Iceling Read online

  And seeing the three of them together, they look like siblings. Like fraternal triplets. It’s weird. Weirder than how it was when I first saw Callie and Ted together. There were so many similarities, but I didn’t think of them as brother and sister. But now, the three of them . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of this.

  Bobby finishes his drink and starts telling us how his interest in language and linguistics stemmed from the questions Alex used to ask when he was a kid, about how to better try to talk to Greta. Hearing him talk about it, I realize that Bobby’s approach to those questions is something I wish I’d thought of, honestly.

  “It just made me think, you know?” says Bobby. “About the roots of language, why we need it, how and why it works. So in the time that I’ve been the sole brother taking care of Greta, my Iceling—real great neologism, by the way, I’m really cottoning to it—I’ve tried every sort of base language and permutations I can think of, writing programs to cycle through them endlessly, getting Greta to sit and listen to them with headphones on, electrodes to her temples, her butt in a chair in the living room of the apartment we share, checking to see if anything lights up. She watches a lot of plant docs on YouTube and Netflix and whatever. I started renting some from libraries too, playing them for her one after the other, sometimes keeping the electrodes on and wishing that I had any idea how to quantify, let alone name or navigate or define or even begin to get a glimpse of, the responses behind her eyes.”

  I’ve got to say, I admire his dedication to Greta. And the fact that he doesn’t seem to blame her for his brother’s death, the way you’d think the TV version of a guy like Bobby would. I can tell Stan’s listening through his standoffish veneer and that he got especially perked up about the electrodes. I want to know what he’s thinking right now. About Bobby and Greta and this whole trip now that we’ve met Bobby and Greta. And I want to hear what Bobby has to say about as badly as I want us to get back in the car and talk to Stan about what Bobby’s saying.

  “Like I was saying when I first met you guys, back on the highway, about the island?” Bobby says, and I nod to encourage him to keep going. “Well, just the other day, she started to build this island. Out of dirt and flowers and these sticks she uses to prop up plants. Building, like, very insistently. Somehow she built this island so that in the center of it was this kind of . . . undulating field. And these blossoms that looked . . . heavy. You know? Like they were about to give birth or something. And after she built it I could just tell that she needed something. She had her suitcase already packed—no idea when she did that, but that was another thing she’d gotten up to lately that was strange: packing and unpacking her suitcase like it was some kind of relay race. Anyway, after the island, with her in the car and looking so worried and scared and excited and I don’t even know what, I had this thought: that I might be able to finally help her. The same thought Alex had that night. But he couldn’t do it. And maybe I can. So that’s why I’m here.”

  “Well, Bobby,” says Stan, “that’s exactly why we’re here too.”

  “Yours too?” Bobby says.

  “Yup,” I say, and then all three of us gaze out at our siblings like proud parents at a dance recital.

  Bobby smiles and excuses himself to go to the restroom.

  I still don’t know exactly what to make of Bobby, but I do know that the scared and suspicious feeling I got when he first flagged us down is pretty much gone now. I watch Stan watching Bobby as he walks, and I can tell that he’s still skeptical. A few minutes later, Bobby comes back and then Stan gets up to use the bathroom, which is when my phone buzzes with a text from him that says, Okay, fine. His stories are crazy, but they sound pretty legit. But I can’t take someone who dresses like a fancy nerd that seriously. I allow myself a little smile and then take a second look at Bobby’s outfit: kinda tight chinos tucked into a pair of duck boots, faded button-down, a lined deck jacket. I don’t know many grad students, but Bobby’s style doesn’t seem so off-base from the language-obsessed intellectual he claims to be. yr just jealous of his sweet all-weather gear, I text back, trying to let Stan know that I’m not worried about Bobby, but that this is first and foremost our journey.

  Anyway, if Bobby’s attentiveness to his appearance is Stan’s only complaint about him, then I know he agrees with me that this guy knows about Icelings. It’s clear he’s lived most his life alongside one of them, and he knows all about the delicate balancing act you’re forced to perform when you’re the one pivot point between them and everything else in the whole world.

  Stan joins us back at the table, and we share a look and a wink to acknowledge our secret text conversation. Then Bobby leans in, as if to initiate some kind of huddle in which he’s about to tell us the game plan.

  “I figure,” he tells us, “that if my Iceling did this, and your Icelings did this—building the islands, I mean, and then making us drive north—then probably other Icelings are doing this too. Maybe all the Icelings are doing this. Like a mass exodus sort of thing,” he says.

  Bobby waits a beat, as though he’s waiting for us to say something. When we don’t, when instead Stan and I both just study him and try to figure out if he’s for real, Bobby continues. “If that’s true, then that means something, something deep in their bones or their hearts or their memories, is calling them home. All of them at once. So we’ll probably see more of them, and more of us, out here on the road pretty soon. And what worries me is that someone other than us’ll notice too.”

  “You’re right,” says Stan, without a hint of mocking or smugness in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Bobby says, and then we’re all quiet as we try to think about what this means.

  “Oh my God,” I yelp. “Where are they?” Because all of a sudden Callie and Ted and Greta are gone, and I have no idea where they are.

