Iceling Read online

“The amount of activity is ridiculous for that area,” Mom adds. “It makes hardly any sense. We could almost explain it away as some kind of wandering pressure system, but that doesn’t really explain the seismic stuff, and we haven’t seen something like this in years, and I’ve never even seen it up close.”

  I start to tune out a bit, because I know for a fact that I’m not going to follow any of this, and they haven’t invited me yet, which means the chances that they will are growing slimmer by the second. No vacation for us, kid sister, I mouth to Callie, who has already finished her salad.

  “But anyway, sport,” says Dad, “here’s the thing.”

  Wait. Are they going on this trip together?

  “We’re going on this trip together,” Mom says.

  Because they never go on trips together. Because one of them always stays home with me and Callie. Those are the rules. I mean, Callie isn’t some freak or anything, but she’s special, and she has needs and thrives best in certain conditions, so when these trips happen one of them always stays home with us.

  “And we feel totally confident leaving you home with Callie for a few weeks.”

  Well.

  I pour us all a bit more wine, and they smile at each other and at me, and for some reason I’m feeling a little weird right now. I think about how we’ve watched movies together where the parents go out of town, and almost immediately the kids start running through the house drunk and naked, and then Mom says something like “What kind of idiots would leave their kids alone and expect something like this not to happen?”

  Maybe Callie’s the reason they’re so cool with this? Like I wouldn’t dare have a party at our house because doing so would be uncomfortable and scary for my sister? But honestly I kind of think they just haven’t even thought of it. Like maybe they’ve waited my whole life to do something like this together, and now, for the first time, they can, because I’m just barely grown up enough to take care of stuff. They’re talking about something else now, but I’m basically lost in these thoughts, and it takes me a minute to focus back on them.

  “Anyway, sport. We just want you to know. And you too, Callie!” Dad says, looking at Callie, then looking at Mom.

  “That this is just one of the many reasons why we know we can always count on you, always, no matter what,” Mom finishes.

  “For real and for always.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Thanks, guys,” I say. “And, I was just wondering . . .”

  “Yes?” says Dad.

  “Well,” I say, finishing my glass of wine, “I was just wondering, since I’m the world’s greatest big sister and all, when am I going to get my trophy, and my certificate, my cash reward . . .”

  Mom laughs, and Dad says, “Your certificate’s at the print shop, kid,” and Mom finishes his glass of wine.

  ON THE WAY home, Callie naps next to me, though it’s impossible to tell whether or not she’s actually sleeping.

  Dad looks back at us in the rearview and asks, “How’s Callie been?”

  “She’s been fine,” I tell him.

  He looks at me in the mirror and makes his face into the shape of a question, and that question is: Really? And it is real skeptical.

  I tell him that since the hospital she’s been fine, if not better than fine. I tell him that if I were worried, I’d let them know. It works okay, I guess. His face unfurls from its question, and we keep driving.

  But the more I think about it, it’s weird as hell that they’re going on this trip together. I keep thinking about this even though all I want, just for a minute, is to pretend it isn’t there, so I could just enjoy this happy family feeling a little bit more.

  And I’m tired. And maybe I had a little bit more wine than I should have. And then I hear something.

  “We just worry is all,” Dad says quietly.

  Mom is asleep in the front seat, or so it seems. Then, more to himself, I think, than to me, Dad says, “That day . . . that day, it . . . just. It just wasn’t what we were expecting to find out there. But mostly what I remember was the sky. My God. It was purple and yellow, and it smelled like lightning, but I couldn’t see any. Do you know what lightning smells like? Don’t. Don’t know that. And the clouds were so low and heavy and with a mind of their own, opening a hole in the sky to let the light in,” he says. He says this to whom, I don’t know.

  “How did you guys find the boat?” I ask.

  “The boat?” he says, as if just remembering that I’m in the car with him. “The boat. The boat was . . . just there. It was just there. In the middle of all this, there they all were.” He pauses. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to come out the other end of whatever they came out the other end of. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be . . . to not have the words . . . to not have any words to put to your experiences.”

  Then he tells me—or himself, I still can’t tell—“You’re a good sister, Lorna. You’ve got a good heart even if you like to keep it under wraps sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but just be careful.”

  He tells me, “I love you, sport.”

  And then we’re home.

  FIVE

  I MAKE PLANS to see Dave tonight, this time at his house so I don’t have to do the same old dancing-around-my-parents thing that both of us hate.

  Can’t wait to see you, he texts, and I tell him, same, with the hearts-for-eyes emoji.

  I got the sense at dinner tonight that we were all scared that Callie was going to have another fit while we were out. They’ve been ramping up, getting more intense and unusual ever since that night Dave was over and we had to go to the hospital. Also, it wouldn’t have been the first time she would have had a fit while we were out to dinner. But it didn’t happen, and there was a feeling of relaxation during the whole car ride home, and it wasn’t just that we all had something to drink at dinner, I don’t think.

