The Ice Queen

I had my hand over the phone receiver. I was crying.

“I know what you’re doing,” Jack said.

“You’re such an expert.” I sounded snotty and bitter and desperate.

“About some things. Most people cry for good reason. Most people smile for good reasons, too.”

The next package he sent contained wind chimes. My brother had us put them up by the window. He smiled whenever he heard them. It was a gift for my brother, but it was also a message to me. There was something still worth having in his world.

“Did I know this guy Jack?” Ned asked. He was at the point of repeating all of our conversations. His memory was gone, and the here and now was going as well.

“No,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“He has good taste.”

“Seems to,” I had to agree.

At night, when Nina was exhausted, I sat with my brother and read him fairy tales.

“Read the one I like,” he said one night.

“It’s not in this collection,” I lied.

“Liar.”

But I would not read the story about death, not now, not when we knew what the ending was. I read “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Juniper Tree” and “Brother and Sister”; I read about fishermen’s wives and horses that were loyal, and then I told him the story I’d made up, about the frozen girl on the mountain.

“Now that’s a sad one,” my brother said. “All she has to do is pick up her feet and walk away and she won’t turn to ice. Even when we were kids and you told me, I never understood that girl.”

I wanted to change what was happening, but it couldn’t be done. I bit my tongue a thousand times a day. I wasn’t about to wish for anything. I was afraid of wishes still. But Nina wasn’t. She had gone to her doctor, who said she could no longer travel. My brother had made it to sixth months. He loved to put his hand on Nina and feel the baby moving. Nina didn’t tell me, but she bought the tickets for his dream. She started to teach me how to give Ned his injections of antibiotics and Demerol. She taught me how to work the IV when he needed more fluid.

“What’s the best way to die?” I asked Jack one night. I usually called him at work, but this time I’d phoned him at home. He still seemed surprised to hear from me, but he answered me right away.

“Living,” he said. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was as if he’d always known the answer.

When Nina told me she wanted me to take Ned to California most of what I felt was terror. Her doctor had told her she couldn’t make the trip because of her condition. But surely I wasn’t up to the task. I wasn’t up to anything. My brother was leaving so fast. He was in diapers now. He was going backward in time. Every time he woke up he talked about the butterflies. Once in his life, that’s what he wanted; well, this was that once. Nina had called a friend in Monterey who would pick us up at the airport in San Francisco; Eliza, a nurse, would come with a rented ambulance and take us to her house. The migration was already happening, she’d told Nina. Eliza’s husband, Carlos, would take us to Big Sur, where the monarchs spend the winter. We would get there by ambulance if necessary.

“It’s too much for him,” I said.

“It’s not enough,” Nina told me.

She had that stony look. She was the woman who’d been reading about the hundred ways to die. She wanted my brother to have everything he’d ever wanted.

I packed a bag that night. A carry-on, since the suitcase would be filled with medicine. Nina hired a medevac plane. She had already taken a second mortgage on the house. If she never had another car, if she and the baby had to walk everywhere, eat rice, read by candlelight, she still wanted this. Even if she couldn’t be there.

“You’re going to see the butterflies,” she said to my brother on the morning it was to happen.

“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t believe it. He was still traveling backward through time. Younger than he had been on the night my mother died. I was the older sister now. I was the hand to hold.

“I can’t go, because of the baby, but your sister’s going to take you to California.”

“What do you know?” My brother closed his eyes, exhausted just thinking about it.

“I know I love you,” Nina said.

She was kneeling beside his bed. I had never witnessed such an act of generosity. Ned had on both pairs of socks Jack had sent. There were the wind chimes swinging back and forth in the window. I had been wrong about everything. I was terrified to go.