Iceling Read online

  “How’re you kids doing?” Betty asks. “Can I get you all the check?”

  “Yes, please,” I say, then turn to Stan and wave. He’s no longer the center of the argument, thank God, so I tell him to get the hell over here, please, in gestures. He catches my meaning and drags Ted back to the table.

  Betty brings the check, which has a smiley face at the bottom, and I notice she left off all our drinks. Stan and I pay, and I leave her a huge cash tip, and then we’re off, leaving the angry diners to fume and scratch their heads.

  ELEVEN

  WE’RE BACK ON the road, still headed north. It’s my turn to drive for the next four hours, which Stan and I have decided is the longest either of us seems to be able to manage before the road and its accompanying signs and markers all start blending together.

  I keep my eyes straight ahead on the road, and at the sides of my vision I watch the trees chase the retaining walls and the retaining walls chase the trees into some sort of small space in the distance where the highway will stop, where everything we know will just disappear. I see Callie in the rearview watching me, and I start to smile, but my face is too tired, and anyway she doesn’t smile back. I must be wearing my anxiety on my face, because all of a sudden Stan pipes up and tells me he thinks that I should rest and he should maybe drive for a bit. I make a lame attempt at reminding him that my shift isn’t quite up yet, but he insists, and I can’t find the energy to pretend I have any real powers of concentration left.

  So now I’m in the passenger seat watching it all with full vi sion, as one sign for the interstate swallows another until, poof, we’re in Maine. I think of this poem I once read, about how one train can hide another, and this feels a lot like that. One thing is right in front of you, and directly behind it is another thing, and then they’re gone, but then there’s something else, let’s call them clouds. So there are clouds, and they’re in the sky, and then the clouds in the sky swallow up the sky, and then everything’s just sky, and the power lines keep running along around the sky’s knees, and cell phone towers keep trying to punch their way up into space. All of which is to say, it’s a good thing that Stan took the initiative to take over the wheel.

  It didn’t take being around Ted for too long to learn that he’s startled by sudden movements, so when I get the urge to check on Callie, I glance up to the rearview mirror instead of turning around. I look at Callie’s reflection instead of her real self, and then I look at Ted’s reflection too, and I think about how different the two of them are, but also how identical. And then I think about the first time I realized things were different for us, for me and Callie. I was older than a person might think, because it turns out that most people are fine—almost happy—with a kid who doesn’t ever speak. Especially a cute and affectionate kid like Callie, who sometimes smiles for no reason but in ways that can accidentally make your whole day better. So I was as old as nine or ten the day that some office lady came into my classroom to take me to the vice principal, who then took me to the nurse’s office, where Callie was sitting alone on the cold linoleum floor. She’d been having a fit for nearly thirty minutes. It was already starting to become common for kids to have seizures and brief telekinetic explosions back then, but for something like that to go on for thirty minutes was not something the nurse felt was normal—or that she was equipped to handle. I remember the nurse’s face: pure terror. I have no way of knowing what went on in there before I got there, but I have an idea. And it must have been bad, be cause I remember the nurse talking to my parents in her office later that year, telling them that she was worried the event was going to have some sort of brain-damaging effect on Callie. But it didn’t. According to Jane, the CAT scans came back completely normal, the same as before. Callie has gotten regular CAT scans ever since she first got rescued, and no matter how bad the fit, there’s never been a blip. But after that day, the school sort of made it clear that they felt they couldn’t handle Callie and that alternate arrangements had to be made.

  I’ve never told this to anyone before. Obviously my parents knew the facts of the matter, but still, I’ve never told anyone about it from my angle, or confessed that that was the first time I looked from myself to Callie and saw something fundamentally different. But I guess if something is important and awful enough for you to carry around inside yourself for long enough, it’ll eventually find a way to get out. I guess my “something” has chosen now to come out, because that memory has come back to me with such force that before I know what I’m doing, I’m saying it aloud to Stan.

