Iceling Page 7

  But all I notice now is that I’m hungry. I mean, I’m that kind of hungry where thinking about anything other than the fact that I’m hungry is nearly impossible. Probably we’re all hungry. There is no way I am alone in this. And come on. Of course I packed snacks. But we already ate them.

  “Stan,” I say, pointing with a trembling finger at a sleek, chrome roadside diner. “Look. Oh man, look what’s coming up ahead.”

  “Are you hungry?” says Stan.

  I nod vigorously, because I don’t even have the energy to say, “Duh.”

  “I guess I could eat,” he says, and then everyone applauds. Even the radio.

  THE BEST THING about roadside diners is that they have got those large and deep booths, the kind you can hide in with your siblings who don’t respond to language and who aren’t always great at responding to new and outside stimuli. Plus, their menus usually have a lot of pictures you can just sort of point at, which is great when, again, you’re traveling with two people over whom language just washes like rain on a raincoat covered in grease.

  Did I mention how hungry I am? Or that there are complimentary rolls on the table, brought to us by some kind of goddess named Betty, who smiled and said she would keep them coming? Betty the goddess takes our order, and we don’t even wait until her back is turned to pounce on the rolls and tear into them. It’s not at all pretty, it’s kind of an animals-at-the-watering-hole type of scene, but I couldn’t care less about table manners right now, because these rolls are maybe the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.

  We order chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks and French fries and cheeseburgers and grilled cheeses and a few very large salads, because Callie doesn’t go as crazy over greasy diner food as the rest of us do. After downing a few rolls each, the clouds part, and the lights shine down from heaven or the ceiling, because the food has come, and we eat.

  We approach our main courses the way we approached the rolls, which is to say hungrily, and with vigor. I only slow down once I feel my hunger has been about 40 percent satiated, at which point I take a break to sip some water and look around the diner. It’s about three-quarters full. Whenever I’m with Callie, I’m always watching out for people sending dirty, confused looks our way, but the patrons here don’t seem to be all that fazed by our unusual siblings. Most of the families look like they’re on trips, which I surmise based on the way the parents seem really good at tuning out whatever frequency their kids' voices seem to exist on.

  There are a few couples, young and not so young, leaning across the table in various poses of affection or malice. There’s a group of what I assume to be long-haul truckers lined up at the bar, drinking coffee, with their pants hanging off various points of butt or no butt, their guts or no-guts hanging a bit over their belts, their T-shirts hiding what they can, but—let’s face it—a T-shirt only has so much to work with. They all have mesh-back ball caps. One of them has what looks like a map tattooed all over his forearm.

  Satisfied that no one’s out to get us or even gawk at us, I turn back to my food and go in for another round. When we’re all finished, Betty, the manifestation of grace on earth, clears it all away, like a battlefield medic.

  Stan leans back in the booth, clearly full and satisfied. He looks at Ted and Callie and then back to me.

  “Did you notice how they, like, touch the ground when we get out of the car?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Weird.”

  “Yeah. They like grass better than asphalt, it seems.”

  “That thing with them and soil.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s definitely weird. But honestly that’s not even close to what I’m thinking about. I mean, I’m kind of excited,” I say. “About this ‘journey of discovery’ or whatever it is.”

  “Why the air quotes on ‘journey of discovery’?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Um. I was being ironic, I guess? I don’t know why I felt weird calling it that.”

  “Oh,” he says. “So you were being ‘insincere’?” He puts his hands up and curls his fingers in scare quotes when he says “insincere.”

  “No! I just . . .”

  “Because,” says Stan, “it’s not like I’m comfortable calling this a ‘journey of discovery’ or whatever. But probably that’s what it is, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s probably what this is. And it’s really weird to think about! I mean, I never really thought I’d see where they came from. You know? And not just with Callie, in the context of a journey of discovery, but in general. I still don’t fully believe it. That we could—that we could—learn so much about Callie, about Ted, about these people we spent our whole lives growing up with, our siblings . . .

  “So I guess it’s more that I’m being . . . cautious. Trying not to jinx it. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s going to give us a map to their past, full of explanations and a backstory and a whole pile of solutions to the questions our perpetually mute siblings inspire. But I just . . . I guess I just resigned myself to the fact that I’d never get to share anything with Callie. Especially not something that mattered.”

  Stan’s looking at me like I have one too many heads, so I take a pause to sigh and figure out what it is I’m trying to say. “I guess I don’t really know how to put this. But it’s like . . . this is the first chance I’ve had that I can think of where I can do something for her that won’t just help her, you know, with day-to-day things. It’ll be something I can do for her and also with her, that will be a shared experience. It’s not like I’m helping her get around on the first day of school back when we were kids, or showing her how to be around people, or sitting with her in the garden. Whatever this is, we’re going through it together, as sisters. I’ve never had anything like that. With her or anyone else. I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I could share something meaningful with her, or that some kind of miracle might happen that would just turn everything around. Like . . . maybe one day Callie just starts speaking. And we stay up all night and share everything forever. And it turns out I’ve mostly done right by her. Sure, not all the time. She’ll tell me that there’s some stuff I should really work on. But she knows my heart was in the right place. But I never thought any of those wishes would come true. Or that I’d actually get to do something for her that was real. And this is real. This isn’t a story I tell myself to feel better about things, it’s an actual thing that’s happening.

