Iceling Page 9

  He’s not watching the bear anymore at all; he’s watching Ted. Only Ted.

  And Ted has picked up the bear.

  Ted lunged at the bear’s stomach, and we saw the wind get knocked out of the bear as Ted hoisted it up over his head. Ted’s whole body is now trembling with the effort, and then he snaps himself upright, and he shakes it, and its legs smash together, and it gives a yelp.

  The bear’s front legs are dangling and bent at painful angles over Ted’s head, and now Ted, with the bear, is running full bore at the highway barrier.

  “Stan,” I say. “What’s he . . . is he going to . . . throw the bear over the guardrail? Stan?”

  Stan doesn’t respond. He’s watching Ted and muttering, and I want to yell at him to snap out of it, but I’m also completely terrified that if I disturb this situation, if I let the bear know there are other people here who are weaker and more terrified than Ted, then the bear’ll eat Ted, and then Callie, oh God, Callie. I look back. She’s watching everything with her hands over her eyes, her fingers splayed wide like slats in a window blind. Ted’s still carrying the bear, and it still looks to me like he’s preparing to throw it far away from us, but I’m having lots of trouble believing in a reality as insane and backward and illogical as the one that’s apparently right in front of me. But it’s all I have to believe in, and so I do. I hope he throws the bear over the divider. Because the bear will recover from a fall like that, he’ll just get up and scramble away and out of sight, and then Ted will dust himself off and get back in the car, and he’ll just sit in the backseat blankly and calmly like nothing ever happened, and we’ll drive off, trembling, completely terrified, and just so relieved to be alive.

  But that isn’t what happens.

  What happens is: Ted rams the bear’s head into the barrier. He runs at full speed, somehow managing to distribute the bear’s weight so that the bear is in front of and forward of his body, almost like a lever. This doesn’t look right, not even a little, and now it definitely doesn’t look like Ted was ever planning on throwing it. Instead, he keeps pushing forward. He gathers momentum until there’s nothing left to gather, and all that’s left for him to do is ram the bear’s head into the highway barrier.

  But then he doesn’t stop. He finds more slack to pick up. He just keeps moving, pushing into the dirt with his legs while the bear shudders, goes limp, and makes the saddest, most terrible sounds. The sound of all life leaving a body that big. These are not sounds I am ever going to forget. Teeth are falling like loose change. Ted’s face isn’t exactly calm, but it’s also not incredibly expressive or full of fear or pain either. Like a guy in a weight room. Like he’s exerting a lot of concentration and effort, but without any actual feelings attached to it. I can’t help but think Ted looks a little monstrous.

  Suddenly, we’re moving.

  Slowly, Stan is inching us forward. “Ted!” he calls. “TED!” he shouts again, but louder. “TED!” he screams and opens the car door.

  Ted looks up, and just like that, he walks back to us, his footfalls strong and deliberate. His face still has that look of almost frighteningly dedicated concentration. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see it through the filters of the dirty windshield and the tears welled up in my eyes. His eyes are focused on something beyond us, and he’s still moving like the world’s a step behind, leaning forward, as if pulled—no, tugged—along. Beyond him the big bear twitches, and I realize I’m holding my breath.

  Stan gets out of the car and walks to Ted. He isn’t shouting now, he’s saying, calmly, soothingly, “Ted. Hey, Ted.” When he gets to him, he says, “Whoa,” and Ted still doesn’t look at him. Stan puts his arms on Ted’s shoulders, and it isn’t until he stops Ted in his tracks that Ted’s eyes seem to see him. “Ted, whoa, hey,” Stan says, and Ted’s jaw slowly unclenches. While Stan leads him back to the car, I coach myself to start breathing again, slowly. I look back at Callie again, bracing myself for how frightened she must be, but her face looks placid. She’s just sitting there, quiet and still. She’s looking ahead, north.

  WE’RE DRIVING AGAIN. It’s quiet as hell.

