Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

I had been unconscious for thirty-two hours, hence the IV in my arm. Naturally things were fuzzy. Of course, my brother and Nina looked concerned. And so I didn’t men­tion anything when the nurse came in with a dinner tray. I didn’t say a word when I noticed that the Jell-O I was being offered was the color of stones. The nurse herself, not more than twenty-five, appeared to have long white hair. The flowers my brother and his wife had brought me seemed dusted with snow. I understood then. I had completely lost the color red. Whatever had once been red was now cloudy and pale. All I saw was ice; all I felt was the cold of my own ruined self. Perhaps I had an ocular reaction to the heat of the strike — vitreous hemorrhage was one of the many po­tential effects on the eye, along with corneal scratches and cataracts. Why the absence of a color would affect me so deeply, I had no idea, but I suddenly felt completely bereft. I had lost something before I’d known its worth, and now it was too late.

I stayed in the hospital for nearly two weeks. I didn’t see much of my brother, but Nina went daily to my house to feed Giselle. When I was finally allowed out, still using a walker because of the weakness on my left side, Nina picked me up and drove me home. I saw that my sister-in-law had also stocked my refrigerator. I think she may have vacu­umed. I understood why my brother had been drawn to her. Nina was logical, a great believer in order, and like my brother, she was not a fan of emotions. She stood there and wrung her hands while I sat on the couch and wept.

“Sorry,” I said to Nina. She nodded and waved me on. I kept at it, running through nearly a box of tissues. It was my first cry in a long time, and I overdid it. I sat there sobbing, shudders running through me. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by everything, a wreck, true enough. My hair had fallen out in clumps and there was that dreadful clicking noise in the back of my head. I still wasn’t able to hold down solid food. The doctor had told me the symptoms were similar to some­one suffering from radiation poisoning. That’s how I felt — to my bones, to my toes — poisoned. All down my afflicted side there was a wrenching sort of feeling, as if something had been twisted. A short in my electrical system, I supposed. My very essence, my inner self was gone. I reached for things and couldn’t feel them. It was as though everything solid had slipped away from me. Inside, my heart felt frozen.

The weather was still humid and stifling; no outsider could be prepared for Florida. We weren’t even close to summer, still the heat exploded in midair, then settled; it weighed you down. All the same, when Nina asked if I’d like anything, I asked for hot tea. I sat there shivering, colder than ever. Ice in my veins. Ice behind my eyes as well, it seemed. While my sister-in-law fixed the tea, I looked out the window. Everything out there was the color of ice. I wondered if the bougainvillea was scarlet: I’d never noticed it before. Now the vine was pale and ghostly, frostbitten and shivering in the heat. I felt as though I had one foot in this world, and one in the next. I couldn’t even get the death wish right this time around. I was like a person who’d tried to commit suicide by jumping out a third-story window, succeeding only in breaking every bone. Still alive, still more or less intact, still trapped in the same life.

Before she left, Nina told me a physical therapist would be coming to see me. When the therapist appeared the next morning and rang the bell, I didn’t open the door. Maybe I didn’t want to be healed. Maybe I deserved whatever I got. Maybe this was the fate I deserved. I sat on the couch with Giselle, imagining I was safe from the well-meaning and the helpful. But my brother had an extra key, which he’d handed over, and the physical therapist let herself in. She in­troduced herself as Peggy Travis. As though I cared. As though I intended to make this personal. I suppose Peggy was wearing a red striped dress, but it was gray to me. She went through the list of exercises we’d be doing to strengthen my left side. I excused myself. Fumbling with my walker, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

“It’s very common to feel sick.” My unwelcome visitor had actually come up behind me and was watching me vomit. “For some people it lasts only a short time, for others it’s different.”

She shut up then. But I got the drift. For others it’s an eternity.

I was pathetic really. I couldn’t even squeeze a rubber ball. More clumps of my hair fell out just from the stress of try­ing. But my Peggy wasn’t the type to let her charges give up. She had seen it all in working with her clients — the lame, the frail, the screwed-up, the messed-up, the chewed-up, the burnt, the sorrowful. She told me about them when we had tea — hers iced, mine steaming. I’d sweated and grunted through my workout, with my swollen face swelling even more and the clicking going on nonstop; I hardly felt up for conversation. That’s how people like Peggy got to you; they waited till you had no defenses, then talked you to death. I felt like a time bomb, as a matter of fact, but I drank my tea. I had no choice but to listen. I heard about Peggy’s last client, a man who’d been mauled by a bulldog. By the time the at­tack was over, the victim had only three fingers, total, and I should have seen how quickly he’d improved. He was now working at Acres’ Hardware Store. Before that, it was a woman in a car crash who couldn’t remember her own name and needed to be spoon-fed but was now up and about and taking art history classes at Orlon University.

I knew exactly what Peggy was up to. So take that! See there! You can do it, too! Up by your bootstraps! Work a little harder!

All of Peggy’s cases were success stories. Perhaps I should have warned her: her luck was about to change. I was stub­born; I suppose I tried to fail, and yet I did improve slightly, at least on the surface. I never mentioned the lack of the color red, the buzzing under my skin, the clicking in my head. The one creature I couldn’t hide my most secret ef­fects from was the cat. Sometimes Giselle would come to sit next to me and place her paw on my arm. Her paw would vibrate violently and after an instant, she’d remove it and stare at me. I thought she knew me then. The only creature in the universe that understood how I really felt. No wonder she disliked me. I hadn’t fooled her one bit.

Frances York had promised to keep my job open for me at the library, that bookless, underused place. When she tele­phoned to tell me the news I said, Oh joy. She missed the sar­casm; she thought I meant it. But of course I will, dear. We stick together.

I didn’t know if she meant librarians, or losers, or women who were alone, facing some sort of tragedy. I figured she’d had tragedies of her own, not that I wanted to hear about them. I wanted to tell her that at my last job I used to have meaningless sex with someone in the library parking lot on a regular basis. Someone I didn’t love and didn’t want to love me. That I did it even in the winter, when there was ice everywhere and our breath steamed up the car windows. I wanted to tell her that ever since my lightning strike I spent my nights vomiting and clicking, and that my eyes — the stand-ins for her failing vision — hurt so badly I’d probably never read another book again. I wanted to tell her I had managed to do away with nearly all of the people I loved most in the world, death by proximity and idle wishes, and I still couldn’t manage to get rid of myself. Instead, I said, Thank you, and promised I’d advise her about my condition; as soon as I felt up to it, I’d come back to the library.

My life was empty and that was fine. It was what I was used to. Yet there was something expected of me, like it or not. I was to be a part of the lightning-strike study, per­suaded by my brother to be among the dozens of patients tested by a team of biologists, neurologists, and meteorolo­gists on the third floor of the Science Center over at the uni­versity. My brother seemed to feel guilty about what had happened to me, and yet he was avoiding me. Best not to see what disturbs you. Best to order it, examine it, and place it in a study. The way I saw it, chaos theory was at the root of Ned’s guilt. On those occasions when he phoned me, it was to discuss the probabilities of my lightning strike. If he hadn’t insisted, I wouldn’t have moved to Florida. If I hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have been struck, and on and on. I didn’t want to hear any more and I certainly didn’t want to see Ned suffer. One of us doing that was enough.