Iceling Page 13

  “No problem,” says Stan.

  “So,” says the cop. “You kids going north?”

  “Yes, sir, officer. North,” says Stan.

  “Just the four of you?” asks my cop, peeking in and looking toward the backseat.

  “In the car?” I ask.

  “In the car, yes,” says my cop.

  “Yes, sir. Just the four of us,” says Stan.

  Everything feels like when things won’t load on streaming platforms. I have a lag time. I can’t really process it all.

  “Uh, officer?” I start. “Can you tell us . . . well, what was that all about, earlier? With the man?”

  “The man?” asks my cop.

  “Which man?” asks Stan’s cop.

  “Uh, well, the one you removed from his vehicle. Earlier. Just a little while ago.”

  “Oh, that,” says my cop. “Well.”

  “That’s nothing to worry about,” says Stan’s cop. “Don’t let it trouble you, miss. Feel free to move along. North, you said you were going?” says Stan’s cop. Their sunglasses are on. What the hell is happening here?

  “That’s right, officers. North,” says Stan.

  “Mighty fine direction, north,” says Stan’s cop.

  “Mighty fine indeed,” says mine.

  “Feel free to move along now, though,” says Stan’s cop.

  Stan takes the hint, and we move along.

  WE’RE STILL ALIVE. We plan on staying that way. But we’ll still spend the rest of this drive making guesses about what that cop must have whispered in that guy’s ear and about what exactly is going on here and why, and I guarantee that no matter how sure we are of any of our explanations, we’ll still be 100 percent certain that we have no idea.

  SEVENTEEN

  WE’RE PAST THE checkpoint, headed north again.

  Stan’s moving his lips like he’s muttering, but he isn’t making a sound. A glance in the rearview shows Callie and Ted staring straight ahead. In the other cars, the other Icelings are too. The Icelings in the other cars are all white, and relatively pale, with varying degrees of dirty blond hair, just like Callie and Ted and Greta.

  As we drive amid this flock of Icelings, I start to notice that these kids don’t just have similar coloring and features. Some of these Icelings really, really look alike, like siblings. Could it be that some of them are brothers and sisters by blood rather than circumstance? What if Callie has a sister? A sister in a way I never was, or maybe never could be?

  An image flashes in my mind of Callie lounging around with a girl who is pretty in that same chilly way that Callie’s so pretty. They’re communicating in that easy but complicated way that best friends do, where real language is secondary to a certain comfort able code that years and years of closeness has established and from which outsiders are totally excluded. And Callie’s telling her in this way about how sad she was to be stuck with me instead of her real sister, how sad she was that I prevented them from being together. And then I wonder, could that sister be in one of these cars surrounding us, hurtling us toward wherever?

  Maybe it was always going to be like this: Callie would leave us for something greater someday. At least I got to have Callie, even if it was only for a little while, in the grand scheme of things. Or maybe this line of thinking is just me spinning my wheels, a kind of selfish distraction from the weird hellscape this highway is starting to feel like. Or maybe I’m just piling on another thing to worry about, to make the whole world feel even more impossible. I want to talk to Stan about this, but it seems like he’s in an even deeper existential crisis than I am. He’s still muttering silently, worrying away at the handle on the inside of his door, when suddenly he says something that I can’t quite make out.

  “What?” I say. “Did you just say something about the meek being stuck in . . . squalor?”

  “Like sheep to the slaughter,” he says clearly.

  “Stan,” I say.

  He shrugs. He says, “It is what it is, Lorna.”

  And I don’t have anything to say to that, because take one look around us. Look at Callie and Ted in the backseat, asleep. Look at the Icelings in the cars moving alongside us, some of them reaching out from their backseat perches, hands pawing at their windows toward the windows of other cars that probably contain their brothers and sisters, whom they haven’t seen since my father found them and ripped them apart in the name of rescuing them. I turn and look back to the cop cars behind us, to where we saw the family way back when, a couple of centuries ago, it seems, but it’s really only been, like, thirty minutes. The way time passes out here, the way time seems to keep expanding and contracting in alternating fits of bad dreams and sparks of hope . . .

  Just take one look around us. He’s right.

  MY SHIFT IS up, so we pull over at a gas station because finally Bobby needs fuel. We pull up at opposite pumps, and the three of us—Stan, Bobby, and I—get out of the cars while our Icelings stay inside, looking longingly at the road leading back up to the on-ramp.

  “Can I tell him what you said?” I ask Stan, and Bobby shoots us a questioning look.

  “I don’t see why not,” Stan says.

  “After we passed the checkpoint,” I start, “Stan said that we were like . . . sheep. You know. Sheep heading to the slaughter.” The gas pump makes a struggling sound and then clicks off, so I remove the nozzle and secure the gas cap. When I turn back to Bobby, he’s looking at me like I just slaughtered his favorite sheep right in front of him. “What?” I say. “He has a point. That was way too easy.”

