Iceling Read online

  “This is exactly what Bobby said,” says Stan. “A ‘mass exodus.’ Of Icelings and . . . uses.”

  My stomach plummets as my mom’s words echo in my head. Don’t die for her. Is that the choice we’re making here? Is that what all these other Icelings on the road are telling us?

  “Oh my God,” says Stan.

  “I know,” I say. I snatch up Stan’s phone. “What do we do? Do we keep going?”

  “I don’t know,” Stan says, looking from the Icelings on the highway to the Icelings in our backseat.

  “I say we keep going,” says Bobby.

  Stan turns to look at me, then puts his phone on mute. “What do you think?” he says. “Should we trust him?”

  I look back at Callie, and Stan’s voice fades away. She’s breathing so steadily, and her skin looks like it’s almost glowing, as if illuminated by moonlight that isn’t there because the sky is really cloudy.

  “Uh, Lorna?” says Stan. “Hello?”

  “Do they look happy?”

  “Huh?” Stan says.

  “The Icelings. Ours. Theirs. Do you think they look happy? Like people on their way to somewhere wonderful?”

  Stan takes a long look at our siblings through the rearview. “They look completely content, Lorna,” he says. “But you and I both know that that maybe doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means we’re doing the right thing,” I say, without much of a pause. “We’re helping them.”

  “How can you be so sure?” says Stan, who has fought his way into the rightmost lane, clearly prepared to make a swift exit.

  “I can’t,” I admit. “But look around us. Look how many of us there are. This can’t be a mistake. All around us are people like us, taking care of their brothers and sisters, making this journey all because of love.”

  “Okay then,” Stan says. He takes the phone off mute. “You’re right. We’ll keep going.” He finds his way back into a middle lane.

  “I agree with this,” says Bobby, and then I reach over and end the call.

  The thing is, I don’t feel certain—in the way humans usually mean when they say that, at least. I don’t feel at peace or completely free of doubt. Because all of this is a bit scary: all these cars full of kids ferrying their Orphans, their Icelings, their siblings, up north, wherever it is we’re all headed, possibly just to certain doom. But this has nothing to do with me. It has to do with Callie, and all these kids who know what she knows, and about that I feel certain. So we keep going, straight on ’til whatever morning is out there, off in the distance, twinkling knowingly, like a smug jerk.

  SIXTEEN

  THE MORNING SKY is gray and covered in clouds, and it’s my turn at the wheel. All is calm and quiet, this huge fleet of cars moving at a fairly steady pace, when suddenly a sea of red brake lights starts to blink on all around us. Stan leans out the window to get a better look. The whole highway has come to a stop, so I put the car in park.

  “There’s a whole bunch of cop cars up ahead,” Stan says, pulling his head back into the car.

  “Why?” I say “Is there an accident?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  Bobby’s one or two cars ahead of us, so we call him up and ask him if he can tell what’s happening.

  “All I can tell,” says Bobby, “is that traffic’s stopped. Shit. Hold on.”

  We exchange a worried glance, then look back to Ted and Callie. I’m expecting to see a pair of anxious frowns, but instead all I see is bright, clear-eyed alertness.

  “I don’t like this,” Stan says.

  “Okay, it’s probably unlikely that this is, like, a stop to find us, right?”

  “Probably,” says Bobby, on speaker.

  “Like, just a routine thing,” I say, as if I believe this, as if saying it could make it real or make me even believe it.

  “Right. A bunch of cops stopping northbound traffic. Just your everyday event here on this remote rural interstate.”

  “Okay,” says Bobby, “We don’t know that that’s what’s happening. Do you see any police cars or flashing lights? Let’s figure this out.” His voice sounds weird and doubled, and then I realize he’s walking toward us, turning back and clicking the door lock button on his key ring.

  “Hey, guys,” says Bobby, leaning into the driver’s side window, his phone still on and in his hand.

  “Hi?” I say. I’m about to reach over and end the call, but Bobby stops me.

