Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

A nurse came in once a week while I went with Nina to her Lamaze classes at the health center at the university. The other women were younger, graduate students, wives of young professors, two lesbian couples. Everyone seemed so sure of the future. They had potluck dinners together on the weekends. We never went to those. Maybe everyone thought Nina and I were a couple. I suppose for those hours of class we were.

“She’s the best breather in the class,” I told Ned.

“Of course. Naturally.” He was proud of her. He was in love with her. But he was also in the process of leaving. He often sat at the window and stared at the yard and I wasn’t quite certain he was seeing what we were seeing.

I did get a card from Seth Jones. The postmark was Flo­rence, so he’d made it there. He wrote, Plan to take the ashes to Venice. Wish you were here. SJ.

I didn’t. I wanted to be exactly where I was, sitting with my brother in the afternoons, fixing dinner and washing up afterward, playing cards with Nina in the evenings. One day a package arrived for my brother; it was a bathrobe, sent by Jack Lyons.

“Who the hell is Jack Lyons?” Ned asked. He liked the bathrobe but felt odd accepting a gift from a stranger.

“You went to high school with him in Red Bank. And I used to sleep with him.”

“He has good taste,” Ned said.

“Shut up.”

“I meant in bathrobes.”

Jack knew what the dying needed. He was far more of an expert than I’d ever been. Even when I didn’t contact him, he continued to send my brother gifts. As for Ned, he’d started to wait for the packages. Look forward to them. One week there was a tape of birdcalls that my brother liked to have played while he napped. Another time there were two pairs of heavy woolen socks. And then came a huge box of fudge, the old-fashioned kind. My brother couldn’t eat it, but he loved the smell.

At last I called New Jersey. “You don’t have to send my brother anything,” I told Jack.

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he said back.

There wasn’t much of an answer for that.

“He loves the birdsong tape. And the fudge.”

I was glad it was impossible for Jack to see me. I was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Giselle curled on my lap. I had all the lights turned off to cut down on my electricity bills. I had recently applied for a job at Acres’ Hardware Store, only to be told I was unqualified.

I had my hand over the phone receiver. I was crying.

“I know what you’re doing,” Jack said.

“You’re such an expert.” I sounded snotty and bitter and desperate.

“About some things. Most people cry for good reason. Most people smile for good reasons, too.”

The next package he sent contained wind chimes. My brother had us put them up by the window. He smiled whenever he heard them. It was a gift for my brother, but it was also a message to me. There was something still worth having in his world.

“Did I know this guy Jack?” Ned asked. He was at the point of repeating all of our conversations. His memory was gone, and the here and now was going as well.

“No,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“He has good taste.”

“Seems to,” I had to agree.

At night, when Nina was exhausted, I sat with my brother and read him fairy tales.

“Read the one I like,” he said one night.

“It’s not in this collection,” I lied.

“Liar.”

But I would not read the story about death, not now, not when we knew what the ending was. I read “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Juniper Tree” and “Brother and Sister”; I read about fishermen’s wives and horses that were loyal, and then I told him the story I’d made up, about the frozen girl on the mountain.

“Now that’s a sad one,” my brother said. “All she has to do is pick up her feet and walk away and she won’t turn to ice. Even when we were kids and you told me, I never under­stood that girl.”

I wanted to change what was happening, but it couldn’t be done. I bit my tongue a thousand times a day. I wasn’t about to wish for anything. I was afraid of wishes still. But Nina wasn’t. She had gone to her doctor, who said she could no longer travel. My brother had made it to sixth months. He loved to put his hand on Nina and feel the baby moving. Nina didn’t tell me, but she bought the tickets for his dream. She started to teach me how to give Ned his injections of an­tibiotics and Demerol. She taught me how to work the IV when he needed more fluid.

“What’s the best way to die?” I asked Jack one night. I usually called him at work, but this time I’d phoned him at home. He still seemed surprised to hear from me, but he an­swered me right away.

“Living,” he said. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was as if he’d always known the answer.

When Nina told me she wanted me to take Ned to Cali­fornia most of what I felt was terror. Her doctor had told her she couldn’t make the trip because of her condition. But surely I wasn’t up to the task. I wasn’t up to anything. My brother was leaving so fast. He was in diapers now. He was going backward in time. Every time he woke up he talked about the butterflies. Once in his life, that’s what he wanted; well, this was that once. Nina had called a friend in Mon­terey who would pick us up at the airport in San Francisco; Eliza, a nurse, would come with a rented ambulance and take us to her house. The migration was already happening, she’d told Nina. Eliza’s husband, Carlos, would take us to Big Sur, where the monarchs spend the winter. We would get there by ambulance if necessary.

“It’s too much for him,” I said.

“It’s not enough,” Nina told me.

She had that stony look. She was the woman who’d been reading about the hundred ways to die. She wanted my brother to have everything he’d ever wanted.

I packed a bag that night. A carry-on, since the suitcase would be filled with medicine. Nina hired a medevac plane. She had already taken a second mortgage on the house. If she never had another car, if she and the baby had to walk everywhere, eat rice, read by candlelight, she still wanted this. Even if she couldn’t be there.

“You’re going to see the butterflies,” she said to my brother on the morning it was to happen.

“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t believe it. He was still traveling backward through time. Younger than he had been on the night my mother died. I was the older sister now. I was the hand to hold.

“I can’t go, because of the baby, but your sister’s going to take you to California.”

“What do you know?” My brother closed his eyes, ex­hausted just thinking about it.

“I know I love you,” Nina said.

She was kneeling beside his bed. I had never witnessed such an act of generosity. Ned had on both pairs of socks Jack had sent. There were the wind chimes swinging back and forth in the window. I had been wrong about every­thing. I was terrified to go.

“Don’t worry,” Nina said. We had to take him to the air­port by ambulance — how could I not be worried? “You’ll manage.”

At least her friend Eliza was a nurse. I wouldn’t be all alone in this.

“Are you sure you want to go ahead? You probably won’t be with him when it happens.” When he goes, I meant to say. But I couldn’t.

Nina put her arms around me. She told me a secret. “I will be,” she said.

We gave my brother his maximum amount of Demerol and got on the plane. There were two EMTs with us, so I slept for a while. When I woke I felt weightless. There were clouds all around us. My brother was hooked up to an IV and the machine made a clicking noise. I realized the click­ing inside my head had disappeared some time ago and I hadn’t even noticed. I could see Ned’s feet, the socks Jack had sent him. I might have sobbed. One of the EMTs, a man about my age, sat down across from me and took my hand.