddo, MacDowell, Michael Pietsch, Melanie Jackson, the Count de Cenci, D.A., Helen Schulman, Dan Barden, John Crutcher, N.B.W., Shrug, Jack Moody, Angela Carter, and especially Jules.

Cover design by Mauricio DÃaz

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2767-0

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com