  “Lorna,” he says, once I’m finished. “I’m sorry.” I bite my lip and don’t look at him. “And I’m also sorry that I have nothing more helpful or creative to say than ‘sorry.’”

  “Ha,” I say, letting him know that it’s fine. I’m fine. “I doubt anyone does. There’s not exactly a step-by-step guide for how to talk about non-lingual adopted siblings that someone found abandoned in a boat in the Arctic. You know?”

  Stan nods and gives me a long, thoughtful pause.

  “So you’re saying,” he says, slowly and seriously, “I would not find this as a volume in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series?”

  “Oh, my bad, you’re right. There is a guide. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul of a Teenager Whose Sibling Is Totally Non-lingual and Was Found Abandoned in a Boat in the Arctic.”

  “Ah-ha—so you’re the one who always has it checked out of the library!” he says, and we both laugh, which feels great.

  “So,” says Stan, once we’ve laugh-sighed our way into silence again. “They were still calling it the ‘special class’ when Ted was there, which is a horrible, awful name, and I can’t believe a professional educator would allow it. Anyway, this one day, when Ted was maybe eight or nine—and huge for his age—there were some workers out on the playground pulling out a tree to make room for a new jungle gym. Some genius—the same one who thought of ‘special class,’ probably—thought it was a good idea to go ahead and hold recess outside anyway, with just the jungle gym part of the playground off-limits. But of course that rule didn’t deter Ted—he didn’t even know there was a rule. So Ted sees the guys working out there, and he starts to have a fit. It was a short one—like, weirdly short—and it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. His eyes were rolling up, his hands were opening and closing, and his entire body just got really stiff. One of his teachers came to get me—I was just over on the playing fields for gym class—and as I walked over toward him, I saw it all happen. His body unfroze, he shook his head, and he stood up, like nothing happened. But then he turned. He was looking at the workers, who were pulling up a tree to clear out the ground for the jungle gym. And then something came over him, a different kind of fit. And this is where it gets fuzzy for me, because all I could do was start panicking and running toward him. The roots were starting to surface, and the tree was out of the ground, and Ted lowers his head and just . . . went at them. He pummeled them with his little-kid fists, and it didn’t do much to the huge dudes removing the tree, but it made an impression on everyone, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Jesus” is all I can say, and a bright, clear image of Ted as a child, violently lashing out on an elementary school playground, crops up in my mind with a fierceness that lets me know it’ll be there for a while.

  “Yeah,” Stan says quietly, his eyes straight ahead on the road, where they’ve been the whole time he was telling the story. “Ted’s on the . . . aggressive side. Sometimes I wonder if all the wrestling my dad has us do isn’t so much so Ted can have an outlet but more, like, my dad seeing if I have what it takes to help contain him. I truly don’t know—my dad is a weird enough guy for an idea like this to either be right on the money or so far from his mind that he’d find it insulting that I’d even suspect it. But I wonder.” Stan pauses, and I let the moment be a silent one. “Anyway,” he says after a short while, “Ted was asked to not come back. Just like Callie. I guess a nine-y
ear-old kid built like a twelve-year-old, prone to seizures and who doesn’t speak or react when spoken to and who sometimes freaks out and tackles or hits things and people, is not exactly . . . easy. The saddest part about it was that even though I was just a kid too, I still got the distinct feeling that the main sentiment around school after Ted was gone was sweet relief. Everyone was glad to not have to worry about him anymore. And just . . . it’s not always easy having to live with people looking at your brother like that.

  “And I get it! But just . . .” And his voice drifts off as both of our gazes wander into the rearview, where Ted is clumsily braiding Callie’s hair.

  It’d be great if we’d passed the Walt Whitman service plaza right then, so we could think about how we contradict ourselves and contain multitudes or whatever, but this is real life, and real life doesn’t get to line up in convenient metaphors.

  Suddenly, my phone buzzes. “Sorry,” I say, taking it out of my bag.

