The Ice Queen

“Who, a mass murderer?”

“Me,” he said.

I leaned down and kissed Renny’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said to me. I think that’s what he said. He was already falling back asleep.

“He’s tired,” Marina said.

Her hair was red, I could see that now. I blinked and was still stunned by how beautiful the color was. When I got my bearings, I wrote down my address. “Will you let me know how he’s doing?”

I felt that I had dreamed him up — Renny was that honest and that true.

“Do you think it’s possible for him to be happy?” she asked.

She wasn’t much more than a girl.

“I think anything is possible,” I said. It sounded as though I meant it.

I left, back into the heat of the day. I was walking across the parking lot to my car, thinking about love and why it mattered. It was an idea, wasn’t it? Nothing real, nothing lasting, nothing to live or die for. In all the talks I’d had with Jack Lyons, I’d never once asked him what he thought about love. I hadn’t wanted to know.

The clouds were moving quickly in the sky. There was so much blue and there was the color I’d missed the most moving across all that blue. So startling. So alive. It was a cardinal flying above the treetops. I stood there with a hand over my eyes. After so much time, even the smallest amount of that color hurt my retinas. I think I felt tears.

I heard something. Renny’s sister running after me.

“Hold on,” she called.

I turned and waited for her to catch up.

“Renny said you’d take care of this.”

Marina held out her hands and I held out mine. She turned over the little mole Renny had rescued from the cat. It felt like a glove, a leaf, a wish.

“What’s going to happen to him?” I said.

“I’ll take care of Renny. When he’s better he’ll go to the University of Miami. Art history. Or did you mean the mole?”

I hadn’t, but I supposed I should be interested in the poor thing; he was my responsibility now.

“If you can’t find grubs or earthworms, Renny said to feed it American cheese and lettuce. Twice a day.”

It was nothing I wanted. Nothing I cared about. But mine all the same. I held the mole up and looked into its blind face. And then I realized what love did. It changed your whole world. Even when you didn’t want it to.

On the way to my brother’s house I saw flashes of red everywhere. I suppose I was recovering. Or maybe I was hallucinating, imagining what I wanted most to see. The sign on the mini-mart flashed so deeply crimson it took my breath away. Had such ridiculous things been beautiful before and I simply hadn’t noticed? I stopped, pulled into the lot, went inside the market, to the fruit aisle. Wrapped lettuce, cucumbers, peaches, lemons, and then, at last, a single pale apple, blushed on one side as if filled with life, with blood. I bought the apple and ate it in my car. It was delicious, all the more so because of its color. Sitting in my parked car, I felt absurdly alone without Renny. I’d gotten involved, even though I’d known it was always a mistake.

I drove along idly until I was on my brother’s street. This was often where the story went in a fairy tale. Sun and moon, brother and sister, the guardian and the guarded, opposites who gave each other form, guided each other until they stumbled home. Ned was at the university; I knew an emergency meeting of the lightning-research group had been called. There was a great deal of worry about the lawsuit Renny’s family was threatening. None of the experts had offered him counseling, taken note that he might be unbalanced. Well, weren’t we all? It was true for all of the members of our study group. We’d been turned inside out, picked up and dropped down, flattened, wounded, torn apart. I’d seen the Naked Man several times, wandering through the park, stopping to throw tennis balls for other people’s retrievers and poodles. I’d seen the young girl with the mismatched socks at the coffee shop in town, her hand held over a tabletop, trying to make a spoon turn in a circle.

Frankly, I thought if Renny’s family sued anyone, it should be me. Ignorant, selfish, greedy, blind, the friend who wasn’t there. Oh, definitely, it should be me, although what they might take in reparations was minimal: my cat, my car, my future, my past.

I got out of the car onto my brother’s street, and tossed the apple core away. I suppose seeing Renny’s sister and her devotion had made me think of Ned. I’d been a terrible sister; I should have told him about Nina and A Hundred Ways to Die. Now, I knocked on the door. The car wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe Nina walked to her classes; the mathematics building wasn’t far. It was such a beautiful day. It was getting dark earlier. That was the only thing that was the same here as it was in New Jersey. By now the maples would have begun to turn red with the first rush of cooler weather. Here there was just a slow bluing of everything. Birds sang in the darkening sky, and a few palm fronds, ones that had turned dry with the heat, rattled and shook in the breeze.