Ink and Ice

by Erin McRae

  The snow wasn’t very deep, just past their ankles really, but the path hadn’t been cleared and the walk took more effort than Zack had expected.

  “How big is this place?” he asked.

  “Not big. Maybe a couple miles around.”

  “And it’s just your family here?”

  “What? No.” Aaron laughed. “I’m not James Bond, my family doesn’t own a private island. There’s like four other families. You’ll see their houses as we go.”

  “Still, four other families is not a lot of people.”

  “It’s not. But there’s forty or so that stay year-round on the main island. So by comparison.”

  “Mind if I take some pictures?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Zack was glad he’d brought his camera. There wasn’t much to see, to be sure, but what was there was rich in shape and texture: The bare branches of trees silhouetted against the sky, the mossy roof of one of the neighbor’s houses, a tiny frozen waterfall where a stream ran down to the shore.

  Aaron perched on a rock by the edge of the ice to watch him. “I didn’t know you did nature pictures too.”

  There was a slight emphasis on the ‘too’ that made Zack immediately think of the last time he’d had his camera out with Aaron: The night before Aaron had left for the Grand Prix Final. He wondered if Aaron still had the picture Zack had taken of him then.

  “I don’t usually get the chance. But it’s beautiful here.”

  “Beautiful and strange,” Aaron said.

  “Like you,” Zack said, before he could stop himself.

  Perched on his rock, his cheeks already red from the cold, he was pretty sure Aaron blushed.

  BY THE TIME THEY RETURNED to the house from their walk, the sky was already growing dark, which meant the whole snowy landscape was slowly fading into dusty purple twilight.

  They ate dinner together with Aaron’s family, where they caught Aaron up on all the local news that hadn’t gotten covered at lunch. After dinner Ari went out to the garage with Mrs. Sheftall to work on a recalcitrant motor of some sort, and Aaron went off with his dad to his parents’ office to deal with some of the accounting he did for them, leaving Zack to his own devices.

  He sank into one of the overstuffed armchairs near windows that peered out towards the lake. Behind him was a hearth in which a fire crackled merrily, throwing warm light around the room. Beside it, was a waist-high synthetic tree, decorated with twinkling lights, an assortment of blue and white plastic dreydls, and topped with silver-painted wooden menorah that looked a bit like a high-school shop class project gone awry. And that, Zack told himself, must be the Hanukkah bush. He wondered if it was Aaron or Ari that had made the topper.

  By now it was fully dark outside, and far on the horizon he could see lights glimmering faintly. The distant signs of human habitation, invisible during the day, somehow made this little house seem even more remote.

  It had been a long time since Zack had just sat and done nothing, and he found himself zoning out peacefully, watching the lights blink on the horizon. In the distance, he could hear a dog barking.

  ZACK CAME TO SOME TIME later to the touch of a hand on his arm. He jerked awake, his heart pounding, but it was only Aaron crouched in front of him, a look of concern on his face.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” Zack scrubbed a hand over his face. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “You’ve had a busy day,” Aaron said, without a trace of sarcasm. “Here you go.” He set down a mug of hot chocolate on the arm of Zack's chair, then dropped into the opposite chair, curling up in it around his own cup of tea.

  "Thank you," Zack said, sitting up properly and wrapping his hands around the mug. It steamed gently.

  "It's no problem.”

  Zack became aware of the utter silence of the rest of the house, aside from the crackle of the fire which someone must have built up again while he dozed. In other places and times in his life, silence like this would have been eerie. Here it felt strange, to be sure, but comfortable nonetheless. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Gone to bed. It’s late.” Aaron took a sip of his tea. “For here, at least.”

  “You always keep skaters’ hours, don’t you,” Zack guessed.

  “Pretty much. Someday I’ll take a vacation and sleep ‘til ten in the morning every day,” Aaron said, looking off into the distance with exaggerated wistfulness.

  Zack laughed. “Sounds decadent.”

  Aaron smiled. “You have no idea.”