  “Not so fast!” he says. “I think we should all just stay calm. I’ll go up there and see what’s up. It’s not likely there’s any sort of trouble about you guys, but seeing as I’m thirty and Greta’s legal guardian and thus not her kidnapper and all, I think it’s better that I go. I’ll keep the call open; that way you guys can hear what’s going on, and we’ll figure out what’s up.”

  Bobby heads up the line of traffic, and soon we hear him say, “Hey,” though we can’t see him and don’t know whom he’s talking to. “You guys have any idea what’s going on?” Ted coughs, and I mute the phone.

  “No, sorry. All we heard was some guy a few cars up yelling about his rights. And, like, the rules of the road. No idea if he was actually talking to someone or just ranting.”

  “Sounds like a cool guy,” says Bobby.

  “Hey, why’re you holding your phone like that?” asks whomever Bobby’s talking to.

  “Oh,” says Bobby. “No reason. So you said the guy was a few cars up, shouting about rules and rights?”

  “Can’t miss it,” they say.

  “Thanks!” Bobby says. Then, more quietly and right into the phone, he says to us, “So, first and foremost, I learned that I need to be less sketchy with my phone. Putting it in my pocket going forward. Second, thought you should know that guy had an Iceling in his car.”

  Good job, Bobby.

  It doesn’t take him long to find the car his informant told him about, which we can tell because all of a sudden we can hear the hollering.

  “Hey!” we hear Bobby say. “Any idea what all the trouble is?”

  A loud, static rustling fills the phone speakers in our car, and the best I can guess is that Bobby’s jogging and the phone is rattling around in his pocket.

  But then the next thing we hear is this: “What the hell is this? This goddamn phone in your pocket—it’s on! Are you goddamn spying on us? Who the hell are you?”

  “What? No!” Bobby says, sounding farther away than before. “I’m just trying to figure out why there are, like, a hundred cars, totally stopped, with absolutely no indication of when we’re going to get moving again.”

  A new voice—a woman’s—says something unintelligible, and then the angry and suspicious guy pipes up again with “Yeah, right, explain that!”

  “Come on, sir, have a little faith. These are just my friends on the line—they’re in the jam too—and I put them on hold, uh, in my pocket while I came to talk to you. Sir, I swear—”

  And then we don’t hear anything after that.

  UNTIL TEN MINUTES later, when Bobby calls us back.

  “Jesus, Bobby,” says Stan when he picks up. “We thought that guy might’ve murdered and ate you or something. You okay?”

  “Man. That guy had a whole lot of what you’d call opinions regarding the rules of the road and his rights as a citizen of the United States in possession of an automobile that he drives on roads his taxes pay for. Good lord. Sorry about that—it was him who hung up on you, not me, by the way.”

  “But did he have any information?” I ask. “Anything useful and not insane or irrational?”

  “No.”

  “So those ten minutes after that guy hung up on us . . .” says Stan.

  “Lucky me, I got to spend those ten minutes listening to a series of lectures about the aforementioned subjects, given while his five-year-old daughter was knocki
ng her head against the backseat window. I wish I knew Morse code, it could have been an SOS.”

  “Damn,” says Stan. “Stay strong, little trouper.”

  “Anyway, there was one helpful person. I think she just wanted us to shut the hell up and give her some peace, but she was helpful nonetheless. She said that the AM traffic band had been offline for nearly an hour. Apparently it started fritzing out when this big standstill started. Which doesn’t seem ominous at all, right?”

  “Nope,” says Stan.

  “Totally not at all ominous in any way,” I say.

  “Great,” says Bobby. “Real glad we’re all in agreement here. Anyway, she also said she heard that the AM band would be back up anytime now, so we can stay tuned for that.”

  “Can’t wait,” says Stan.

  “I’m gonna get back to Greta,” says Bobby. “Keep in touch?”

  “Roger that,” I say, and Bobby heads back to the french fry mobile.