  Stan panics. “How the hell did this happen? They were right there! We were right there!”

  “Guys,” says Bobby, “it’s fine. They’re by the cars. They probably just got impatient. See?”

  Bobby points at the window behind Stan and me, and there they are. By the cars. Just like Bobby said. And I don’t know how Stan feels about it, but I do know that right now I’m feeling a little bit jealous of Bobby and his skills at being a big sibling.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Stan says, and we bus our tables and head out to where our Icelings wait to get back on the road to the Great Wherever.

  Out in the parking lot, Bobby says, “Hey, guys, I got this big old SUV from my parents a while ago. I converted it to biodiesel, so it smells like french fries, but it’s got a ton of room.”

  “Nice sales pitch,” says Stan. “You trying to get rid of it?”

  “Ha, no, man, you’re funny. I just mean that if things are feeling a bit crowded in your car, you guys could always ride with me. Since we’re heading in the same direction and all. Plus, I don’t know what your situation is, man, and I don’t mean to presume, but I do know that I’m not a teenager driving a car in my parents’ name, so no one’s looking out for me in that kind of way. You know?” I can’t tell if what Bobby’s saying sounds more ominous or practical—though it’s definitely a little pushy, I know that, and I have a feeling Stan does too.

  “Nah,” says Stan. “Even if our parents freaked, and on that possibility we’re mostly covered, I think, when it comes down to it, the government’s been keeping tabs on the Icelings their whole lives. Once they figure out what’s happening, if they haven’t figured it out already, they’ll be tracking us anyway. So if it’s cool with you, let’s just do this convoy-style?”

  “Hey, fair point,” says Bobby, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “I’ll see you out there on the road!”

  We exchange numbers, get in our cars, and wave to one another as we start our engines and roll out. It’s my turn to drive, and I wink at Callie as I turn around to back us out, and then Callie rea
ches forward and points us north again. It’s fifteen minutes before I realize we missed the sunset.

  FIFTEEN

  BOBBY’S LEADING THE way, mostly because Stan likes the idea of keeping him in front of us rather than behind us. As the traffic builds on this weirdly busy stretch of highway, I start imagining that I’m seeing all these cars pulling into and out of traffic gaps from way up above, their swerves and swoops making up the shapes of their drivers’ names. Cars keep passing us, we keep passing cars. Stan nudges me softly and points to a car just ahead of us on the right: a junky Mitsubishi Montero with a Montana license plate that says CORVET. Stan and I started keeping track of particularly strange vanity plates during a particularly boring stretch of New Jersey. So basically when we got to New Jersey. My favorites so far:

  CYCLOPATH

  9-KIDS (There were only two in the car. What did they do with the other seven?)

  1W0JMA

  T00TT00T

  B33PB33P

  F4RTS

  I give a small smile to the Mitsubishi CORVET, and Stan adds it to the list in his phone. We picked up some cigarette-lighter-thingy-compatible USB cables for our phones way back when we started this trip, and I’m surprised by how much comfort I get from knowing my phone—and its scary-good GPS capabilities—will never die. I’ve been wrestling with the idea of shutting off my phone, but I feel weird just cutting my whole world off like that—and I know that Dave and Mimi would completely freak out if I explained to them why I thought it best that I shut off my phone. It’s been easy to dodge calls from Mom and Dad, and if worse comes to worst, I can always shut it off and chuck it out the window.

  Finally, traffic starts to move a little. It’s time to pull over to fill up the tank and switch driving shifts. My butt is numb from all the traffic-sitting, and this is the most relieved I’ve been to trade in the driver’s seat for the passenger’s. Bobby leans on the side of his car and chats with us as we pump and pay. He doesn’t need gas for a few hundred miles; apparently Bobby gets great mileage in his french fry mobile. Good for him. For the past several miles, Ted has had that look in his eyes that Stan has decided means he needs to get out and pace. Maybe he’s right, because Ted is currently all over the rest area, pacing up a storm, while Callie finds a patch of grass and plucks out some blades to braid in the car.

  Back on the road, we pass another giant diner done up in chrome, and a song I like comes on the radio. I turn it all the way up, lean back against my seat, and let it wash over me. The traffic’s building up again, and I can tell we’re going to be at a standstill soon. As we slow down, I look over at the diner, which is directly outside my window now. We slow to a stop, and as I’m looking at the diner and the cars parked outside it, a flash of bright color in the diner window catches my eye. It’s the sleeve of a high school varsity jacket, worn by a pretty girl about my age who’s sitting alone in a booth and putting her hair up in a ponytail. A guy is walking toward her, he’s maybe a little older, and my first thought is “Ugh, creep.” But then he starts dancing at her. And he’s really good. And he’s totally in sync with the song playing in our car, and I think to myself that this is the most magical thing I’ve ever seen while sitting in traffic. But the pretty girl in the jacket just isn’t having any of this. So the guy steps up his game. He pulls some sunglasses from his back pocket and puts them on, and then he drops out of sight beneath the table, like he did a split, and then a moment later he comes back up and leaps into the air, right onto the table, does a crotch grab and bends his body back, then hops down into the booth across from her.

  I break out into wild and ecstatic applause, and Stan kind of flinches as if I woke him up from a trance.