  I never thought of hell as being quiet before, but I’m starting to think, of course, that’s exactly what it would be. Hell is probably just you and whatever demons are crawling around in your head, locked in a small, quiet room, damned to whisper to each other forever. Neither of us moves to put on the radio, even though I think we’d both rather listen to anything other than the sound of us coming to terms with what just happened.

  After a few miles we reach a rest stop, and I don’t even need to tell Stan to pull over. We park, and I tell him I’m going for a walk.

  “Okay,” he says, and then, more quietly and without making eye contact, “Just stay close? And maybe be back soon, please?”

  I nod and I walk a bit, making sure I can see him and Callie and Ted, even though all I want to do is walk into that crowd of people and disappear, get lost, or at least just be surrounded by people who didn’t just encounter a bear that climbed over a highway divider to stare at you through your windshield, like your body was a jar of honey it wanted to eat. Who didn’t just see a strange kid kill, with nothing but his body and fury, that bear who would have otherwise killed you. I realize my breath keeps catching, keeps getting held, and that my heart is trying to kick its way out of my chest and run someplace safe.

  I stop and watch Callie lying in the lawn across from the parking lot. She’s smiling, her fists bunching up around the grass. Without thinking, I take out my phone and call my dad. I’m totally terrified, completely scared, and possibly definitely traumatized, and I don’t know what to do, and I want to talk to my dad.

  TWELVE

  THE PHONE’S RINGING.

  And it rings again. And again.

  When it rings again, I check the screen to make sure I pressed the listing for Dad with the satellite emoji next to it, which signals the number for the super-high-tech phone my parents use on expeditions, the one that can always reach them. After confirming that I do in fact know how to operate a smartphone contact list, the line rings again one more time, and then starts in on the next ring when Mom picks up.

  It’s not that I don’t love my mom. And it’s not even that I don’t love talking to her, or as though my mom hasn’t talked me through upwards of fifty, actually probably more like one hundred, crises. It’s more that, where Callie’s concerned, Mom’s always sort of thought of her as more of a specimen she’s objectively interested in than, say, a daughter. Dad and I, we see her as a necessary part of the family. Or at the very least I know that Dad makes sure we all know that he’s on Callie’s side, and he has shown what could easily be called compassion toward his younger daughter, in addition to his first and favorite. But anyway, it was Mom and not Dad who answered the phone, so I prepare to put the kind of cheerful voice that might get me past the gatekeeper and into Dad’s ear.

  “Hey, Mom!”

  “Hi, Lorna, sweetie. Is everything okay? Did something happen to Callie?”

  “No, no, Callie’s fine! Everything’s just dandy. How’re the turtles?”

  “Turtles?”

  “Whenever anyone says ‘Galápagos,’ all I can think of are giant turtles everywhere, possibly speaking, catering, bringing drinks, floaties, et cetera.”

  “Cabana boy turtles is what you’re telling me you imagined?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a fun image,” she says, and then we both go silent for too long for either of us to keep pretending that everything’s normal and fine.

  “Lorna?” Mom says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to ask me to fetch your father so you two can talk about whatever it is you two talk about?”

  “Mom! I’d never even dream of asking you to do a thing like that!”

  “Well, I take it all back then,” says Mom.

/>   “I forgive you,” I say, then take a deep breath away from the speaker. “But now that you mention Dad . . .”

  “Aha! Well, sorry, sweetie, but your father is unavailable right now. He’s out at the research site, and he’ll be mostly unreachable for the better part of the rest of the day. The sinkholes and the lightning storms are at it again, but there are also these strange clouds that keep gathering. You get the feeling they’ll shake with thunder at any minute. And beneath them, the earth and the sea are trembling. As if they’re in concert. It’s so bizarre, honey. And absolutely amazing. Your father claims he’s seen something like it before, but it was back when we didn’t have the instruments we have now, so the data is practically nonexistent. It’ll take us at least a week to figure out what to make of it.”

