Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

Over the Rockies, my brother was in pain. The sky was the brightest blue I’d ever seen, dotted with puffballs. I won­dered if this was what the sky was like in Italy. So blue. So open. We were floating through space and time. But I didn’t wish we would always be there. I knew this was only an in­stant. I gave Ned one of his injections, to make sure I was capable, with the experts looking on.

“There you go,” the EMT said. “Just like an old pro.”

I didn’t want to get to know him, or the other one, the young woman. I didn’t have any space for anything more than I was already carrying. I described the clouds to my brother.

“Cumulus,” he said. 200

His mouth was dry, so the woman EMT traveling with us gave him ice to suck on.

“Ice,” he said. “Very nice. Unless it’s on the porch.”

Ned and I laughed.

“Private joke,” I told the EMTs.

Ned was asleep when we landed at San Francisco. The am­bulance was parked on the runway and Nina’s friend Eliza was there. She and Nina had grown up next door to each other in Menlo Park, and she was Nina’s opposite, dark and jovial, even now when Ned cried in pain as he was being transferred.

“We’ll have him in a nice big bed soon,” Eliza reassured me. “We’ll take good care of you,” she told my brother.

Eliza telephoned Nina from the runway and then held the phone up to Ned’s ear. He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. I don’t know what Nina said to him, but she comforted him somehow, and he slept all the way to Eliza’s house in Monterey, a long trip, so tiresome I fell asleep my­self, sitting up, my check against the window.

When I opened my eyes all I saw was green. And then the sky, and then the clouds.

“Almost there,” Eliza said cheerfully.

The ambulance pulled up in her driveway. I sat beside Ned while they got the stretcher ready. I could see Eliza’s husband come out to meet the EMTs. New ones now. The ones from the plane had disappeared.

“My fucking back,” Ned said. “It hurts.”

“Serves you right for being such a pain in the ass.”

A joke from a thousand years ago. He remembered.

“You’re the pain. You.” 201

***

I think Ned took the dishes off the table when he found them there that morning. I think he put them in the sink when he realized what it meant for our mother to have left breakfast for us. He did the logical thing in an illogical world. He cleaned up the mess.

I hopped out of the ambulance so Carlos and the EMTs could carry Ned inside. It was beautiful here, wherever we were. I blinked. A bat. There beyond the trees.

“Go to sleep,” Eliza told me. “We’ll wake you in a few hours, and then we’d better go right there.”

She was a nurse. She saw where my brother was. That he was leaving right now.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I said.

“An hour,” Eliza insisted. “Then we’ll be ready to go.”

They had a pullout couch made up for me. They were kind, and I accepted their kindness, even though I knew I’d never see them again, never be able to repay them.

When I woke up I could hear my brother and Eliza talk­ing. She asked him if he wanted food, applesauce, or home­made vanilla pudding, or crackers softened in water.

“Nope,” my brother said. “I couldn’t stomach it. That’s a joke. Get it?”

I heard Eliza’s laughter. I got up, found the bathroom, washed my face. Today was the day. It was the start of the ever after . I ran a stranger’s brush through my hair. It was longer than it had been since I was eight years old. Black. Sticks. Crow-colored. 202

I went into the guest room. My brother looked happy. He looked like a cloud.

“Guess where we are,” he said.

“The middle of your dream?”

“Monterey, California,” my brother said.

He was still here. Right here with me. And I was grateful for that.

Carlos and Eliza took him out to their van, and rested him in the back. An ambulance might not want to go as far into the forest as we meant to go. I got in the front seat while Eliza hooked up Ned’s IV and gave him all his meds. It was another ride, but it wouldn’t be as long. Carlos got behind the wheel. He worked for the parks de­partment.

“We try to keep this week secret,” he said. “So we don’t have tourists up the ying-yang. Plus we never know exactly. All fall they arrive in dribs and drabs and then all at once. They’re everywhere. That’s why it was all so spur-of-the-moment. But you made it in time, Ned,” he called to my brother.

It didn’t take that long to get there, but the road was curvy. It was the most beautiful place I had ever been. “Can you see out there?” I called to Ned.

Lying on his back, he could see the sky.

“Cirrus,” he called back.

His voice was a hundred years old. But he sounded happy. When I walked into the kitchen all those years ago, Ned was tossing something into the trash; he was piling the dishes into the sink. Our mother had left us two bowls of cereal, 203

two glasses of juice, our vitamin pills, the sugar bowl, two spoons, blueberry muffins, cut in half.

My eyes were filled with sleep when I walked into the kitchen that morning. My brother had looked guilty because he knew something I didn’t know. He looked ashamed, as though he had a secret that was too bad to share. It’s too early. Go back to bed.

Beautiful long, stretched-out clouds drifted all along the ocean. Big black rocks. The curving road. The smell of something. I stuck my head out the window, breathed deep. The here and the now of it blew me away. But I didn’t wish for anything. Not more. Not less. I was exactly where I was, head hanging out the window, feeling the wind, tears in my eyes. The scent of this place was amazing.

“Eucalyptus,” Carlos said. “It’s what attracts the butter­flies. The groves.”

I had no sense of what time it was. I think we had traveled through a day and a night. It was still morning, Eliza told me. I felt more for her than I had for people I’d known for years.

“He’s holding up,” she said, but the way she said it made me know, not for long.

We pulled into a parking lot. There was the Santa Lucia Range in front of us. And nearer, Mt. Lion. All rocks and trees. The ocean was so blue I couldn’t believe it. We were in a picnic area, but it was early and the lot was empty. Luck for once. Pure luck.

“We’ve got it all to ourselves,” Carlos said. “And a day without fog. That’s a miracle.”

The three of us got Ned onto the stretcher, into the fresh air. I carried the IV pole.

“Green,” Ned said.

It was. It was a eucalyptus grove. So delicious. Like the world was brand-new. We went up a path, slowly; pine needles make you slip, so carefully, carefully. The air was cold and warm at the same time — cool in the shadows, lemony in the sun. We crested a ridge. I thought there were falling leaves at first. All those orange things. Everywhere.

But no.

I leaned down and whispered to my brother, “You won’t believe this.”

We went into the sunlight and they were everywhere. In front of us were several picnic tables made of redwood, and we hauled the stretcher up on one. Settled it down, slowly.

“My, my, my,” my brother said.

There was a whirlwind of monarchs. You could hear the beating of their wings. I stood there with my arms out and they lit upon me, everywhere; they hung on my fingers, walked in my hair.

Carlos and Eliza were standing on a picnic bench, arms around each other.

“More,” they both said, and they laughed and drew each other near so that the butterflies swirled between them.

There were too many to count, everywhere, thousands of them, sleepy, slow, whirling. It was the height of their mi­gration, and they were exhausted and beautiful. So orange they were like rubies, red, red, red.