  “And, well,” I go on, because all of this is hitting me just now, hours after Callie and Ted made their islands and we set out on this crazy journey, “I’ve wondered a lot about what things would be like if Callie hadn’t . . . been around. If I didn’t spend my days thinking about how she might view the world, trying to think of ways to make it easier on her. I hated having those thoughts. Having those thoughts made me hate myself. I don’t know what happens next, but I know something happens next, and whatever it is, I just hope it means that I don’t ever have those thoughts again. I don’t know what I’m saying or even fully what I mean. It’s just . . . this feels like something new. Like something is happening. Does that make any sense?”

  “No, no, I get it,” Stan says, and I immediately feel calmer. “It’s really hard to deal with Ted sometimes. You know? I need to watch out for him pretty much all the time. I need to watch out for authority figures who might not realize that it’s not that Ted’s a problem, it’s that someone abandoned him in the Arctic when he was a baby, and so he doesn’t understand language and is maybe in a constant state of shock or something, but we have no way of knowing because, once again, he cannot speak. And when he gets confused he gets upset, and when he gets upset he gets tackle-y. And then I need to watch out for everyone else.”

  He looks away a bit, and I follow his gaze to Ted, who fidgets and then looks around. Stan looks back at Ted again, sort of nods downward, and then points to the bathrooms, and Ted gives him a kind of “hello” sign, the
n heads back to the men’s room. I wink at Callie, because it’s not until now that I realize how lucky I am to have the sibling with the big bladder—we had to pull over at least a dozen times on the way here so Ted could go relieve himself.

  “Callie’s got a big bladder,” I tell Stan. “Not like Ted over there. Right, kid sister?” She’s shredding up her paper place mat and arranging the scraps into something beautiful and unnamable.

  Stan, though, isn’t listening to me. He’s still watching Ted and looking an awful lot like he has something to say but isn’t sure if he should say it. And then he goes for it.

  “He’s never, like, hurt anyone,” says Stan, still looking toward the bathrooms, even after we both watch Ted get in safely. “Or done anything really out of the ordinary. Out of the ordinary for Ted, I mean. You know?”

  I do, and I think about that rule from earlier, about determining the baseline of behavior for each individual Iceling.

  Stan goes on. “The most alarming thing he’s ever done—that has ever made me think he wants or needs something really urgently—has been, like, running into walls. So building this thing and figuring out a way to tell us to take them somewhere . . . I know it’s awful of me, but I keep thinking maybe this means there’s something out there he can do. You know, some purpose he can serve, some way for him to be independent. And maybe then that means . . . for a time . . . or for once, or just . . .” And he kinds of trails off a bit and looks out the window.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes,” he says, still looking out the window, “I think about how, if Ted weren’t Ted, I could maybe have my own life that didn’t revolve around just keeping my crazy brother from getting tackle-y all over the place all the time. And I could maybe have friends, who I could actually spend time with, or invite someone over—not just to my house but anywhere, ever, and not worry about Ted, or my dad, or my dad’s reactions to Ted. I mean, this is good, talking to you. But you only know me through Ted and Callie.”

  “Stan—”

  “It’s fine. Or it’s not fine, but it’s whatever. It’s awful and it’s selfish, and maybe I’m awful and selfish. But I can tell Callie isn’t a burden to you, Lorna.” And I look over at Callie, at my sister, and I don’t know what to tell him. Because I know what he means, but I also don’t. “She’s not like Ted,” Stan goes on. “I mean, I don’t mean that he’s a burden. But, like, for instance, you have a boyfriend. You have friends, you have people over, you have parties where you don’t worry about your sibling tackling someone because the music is weird and not what he thought it would be. Or, I mean. I don’t even know if that’s what he’d do. Or if that is what he would do, I wouldn’t know why he’d do it. I don’t really know why Ted does the things he does when he does them.” And I can tell how much this kills him when he says it.

  Stan leans in, kind of looks down at the table or his hands in front of him, and his voice gets quieter. “His whole life. His whole life, and Callie’s whole life, they’ve just . . . they’ve been trapped, basically. Right? Those researchers found them, and then the government just stuck them in homes, just decided on the families they’d grow up with. And the whole time they’re just stuck in their own heads, totally unable to talk to us about what it’s like for them. And then we just stick them in hospitals when things get too weird for us! And in the hospital Jane just sticks them in closed-off spaces and guarded areas where they can only leave when someone else decides, and they have to be there alone without the people who they know and maybe trust.” Stan leans back in the booth, looking exhausted. “Wow. I guess the short version of all that is that I agree with everything you said. And I guess my feelings about this are more complicated than I thought. Which is I guess what happens when you don’t spend a lot of time thinking or talking about them much.”

