The Ice Queen

“What’s this?” He opened the box; there was the little leaf of a mole. Dry and ashy now. Bone and fur. “You tried to save something,” Ned said.

I laughed. How mistaken my poor brother was. “Idiot. Can’t you see? I killed it.”

Ned went into the kitchen and came back with a serving spoon. I traipsed after him to the hedge, where he intended to dig a little grave. There were beetles flying about. There was the scent of oranges, even here, miles away from any of the orchards. The circle of bats was high in the sky. They looked as though they could reach the moon.

My brother’s knees creaked when he knelt down on the ground. He was thirteen years older than my mother had been on the night she died. He finished digging the grave in no time. He was efficient. Always had been.

Ned took the mole out of the shoebox and placed it in the earth, then covered the body with several hibiscus leaves. I realized I was crying, something I hadn’t done at my own mother’s funeral. When I deposited my heart monitor at the cardiologist’s office in the morning, my doctor would most likely find a spike at exactly this hour. The hour when my brother and I buried something together while the bats flew overhead. The time when I felt something.

I wished my mother would step out from between the hedges. I wished I could take back everything I’d ever done or said or wished. I would throw myself at her feet and ask her to forgive me. She’d be kind, I knew that. She was that way, and would be still. She’d tell me to stand up, to forgive and forget; she’d tell me she wasn’t one to hold a grudge. That her heart was open and always had been; that she was the same as she was, not a day older; that love didn’t change like the moon or tides, that it was the single constant in the universe.

But here was the thing — even if I did know her, I wasn’t certain she would recognize me. A strange woman in the dark, all grown up, standing in the grass, under the moon, beneath a cloud of bats, crying at a funeral for a leaf, a mole, a lost love, an idea.

“Well, that’s done,” my brother said.

He clapped the dirt from his hands and the bats came closer. “What’d I tell you. Poor schmucks. They’re drawn to sound.”

He knew I was crying, but was too polite to mention it. Just as I was too polite to suggest that his wife was someone he didn’t really know.

“Well, thanks,” I said. “I would have kept it forever.”

We laughed at the way I held on to things. I didn’t even like to throw out my garbage; I had a month’s worth of old newspapers stacked in the hall.

“Let go,” my brother told me.

“You first.”

Exactly what we used to say when we both wanted the same thing — the last cookie in the box, the last soda in the fridge.

We looked at the moon.

“Is it red?” I wanted to know.

“Any color you see is refracted by the water molecules in the air. It’s stone-colored, however it appears, kiddo. It’s gray.”

Regardless, it was certainly the most beautiful full moon of the year. In New Jersey it would be rising over birch trees, marshes turning brown, papers blowing down the sidewalks.

It was probably the color of a human heart.

“You’d be able to float if you were walking up there,” my brother told me.

I thought about that after Ned left to go home. I thought about how he’d called me in from the porch when my mother drove away and how I wouldn’t listen. Eventually, of course, I’d had no choice. My feet were freezing; they hurt. At last, I went inside. We were weightless that night. We had both stood at the window together, just for a second, side by side, seeing the very same thing for once in our lives: the long road away from our house, the dark horizon, the future, and everything it could bring.

II

I brought a candle with me when I next went to the orchard. How many women in how many stories had done this before? Mistrusted a lover, longed for an answer to a question that was not yet fully formed. If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting. Truth, sleeping on the other side of what I knew. Of course, there were a hundred versions of the same story: a woman who has to learn what she already knows, somehow, somewhere inside.

I’d brought matches as well. In my pocket, snug against my hip bone. It was a plan, not an accident. There was no chance involved, no circumstance. It was what I thought I wanted, needed, had to have. I had spent the day waiting for the dark, looking forward to it, the way bats must pine for the last bits of sunlight, green, gold, disappearing from sight. I’d dropped off my heart monitor, then stopped at Acres’ Hardware for the candles; I was in the notions aisle when I saw the man who’d been attacked by the bulldog, the patient my physical therapist had told me about. Bitten, torn apart, he was now shelving cans of paint. Even from a distance I could see the marks on his face, tooth and nail.