  But then as soon as we got back, Callie ran to the garden and stuck her hands in the dirt and wouldn’t budge until two in the morning. I sat there with her, rubbing her back, until I started dozing off a little. And then I dozed off a lot. I fell asleep basically on top of her, my arms draped over her back, and she woke me up, gently poking me in the cheek with her dirty fingers, staring at me with something like worry. When I opened my eyes, she closed hers like she was asleep too. “Bedtime, kid sister,” I said. She smiled, as if she understood me, as if she’d only just had the idea to go to sleep now, as opposed to at nine thirty when we first got home and instead of running upstairs she ran to the garden to tend to the dirt in the ground.

  I go back to my contacts list and open a new text window. hey, I text Stan. how’s yr arctic brother? Having never texted Stan before, or ever even talked to him before the hospital the other night, maybe it’s weird to just ask him about his brother, right out of the blue. But Callie has been acting stranger and stranger, even for Callie. Even before the hospital and definitely a lot more since that night, she’s been running outside to the driveway and getting into my car. She’ll just sit there in the passenger seat, looking as though she’s waiting for me to get in and take her somewhere. Which, okay, fine—she does odd stuff sometimes, but usually when she gets back from the hospital after a bad fit, she’s great! Things go back to “normal” for a while. But this time, it seems like she’s getting, for lack of a better word, worse. And if I tell Mom and Dad, they’ll just want to take her back to Jane, and since that just seemed to make her worse, or at least not make her better, this time . . . Anyway, I’m starting to wonder if maybe Stan’s brother might be getting stranger too. And if he is, well . . . then what does that even mean? And who else can I talk to about this? Stan is literally the only person I know who would have any idea what this is like.

  My phone buzzes almost immediately after I press send, and for a second I think Stan must be a weirdo who just stares at his phone all day, but then
I see it’s not from him, but Dave. Let me know what you want me to get for dinner, and then the pizza, donut, bento box, and question mark emojis. all of the above pls, I text, and Dave says, On it.

  I switch back to Stan’s window and put my phone facedown on my desk and wait. I don’t know why I feel anxious, but I do. I can’t stop thinking about the night at the hospital and how it was weird in a way I can’t put my finger on. I decide to stop thinking about that and instead think some more about Dave and about why I don’t want him to meet my parents, because it can’t just be that they’ll like him, right? Spite can’t be, like, the only thing going on here, I think to myself hopefully.

  And then the phone buzzes, and this time it’s from Stan. Hi Lorna. Um. Ted’s OK? Things are OK?

  oh, cool. glad to hear it. callie’s fine too, I type.

  And then some time passes, and I stare at my phone, because apparently texting with Stan is roughly as awkward as trying to talk to Stan while seeing if he’ll look you in the eye. Or, it’s not that it’s awkward, it’s just that I just get the feeling that Stan has even more of a guard up than I do. And from what he was telling me about his dad having him wrestle with his brother to calm him down, and basically being a kind of a human tackle dummy, maybe there’s good reason for a boy with a brother like that to not talk so openly about things. And I was kind of freaked out by all that stuff, honestly. It seemed pretty weird to me. But then I looked over the rules again. I’d be embarrassed to say how often I do that, but I do. Anyway, there is this bit in there that basically says that our Icelings are special and that we should learn to understand their specialness. It wasn’t clear if that was a suggestion for the parents or for us, the siblings, or for the person who was writing it. The emphasis on the need to understand the individual specialness of each Iceling . . . it got me thinking about how I really just have no idea what Callie’s been through. Let alone what Stan or Ted have been through. And about that whole nature versus nurture thing. About whether it’s our biological imperatives or our home lives that shape us. But why is that even up for debate? Of course it’s both. Why can’t we just say it’s both?

  Anyway, maybe the wrestling has to do with what Ted’s individual specialness is. Ted’s loud. For someone who has no access to language, of course. And Callie—Callie’s quiet. And anyway, the rest of that section in the guidebook is about establishing a baseline for behavior. Like: Understand the individual specialness of each Iceling, so that if they start getting weird, you’ll know whether it’s just “their way” or if it’s the kind of thing to notify an authority figure about. This was something that no one ever really went over with me. Also, the guidebook doesn’t call them “Icelings.” I do. I’m the only one who calls them that. And anyway, look. Over there. My phone. It buzzes.

  Actually is it weird if we talk some time?

  I call him, right here and now, because that seems easier than waiting to see what happens next.

  “Lorna,” he says.

  “Stan,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “Well.”

  “Stan,” I tell him. “Look. I know we don’t know each other that well, or really at all, but it’s just that I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this. You know? Not that your ‘this’ is the same as my ‘this,’ or that I get what you’re going through, or that you get what I’m going through. But we both have these siblings we can’t talk to, but then we also can’t really even talk about them with anyone else. You know? I just feel like if I were to talk to my friends about Callie, like, really talk to them about it, they’d just stare at me and assume she was a total freak. But then if I talk to my parents about it, or Jane, then I feel like there’d be . . . consequences. To that.” I pause, but in such a way where Stan knows that there’s still more I have to say. “I feel like you’re the only person I can talk to about Callie,” I continue, “and that maybe I’m the only person you can talk to about Ted, and nothing bad’ll happen because of it.”