  Zack could have said he had some idea; how many mornings had Aaron had to peel himself out of his bed to get to the rink? But he hesitated. Unlike Aaron, he could rarely blurt what he was feeling.

  He realized, as he and Aaron sat and just...looked at each other, that this was the first time they had been alone together in months. The hours in transit today decidedly did not count. Zack should probably ask Aaron what his plan was, or if he even had one, but then he decided he didn’t care. Being here with him right now was enough.

  Aaron broke the silence first, tucking his knees up under his chin and wrapping his arms around them. “How do you like it here?”

  "This place is—haunting, I think, is the word,” Zack said.

  Aaron cracked a smile. "I've been telling you. And you can see why I don’t say more than that.”

  Zack nodded. "I guess it's the sort of thing you need to see to believe."

  "Do you regret coming?" Aaron asked.

  "No. God. Not at all," Zack said, with a vehemence that surprised even him. "I love it here," he admitted.

  "Yeah? You haven’t even been here a whole day, yet.” Still, Aaron looked delighted at Zack’s declaration.

  "Yeah," Zack said firmly. "Don't get me wrong, that plane ride in was fucking terrifying. But once we got here..." he trailed off, thinking about it. "Since I stopped going out on assignment, I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of hours in therapy trying to figure out how to exist. But here is just...out of the world. There's no crowds, no loud noises, nothing happening. I get to just be and be curious about something that’s not going to kill anyone. It’s great."

  "Is it that hard for you? To—be, in the world?"

  "I don't know. Honestly? I know I don't work in the way most people do. Even without the PTSD, I'm an adrenaline junkie.”

  "Which is how you got the PTSD,” Aaron said.

  Zack shook his head. "I have PTSD because I was in multiple war zones. If I'd been more reasonable, I could have gotten my thrills from, I dunno, bungee jumping."

  Aaron tilted his head consideringly. "You don't really seem like the bungee jumping type. Although I didn't think you'd be the hockey bro type either, and look how that turned out."

  "Thank you?" Zack wasn't sure if that was a compliment.

  Aaron smiled. "I've watched some of your games. You're not half bad."

  Zack was startled. "I didn't know that. That you'd watched any of the games."

  Aaron shrugged. "Hard to keep an eye on the audience when you've got a helmet and everything on. Anyway. I never stuck around long. Just wanted to see you. I was surprised you stuck around, actually. After...everything."

  "You mean with us?"

  "Well yeah. You finished your article, right? Or at least the part that was about me. And then you broke up with me. I know you’d said you were going to move to Saint Paul, but I still sort of figured you'd just disappear after that."

  “I didn’t move to the Twin Cities just for you, you know,” Zack said, careful to keep his tone light. Teasing.

  “Really? Why not?” Aaron put on a look of exaggerated feigned offence. “But I’m so cute!”

  Zack laughed. “I won’t deny that. But I like it there. I can get work done. And I feel like I have a community, with the hockey guys and Marie. Although Marie is kicking me out, so I need to find a new place of my own when we get back there."

  "So you're really gonna stay? Aaron asked.

&
nbsp; "For now, at least.” Zack looked down at the hot chocolate he still held cupped between his palms. He swirled the cup gently, watching the melted whipped cream marble the surface. “Which is probably the most I can say about any place at any point. I probably needed to say that about Florida, but didn’t realize it at the time. And like I said...I can get work done there, in Saint Paul. Which has value.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “A book,” Zack admitted.

  “Oh. Like the one you won those awards for? That I still haven’t read and really need to some day?”

  “It’s fine,” Zack said. “It’s not exactly easy reading.” Truth be told, he couldn’t quite square Aaron existing in the same universe in which he’d written that book. Some part of him, problematic as it was, wanted to protect Aaron from that world.

  “Well, I’m not an easy reader. Come on, what’s your book about? You spent all those weeks watching me work, it’s payback time.”

