Iceling Read online

  I know Callie knows me, and she maybe even loves me. But I’m not someone she can share this with. She’s my sister, but I still don’t know her. I’ll maybe never really know her. And she’ll never really know me. But I have to swallow all this down, because all I want to do is cherish this, to be glad for her, so I banish the shame and the sadness and the portion of the happiness that led to this whole mess, and I turn all the energy I have toward trying to be a good sister.

  “Wow,” Stan says, as if coming up for air from his own personal emotional storm. “Callie’s island is . . .”

  “Decidedly un-ham-fisted?” I finish for him.

  “I was gonna say ‘deft,’ but sure, that works.”

  Ted has set his island on the floor next to Callie’s, and the two of them kneel in front of their creations. Stan and I take a few steps toward them. Dave and Mimi hang back by the door, and I’m grateful to them for knowing that this is a time to give us some space. Mark’s long gone and I don’t much blame him, and so I just text him thank you thank you thank you.

  We stand there, Stan and I, watching our siblings moving their hands over these mountains and plateaus. Their hands tremble in time with and over their trembling fields, the bit that seems to shake and bloom so gracefully on Callie’s island, kind of violently on Ted’s. Their hands move closer together, until they’re almost touching but not quite, and I look down again and stare at the small mountain ranges, the long expanses broken up by cracks and tears in the sticks and grass, by shallow dips that look like riverbeds long dry and frosted over. There’s a ridge ringing a field and around it what could be a stretch of trees with low branches. I look over at Ted’s, and there’s the same ridge ringing this shuddering expanse. His is this thin, thin, thin layer of paper that seems to shudder and shake with every molecule of air that moves around it, while Callie’s is almost . . . dancing, and I can’t figure out how. Ted’s trees are actually Popsicle sticks and pens and pencils stuck in hard with some paper on top like a canopy, whereas Callie’s are also sticks, but the canopy is woven, and some of the sticks are split up and splintering off into branches. But still. It’s the same place. And that trembling expanse, with small flowers almost poking through on Callie’s . . .

  Oh my God. Dad’s story.

  They’re building their home.

  They’re building their memory of home.

  “Stan,” I whisper without knowing why. “Everyone. Can you help us get these guys back in the house? I think I might know what’s going on. Or at least part of what’s going on. And Stan and I have some stuff to talk about.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Dave asks. I can tell he’s wary of Stan, and I don’t have time for his wariness right now, because my sister has just built a smart-car-sized memory of the place where she was born out of grass and sticks, and Stan’s brother did the same thing but with paper and spit as well as sticks, and Dave, the major thing you have going for you is that you’re so understanding, so how are you not getting that this is all that matters to me right now?

  But I don’t say that. What I do say is “The fact that our Arctic-born siblings just made these models, simultaneously, despite being totally isolated from each other.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he says, but not without giving Stan one more warning look, and then everyone helps shepherd our siblings and their sculptures back into the house.

  Dave, Stan, and I sit in the kitchen, while Mimi flits around trying to find some food for Ted and Callie. Ted and Callie are sitting down and basically just staring at each other, raising their hands one at a time, like they’re trying to figure out a math problem using sign language.

  “Okay, Stan,” I say. “What do we do?”

  “What do you mean?” says Stan.

  “Uh,” I say and gesture first toward the greenhouse and then at Ted and Callie. “You know, the whole ‘Our Icelings built, at the same moment, in two different places, incredibly intricate replicas out of whatever materials were handy of what is almost definitely an Arctic island, which strangely seems to replicate what little we know about the one where they were abandoned’ thing? That’s more or less what I’m referring to when I ask you what we should do next.”

  “Are you asking whether or not we should report it to Jane?” Stan asks.

  “Well,” I say. “Does a situation like this really warrant reporting?”

  “Good point. They don’t appear to be in distress,” Stan says.

  “They’re not showing any symptoms normally associated with fits or . . .”

  “Conniptions?” Across the counter, Dave says the word he knows I refuse to say, and he winks at me, and it’s cute, but I get these shuddering chills anyway.

  “Nope,” says Stan, “I definitely don’t see any fits coming on. Their eyes aren’t rolling up into their heads.”

  “No arms or other limbs flailing about,” I say.

  “They’re being supervised by those responsible for them.”

  “I think we’ve exhausted the list of report-worthy criteria and can conclude that this isn’t anything we need to bother Jane with.”

  “Unless there’s some ‘Weird, Spontaneous Art Projects and the Dangers They Pose to Your Orphan’ pamphlet that I missed, I’d say we were in the clear,” Stan says.

  “I have seen no such pamphlet, and as such I definitely agree,” I say.

  “So then what?” Dave says, leaning on the counter between us now. I turn to him and give him a look that’s more accusatory than I meant. “What? Don’t give me that look. I care about Callie. And I obviously care about you, and you care about Callie more than anyone. And what happened—what’s happening—tonight is crazy and basically unprecedented. In that it’s unprecedented. So what are you all going to do about it?”

  “Dave’s right,” I say. “All of this is too weird to be just a coincidence.”

  “I agree,” says Stan, and the way he says the words makes them feel heavy as hell.