  “I mean,” Bobby starts, then stops. “Listen,” he starts again. “They know what we’re up to. Stan’s right, we’d be stupid to think they don’t know what we’re up to with all these Icelings. They know more than we do, I’m sure. They know that we’re taking them somewhere, and they also know exactly where they’re taking us. They—the government—they’re letting this happen. They’re letting us do this.”

  “So . . . how is that not something to completely lose our minds over?” Stan says.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby says. “But we’re still standing here, right? We’re still okay. They had a wide-open shot at us—a shot to wipe all of them out—and they didn’t take it. But you—we—need to be cautious. Those cops were going out of their way not to do anything to us. You saw that guy who collapsed when they went up to him after he hesitated at the off-ramp? I kept expecting them to just start pulling people out of cars and stomp their faces in. That would have made sense to me. But what they were doing while we drove by, pulling grown men and women from their cars and intimidating them into slumped nothings in front of their children? I mean, in a way that’s almost scarier than pistol-whipping them or beating them with their flashlights, you know? That one guy . . . he looked scared. But when you and I went through? They just stood there. Smiling hard. And moving us all along.”

  “Man, Bobby,” says Stan. “Somehow you’ve managed to make everything sound even more terrifying.”

  “God, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to. But regardless of how terrifying this all is, the most important thing is that they know, the government, about what’s happening here. They know where we’re headed, precisely where we’re headed, even if we don’t. That’s a fact. And it doesn’t seem like they want to harm us . . . at least not yet.”

  I widen my eyes as menacingly as I can at Bobby’s last statement. “Not yet? When, pray tell, are they planning to strike, Bob?”

  “I’m not trying to play mind games here, Lorna. And I don’t have, like, a cheat code for the future, or copies of any battle plans. I’m just trying to think about this as clearly as possible, from every angle I can. Even if they mean to harm us or our siblings at some point down the road, that doesn’t change anything. We have to go there anyway. Wherever we’re going, that’s where our siblings want to be, where they need to be. And
now we know we won’t be alone in this—there are at least a hundred other people taking the exact same chance we are! So we know we need to be cautious and wary. But we also know we have strength in numbers and a prize to keep our eyes on. Okay? We’re here, and we’re not alone. None of us. Not now.”

  A tiny noise draws my attention back to the car. Callie has bumped the window, accidentally or on purpose I don’t know, because I stop caring which as soon as I see that she’s holding up a perfect grass crown, which is what she’s been weaving for the past couple of hours. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and then I start to cry a little.

  “I’m sorry,” Bobby says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Don’t think about it like that, like this is some big, serious, apocalyptic, suicidal mission. Look, cops know how scary they are. If they didn’t want us to feel freaked out, the government wouldn’t have sent cops. They would have done something super shady that we wouldn’t have even seen.”

  I consider this and am shocked at how much Bobby’s version of logic has cleared things away for me. “That’s true,” I say. “Only a moron wouldn’t be fazed by that checkpoint.”

  “See? If anything, they’re being transparent, which is more than I can say for their methods over the last sixteen years.” Bobby takes a deep breath as he secures the gas nozzle to its home on the island and screws on his car’s fancy gas cap. “So. Can we agree to keep going, proceeding with level heads and lots of caution?”

  “Yeah,” Stan says. “I think so.”

  I turn to look at Callie, who’s placed the crown atop Ted’s head, adding some cheer to his stoic appearance. I smile and say, “Yes.”

  “Okay then. Let’s hit the road. Greta, you ready, girl?” Bobby opens the driver’s side and hops in, then turns to us before closing the door. “See you at the next rest stop?”

  We nod and wave and take our assigned seats in the car. Stan starts the engine, and we’re off again.

  I want to say that everything’s different now, that our mission is at once more dangerous and foolhardy yet astonishingly more profound, but I don’t know that it is. Or that I feel any different. Maybe it’s always been this way, but we just never had the words to say so or the proof to see it. Which makes me think that what’s maybe even scarier than the world changing is realizing that the world has always been this way, you just managed to not see it. It’s that not-seeing that bugs me. Because what else am I missing? What else are we missing?

  I turn to Stan and tell him this. About the not-seeing and how scary it is.

  “Man,” he says. “I was just trying to not think about exactly that.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I say.

  “No, no, don’t be. It’s actually a nicer thing to think about than the other thing on my mind.”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “Yeah. My dad hasn’t checked in with me,” he says. “Like, not once since I went over to your house. God, when was that? This morning? Yesterday morning? Whatever. Anyway, I guess not hearing from him isn’t that strange, but it also is. At least a little. What I mean is that if this were any other day I wouldn’t think about this at all. Dad not calling me wouldn’t register a tick on my scale, good or bad. But because today is today, it’s at least a little weird. Right? I guess this could mean all kinds of things, though none of them are very good, I don’t think. And the most obvious thing is that it’s proof that he really does work for or with whoever it is that’s after our Icelings. That or his phone died and he forgot how to charge it, and he forgot my number. Or he got hit on the head and it completely slipped his mind that he has two sons, one of whom is an Orphan who cannot speak. Or he met a real nice lady—or a real nice guy, who knows!—and learned how to be happy. Or he learned how to be happy just by himself, living all alone, and wants me and Ted to do the same thing.”