  Aaron had a point, but still, Zack hesitated. He hadn’t told anyone what, exactly, he was working on yet. Saying it out loud made him feel too vulnerable. But Aaron made him want to try.

  He fortified himself with a sip of the hot chocolate. “It’s a memoir.”

  Aaron frowned. "Aren't you a little young to be writing your memoirs?"

  Zack chuckled. "A memoir is not an autobiography. It’s just a story that I happen to be in.”

  “And what story are you in?” Aaron asked, too keenly for Zack’s comfort. “Your war zone stuff?”

  "Not really. I mean... that’s there, that’s where it starts. But it’s more about figuring out how not to live that life anymore."

  Aaron seemed to ponder that. “That’s why Saint Paul, then?” he said thoughtfully. “We’re your new

  life?”

  “Something like that.”

  Aaron frowned. “Are you being evasive because you don’t want to talk about it or because you don’t know how to talk about it?”

  Zack sighed. He was absolutely pinned to the wall on this one. “Some of both. You know, I took this gig, the article about you, because I was broke and a mess. And it didn’t really upend my life because my life was already upended. But it did give me something to latch onto in a way that’s either me being really mentally healthy... or really mentally not. I don’t know.” A log popped in the fireplace, sending out a cloud of sparks and making him jump.

  “So I’m just trying to figure it out,” he went on, adrenaline prickling unpleasantly under his skin. “What I’ve learned about telling stories is that you can tell when they are going to make sense, even if they don’t entirely hang together yet. That’s how I feel about this project. But it’s weird to talk about. And most certainly to you.”

  “Oh,” Aaron said. “You mean I’m in the book.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t that sketchy?”

  “In a journalistic ethics way? No, because it’s not journalism.” And because this time I’m actually going to tell the truth about it, Zack thought. “But are we two people who are going to have to talk about this at some point and we might not enjoy it? Yeah. You bet.” Zack watched Aaron’s face carefully, looking for his reaction.

  “Well don’t stop there.” Aaron looked, if anything, even more intrigued.

  “For what it’s worth,” Zack said, “The person who comes off looking poorly in memoirs is usually just the author. So... unless you’re like ‘No don’t do that at all ever or I will cut an ice fishing hole and throw your body in it,’ you probably don’t have a lot to worry about.”

  Aaron gave an awkward laugh. “Well, I didn’t until that speech.”

  “Sorry. I’m not used to talking to people about my shit.”

  Aaron shrugged. “It’s all good. I’m not used to letting people see my island.”

  Chapter 27

  AARON’S HOUSE

  Whisker Island

  AARON, ARI, AND ZACK spent most of the next day outside. Snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and even skating, once they’d shoveled off a big enough patch of the lake and thrown hot water on it to get a smooth surface.

  “This seems counterintuitive,” Zack said, dubiously, holding a giant soup pot of water they’d just taken off the stove and eyeing the ice in front of him.

  “How do you think zambonis work?” Aaron countered, plopping down beside him in the snow to put on an old pair of skates. He’d dug out another pair for Zack; there were always plenty of extras here, and no one needed anything fancy for lake skating.

  “Much more efficiently,” Zack said drily.

  “I checked it this morning,” Ari piped up from where she was lacing up her own skates. “It’s ten inches thick.”

  “I have no frame of reference for what that means.”

  “Don’t go on ice that’s less than four inches thick,” Ari said, in the exact same tone Aaron had used on Zack when he told him not to use his hands to stand up, less someone skate over his fingers. “Five and up can hold a snowmobile...probably. Eight and up can hold a car.”

  “Probably?” Zack finished.

  Ari nodded. “Ice is fickle. And you have to check it every day. Just because it was thick enough yesterday doesn’t mean it’s thick enough today.”

  “I can’t believe you have three days off from figure skating training, and you come home and do...this,” Zack said, finally resigning himself and dumping out the water. It splashed on the ice, the faintest wisps of steam curling in the air, before it cooled and re-froze in a beautifully smooth surface.

