The Ice Queen

I ran up to the door and let Giselle out. She was angry with me, had her haughty expression on, her tail up; she went past me and jumped around in the weeds. She turned her back to me to pee. She was a private creature and I respected that. She held a grudge; I respected that, too.

I wanted to go inside, take a shower, put on some clean clothes, reconsider my life. I thought perhaps I’d discovered the difference between love and obsession. Only one of them puts you in jeopardy. I felt like a gambler who had only just realized how much there was to lose. Everything seemed different. The steps I took, the scratchy weeds against the bare skin of my leg, my cat mewing.

Giselle trotted past me to the door. She had something in her mouth. I hoped it was a bird, not another poor mole. I chased after her. She shook her prey back and forth. It was brown, whatever she’d caught: feathers or fur, I couldn’t tell.

Giselle rubbed back and forth against my legs, then deposited her catch at my feet. No longer angry that I’d been gone so long, proud of herself. She had given me a gift. I suppose she was my pet — and I, her what? Surely not her keeper. Perhaps I was her pet in return. Her little murderess. Her darling dear.

I bent down, cautious. The thing at my feet didn’t seem familiar. And then, it was.

It was a leather glove. When I peered inside I saw flecks of gold.

I ran back across the lawn. I found the other glove under the hedge. It was curled up like something broken, a leaf, a bird, a mole, a heart.

Monday. The day after I was supposed to have met Renny to finish his architecture project. I’d forgotten.

I went into my house, through the living room, into the kitchen. The Doric temple, unfinished. The gloves on the lawn. My irregular heart. My greedy self. My wish that he would disappear.

I heard someone call my name. The voice was unfamiliar. I charged back through the house and saw a young woman on my front porch.

“Hullo,” she called.

I peered through the screen door.

“I had a message from Renny Mills,” the woman said. She was young, blond, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She looked somewhat familiar.

“You have a message for me?”

“No. For me. Renny left me a note to meet him here. We were in art history class together in the spring.”

Iris McGinnis.

She laughed, nervous. She was thin and pale, with a sweet expression. “He said he had a present for me. I don’t know why he’d want to give me anything.”

Because he’s madly in love with you, idiot, I wanted to say. I opened the screen door. She was very young. Nineteen, perhaps. I had a terrible sinking feeling.

“He’s been making you something,” I said.

“Me?” Iris laughed, and the sound was like water. Maybe that was what he’d fallen in love with, that sound.

“But he’s not here.”

“Okay, well, can you have him call me?”

Iris wrote down her phone number on the back of a piece of notepaper.

“I’ll be home all day. Studying. I’m not as smart as Renny is. He got an A in the class we took together and I was lucky to get a C. I’ll just wait for his call.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I can’t believe he has a present for me.” She had green eyes, I noticed. She was pretty in a pale, sweet way.

When Iris left I phoned Renny’s dorm. Someone answered and, when I asked for him, said, “You haven’t heard?”

I felt panic-stricken. I had the gloves on my bureau. My hair was sticking up as though I’d been shocked.

“What did he do?” I asked. I knew it was something bad, something desperate, a monster’s attempt to tear off his skin, an angel’s attempt to rise.

I pieced it together from that initial call and then a call to my brother. Everyone in the Science Center knew. Renny had walked into Acres’ Hardware Store and taken a hatchet from the wall. He’d been calm and cheerful; no one had even noticed him. Now there was so much blood on the floor of the hardware store that new oak planks would have to be installed. Renny would have surely bled to death if the manager of the paint department, the man who’d been attacked by the bulldog, hadn’t taken a lifesaving course. The manager was a quick thinker; he’d been so ever since his own attack. He jumped over the counter and made a tourniquet out of the strings of his Acres’ Hardware apron.

Because of the incident, and the university’s liability, the lightning-strike study was to be disbanded. There hadn’t been enough psychological supervision, that’s what Renny’s parents were saying, and it was rumored that a lawsuit loomed. Orlon University had no vested interest in the study. Twelve years of research was to be poured down the drain; all those photographs of us, the charts of our poor health, would be shredded now.