  “And can we also agree that these . . . structures are probably totally definitely replicas of an Arctic island?”

  Stan pauses, looks to Dave and then to me. “I believe I think we can,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well, I’m really curious about what any of this means. And I want to try to figure this out.”

  “Me too,” says Stan. But then Dave says it too, just a nanosecond after Stan started speaking, so they’re almost exactly in unison, like two cheesy actors in a bad sitcom. Mimi loses it immediately, falling to the floor laughing again, and I only hold a straight face for about ten seconds, and then everyone’s laughing, and it’s almost enough to make me ignore the strange shuddering feeling seeping into my bones.

  NINE

  STAN AND I sit at the dining table trying to figure out what to do, while Dave walks around picking up cups and putting them into a giant trash bag he’s hung from his neck.

  “Reporting this is out.”

  “Turning them in is out.”

  “Cutting open their brains in the name of science?”

  “ . . .”

  “Cutting open their brains in the name of science is definitely out.”

  Dave takes a break from cleaning to see how we’re doing. I give him a kiss and squeeze his hand, but my heart is only barely in those gestures.

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” Stan says.

  “Maybe,” I say, though when I turn to look at Callie and see her worrying—practically praying—over her island on the kitchen floor, I remain completely unconvinced of Stan’s theory.

  “Maybe,” Stan says, “when you’re an Iceling, this kind of behavior is totally normal. Maybe building sculptures of islands is the Iceling equivalent of playing hearts or watching YouTube videos.”

  “What if it’s not, though?” I say.

  Stan looks stumped, and I let out a big sigh. Suddenly, Callie raises her hand like
she has a question.

  “Callie?” I say uselessly. “You okay?” But she just continues to raise her hand as she stares at mine.

  “I think she wants you to raise your hand,” says Stan, one eye open, resting them in shifts.

  I raise my hand, and Callie’s eyes sort of light up a bit, and then she stands up and comes toward me and grabs it, takes hold of it. She leads me over to her sculpture and places my hand on the trembling field.

  My hand is there, over the trembling, dancing field. My hand is trembling too, and now Callie’s hand is holding mine, and hers is trembling too. And right now it feels like the whole world is trembling.

  I look up to see that Ted has, meanwhile, done the same thing with Stan: raised his hand, then took Stan’s and led him over to us. Stan and I crouch across from one another, our siblings pressing our hands down against these buzzing fields, as if asking us to read them like braille.

  Suddenly and simultaneously, they pull our hands back from the fields, then bring them back down again. They keep doing this, holding our hands down to the fields, pulling them back, bringing them down again, over and over, as if they’re trying to make us point at the sculptures and then at them. It’s three or four in the morning at this point, and I know something is happening, but per usual with my kid sister, I have no idea what, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more frustrated about the language barrier. Their eyes are getting worried, and Stan and I are getting worried too, and the more worried we get and the longer the night draws out, the less sure we are about what we’re supposed to do.

  And then they’re gone.

  They run out of the house, leaving the front door gaping open, and we follow. We run to the edge of the driveway and look up and down the street, but we don’t see them. I spin around in a panic, and there they are, sitting in the backseat of Stan’s car.

  “Road trip?” says Stan.

  “So it seems,” I say.

  CALLIE AND TED are still in the car, and I’m in the kitchen, putting on a pot of coffee and telling Dave that Stan and I have to take the Icelings somewhere. I tell him I’m sorry and that I don’t know what else to do, but that I have no reason to think we’ll be gone for a very long time.

  “I get it,” Dave says. “But don’t you think you at least need to tell your parents? They’ll be worried. Or, like, leave a note? You know, Dear Mom and Dad, Callie made a weird sculpture, so we drove to the Arctic. Back in a few days! Or something like that.”

  “No way,” says Stan.

  I glare at Stan, because he’s snapping at Dave, and Dave is only trying to help.

  “We can’t tell them, really,” I say sweetly. “All they’d do is freak out and call the hospital and then come home and then their trip would be ruined, and Callie and Ted’s trip would be ruined too. And if the hospital finds out . . . I don’t know what they’ll do. They might take her away, I don’t know. I know you know I need to do this. She’s my sister, Dave. She’s my family. And she needs me. I need to figure this out. For Callie, but also for myself.”

  “Well,” Dave says, grinning a little bit, “who am I to get in the way of you finally figuring out what’ll make your sister happy?”

  “No super-heroic guy I’d ever hang around with, that’s for sure.”

  And then he takes me in his arms and kisses me, and I just want to collapse in them, right here, right now. And I do. But then the coffeemaker makes that spitting noise that sounds like Dad in the morning when he has a cold, which means our caffeine is ready and it’s time to go. I kiss him one more time, then tear myself away. Stan and Dave find and fill some travel mugs, while I go grab a phone charger, three changes of underwear, and some other essentials and throw them in my purse, the big one, because we don’t know exactly how long we’ll be gone or even where, exactly, we’re going. But because we suspect the far north, I also grab both my and Callie’s warmest winter jackets and two of Dad’s for Stan and Ted, and I throw them in the biggest duffel bag I can find, along with a bunch of random hats, scarves, and gloves. I feel like I’m forgetting something but I don’t have the time to worry.