  “Then you’ve forgotten one very important thing about me,” Aaron said, testing out the feel of the ice with a few crossovers. Not as perfect as freshly-resurfaced ice in an arena—it was brittle in places, and would chip if he tried any jumps—but it had the indescribable feel of real, live ice, instead of just water frozen over some compressors in a rink.

  “What’s that?” Zack asked.

  “I love skating.” And I love you, he thought.

  THEY RETURNED FOR THE house only briefly for lunch, and by the time the sun had set and dusk was falling, Aaron was tired, sore, and blissfully happy. These were the sorts of days he loved best. Having Zack there with him to share it all just made it even better.

  Zack had offered to cook dinner tonight, and Aaron helped out, enjoying the companionableness of sharing a kitchen. Even when they’d been dating there hadn’t been a lot of time for cooking together, and he still had very fond memories of their first date when Zack had made dinner for him.

  He stole sidelong glances at Zack as he chopped vegetables and dumped spices together with little regard for measuring. Spending so much time together had done absolutely nothing to lessen Aaron’s desire to grab him, kiss him, and drag him off to bed. That Zack was interested, he was in absolutely no doubt of; whenever they spoke, Zack’s gaze kept dropping to his mouth, and Aaron had looked up from enough conversational pauses to see Zack staring at him. What, if anything, Zack planned to do about that, Aaron wasn’t sure. Which was all right—after all, Aaron had told him this was a no-pressure trip, and he’d meant that.

  Zack seemed to fit in here on the island as effortlessly as he did with the group at TCI. Aaron wondered if that was because those groups were particularly welcoming, or because Zack just had a way with people. He suspected it was the latter. If either the people at TCI, or his own family, had found someone not up to their standards, they would certainly not hesitate in making those feelings known. Their acceptance of Zack was a strong stamp of approval. I wonder if Zack knows that, Aaron mused

  ***.

  “Do you want to take a walk?” Aaron asked Zack once they’d finished dinner and the two of them had cleaned the kitchen.

  Zack looked dubious. “How cold is it out there?”

  “Colder than it was when the sun was up.”

  “You’re not natural,” Zack complained, but he headed for the closet for his coat anyway.

  Aaron said nothing. It wasn’t the sort of sentence it w
as worth getting prickly about, not when they were both queer and living lives that could most generously be described as odd. But if his sister had heard it... that would have been one way to have a conversation about the mythology of this place.

  Aaron knew he wasn’t obligated to bring up the children’s stories that were only extremely local knowledge—even the year rounders on the bigger islands didn’t necessarily know them, not if they didn’t regularly deal with the lake’s furthest, smallest outpost. But those that did didn’t trade on them. Aaron always thought that was notable, that the seals weren’t featured on kitschy t-shirts and souvenir shot glasses. It was why he took Ari seriously—at least some of the time and against his better judgement. If the stories weren’t true, wouldn’t people be freer with them?

  Zack sucked in a sharp breath as they stepped outside again, but Aaron drew in a more leisurely lungful, relishing the way the cold stung this throat and made his eyes water. The night sky was clear, and the stars spilled above them, making the world around them glow faintly. Aaron led the way down to the shore.

  "What's that sound?" Zack asked, suddenly tensing beside him.

  "Which?" Aaron stopped walking and cocked his head to listen. The wind blew through the trees. Somewhere, a dog whined, protesting perhaps a late-night walk. Probably on one of the Bass islands. Sound travelled oddly in the still night air.

  Zack stopped, too. "The...." His voice trailed off. "I don't know how to describe it. Clapping? Something snapping."

  "Ohhhhhhhhh.” Aaron hadn’t even been aware of it until Zack pointed it out. In winter the sound was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. But now that he was, he had a problem. Because there were two different answers he could give Zack, one sensible and practical, one much less so. That one that was a critical part of Aaron’s own sense of self, but it might frighten Zack off for good.

  You invited him here, Aaron reminded himself. Because you wanted him to know you, as you exist here. Tell him.