  “Any of those things are possible,” I say.

  “Yeah, and really unlikely. Anyway, like I said, I don’t want to think too much about that,” Stan says. “And I think you’re right. About the world and how nothing’s changed. Or that’s not true—something has changed, but it’s not the world. It’s us. Right? I’ve spent a good chunk of my life resenting Ted and my dad and just . . . all of this, because I blamed them for me not feeling like I have a life or a purpose. And I’ve always thought that in order to have those things—a life and a purpose—I had to be alone. But I don’t think I feel that way anymore. I don’t think that’s it. I mean, think about what we did back in Pennsylvania. We made this crazy decision, on our own, and now we’re on this crazy trip while everyone else we know is just back home watching movies edited for TV and eating bad pizza. And instead of me resenting Ted and thinking he’s the problem and I’m just his lame victim, I’m making the choice to help him in a way no one else can. And you’re doing the same for Callie, and it feels good and right. I’m not being stupid, I’m not talking about some big idea of Good and Right, like lit-up words hovering over us, but you know . . .”

  “You feel like something in you is sliding into place,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like you found a way of being in the world that makes it a little easier to be in the world.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we’re really going to do this, huh?” he says, his eyes on the road and lit up by the highway lights and the cars around us. “We’re going to help them. We’re going to give them a shot at feeling this same way too. Is that a selfish way to look at this? I mean, we don’t know what they’re feeling. No matter how differently we feel about ourselves and them right now, we still have no idea what they think or feel. Or what they want to think and feel.”

  “Yeah. We don’t know,” I say. I spy Callie in the rearview mirror, dozing but not quite sleeping with her head against the cold backseat window, a faint reflection of her face glowing out into the night. “But, cheesy as it sounds . . . we can look in their eyes.”

  “Yeah. We can look in their eyes and know we’re the ones best equipped to see the difference between when they feel trapped and when they feel—when they look like they feel—rooted. In themselves and in the world.” Stan’s voice goes dreamy as he says, “I wonder what it’s like for everyone else.”

  I roll down the window.

  “Uh,” Stan says. “Everything okay?”

  I ignore Stan and shout, “Hey!” out the window to no one in particular.

  “What the hell are you doing, Lorna?”

  I turn back to him. “Finding out what it’s like for everyone else. Duh.” I turn back to the refreshing chill outside my window. “Hey! Someone roll down their window!”

  The kid driving the next car over, Indiana plates, rolls down his window. He has a sister in the backseat, her flower-petal cheeks shining with that glow from the absent moon.

  “You okay?” shouts the kid back at me.

  “We are, yeah!” I say. “Are you? Anything . . . seem weird to you about any of . . . this?” I sweep my arms out wide to gesture to the entire highway.

  “Well,” he shouts, “a couple of cops just pulled me over with my sister in the car and didn’t ask me what’s wrong with her that she can’t speak, and that’s never happened before. So there’s that. And, oh yeah, there was that whole thing about my sister building a professional-looking scale model of an island and telepathically demanding I take her on an elaborate road trip to a mystery location. So, yeah. It’s been weird.”

  “For us too!” I shout. “Back in New England, my friend’s brother fought a bear.”

  “Jesus,” says Stan.

  “A bear?” says the guy.

  “Yup, a bear,” I say.

  “No way,” the other driver says.

  I unbuckle myself and lean out the window.

  “Careful!” both Stan and our new friend shout at the same time, and Stan swerves the car a little. “Jesus
, Lorna!” he says.

  “I’m fine!” I say. “You just focus on driving.” I point to the claw marks on the hood of the car.

  “Holy shit,” the guy says. “What one guy can do another can do, huh?”

  I laugh, loud. I have got to tell you, it feels pretty amazing to laugh right now. Stan isn’t laughing. I guess he never watched The Edge on cable with his dad.

  “I’m Lorna,” I say, settling back in my seat.

  “I’m Jayson,” he says. “That’s Chantal in the back.”

  “That’s Callie, and that’s Ted, and Stan’s driving.”

  “Hey,” says Stan, waving, not taking his eyes off the road despite the fact that we haven’t broken thirty-five miles per hour in what feels like days. Traffic’s not at a standstill, but it isn’t exactly racing.

  “That’s Charlie in the Nissan just ahead,” says Jayson.

  “Oh yeah? Did he yell at you from the road too?”

  “Yup. Long time ago,” he says. “Look around. Do you think you’re the only ones who want to know if what’s happening is real?”

  “I guess it would be pretty crazy if we were,” I say.

  “Bingo,” says Jayson.

  Our lane starts to free up, and Stan looks to Jayson apologetically as he gestures to the open space ahead of us.

  “Go on!” says Jayson. “Looks like we’re all headed toward the same place anyway.”

  We wave to each other as Stan pulls ahead, and soon Jayson’s out of sight. A drawn-out silence fills the space between me and Stan.

  “I’m terrified, Stan,” I blurt, and then instantly feel so much re lief at giving voice to that feeling that I add, “but I’m also kind of excited too.” Because it’s true.