  Perfect. My eyes wander over to the car. Stan, Callie, and Ted are just sort of standing there, waiting, looking freaked. Even Ted looks freaked out, like maybe everything that just happened finally, right this moment, caught up with him. And the idea that he maybe didn’t know what he was doing is pretty scary, and the idea that he is just now realizing what happened is honestly even scarier to me right now. So I just go for it.

  “Well, Mom, since you and I are chatting and all . . .”

  “Yes, honey?”

  And all at once, I can’t even help it. It just spills out of me. I tell her about the party and about how it wasn’t my idea but I still let it happen, so I’m sorry for that, but I think I kept it under control okay, and don’t worry, the house is fine, and everyone made it home safely and responsibly. But how the party came to a screeching halt when we discovered that Callie made this model of an island. I describe to her the vibrating expanse of the sculpture, with the almost blooming blossom things, the way it trembled, the way Callie’s hands trembled over it. My voice catches on the words and feelings that are coming up from my chest and propelled out of my mouth, into the receiver, up to the satellites, and then into my mother’s ear.

  I power past these trips and falls and tell her about Stan and Ted, who they are and how they came to the house after Stan and I found out that Ted was also building an island at the exact same time Callie was. I tell her how, after a lot of careful debating, Stan and I decided to take our siblings and go, to figure out what they needed. Because they’d built those sculptures of what seemed like exactly the island where Dad was when he found them, and they kept pointing to it and trying to get in the car, and in the end, all we could think was that they wanted to go there. Home. To their home. And then before we knew it, they were running to the car, and then they were in the car, and so we figured that was it, they wanted to get in the car and go somewhere, so we drove. We just drove. It was the only thing we could think to do for them.

  I tell her about the diner, how I decided, or I guess already believed, already knew, that I wanted—that I want—to do this because of Callie. Because of craving that closeness and feeling of sisterhood and finally, for once, maybe being able to do something for her. I talk about agency, how Callie and Ted and everyone like them seem so trapped in these bodies without language, with no way to ever really tell anyone anything, ever, not about themselves, or the weather, or the weather inside of themselves. Nothing. Not a thing, not once, not ever, not never.

  And then the bear. Oh my God. I tell her about the bear, and I just barrel through it because I can’t even stand to think about it or to have her ask me about it. So before she can ask I tell her not to, and I tell her that we’re fine, but we’re all really rattled. Even Ted looks rattled now, like he wasn’t prepared for any of this, for his actions, for the bear, for the highway, for this life.

  “But,” I tell her, “they are trying to go somewhere. I know they are. It’s like they’re being pulled, and they’re pulling us in that same direction. They need to go home, to their home, they know that we can take them there, that we can do this thing for them. Mom, this is a chance for me to do more than just chaperone her around a world she isn’t equipped to engage with.” And now my throat is closing up on me, and the words are sort of hiccupping out. “This is me enabling whatever it is she feels to be her sense of purpose. I’m sorry,” and I start sobbing and trying to talk through it, which barely works. “I know this sounds crazy. You’re probably freaking out. But this just feels so important. And I’m responsible, remember?” And I take a moment here, because I’m crying. “You and Dad said it yourselves. I am. I’m a good kid, and it’s not just because I know how to work around things. It’s because I have no real interest in trouble, and I don’t invite it. How often do you get to do a good thing, like a genuinely good deed, for someone you love? Mom. I’m scared. But I’m mostly happy because I can help Callie.” And I start wiping the snot from my nose and the tears from my face and trying to do that thing from earlier where I try to remember how to breathe.

  It doesn’t work, though. My heart is racing all over again, and I just wish it would stop, but it won’t. The line is insanely quiet. I have no idea what is coming, and I am terrified. I keep breathing into the stark silence, but I know she’s still on the phone, because I can hear something gathering inside her.

  Then, suddenly: “Turn around, Lorna,” she says. “Now. Right now. Get in the car, then turn the car around, and go back home. Please. Please, Lorna.”

  My eyes dart to Callie, and my heart starts jumping even more. What?

