The Ice Queen

Sometimes my brother cried out in his sleep, sometimes he called out.

“Butterflies,” Nina said. “In his dreams.”

Nina had dark circles under her eyes. Now, when my brother went to all his medical appointments, they let him have whatever he needed to kill the pain. That should be a good thing, but it’s not, because then you know you’re nearing the end.

I offered to help out full-time, and Nina let me. They had closed the library, just as Frances had suspected. I had no job and was collecting unemployment benefits. I didn’t think about what I would do when my money ran out. I could always get a job as a cashier at Acres’ Hardware. People would still ask me questions there. Reference me a saw, a hammer, a can of paint, an apron, an anvil. I would learn it all, recite it by heart.

But for now, I was available. I did the food shopping and the laundry. I felt useful for once. I began to paint butterflies on the wall. I began to dream of them, too. I thought of Lazarus, surely halfway across the world by now. I dreamed of him as well, but only occasionally. I was too busy for that now.

My brother had started to age, the way ill people do. He was a hundred years old when he slept in his wheelchair; he was breaking our hearts. When he napped, Nina and I sat out on the grass, even when it was hot. There was a hedge of boxwood. We sat in its shade. Nina cried; I watched her. Once, I went into the kitchen to fetch some ice water for Nina and found my brother at the window.

“Do you think we all have something we dream of doing?” my brother said. At that moment he was perfectly alert.

I sat down at the table. “Such as?”

“The thousands of monarch butterflies. In migration. The thousands of changes. All chaos. All one moment. That’s what I’ve always wanted to see. I want to see that.”

He sounded upset. I’d never heard my brother want something quite so deeply, so much. This was far beyond his desire to see the old man in Jacksonville. That was a lark; this was the heart of the matter. The end of his life.

We hadn’t heard, but Nina had come in, looking for me. She was still crying, but she looked like stone, the way she had when I spied her in the yard. There were bits of grass on her clothes. She smelled like boxwood and evergreen. She was stronger than you’d think. She simply didn’t give away who she was to just anyone. She probably started to plan it out then. When she heard his dream.

A nurse came in once a week while I went with Nina to her Lamaze classes at the health center at the university. The other women were younger, graduate students, wives of young professors, two lesbian couples. Everyone seemed so sure of the future. They had potluck dinners together on the weekends. We never went to those. Maybe everyone thought Nina and I were a couple. I suppose for those hours of class we were.

“She’s the best breather in the class,” I told Ned.

“Of course. Naturally.” He was proud of her. He was in love with her. But he was also in the process of leaving. He often sat at the window and stared at the yard and I wasn’t quite certain he was seeing what we were seeing.

I did get a card from Seth Jones. The postmark was Florence, so he’d made it there. He wrote, Plan to take the ashes to Venice. Wish you were here. SJ.

I didn’t. I wanted to be exactly where I was, sitting with my brother in the afternoons, fixing dinner and washing up afterward, playing cards with Nina in the evenings. One day a package arrived for my brother; it was a bathrobe, sent by Jack Lyons.

“Who the hell is Jack Lyons?” Ned asked. He liked the bathrobe but felt odd accepting a gift from a stranger.

“You went to high school with him in Red Bank. And I used to sleep with him.”

“He has good taste,” Ned said.

“Shut up.”

“I meant in bathrobes.”

Jack knew what the dying needed. He was far more of an expert than I’d ever been. Even when I didn’t contact him, he continued to send my brother gifts. As for Ned, he’d started to wait for the packages. Look forward to them. One week there was a tape of birdcalls that my brother liked to have played while he napped. Another time there were two pairs of heavy woolen socks. And then came a huge box of fudge, the old-fashioned kind. My brother couldn’t eat it, but he loved the smell.

At last I called New Jersey. “You don’t have to send my brother anything,” I told Jack.

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he said back.

There wasn’t much of an answer for that.

“He loves the birdsong tape. And the fudge.”

I was glad it was impossible for Jack to see me. I was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Giselle curled on my lap. I had all the lights turned off to cut down on my electricity bills. I had recently applied for a job at Acres’ Hardware Store, only to be told I was unqualified.