Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

“Where are you?” Jack asked. “You disappeared. I wrote you a note, but you never wrote back.”

“I moved to Florida. Better weather.” What a joke. It was about a hundred and five degrees and so humid my usually straight-as-sticks hair had curled. The night smelled like poison.

“I know you moved. You think I didn’t take it upon my­self to find out what had happened to you? I mean, where are you right now? I hear traffic.”

I thought about the way he used to look at me. He had wanted something from me and he never got it. I thought I’d been humiliating myself, but maybe I’d been doing the very same thing to him. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“You’re sorry that you disappeared and never bothered to write? Or you’re sorry that you never gave a shit about me and how I felt?”

“I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“As opposed to now.”

I laughed. Maybe he did know me.

“So, what is it you want to talk about?” Jack went on. “Or let me guess. What did we always have in common? Oh, yeah. Death.”

He sounded different, or maybe I’d never listened to him before. Maybe those times in his car and in the parking lot weren’t exactly what I’d thought they were. Maybe he’d noticed the ice, the stones, the way I believed I deserved to be hurt.

“Are you making fun of me?” I wasn’t used to feeling this way when I talked to him. It had been a long time, after all.

“Hey, baby, I am Mr. Death. Ask me your questions.”

I’d called to ask him about Lazarus, about how I could help him if he was accused of murder. Should I help him flee, or tell him to stand up to everyone? But as it turned out, that’s not what I really wanted to know.

I hesitated. That wasn’t like me, I was overwhelmed with feeling.

“Go on. Shoot,” Jack said. “Make it a good one. Give me a what-if.”

So I did. I made it the only one.

“What if your brother is dying and you can’t stop it. What do you do?”

All I could hear were the trucks. The gears grinding. So many people going somewhere. I was standing in a gas station in the middle of the night in Florida. It was as though I’d never talked to anyone before. I could hear Jack breathing. I wanted to cry. I’d never even really given him a chance. Dealing with so much death had given him the abil­ity to find logic in an irrational world.

“You help him find something that makes him feel that he still wants to be alive. Only thing to do.”

“Maybe you should have been the one at the reference desk.”

I could have been anywhere on earth. I was that lost.

“Not me,” Jack said. “It was always you.”

When I got home, I knew someone was there. Giselle was on the lawn and I had left her inside. There was a spare key under my mailbox. Not very hard to find; when I slid my hand under the metal, it was no longer there. I crouched down beside the cat and rubbed under her chin and left her out a while longer. She didn’t hate me as much, or maybe she’d grown used to me. Lazarus was asleep on the couch, one foot planted on the floor. He looked young, and tired, like a man who’d hitchhiked and walked all night. I locked all the doors, unplugged the phone. He had a duffel bag with him, which I took into the kitchen. You shouldn’t do these things, I know, but I did it anyway. I unzipped the bag, looked through it. I suppose I was just making sure he was who I thought he was. There were some clothes, a wallet with a few hundred in cash, a plane ticket to Italy, a passport with Seth Jones’s name and Lazarus’s photo; at the very bot­tom I found the wooden box filled with ashes.

I replaced everything and put on some coffee. I got a new bag of coffee beans from the freezer, and I noticed the elec­tricity must have gone out sometime during the night. My house was a mess. I’d paid no attention to it; but then, I’d never felt as though it belonged to me. I’d never really lived here. The closest thing to something familiar, something that belonged to me, were the few pieces of Renny’s Doric temple still on the table. Giselle liked to play with the col­umns, batting them around until they fell on the floor.

I went to the back door to call her in now, but she wouldn’t come. I had to go to her, out by the hedge. The sky was inky. The center of the horizon was the color of the bats I’d seen in pure daylight, deep blue, streaks of black and purple. When I bent down I saw that Giselle had gotten Renny’s mole. I recognized it because of the bite out of its ear. We’d tried to save him and we couldn’t. The little pet who had cheated death; it wasn’t moving now.

“Bad girl,” I scolded Giselle.

I sat cross-legged and picked up the mole and held him in the palm of my hand.

By the time Lazarus woke up I had buried the mole, made coffee, and telephoned my sister-in-law. My brother was still recovering from our trek to see the Dragon, but he was happy that we’d gone. Ever since, he’d been dreaming of bats and butterflies, Nina told me. He was writing a paper on chaos theory in fairy tales. He was writing like mad, up half the night. Things had become clear to him and he wanted to get it all down before it was too late. The tiniest action, the smallest creature, the most minute decision had huge ramifications. One mole dies, one is saved, only to die again. One word is spoken aloud and the world changes. An arm becomes a wing, a beast becomes a man, a girl is silent for a hundred years — frozen in place and in time — a young man has to search the world before he discovers who he really is.

I lay down beside Lazarus on the couch. His eyes opened. Ashes to ashes. They were so dark.

“Hey,” he said to me. He was about to embrace me, kiss me, then he thought better of it. “I’ll burn you.”

I shook my head. I remembered what the Dragon had told us about fire. I handed Lazarus two cloves of garlic that I’d peeled in the kitchen. “The remedy,” I told him.

Another man might have questioned me, might have failed the test. Lazarus looked at me, then ate the garlic. I put my head against his chest. I didn’t feel the same heat from inside him.

Lazarus had seen the delivery truck from his window and he’d also recognized the driver, Hal Evans. He knew him because they’d had an altercation when they were working together at the feedstore. Hal had come in drunk and had been saying this and that, goading Lazarus. Lazarus had left some bags of fertilizer in the other man’s path and Hal had stumbled. Hal Evans was the worst of all people to come sniffing around the orchard. Maybe he’d heard the rumors the farmworkers had spread, that they worked for a mon­ster, a man who refused to be seen, that there was something not right in the house where all the window shades were drawn.

Lazarus packed a bag as soon as Hal’s truck pulled out. He’d been waiting for something like this for a while; now he waited for what came next. Later that day, someone he didn’t recognize was talking to the workers in the field. He saw them looking at the house, conversing with the men he employed. That afternoon he walked out the back door. He figured any phone calls he made would be traced, but walk­ing, he knew what that did: it made you a free man.

Lazarus was shivering, so I covered him with a blanket. The morning was bright. We blinked in the light of it. I told myself not to make a wish, or if I did, if I had to, if I just couldn’t stop myself, then to make one for him. Lazarus fell back asleep; he was exhausted and couldn’t wake up. I wanted to let him dream for as long as he could. He had walked for miles. I looked at him. I could taste the garlic, the cure, the end of everything, the beginning of everything.

I got dressed and went to the bank. Peggy, my physical therapist, was there on line and she congratulated me on how good I looked. “You worked hard,” she said to me. “The comeback kid.”