  “What?” I say. “Mom, did you hear anything I just said?” Oh God oh God oh God. I shouldn’t have said anything! Unless, “Is it because of the party? Because the house is fine, and locked up, and I called the cops to let them know we wouldn’t be home in case of burglaries, and I set timers for the lights, and . . .” Ugh. Of course it’s not that. Obviously, Lorna, come on. “Is it the thing with the bear? Because we’re fine! I was just scared, so I wanted to tell someone about it so I could feel less scared. Which I do now! Thank you! Talking to you has really helped. It was nothing. Mom, I just—”

  “Lorna. I need you to listen to me. I need you to take a deep breath and listen to what I’m about to tell you, which also happens to be something people could kill me for telling you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say softly, and now I feel my heart is actually in danger of stopping. Everything’s stopped. The whole world feels like it’s slowing down, and now I’m stuck here, in this moment, for probably forever. What the hell is she talking about?

  “Listen. Your father”—she snorts a bit, or else breathes hard through her nose, I can’t tell—“your father believes that this group of orphans Callie belongs to are peaceful and naive and innocent. But there are many people, many of them in the government, who do not feel this same way. These people believe that Callie and the other children like her are a sort of living weapon. A force to be used against us. Against people.”

  “What? Mom, are you kidding me with this? That’s insane—”

  “Lorna! Let me finish! This is important, you have no idea how important. Because of Jane. Jane—well, Jane isn’t Callie’s caseworker, Lorna. Jane is the government liaison who was assigned to monitor Callie and Ted and three other Orphans. This is why it’s always the same hospitals, always the same doctors.” She pauses for a moment, and my chest feels crushed, like the bear from Ted’s fury.

  “Lorna,” she starts again. “Lorna, if you take Callie and that boy, Ted, if you take them back to the place where they were discovered, which is where I’m almost certain they’re trying to get you to take them, if you do that, the consequences will be very, very bad.” She gets quiet here, and she does not elaborate on what she means by “bad.” “We’ve been playing with fire for years by having her here, in our family, in our home, and if you do this . . . If you do this, Lorna, baby, there will be hell to pay.”

  “Stop!” I shout, panic engulfing me now. “What the hell are you even talking about? I—I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a single word you say! Where’s Dad? I want to talk to Dad. Please
. Now. Put Dad on please. Now.”

  “I can’t, Lorna. I told you—he’s not here, he’s at the site, and thank God he is. Please. Please. Please do not take them back there. Please. Please listen to me, and do as I said, and I promise that Jane won’t harm you. Or Callie,” she adds.

  Then, after her longest pause yet, during which I’m not talking because I’m shaking so hard and she’s not talking because her desperation is so thick I can feel it through the phone, she says, “Whatever you do, Lorna, please: Please don’t die for Callie. Please. Just please promise me you won’t die for her. I know you love her, I know you love her like she was your own sister, I know that. But do not get between her and the government. Please. Please don’t die for her. She’s not your blood. Please, Lorna—”

  I hang up. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner, but what she said about Callie, about how she’s not my blood . . . I just couldn’t hear any more of it. I look over, and Stan is waving at me. Somehow, blindly and floating like in a dream, I make it there, to the car, and he starts the engine.

  “What happened?” he says.

  And then I just start weeping and shaking and shaking and weeping.

  THIRTEEN

  WE’RE STILL GOING NORTH.

  Stan’s driving again, and I’m just staring out the window, thinking that if I don’t make a sound, then I can maybe draw all the sounds around us right into me. And then I could drown out the echo of everything my mother just told me.

  Weeks pass like this, but then I check the clock on the radio, and it’s only been an hour.

  Another ten minutes pass, and that feels like a whole day, and I just want to crawl out of my skin. I feel like my guts want to jump out of my mouth and like my bones want to crawl out after them and head off in another direction entirely, like south, or east, or west, or anywhere but here, and then whatever’s left of me will just be here, in the car, existing. What Mom said. I. I can’t even form thoughts right now, the only things echoing around spookily in my head are a few disjointed words, some underwater sounds. I’m narrating all this to myself to try to give any sort of structure to anything at all.