  Unless the government’s listening. HA HA HA, I think but don’t say.

  Then it’s quiet for almost a minute, which I know because I check my phone to see if he’s still there.

  “Hi, sorry,” he says at second fifty-three. “It’s just . . . ugh, man. Yeah.”

  And then it’s quiet again.

  I’m about to just plow through with my own plan and start talking about Callie when he starts talking again.

  “So my mom left a couple of years ago. We were on a trip, me and Dad and Ted, and when we came back she was gone. So that sucked. But I got pretty okay at cooking. Which is nice? Ted is just . . . he’s aggressive as hell. He walks around the house like . . . well, not like he wants to fight. But like he’s convinced that, at any moment, someone’s going to want to fight him. Does that make sense?”

  “Kind of?” I say, but then I think that yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense.

  “So, like, hands in his pockets, but really shoved in there. And his eyes aren’t exactly . . . furtive, but I can see them trying to take in the whole room, all at once. He doesn’t like to be touched or anything. I think ‘bristles’ is the word you could use for what he does when anyone tries to touch him. Yeah, ‘bristles at contact.’ That’s definitely something I read in some file of his somewhere. And. Um. What are . . . Callie’s? Fits like?”

  “They’re . . . well . . . I guess it depends. The one that I took her to the hospital for the last time I saw you was weird. A lot of the time, she’ll just start making fists, really tight ones, with her fingers digging into her palms. And then she’ll hit her thighs while kicking at the air or whatever is around, and sometimes she falls down, and her mouth is open. I used to think it was her version of a scream, but without any sound. But now it’s more like . . . I think it’s like she’s trying to get something out. Or something’s trying to get out of her, but I don’t know which. And I don’t know what, and I don’t know why. A few weeks ago, she was out gardening, and I found her out there with her hands in the ground, just trying to dig herself a hole. But her eyes were almost rolling up in her head, and her mouth was shut, like she was trying to keep it that way, or like something had tripped a trap.”

  “Tripped a trap?” Stan says.

  “Yeah, like a bear trap or something. Like something came along—whether it should or shouldn’t have, I don’t know—and her mouth was a trap, and she had to snap it shut and keep it that way so whatever came along couldn’t get out. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway. But then the other day, I was up in my room and I heard this noise from downstairs, so I go downstairs, and there’s Callie, my sister, on the ground, her eyes wide open, her legs curled up into her chest while her arms flail at the air, like she’s digging her way through the air. And she was making sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before. And then suddenly she was up on her feet and just . . . shaking. Like she was being shaken. And I almost feel like if that last part hadn’t happened, where she stood up, I might not have been able to get her in the car to the hospital.”

  “Seems scary.”

  “It was. I’d never seen her like that before.”

  After a pause Stan says, “Ted runs into things. We’ve got punching bags in basically every room at this point. Dad’s tried to get him to run at them on purpose, and it sometimes works. The only thing that actually helps is if I can get him in a nelson. You know, with my arms coming up under his shoulders from behind, and I grab around the back of his neck, and then I try to . . . sit on him, more or less. Immobilizing him seems to help—calm him down, I mean. Not just get him to stop moving. But it always has to be me that does it, I think, for it to work. Dad used to try, and he could never calm him. Mom tried once, and he thrashed so hard he broke her nose. His arms sort of thrash around, and he just finds something to run into. His jaw goes all slack when he does i
t. Like he’s hypnotized. And I don’t know if he’d stop if I didn’t stop him. I came home once to Mom sitting at the top of the stairs, watching him. ‘It’s been four hours,’ she said. Then she said it again. Then she stood up. Then I had to wrestle him to the ground, and Dad came home and took us to the hospital.

  “Ted,” Stan said, sighing, “isn’t the easiest little brother in the whole world.”

  “Our Icelings seem pretty different,” I say stupidly.

  “Icelings?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. So that’s a word I made up. Like a portmanteau of ‘ice’ and ‘sibling.’ It just . . . seemed better than calling my sister a capital-O Orphan, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Then a pause. “It’s still not very . . . humanizing, though, is it?”

  “No,” I admit. “It isn’t.”

  “That’s probably right,” he says quietly.

  And something in me sings out, because this is it. This is the thought I have but that I ignore all the time, because I don’t ever know what to do with it. And because I don’t know that I’ll ever be okay speaking that thought aloud, I just say this: “Not that they’re not human! Just that . . . I mean, something must have happened, right? And we can never understand it or know it, because we don’t know what it’s like to think or do anything without language to do it with. We have parents we know are ours, who’ve been talking to us since before we were born. And we go to school, and most of the time we learn things, and when people talk to us we have some idea of what to do or say in response. And for the most part, we know what’s expected of us.” I stop for a second, making sure he’s still there and that it’s safe to go on. “And they don’t. Not at all. They don’t, and we have to see that every day. And they have to see whatever they’re seeing every day. And know that all we can do is try to be, like, mediators between them and the world. But nobody can be careful enough to do this job right.”

  “Yup. Pretty much Suck City.”