  “What? Don’t be sorry. That’s silly,” Stan says.

  His response makes me think of Mimi, who’s on a personal crusade to erase “sorry” from women’s vocabulary, so I smile.

  I look down to see a text from Dave: Hey.

  hi from the road, I type, a novel about road trips, featuring a stranger and two silent siblings, and yrs truly. who misses you.

  Aw shucks.

  How’re you?

  How’s Callie? Are you any closer to her Secret Origins issue?

  Was that a bad joke?

  I thought it was a pretty good joke. I could explain it if that would help?

  All of these come buzzing in one after the other, but I don’t look down, because in the mirror Ted’s still trying to braid Callie’s hair, and it’s mesmerizing, but then what’s more mesmerizing is the way Ted suddenly drops Callie’s hair and turns to stare straight ahead and to the left, right at the back of Stan’s head.

  My phone buzzes again, breaking the spell, and I look down.

  I thought it was a pretty gThat always makes jokes funnier, when you explain them?

  dave! hi. sorry. no, no, i get it. that’s funny! we’re doing really well. stan has all this money from an inheritance from his favorite grandma, which is sad but also really nice because all our food and gas is taken care of. callie and ted are ok. they’re traveling better than I thought they would.

  Amazing, texts Dave. And what about you? How are you?

  I do a 360 scan of the car. Stan is dazed and looking tired behind the wheel, and now I can’t look at him without thinking about that playground story with Ted. Ted’s in the back, still staring at Stan, and Callie is next to him, looking so content yet so far away from me it makes me want to cry. I decide to answer Dave honestly.

  i don’t know. i mean, it’s not like i thought that just by doing this, everything would make sense, or that callie would all of a sudden start to talk, or that we’d make some big breakthrough once i got to know more about her past. but i guess i also maybe did think those things a little.

  No response just yet.

  sorry, I type, that was maybe a lot.

  No blinking ellipses.

  hey, I type, noting he didn’t tell me not to say “sorry,” wondering if he’s trying to give me a taste of my own medicine by not answering, getting mad at myself for thinking these things because Dave’s the best and I don’t know why I’m always looking for reasons to push him away. you can text back whenever, but it’s my turn to drive soon, so I won’t be able to respond. but i miss you. i would kiss your whole face if you were here.

  There they are now, the blinking ellipses, come to restore my faith in chivalry and Dave.

  Ah, sorry! My mom needed me. This whole trip seems like a lot for you. Take care of yourself. Please? And drive safe.

  A whole face’s worth of kisses right back at you.

  I send him a dozen emojis with hearts in their eyes, then close my own eyes and allow myself to feel just a bit calmer, until Stan pipes up from the driver’s side.

  “I don’t know where the hell I’m supposed to go,” says Stan.

  I look up to see at least four exits going in every direction up ahead where the horizon is.

  I’m setting up a logic puzzle in my head and trying to pull together an educated guess when suddenly Ted reaches up from the back and across the seats and turns the wheel. We zigzag for a terrifying few seconds, but then Stan regains control and rights the wheel, and I look up just in time to see us sailing through one of the northbound exits. In the blur of it all, I catch a hurried glimpse of Ted in the rearview mirror. His hand is still on the wheel, but he’s not looking at the signs or even the road in front of us. He’s looking intently at Callie, who stares back at him too.

  “Jesus, Ted!” Stan exhales, getting into the rightmost lane and slowing to sub-speed limit. “You okay, Lorna? Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m just glad someone’s stepped up as navigator.” I turn to look at Ted, and though he meets my gaze, I can tell he’s staring straight past me. He just seems to be pulled somewhere, like he’s trying to lead us along to wherever somewhere is.