  “Stan!” I say. “Did you see that?”

  “No,” he says.

  I look back to the diner as we inch forward a bit. The guy is chugging water, his chest heaving from having given it his all. The girl continues to stare at her phone.

  Things like this, you can hardly believe them, even when you see them. But there they are, in front of your eyes, proving that anything can happen out here.

  The traffic has barely eased up over the past two hours. We’re on a particularly pitch-black and lonely stretch of road when my phone lights up with a text from Dave.

  Heard a good joke today.

  I hardly have the heart to text him back—I’ve been pretty standoffish with him, with anyone outside this car, and also sometimes inside it, ever since that awful talk with Mom—but of course I do because he’s Dave and of course I miss him a lot.

  i could use a joke rn, I text.

  Why did Ernest Hemingway cross the road? he texts.

  Then, like, a minute passes, and the ghost ellipses keep popping up and dying down, and so I text, idk. why?

  To die. Alone. In the rain. I read the punch line, and I actually snort.

  aw, that was a good one, I text back. snort-laugh-level good.

  Good, he texts. I miss you. How’s the road?

  Well, let’s see, Dave. This is what the road is like: A bear tried to kill us, but we lived, but only because Stan’s Iceling brother picked it up, smashed its head into a guardrail, and killed it right in front of us. Oh yeah, and we met another guy with an Iceling sister who also built an island, so they are also headed north, and we are all headed north, quite possibly tracked by the government, which may or may not include our parents, who may or may not have been lying to us our entire lives.

  the road’s exhausting is what I really type. but we’re fine.

  Ugh. That felt terrible. Not even the lying-by-omission part—that I’m fine with. What feels terrible is feeling so alone with everything that’s happening, and not knowing when that kind of loneliness will end. Or, depending on how big a deal this trek up north really is, if I’ll ever be able to try to turn that loneliness into something else, something no less melancholic but certainly much less maddening.

  And then it hits me. Not that I’ll never be able to tell anyone about any of this—I don’t know yet whether that’s true or not—but that my whole life from before we got in the car is over. No matter what happens with Callie—Callie, who’s drinking water from a bottle through a straw in the backseat while Ted squeezes a crayon he must have grabbed from the diner before the bear—no matter what happens to or between any of us on this trip, we can never go back. Because if the government thinks they’re monsters, and if Mom tells them about the island, then they’ll know where we’re going. Unlike us, they know exactly where we’re going.

  But we have to take them. We told them we’d take them, and we have to. That’s it. That’s it now.

  My phone buzzes. Dave again.

  Babe, I’m sorry things’re weird and exhausting. But however weird and exhausting things are, you’re doing this for Callie, whom you love. So there’s that. And that’s something. You know?

  And it’s not that I start crying. But I do, a little, just a few tears.

  “Huh,” Stan says.

  “Hmm?” I say, wiping away all evidence of an emotional moment.

  “Huh,” Stan says again, then pauses, then says it again. And then: “Shit.” He takes out his phone.

  “What?” I say. But he’s not answering. He glances at his phone and looks over to the left and behind us while trying to keep his eyes on the road.

  “Stan, what is it?” I say, way more edge in my voice now. I look back to Callie and Ted, and for the first time in a while there is what looks like fire behind their eyes.

  “Sorry,” Stan says. “Hold on, we need to call Bobby.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Call Bobby,” he says into his phone, which he’s put on speaker. It only rings half a ring before Bobby picks up.

  “I was just about to call you,” Bobby says.

  “So you noticed the thing with the cars too,” Stan says.

  “What thing wi
th the cars?” I ask, now really starting to feel invisible. I look out the windows frantically, but it’s all a mess of darkness, trees, and white and red lights. “Bobby!” I shout. “What thing with the cars? Will one of you tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Hold on,” Stan says to Bobby, and he’s turning to tell me, but by then he doesn’t need to. I’m scanning the road and the travelers on it, and I see what they’re talking about. Sitting in the back or passenger seat of almost every single car on the road around us right now are kids, all of them around sixteen years old, all of them staring out ahead, occasionally reaching for the wheel and nudging things north. No doubt about it, they are Icelings, with cheekbones like petals, broad and rising, and that dull blond hair like sweet but dead straw. Through some of the windows I can see that many of the kids are holding objects in their laps, and though I can only see the tip-tops of them, I know immediately what they are.

  “They’ve got islands,” I say. “They’ve got island sculptures.”

  I spot one that’s made of grass, like Callie’s, and a couple made of papier-mâché, of which one is way prettier than Ted’s and one is way uglier. There’s one made of drinking straws and one made of toothpicks and one made of recycled plastic shopping bags and one made of old paper plates that were either used to clean up a murder scene or collected at a backyard barbecue. I see one that takes up the entire back row of an SUV. Some of the Icelings are like Ted and Callie and have come on this trip island-less, and I assume that these are the Icelings who also made sculptures that were way too big to fit in the car. When I scan these cars, I see that Stan, Bobby, and I aren’t the only ones getting wise to the situation all around us. I get this weird feeling in my stomach that is either terror or excitement at the fact that we are all here together for the same reason.