The Ice Queen

  “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.

  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.

  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.”

  ***

  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.

  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, 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.

  I borrowed Eliza’s cell phone. The service was bad, but when I put the phone up to my brother’s ear he could hear Nina. He knew it was her.

  “Everything has just changed a thousand times over.”

  It took all of his effort to say that. When he had, we turned off the phone and waited. I had the desperate urge to turn my brother around. Quick, I would say, we have to do it now. Put your feet where your head is resting. Play the final trick. Let Death pass over; let it pass by. Please, let us try. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.

  Eliza unhooked the IV right before it happened. There was a click, and then quiet. You wouldn’t think there could be so many butterflies in the world. You wouldn’t think everything could change in an instant. But there are, and it does.

  There were whirling clouds above us, brought in from the cold ocean air. Nimbus. Fast moving. Flying. Good to lift your spirit. Good for everything. Good for him.

  II

  Nina named their daughter Mariposa. She was born in January on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I noticed. I was keeping track of such things. I was there with Mariposa when she was born; I was the coach who said, Breathe and Push and Oh my God, there has never been anything so beautiful. I was watching over her from the beginning, so I was made her godmother, which meant I had to watch over her forever more. It turned out to be something I was good at. Something I was meant to be. I stayed on for several months, babysitting, helping out, nearly learning to cook, until Nina was ready to go back to work, ready to have her daughter go to the day care center at the university while she taught her classes. I left Giselle with them. It just made sense. She was a Florida cat now. She’d have howled if she’d been made to put a paw into snow and ice. Besides, I’d never thought she was mine, so I wasn’t really giving anything away.

  A godmother’s role is to send gifts, and I do that — too much, probably. Every year on Mariposa’s birthday, I go for a visit. I don’t despair over that time of the year anymore. It’s my favorite month, just as it used to be. I’ve given Mariposa a dozen volumes of fairy tales. Her favorites are the Andrew Lang books, with all those pretty covers, filled with stories that feel illogical and true at the very same time. She and I are both partial to the Red Book.

  Once I read Mari her father’s favorite, “Godfather Death.” “That’s not funny,” she said to me.

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed. “But your father liked that story. He was a scientist like the doctor.”

  “They don’t all have to be funny,” she said after thinking it over. “But tell me the one about a girl who climbs a mountain that no one has ever climbed before.”

  “I don’t know that one. I only know the one about the girl who was turned into ice.”

  “Make it up.” Mariposa had a solemn face that reminded me of Ned. Ned, who was a good secret-keeper. Ned, who never believed in perfect logic. Ned, in the ever after.

  It was difficult for me to say no to Mariposa. I wanted her to have everything. So I made up the story for her. It turned out to be a good one. Better than the story I used to tell myself. It was the same girl, in the same icy land, but this time she thought to climb over the mountain instead of standing in place and freezing. She was smarter now, less likely to give in. As soon as she got to the place on the other side of the mountain, she started to melt; she left a blue river behind her, one that is always cold, always pure, always true.

  The last time I visit
ed Orlon, I took Mariposa out to the orange grove. I was babysitting. Nina was at class, and Mariposa had turned six. That’s the way it happened. Time kept moving forward. We sang songs as we drove, ones I thought I would have forgotten by now. Mariposa made me remember things. She liked my horrible voice and applauded. Everything she did was a treasure in my eyes. I was the godmother, after all. She belonged to me, too.

  When we got to the orchard I pulled into the driveway, parked, and took Mari for a walk. She wore her hair in a pixie cut. Nina had told me she refused to let her hair grow; she hated to have it brushed and braided and fooled with.

  “Smart girl,” I said. I told her that a lot.

  “It smells good here,” Mari said as we walked in the grove.

  She was right about that, too. The land had been sold at auction, and all the trees were in bloom. We walked down the road and waved to some of the workers.

  “Hello!” Mariposa called to one of them who was pruning the branches. “Do you live in a tree?”

  I have thought of Lazarus Jones, but he’s like a story I heard long ago. A story where I turned the pages even though I knew how it would end. Some things are like that, chaos theory aside. Turn left or turn right, you come to the same conclusions about certain things, the very same results. A young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, who wasn’t afraid of death, who, when he got a chance to be someone else, had to take it.

  By now the hole in the ground had been filled in with stone and rock. I suppose the new owner hoped to cover it with fertilizer and sod, maybe reclaim the soil. All the old trees had been cut down. I thought I saw a red orange on one of the trees, but it was just the slant of sunlight, turning a piece of orange fruit crimson.

  My mother’s secret was that she never planned to meet her friends. The riddle of who she was. It was her thirtieth birthday. It was her least favorite month of the year. I had always liked January. I liked ice. It was beautiful, like diamonds, the brightest thing in the world. I liked to write my name in the cold, foggy window of my bedroom with my fingertip. I liked how black the sky was, how the stars seemed to hang down lower in the sky. It was before I cut off all my hair, froze my heart, blamed myself for everything that had ever happened. I was thinking about the future back then. I was looking forward.