The Ice Queen

“Don’t worry,” Nina said. We had to take him to the airport by ambulance — how could I not be worried? “You’ll manage.”

At least her friend Eliza was a nurse. I wouldn’t be all alone in this.

“Are you sure you want to go ahead? You probably won’t be with him when it happens.” When he goes, I meant to say. But I couldn’t.

Nina put her arms around me. She told me a secret. “I will be,” she said.

We gave my brother his maximum amount of Demerol and got on the plane. There were two EMTs with us, so I slept for a while. When I woke I felt weightless. There were clouds all around us. My brother was hooked up to an IV and the machine made a clicking noise. I realized the clicking inside my head had disappeared some time ago and I hadn’t even noticed. I could see Ned’s feet, the socks Jack had sent him. I might have sobbed. One of the EMTs, a man about my age, sat down across from me and took my hand.

Over the Rockies, my brother was in pain. The sky was the brightest blue I’d ever seen, dotted with puffballs. I wondered if this was what the sky was like in Italy. So blue. So open. We were floating through space and time. But I didn’t wish we would always be there. I knew this was only an instant. I gave Ned one of his injections, to make sure I was capable, with the experts looking on.

“There you go,” the EMT said. “Just like an old pro.”

I didn’t want to get to know him, or the other one, the young woman. I didn’t have any space for anything more than I was already carrying. I described the clouds to my brother.

“Cumulus,” he said.

His mouth was dry, so the woman EMT traveling with us gave him ice to suck on.

“Ice,” he said. “Very nice. Unless it’s on the porch.”

Ned and I laughed.

“Private joke,” I told the EMTs.

Ned was asleep when we landed at San Francisco. The ambulance was parked on the runway and Nina’s friend Eliza was there. She and Nina had grown up next door to each other in Menlo Park, and she was Nina’s opposite, dark and jovial, even now when Ned cried in pain as he was being transferred.

“We’ll have him in a nice big bed soon,” Eliza reassured me. “We’ll take good care of you,” she told my brother.

Eliza telephoned Nina from the runway and then held the phone up to Ned’s ear. He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. I don’t know what Nina said to him, but she comforted him somehow, and he slept all the way to Eliza’s house in Monterey, a long trip, so tiresome I fell asleep myself, sitting up, my check against the window.

When I opened my eyes all I saw was green. And then the sky, and then the clouds.

“Almost there,” Eliza said cheerfully.

The ambulance pulled up in her driveway. I sat beside Ned while they got the stretcher ready. I could see Eliza’s husband come out to meet the EMTs. New ones now. The ones from the plane had disappeared.

“My fucking back,” Ned said. “It hurts.”

“Serves you right for being such a pain in the ass.”

A joke from a thousand years ago. He remembered.

“You’re the pain. You.”

***

I think Ned took the dishes off the table when he found them there that morning. I think he put them in the sink when he realized what it meant for our mother to have left breakfast for us. He did the logical thing in an illogical world. He cleaned up the mess.

I hopped out of the ambulance so Carlos and the EMTs could carry Ned inside. It was beautiful here, wherever we were. I blinked. A bat. There beyond the trees.

“Go to sleep,” Eliza told me. “We’ll wake you in a few hours, and then we’d better go right there.”

She was a nurse. She saw where my brother was. That he was leaving right now.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I said.

“An hour,” Eliza insisted. “Then we’ll be ready to go.”

They had a pullout couch made up for me. They were kind, and I accepted their kindness, even though I knew I’d never see them again, never be able to repay them.

When I woke up I could hear my brother and Eliza talking. She asked him if he wanted food, applesauce, or homemade vanilla pudding, or crackers softened in water.

“Nope,” my brother said. “I couldn’t stomach it. That’s a joke. Get it?”

I heard Eliza’s laughter. I got up, found the bathroom, washed my face. Today was the day. It was the start of the ever after. I ran a stranger’s brush through my hair. It was longer than it had been since I was eight years old. Black. Sticks. Crow-colored.