The Ice Queen

I replaced everything and put on some coffee. I got a new bag of coffee beans from the freezer, and I noticed the electricity must have gone out sometime during the night. My house was a mess. I’d paid no attention to it; but then, I’d never felt as though it belonged to me. I’d never really lived here. The closest thing to something familiar, something that belonged to me, were the few pieces of Renny’s Doric temple still on the table. Giselle liked to play with the columns, batting them around until they fell on the floor.

I went to the back door to call her in now, but she wouldn’t come. I had to go to her, out by the hedge. The sky was inky. The center of the horizon was the color of the bats I’d seen in pure daylight, deep blue, streaks of black and purple. When I bent down I saw that Giselle had gotten Renny’s mole. I recognized it because of the bite out of its ear. We’d tried to save him and we couldn’t. The little pet who had cheated death; it wasn’t moving now.

“Bad girl,” I scolded Giselle.

I sat cross-legged and picked up the mole and held him in the palm of my hand.

By the time Lazarus woke up I had buried the mole, made coffee, and telephoned my sister-in-law. My brother was still recovering from our trek to see the Dragon, but he was happy that we’d gone. Ever since, he’d been dreaming of bats and butterflies, Nina told me. He was writing a paper on chaos theory in fairy tales. He was writing like mad, up half the night. Things had become clear to him and he wanted to get it all down before it was too late. The tiniest action, the smallest creature, the most minute decision had huge ramifications. One mole dies, one is saved, only to die again. One word is spoken aloud and the world changes. An arm becomes a wing, a beast becomes a man, a girl is silent for a hundred years — frozen in place and in time — a young man has to search the world before he discovers who he really is.

I lay down beside Lazarus on the couch. His eyes opened. Ashes to ashes. They were so dark.

“Hey,” he said to me. He was about to embrace me, kiss me, then he thought better of it. “I’ll burn you.”

I shook my head. I remembered what the Dragon had told us about fire. I handed Lazarus two cloves of garlic that I’d peeled in the kitchen. “The remedy,” I told him.

Another man might have questioned me, might have failed the test. Lazarus looked at me, then ate the garlic. I put my head against his chest. I didn’t feel the same heat from inside him.

Lazarus had seen the delivery truck from his window and he’d also recognized the driver, Hal Evans. He knew him because they’d had an altercation when they were working together at the feedstore. Hal had come in drunk and had been saying this and that, goading Lazarus. Lazarus had left some bags of fertilizer in the other man’s path and Hal had stumbled. Hal Evans was the worst of all people to come sniffing around the orchard. Maybe he’d heard the rumors the farmworkers had spread, that they worked for a monster, a man who refused to be seen, that there was something not right in the house where all the window shades were drawn.

Lazarus packed a bag as soon as Hal’s truck pulled out. He’d been waiting for something like this for a while; now he waited for what came next. Later that day, someone he didn’t recognize was talking to the workers in the field. He saw them looking at the house, conversing with the men he employed. That afternoon he walked out the back door. He figured any phone calls he made would be traced, but walking, he knew what that did: it made you a free man.

Lazarus was shivering, so I covered him with a blanket. The morning was bright. We blinked in the light of it. I told myself not to make a wish, or if I did, if I had to, if I just couldn’t stop myself, then to make one for him. Lazarus fell back asleep; he was exhausted and couldn’t wake up. I wanted to let him dream for as long as he could. He had walked for miles. I looked at him. I could taste the garlic, the cure, the end of everything, the beginning of everything.

I got dressed and went to the bank. Peggy, my physical therapist, was there on line and she congratulated me on how good I looked. “You worked hard,” she said to me. “The comeback kid.”

Had I? I suppose I had. Those exercises that made me want to cry, dragging my left side along. It felt almost normal now, only not quite; there was still a metallic feeling along my ribs, around my heart. You couldn’t see it, but it was there, just as surely as Renny’s hands were filled with strands of gold.

I withdrew everything in my account except for a hundred dollars.

“Big purchase?” the teller asked me. Everybody knew everybody in this town. Even me.