  SO WE SIT there for exactly thirty-six minutes. Maybe thirty-six minutes doesn’t sound like a crazy amount of time to be stuck in traffic in the grand context of terrible traffic jams all over the world, but when you’re stuck in traffic because just ahead of you is most likely a veritable sea of cops in their cop cars, and you’re in the car with your siblings with whom you’ve run away from home, and the government possibly suspects those siblings are weapons who mean to harm our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, then trust me: thirty-six minutes is a very long time.

  We’ve been tuned to the AM band with the traffic broadcast, which spits to life after thirty-six minutes. “The northbound lane is closed,” a canned voice keeps saying, over and over again. “Unforeseen maintenance,” says the radio.

  “Unforeseen my ass,” says Stan.

  I follow his eyes to the off-ramp off the shoulder. I can tell what he’s thinking: He could make it. We could all make it, pretty quickly. We could weave through two lanes of traffic and make it to the off-ramp, keep going, to wherever. This is assuming that the cops don’t see us fleeing and shoot us on sight. This is also assuming that there aren’t helicopters hovering above, filled with a different sort of cop who will see us and shoot at or follow us. That there aren’t any passes to head us off at. That this doesn’t end like Thelma and Louise did, with some happy, smiling montage of us flashing before our eyes, and whatever images Callie and Ted remember the most flashing before theirs.

  Then, suddenly, something starts to move all around me, tearing apart my dark daydream.

  It’s the traffic. The traffic has chosen this moment, when Stan and I are gazing at the shoulder like it’s an oasis and we’re dying of thirst, to start to move. Honestly, it’s more of a lurching, a crawl. But still. Progress! Stan rolls down the window and leans his head out to try to see better.

  “Wait, Lorna,” Stan says. “Hold on.”

  “Look,” he says.

  “What the hell?” I say, because I look and can’t believe this.

  The cops are guiding traffic through to the northbound lane, which I guess isn’t closed after all. They’re smiling and waving and moving cars along.

  “So . . . there wasn’t any problem after all? They’re just letting us through?” I say.

  Stan shrugs. “Maybe there was an accident and they cleared everything away?”

  But then we get a bit farther along, and it turns out the cops aren’t letting all the cars through after all. An elderly couple in a Buick is directed toward the off-ramp. A middle-aged lady traveling solo in a small SUV follows after. But then a crappy sedan with two teenagers in the front seat are given the wave-through to keep going north.

  They’re only letting Iceling cars through. Stan realizes what’s going on the same time I do, and then . . . this one car.

  This one car—one that a cop had just signaled off the road—pulls into the Iceling lane. The cop reacts, and I crack the window a bit so I can hear. The cop tells the driver, a dad-to-grandpa-aged man, to please move his vehicle out of the northbound lane and to direct himself toward the off-ramp. His voice is loud and stern, but he’s not yelling. Not quite angry.

  “I have a right to be here!” says the driver.

  “Sir, please move your vehicle,” says the cop, stone-faced.

  “Will you please just tell me why? This traffic is ridiculous! I pay the taxes for these roads! I have a right to be here!”

  “Sir, I am going to ask you to not ask questions and to move the vehicle into the off-bound lane.”

  “Why can they pass and I can’t?” the driver says, gesturing at the hatchbacks and ancient Volvos puttering through. His wife in the passenger seat goes from looking embarrassed, hiding her face, to looking alarmed. She sits upright and puts her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

  “Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?” says the cop.

  “Excuse me? I don’t think that’s necessary! I just want to know why they can go through and I can’t. My mother is sick,” he says, gesturing north, where I’m assuming there’s a hospital or nursing home, “and I just want to take the kids”—he gestures to the backseat—“to see her one last time. We don’t know how long she has, and just . . . Please, officer. This is America! Harry Truman did not intend for the highways to function in this way!”

  “Sir,” the cop says, unmoved by this poor guy’s pleas, “I’m going to have to ask you again to please step out of the vehicle.”

  “I know my rights!”

  “Daddy?” I hear a voice say, very faintly. It’s coming from this guy’s car two ahead, just in front of Bobby, who we’re now directly behind, and one lane over. “Daddy?”

  The man turns around to look at his kids in the backseat.