  We head out to the driveway. Stan packs the trunk and gets in the car, leaving me and Dave alone to say goodbye. Dave pulls me in for another hug and then he tells me he loves me. I say, “I know,” and I make my eyes as serious and as sad as I can, and then we kiss, and all of this makes my heart feel so heavy. I join Stan in the car and buckle up, making sure Callie and Ted are strapped in as well, and I blow Dave a kiss. He smiles and puts his palm against the glass, and I match it with mine.

  THE SUN IS up. We’re on the road. We’re drinking coffee. The radio is spitting out a song that I hated when I first heard it at the beginning of the summer but that has grown on me in the strangest, rarest way. Stan’s turning onto the freeway, headed away from where our homes are.

  I allow us about an hour of pure, destination-less driving before I ask the big burning question of the day. “Any idea where we’re going?”

  “Nope,” says Stan.

  I nod, mostly because if I really think about it, this whole trip was mostly my call, but what I really want to do is press him on this. I really, really want to say something like Well, let’s make a plan then! But Stan beats me to it.

  “Probably we should have wondered about that sooner? Like before we left?”

  I let out a weak snorting laugh, then find I have nothing else to say.

  “But,” Stan goes on, “I figure if all this noise is about the Arctic, then we can just take 476 up through New York as far as those two let us. And we just keep going, maybe into Canada? That’s cold, and north. The Hudson Bay, maybe. I don’t know.” And then he kind of sighs, and under his breath I think I hear him say, “Shit,” and this is my cue to start dealing with other people’s feelings again.

  “No, that’s good! It’s something! That’s more or less what I was thinking, but I never take 476, and that’s totally a better route. Less traffic. We do that, what you said. That’s what we’ll do. West-ish and north. It’s a plan!” But then a few minutes pass, and while I’m looking back at Callie gazing sweetly through the window, it occurs to me that Canada is a whole other country entirely, isn’t it? Quietly, I say, “Uh, don’t we need passports for Canada? Or if we don’t, won’t we at least maybe have to deal with Customs? When we cross the border?”

  “Oh. Damn,” says Stan. This is rapidly turning out to not be the easy road trip romp I maybe imagined it would be earlier. “You’re right.”

  The car slows down, and we grind over the rumble strip as Stan pulls over. I hear Callie fuss in the backseat, so I reach back and put my hand on her knee in a pathetic attempt to calm someone who doesn’t necessarily even understand that when someone puts their hand on your knee, it means they are trying to comfort you, and it’s polite to pretend that it’s working.

  Stan pulls out his phone. He starts zooming in and out on the route he mapped out. “I don’t want to deal with New York City, so . . . how about we just get on 80, and then take that to 84 and go through New England? They’ve gotta give us some kind of clues once we start making our way up there, right? And if they don’t, then, well . . . maybe this road trip isn’t what they want after all, and no harm done?”

  I smile and nod at that, though my stomach sort of falls into this sad, anxious somersault when Stan suggests that maybe this isn’t what they want from us after all. I don’t really know why—it’s not like I want to drive up into some forbidding, freezing, unknown territory with two non-lingual kids and a guy who is basically half a conversation away from being a stranger. But I still can’t shake the feeling that turning around after coming this far—even just an hour away from home—would be equivalent to giving up entirely. It would be my hard and fast proof that Callie and I were never meant to understand each other.

  “We can keep checking the map as we go to see if we’re near any islands that
seem like they’d be anything like their sculptures. And if we end up near the border then . . . I guess we’ll figure the rest out from there. Right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Hooray for plans,” says Stan.

  Hooray for plans, I think. There’s movement in the backseat as we pull back onto the highway, and I turn to see my hand is still on Callie’s knee. I remove it, sensing for no good reason at all that she doesn’t want it there anymore.

  THE HIGHWAY IS about to split. We have to make a choice.

  I’m about to ask Stan which way he thinks we should go when suddenly Ted reaches up from the backseat, lurching his big arms forward. He grabs the wheel and tugs it toward 276 EAST, which will eventually head to 295 and north, bringing us onto the on-ramp headed way up there, to the vast unknown or whatever comes closest to that. Stan looks at me, and I look at Stan, and our eyes sort of shrug, and on we go.

  And for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m doing something for Callie. Really doing something, not just spotting her while she negotiates the space around her, or trying to help her in the garden but really probably just getting in the way, but actually helping her find something. Something real and important and that’s for once a part of her world, not mine. I can do something, right now, for my sister, for once in my life. I catch her eyes in the rearview mirror, and she’s looking right at me, and she’s smiling.

  TEN

  IT’S PAST NOON. We’ve been driving north since we left my house at dawn. The last sign I remember paying attention to was for an exit toward Providence. After he got us on 95, Ted stopped reaching forward as much, so we’ve decided just to stick with it. The fact that we ended up going through New York City wasn’t exactly thrilling to Stan. And I’m not exactly thrilled—though not exactly not thrilled—about the fact that when we match Ted’s route with the moving maps on our phones, it seems to suggest that we’re headed up to Nova Scotia.