  I’m flipping around the radio stations, and all I hear are commercials and the same songs over and over again. Because we’re willing to do anything to distract ourselves from our own anxiety and lessen the tension of Ted’s arm shooting out from the backseat to nudge the wheel north again, Stan and I start a game where we see how many times we can hear the same song within an hour, and you’d be surprised how high our scores go. Then Stan tells me about a thing he read about how Elvis Costello once said that we can blame DJs who keep replaying popular songs for the mistaken belief that radios broadcast “frequencies.” We skip through stations, trying to play a new game to see how many times in a row we can hit the song’s chorus, which is to me the best part of any song, and I don’t care how obvious or unoriginal that opinion is. That big rushing moment, the epiphany electric, on fire. You know the part I’m talking about.

  “What if there was a song that was just all chorus?” I say.

  “You mean a song whose main purpose was just to give the people what they want, all the time, and then never walk away from it?” Stan says.

  “Yeah.”

  “How long do you think a song like that could last?”

  “As long as people would listen to it, probably.”

  Some cheesy Top 40 track comes on, and Stan turns it up in a way that suggests he’s trying to be ironic but that he actually really likes it. Me, I just like the song. He’s drumming his hand on the steering wheel when, with a horrifying jolt, he slams on the brakes and sends the tires screeching.

  “HOLY SHIT,” he calls out, then starts muttering more expletives and puts the car in reverse. He has one of those mounted gear shifts, which has taken some time for me to get used to, so while I’m scrambling around to try to see whatever’s freaking him out, the gear shift’s right there in the way. I turn around, and I see Ted and Callie, both of whom are also freaking out, but in an almost negative way, if that makes sense. As in, they are so calm—eerily, unsettlingly, cult-member calm. And now I’m starting to freak out too, I can hear my own heartbeats and maybe everyone else’s heartbeats too, and the sound is deafening. And then I hear this noise, a real noise, from outside this car full of our terrified hearts, and I turn. And then, lo, a bear.

  There is a bear. A giant, frothy-mouthed bear, crouching in the road, right in front of us.

  It starts to stand. And it’s so big and so close that it can reach the front bumper with its paws, which it does, and sort of pushes itself upright. The car is continuing to reverse. I can’t look away from the bear, which is now opening its mouth.

  “Stan,” I say.

  He just keeps muttering curses, and I want to tell him to get it together, if not for us then for our siblings, but then the bear roars at us, snarling with i
ts whole head, spittle flying at the windshield, so I don’t—can’t—say anything at all. Stan hits the wipers.

  The bear bellows. It bares its teeth and snarls and roars, again and again. Stan’s eyes are wide open, and though I’m practically frozen where I sit, clutching that bar above the passenger door, he’s maneuvering the car to try to get us as far away from the bear as possible. I’m yelling at Stan to back up faster, like way, way faster than he’s going, and oh my God, please just faster can we get away faster, and I look back to Callie, and I reach out to just touch her, to let her know I’m here. Just as the car starts to pick up, I hear a small clattering noise in the backseat and the creaking of hinges and then the rush of air, and then I see Ted, who is out the door and on the road.

  Ted looks like Brad Pitt with a crew cut and a broken nose and two chipped teeth, and he’s, like, five eight and built like the kind of house you don’t want to fall on you. He’s moving, striding, quickly and determinedly, right over to the bear. He bends forward at his waist, like his mind is just a few steps ahead of him, or like the world’s a few steps behind, and his arms are widening out to the sides, and his legs are just moving and moving—and then he leaps. He leaps right onto the bear’s back.

  He’s on top of the bear, and he just starts pulling its front legs back toward him, and then we hear this awful, strange cry escape from its mouth. And now I’m terrified that the claws will get him, will slice open his arms, or that he’ll kick the bear in the face and its jaw will snap shut on his leg like a trap, with blood and sinew everywhere. I want to turn away, but I can’t, I need to throw up, but I’m terrified of opening the door, so I just stay frozen and let the nausea sink in deeper and deeper. Stan starts muttering something, and at first I think he’s gone delirious with shock, but then I start to make out words in the sounds: “You can do it, you can do it, come on, Ted, you can do it,” he says.