The Ice Queen

There was a streetlight above me; when I flipped over the book that had been returned I saw the title: A Hundred Ways to Die. It was the instruction manual for suicide I’d often referred to in New Jersey when Jack Lyons phoned me for information. I felt something close up in my throat. I’d thought that like always recognized like, but it seemed I’d been completely mistaken about Nina.

I watched the beetles fly through the dark above their lawn. I wondered if Nina had reached home and had crawled into bed beside my brother, if he hadn’t even noticed she’d been gone, noticed her pale feet were cold. Now I remembered that the day before my mother died, my brother had spent all day making her a present. It was a book made of construction paper, bound with shoelaces. When I’d asked him what it was, he’d said it was the story of his life. That’s stupid, I’d said. I didn’t look at his face to see if I’d hurt him. Who cares about that? I was jealous. I knew a book could make something real. In this case, it was his love right there on that paper, tied with laces, given over freely to our mother. That’s why I’d been so mean to Ned. I had nothing. I hadn’t even thought to give her a present. I hadn’t thought at all.

The house we’d lived in, in New Jersey, could have easily fit into the living room of the house where my brother lived now. It was a beautiful structure, even in the dark. Before tonight I had imagined that Ned and Nina slept well at night, logical sleep, dreamless and sweet. Now I looked through the shadows to see there was a woman on the lawn. My brother’s wife. In her nightgown she was almost invisible. But she was there. It was Nina. She didn’t move at all. I tried to get away quickly, before she could see me. I began to drive away, headlights switched off. Maybe this had never happened, maybe I’d been all wrong, but when I turned to look out the rear window I saw that she had spied me, not that she seemed to care. She looked right through me, as if this world no longer concerned her, as if everything that mattered could no longer be seen with the naked eye.

CHAPTER FOUR

True

I

People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe. My sister-in-law was a perfect example: the sunny, near-perfect mathematician who drove through the quiet streets in her nightgown when most good people were in bed, who studied the hundred ways to die. I had already decided I wouldn’t mention the fact that I’d seen her at the book deposit. A liar like all the rest, ready to pretend I didn’t know about the crack in the reality of her life, the dark hour, the library door, the book of sorrow in her hands.

Absinthe, that’s how it began — ingested, of course. Anemia caused by refusing all food, anonymity, arsenic, asphyxiation, barbiturates (crumbled into puddings or applesauce to make for speedy digestion), bee stings (see wasps, see nests, see allergies), belladonna, black hellebore (brewed into a tea), cars (accident, asphyxiation), crucial arteries (knives, razors, ballpoint pens), death by drowning, falls from open windows (eighth floor or above), fire, gas ovens, gunshot wounds, hanging, heroin, death by ice, ivy (pulverized and made into soup or tea), jimsonweed, OxyContin, pennyroyal, plastic bag over the head (see double death, see ensuring overdose), poison hemlock, the root of pokeweed, ponds and lakes, death by provoked police incident (see car chase, public drunkenness, public nuisance), public restrooms, renting motel rooms, sedatives, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, stimulants, death by wishes.

I had seen Nina in passing since that night at the library, once at the market, another time in the cafeteria while Renny and I ate lunch; both times she’d waved cheerfully to me. I simply waved back, then went about my business as though I hadn’t skimmed through A Hundred Ways to Die before returning it to the shelf, as though my sister-in-law hadn’t been standing on the library steps in her nightgown. Self-help, that’s the section where it belonged.

The truth was, I didn’t want to interfere. Why should it be up to me to touch anyone’s life, guide someone right rather than left, off the road instead of on? Get involved and you made mistakes. Inevitable. Who knows where your advice, interest, love, might lead? Start and it might be impossible to stop. That was what was happening with Lazarus. I had taken the one bead of doubt Renny had tossed out and strung a necklace, red pearls, invisible to my eye, but tight around my throat, pulling at me.