Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

“You have a message for me?”

“No. For me. Renny left me a note to meet him here. We were in art history class together in the spring.”

Iris McGinnis.

She laughed, nervous. She was thin and pale, with a sweet expression. “He said he had a present for me. I don’t know why he’d want to give me anything.” Because he’s madly in love with you, idiot,

I wanted to say. I opened the screen door. She was very young. Nineteen, per­haps. I had a terrible sinking feeling.

“He’s been making you something,” I said.

“Me?” Iris laughed, and the sound was like water. Maybe that was what he’d fallen in love with, that sound.

“But he’s not here.”

“Okay, well, can you have him call me?”

Iris wrote down her phone number on the back of a piece of notepaper.

“I’ll be home all day. Studying. I’m not as smart as Renny is. He got an A in the class we took together and I was lucky to get a C. I’ll just wait for his call.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I can’t believe he has a present for me.” She had green eyes, I noticed. She was pretty in a pale, sweet way.

When Iris left I phoned Renny’s dorm. Someone an­swered and, when I asked for him, said, “You haven’t heard?”

I felt panic-stricken. I had the gloves on my bureau. My hair was sticking up as though I’d been shocked.

“What did he do?” I asked. I knew it was something bad, something desperate, a monster’s attempt to tear off his skin, an angel’s attempt to rise.

I pieced it together from that initial call and then a call to my brother. Everyone in the Science Center knew. Renny had walked into Acres’ Hardware Store and taken a hatchet from the wall. He’d been calm and cheerful; no one had even noticed him. Now there was so much blood on the floor of the hardware store that new oak planks would have to be installed. Renny would have surely bled to death if the manager of the paint department, the man who’d been at­tacked by the bulldog, hadn’t taken a lifesaving course. The manager was a quick thinker; he’d been so ever since his own attack. He jumped over the counter and made a tourni­quet out of the strings of his Acres’ Hardware apron.

Because of the incident, and the university’s liability, the lightning-strike study was to be disbanded. There hadn’t been enough psychological supervision, that’s what Renny’s parents were saying, and it was rumored that a lawsuit loomed. Orlon University had no vested interest in the study. Twelve years of research was to be poured down the drain; all those photographs of us, the charts of our poor health, would be shredded now.

Everyone I spoke to wondered why on earth someone would commit such a horrible act, right there in the hard­ware store on a perfectly ordinary day. But I understood why Renny had tried to cut off his hand. I was sure that when he walked past the girls at the checkout counter and smiled at them, they hadn’t bothered to smile back; like all those students at Orlon who walked right past him, they most likely hadn’t even seen him. Renny walked through the store, the invisible man, with one thought in mind. I knew him well enough to know that. A single desire, his defining secret: he wanted to be human.

I went immediately to the hospital, found the intensive care unit, and talked myself into the waiting area. I knew a few of the nurses, and I was clearly upset and involved. I wasn’t family, and therefore couldn’t see the patient, but they would allow me to wait. For what, I wasn’t certain. I sat down on one of the hard plastic chairs.

I suppose I was easy to pick out if someone had heard about me: lightning-strike victim, distraught friend, fellow monster in disguise. A teenaged girl came to sit next to me. “You’re Renny’s friend,” she said. She introduced herself as his sister, Marina.

“Will he recover?” I asked.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.” Marina had a soft voice, like Renny’s. She wore a black velvet headband that pushed back her hair. I suppose she was a redhead, but her hair looked white to me. A little old woman, concerned about her brother. He’d told me she was the smart one. The favorite. “They had to sew the hand back on, reattach all the nerves. He may not feel anything. Or maybe he’ll just feel less. But mostly he lost a lot of blood.”

“I was supposed to help him with a project. That’s why this happened. I forgot all about it.”

I felt that I should get down on my knees and beg Ma-rina’s forgiveness. I should cut out my heart and place it on the vinyl tiles of the floor.

“The Doric temple? It wasn’t for class. He was already failing when he asked you for help. He wanted to create something to give to some girl he’s in love with.”

“Iris,” I said.

“Is she worth it?” Marina asked.

“I don’t know. I only met her today.”

Renny’s parents had gone to collect his personal belong­ings from his dorm room. They were meeting with their lawyer as soon as they got back to Miami. They might not have appreciated someone from the lightning-strike study visiting Renny, but Marina took me to see him.

“It’s not that my parents wouldn’t like you, it’s just that they’re protecting him from the world. Parents.” Marina shrugged. “They want the best and do the worst. I’m just holding my breath till I’m on my own.”

When we reached Renny’s room, I peered in from the doorway. There he was. Under the sheets. Eyes closed. There was some machine that made a sound like snow falling.

“Knock, knock,” Marina called. No reply. “Demerol,” she whispered to me. “He’s been out for a while.”

She led me in to see him. The room was darkened and we could see the flecks of gold in his hands. He had no idea of how beautiful he was, none at all.

We went to stand by the bed.

“It’s okay,” Marina said. “You can talk to him.”

“Hey.” My voice sounded faint. It echoed as though I were far away when I was right there. “It’s me.”

Renny opened his eyes. He didn’t turn away from me the way I thought he would. That was something.

I saw a line of red along his left arm — the line where they’d sewed him together. I saw it — that amazing, sharp, and painful red. It had been so long since I had seen the color that I was nearly blinded. I had forgotten its intensity.

“I wanted to be normal,” Renny said. “I wanted to feel things.”

“You’ve got a funny way of being normal,” I said.

His parents would take him home, and Marina would bring him cups of tea and bowls of broth until he recovered. One day someone would see him for who he really was and fall in love with him.

“What should I do with your project?” I asked.

He smiled. He had a great smile. “Not much call for Doric temples. Throw the fucker out.”

“Actually Iris came for it.”

“Who?” he said.

We both laughed at that. Girl of his dreams. Maybe it would be better now for her to stay there.

“I was a lousy friend,” I said.

Renny was a gentleman, even now, drugged-up and in pain. “There’s worse,” he said.

“Who, a mass murderer?”

“Me,” he said.

I leaned down and kissed Renny’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said to me. I think that’s what he said. He was already falling back asleep.

“He’s tired,” Marina said.

Her hair was red, I could see that now. I blinked and was still stunned by how beautiful the color was. When I got my bearings, I wrote down my address. “Will you let me know how he’s doing?”

I felt that I had dreamed him up — Renny was that hon­est and that true.

“Do you think it’s possible for him to be happy?” she asked.

She wasn’t much more than a girl.