The Ice Queen

He came in the room, already naked. I couldn’t see him; I could feel his presence. His flesh, burning. His step on the floor. I was standing with my back against the tile wall. Ready. I suppose he trusted me, as a mole trusts a cat, seeing what awaits only as a shadow, not as a predator who wants what she wants, needs what she needs, has to have it. He got into the tub. I could hear the water; I could hear him settle against the porcelain. Cool against his burning back. Soothing him, probably, like rain on the night when it happened, pouring soaking rain.

The water around him sloshed back and forth. The tiles under my bare feet were cold. So dark I had to feel my way.

Wasn’t that part of the story? It is not what you feel or see but what you know in your heart? But my heart was abnormal, the rhythm was off. It thumped against me like a rock against bone. Cold thing, stone thing, thing that would not be red if I ripped it out of my own chest. A piece of ice. Clear. See-through.

I took the candle and put it on the ledge, where there were shampoo bottles, soap. I could feel the bottles with my long clumsy fingers. My bitten nails. The bottles knocked against one another. Time was slow. It was the before that I was in, that I was leaving. I could feel myself making my own future, a spider at work on her web. There was a finished woven pattern, one I thought I knew.

When I lit the match, the gleam was so bright I couldn’t see anything for a moment. I thought it would be easier this way, less harsh than switching on the light, but I was wrong. I lit the candle and it flared. Blue. Yellow. I was nearly blinded.

“What are you doing?”

I could hear his panic before my eyes adjusted to the light. He was angry. He was shocked. I knew I had to look. Wasn’t that the plan? I saw him as he stood, dripping water, lunging forward to grab the candle. Wax fell onto his chest; he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the flame, extinguishing it between his fingers. I could smell him burning.

“Well,” he said. “This is how it is.”

The burning man, cold now. I heard the betrayal. There it was. What had I expected? What had I done?

Now that I had seen what he’d been hiding, I continued to see it through the dark. Branded, is that what they say?

Memory that is stronger than the present, that stays imprinted behind your eyes, layering itself over everything you see in the present, in the here and now. I still saw it in the dark.

Lazarus was marked by the moment of his strike, covered by what were called lightning figures. I’d read about them in a book my brother gave me. Usually they were treelike images imprinted on the body of someone struck by lightning. No one was certain if the images were actually trees or if instead they were some interior path of the veins and arteries. Some experts felt that these designs were shadows caused by extreme bright light; similar images could be produced on glass by large charges of electricity. Handprints appeared on trees, or the perfect shadow of a horse might be captured on the side of a barn; the last image a person had seen as he’d been struck by lightning was cast onto his skin, his soul. All that remained.

“Want a better look? You wanted to see. Look! Go on!”

He was out of the tub, dripping water. He flipped on the light. I blinked, a cold, untrustworthy fish. I could see myself as well. My reflection in the mirror, a pale woman who was quite capable of repeatedly destroying her own life. I grabbed a towel, covered myself. I felt like crying. You do something and you can’t go back, can’t rewind. I knew that, didn’t I? Ice on the porch, tires on the road, make a wish, light a candle, ruin your life.

There were the marks of trees, shadow branches up and down Lazarus’s arms. The arms I knew. The rope of veins.

On one arm there was a blackbird, startled, ready to take flight. And all over there were the wheeling branches, as though Lazarus was part human and partly made of bark and leaves.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Barely enough. Barely anything. Disloyal, untrustworthy bitch, shivering now, shuddering with the very thought of what I’d done to us. I could never get anything right.

“No, really. Finish it! Look at me.”

He grabbed me then. But that wasn’t the worst of it, the angry grasp, the hot hands. Far worse was a tone of voice that I hadn’t heard before, except in our darkest, deepest moments. No bullshit, no pleasing me, for himself. Just for himself. Whoever that was. Whoever he was.

“Look at it all.”

It sounded like a threat. It sounded like the end. And something more. Maybe it was a relief to show someone at last. To turn around and let me see. I did the worst thing when he showed me his back, I made a sound, a gasping, despite my vow to myself to have no reaction. His deepest self, isn’t that what I wanted? True self, real self, self you’re hiding from the rest of the world.