  I want to hug him. Because yes to that whole last bit, and that whole other bit too. But still, when he was talking, I’m sure I made some kind of sour face at him, because I could feel myself judging him for thinking those things. For feeling like his brother was a burden. He’s right that I would never think of Callie like that. Except that I do, a little. And she isn’t even anything at all like Ted.

  So “Yeah” is all I say to Stan. “Yes.”

  “We’re supposed to be doing this, right? We can do this much for them. Who else is going to? Our parents?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Their caseworkers?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “The government?”

  “One hundred percent no.”

  And then, of course, my phone rings.

  POP [snow-capped mountain emoji]

  “Sorry,” I say to Stan. “I have to get this.”

  He puts up his hands in an “Of course, no problem!” gesture, and I turn away, into the booth and toward the window, and focus on a tree in the distance. I take a deep breath.

  “Hey, Pop!” I say. It’s important, when misleading your parents, to appear cheerful yet vaguely callous.

  “Hello, daughter of mine! We have landed! How goes the sister-watching?”

  “Swell,” I tell him. “So far no fits.” Totally true. “She’s had a lot of garden time.” Counting the way she’s been crouching down and examining the ground at rest stops, that’s maybe not a total lie. “Overall, things are good here!” They are, mostly.

  “Well, okay then. Glad to hear it. We just wanted to check in and let you know we’re here safe,” says Dad.

  “How’s Mom? How’re the Galápagos?”

  “Hot,” says Dad, and I can hear him smiling at himself. “And the weather is pretty warm too.” There it is.

  “Ugh, yikes,” I say, pretending to be grossed out by the affection my parents have for each other.

  “In all seriousness, your mother’s doing well, and the islands are beautiful, except I’m mostly staring at the ground and at readouts. So it’s great, for me. And it’s too hot for a suit, so, again, having a great time!”

  “Good!”

  “Uh-oh, sport, it looks like I need to go check on something. Your mother sends her love! Can I say hey to Callie?”

  “Sure,” I say, immeasurably relieved. I only barely had to lie.

  I pass her the phone, which she doesn’t take—never has—so I just hold it there up to her ear and give Stan the “shh” sign with my finger to my lips to let him know he still needs to keep quiet. I hear Dad’s goofy voice through the speaker and watch Callie’s eyelids flutter—in response to Dad, I tell myself slash need to believe. Dad’s voice hums on for a few minutes, then cuts off. I wait about thirty seconds for Callie to offer some kind of response, knowing she won’t, and then take the phone from her ear. The home screen is up, meaning either Callie hung up on Dad or vice versa, but I’m happy either way not to answer any more of his questions.

  I put my phone away and sink back into the booth with a sigh of relief—but this feeling lasts for about two seconds, because then I hear what I can only describe as a kerfuffle coming from the direction of the bathrooms. A baby starts wailing, and everyone in the diner turns to look.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? Watch where you’re going!” A man is yelling at Ted, who looks to me like a cross between scared and sorry and furious, and while I’m trying to come up with a name for what I think I see in his eyes, there’s Stan right there in the middle of it, and I didn’t even see him get up from the booth.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Stan to the guy. He’s gesturing down at something, and that’s when I see the stroller and realize where the baby screams were coming from. From the way Ted is standing and the position of the stroller, which is pressed flush against the diner counter in what looks like a tight squeeze, I conclude that Ted must have bumped the stroller into the counter, upsetting the baby and the baby’s dad even more.

  “Can’t he say he’s sorry?”

  “No
, no—he can’t speak.” Stan looks at Ted, sadly, and then reaches out to him and claps his hand on his shoulder. Ted’s face twists into this sad kind of smile-grimace. The man looks on, and the look on his face almost changes. Almost.

  “He needs to learn to look where he’s going.”

  “Yes. Totally. I agree.”

  “Because he could have killed my baby!”

  “You’re totally right, sir,” Stan says, and I’m surprised he’s conceding to everything so coolly—especially since it doesn’t seem plausible at all that Ted even came close to hurting, let alone killing, that guy’s baby. But then I realize Stan’s not done talking yet. “If my brother had paid better attention to his surroundings, he’d totally have seen the stroller with an infant in it parked right in front of the bathroom door, where lots of people frequently pass through at high speeds.”

  “Are you serious with this right now?” says the guy, and now the baby is wailing even louder. Me too if he were my dad, I think, sending waves of pity over to that poor kid.

  “Yes, absolutely. And I will personally make sure that the next time my brother goes to the bathroom he checks at least three times for strollers with babies in them parked directly in front of the door.”

  A small crowd is gathering, craning their necks to get a better look at Ted, and I’d really rather they didn’t. I’m torn between going up to join Stan and staying here with Callie, trying to shield her from view with my body, against I’m not sure what. People are starting to talk about manners and bad parenting and then about what the hell is going on with all these kids who don’t know how to talk.

  Um, what? “All these kids”? What are they talking about? Who do they mean? I want to ask what they mean, if they’ve seen any others, but then there’s a hand on my shoulder and I think better of leaving Callie to go get involved with a bunch of people who don’t seem like they’d take too kindly to a girl like her. I look up, and there’s Betty, our waitress, our angel.