  “Sir? Please,” the cop says, and the man gives him his attention again. “I’d prefer real strongly not to have to ask you again.”

  The man looks at his wife, and I can see her nod a bit. Slowly, with not an ounce of resistance left, the guy gets out of the car. The cop steps next to him and begins speaking quietly into his ear. The man’s face goes slack. Something in him breaks. A few more cops come around.

  “Get back in the car, sir,” they tell him.

  The little girl who asked for her daddy is sobbing audibly.

  “Sir, if you could quiet your child,” says a cop, and it’s not a question.

  The guy asks his daughter to please be quiet through the part of his mouth that’s not trembling.

  “We’re here to serve and protect, sir,” I can hear the cops saying, all five of them at once. The guy’s just staring ahead. His daughter’s kind of weeping still, but she’s trailing off a bit. They tell the guy’s wife to get behind the wheel and take the car into the westbound lane and to drive along. They help the guy into the backseat next to his daughter and an even younger child sitting in a car seat. They keep their hands on him at all times. He sort of slumps a bit.

  “Have a pleasant day, ma’am,” they say to his wife, who is looking back at her husband and trying to get the car going, and looking back at her husband and pulling onto the off-ramp that all non-Iceling traffic is being funneled onto, while the cops stand outside and nudge their hats up with their guns.

  Now Bobby’s up. And we know he’s probably going to make it, because the only cars they’re letting through are carrying at least one teenager with straw-colored hair and those strange petal-like cheekbones—something I didn’t start noticing before this Iceling traffic jam but now can’t stop noticing. We are almost 100 percent certain that Bobby’s going to make it through, but still, I can hear my heart thumping again anyway, and so I grab Stan’s hand.

  “He’ll make it,” says Stan, as the cops signal Bobby forward.

  “I know,” I say, as the signaling cop holds up his hand for Bobby to stop.

  “It’ll be fine, and then we’ll make it too,” says Stan, through what I would guess are
gritted teeth, but I can’t say for certain, because I’m unable to look at anything but what’s unfolding in front of me.

  Two police officers are leaning into Bobby’s car, at both the driver and passenger windows. My eyes flick up quick to the rearview: There are thumping sounds all around me now, and one of them may or may not be my heart, but one of them is definitely Ted’s fist, which is pounding against the door. I try to get Callie to find my eyes in the reflection, but she doesn’t. Something else I cannot sense holds a claim over her stare. Something else has made it so her eyes are as wide as two bright full moons.

  Still gripping Stan’s hand, I turn around to face her. I reach out to Callie, needing her without being able to articulate why, my free hand groping for hers, to hold her, to tell her we’ll be fine, we’ll be there soon, she’ll be home soon. This is what I need her to need me to tell her right now, and my heart is crumbling with the weight of knowing she might not need me at all.

  “Callie,” I say. “Kid sister,” I say, softer. I take my hand off her hand to wipe at my eye, and as soon as I do, her eyes snap over to me. She reaches out her hand, close enough to make me believe she’s reaching for my hand, and my face breaks into an ugly-cry smile. “Hey, kid sister,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Then Stan squeezes my hand hard and sudden. I snap my neck around. Two smiling cops are waving Bobby through.

  It’s fine.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say to both Stan and the Icelings but mostly to myself, because we just need to keep on saying it until it is.

  One of Bobby’s cops turns back to the main flow of traffic, points his finger right at us, and gives us the “c’mere” sign with his whole hand. Now it’s our turn.

  “It’ll be fine,” Stan repeats, and he lets go of my hand and takes the wheel.

  We’re going to be fine. But this is weird and terrifying. Not the-bear-thing terrifying. But terrifying like menacing and ominous and maybe hinting at things to come that we don’t really want to think about.

  We pull up next to the officer who waved us over. He’s standing on Stan’s side, and then his partner comes around to stand on mine. Stan’s cop opens his mouth and starts saying something we can’t hear, then motions for us to roll down our windows. As Stan rolls down the windows, the cop’s voice kicks in: “—oll down your windows. Thanks.”