The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “Did you tell him where you are?”

  “Yes.

  “I bet he was mad.”

  “He wasn’t happy.”

  She snorted in satisfaction, which was irritating, really. Why did he have to make everyone else happy in regard to this blasted surgery? Wasn’t it his brain? Wasn’t it his tumor? He had a moment’s fantasy in which he was free to do anything he pleased without a wife, an ex-wife, a teenage delinquent, and a paraplegic doctor having an opinion about it. How old was he, anyway?

  “So, what’s with this Tulley?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why’s he so goofy and happy? I thought he was a lawyer. He writes like a cheerleader.”

  “You saw that email.”

  “Is he driving you crazy?”

  She hesitated. “A little,” she said. “But he’s not too bad. He’s pleasant enough.”

  “Is he gay?”

  “Why would you think he’s gay?”

  “I don’t know. The smiley face, maybe.”

  “You’re ridiculous. Straight men don’t use smiley faces?”

  “None that I know.”

  “He’s just friendly. He’s really very nice, you want to know the truth.”

  “Dollars to donuts he’s gay,” Johnny said. What the hell. He’d begun this asinine debate simply to play with Pauline and enjoy her upward mood swing, but suddenly he found himself hoping Tulley was gay. No particular reason. Just because.

  “Johnny,” she said. “Trust me. He’s not gay.”

  “How’s your father?” Johnny said. He felt the need to redirect.

  “Fine. Same. I guess.”

  “You been by?”

  “No. And Caroline will be having a stroke soon, if the caregivers rat me out and tell her I haven’t been over there. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. I don’t know. It’s depressing, going there.”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  “Listen, I was thinking,” she said then. “If you and Corran manage to clear the air, why don’t you tell him to bring the baby over for a visit, after the surgery? I’d love to meet her.”

  “I don’t know. He’s barely speaking to me.”

  “But you’re going to fix that. That’s what you’re over there to do!”

  “I’m going to try, Pauline. But he’s got to meet me halfway, you know. I’m not sure he’s going to be willing to do that.” She didn’t reply. He thought he heard the rhythmic tapping of her fingernails on the kitchen counter. He had an impulse to change the subject.

  “I saw in the news that we’re now being hammered about damaging the river,” he said.

  “Yes, I saw that too,” she said, though she didn’t sound particularly interested. “Johnny,” she said abruptly, “are you happy?”

  “Happy? About the river bullshit? No, I’m not happy. Why would I be happy about that?”

  “No, not about the river,” she said. “I mean happy. Just happy. In life. I mean, before all this awful stuff started happening, with Corran and everything, would you say you were a happy person? Really at heart, happy?”

  “I’m happily married.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean you—individually, singly—are you satisfied? Like, are you content? Do you feel like you’re doing what you’re meant to do?”

  “Why on earth are you asking me this?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  Happy? What was she talking about? “I don’t even know what happy means,” he said. “I’m not a giddy person, Pauline. I don’t go around skipping and whistling.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Are you happy?” she said. “I think a toddler would understand that question.”

  They both fell silent. Johnny was bothered to have to come up with a response. Why was she fussing over such a thing as happiness right now, with all the varied catastrophes they had on their hands competing for their attention? He wasn’t in the habit of dissecting joy, for God’s sake. Happy. He remembered once having a conversation about this same word with Sharon, years and years ago, when they were splitting up. Sharon had told him he deserved to be happy, and he’d looked at her, bewildered, surprised by and doubtful of the veracity of her statement. Was that true? Did anybody deserve to be happy? On the basis of what? Didn’t happiness have to be earned, fought for, and won, like any other asset? He’d puzzled over the notion for some time and then, somewhere in the catalogue of years and the carnival of living, he’d forgotten all about it.

  Happy. Huh. Johnny looked down and saw that the blue stone he’d wanted to fetch for Pauline had been pushed by the creek’s current into easier reach. He leaned over and picked it easily out of the water. It was a cool sapphire blue, smooth as an apple. “Yes,” he said finally to Pauline. “I would say I am more or less happy. Worried, I suppose. There’s a lot of crap going on. So worried.” She still didn’t answer. He softened his voice. “But happy. Yes. Happy.”

  He paused. She seemed to be waiting. He knew what for. “Are you happy, Pauline?”

  “No,” she said promptly. He felt a ripple in his abdomen.

  “Pauline,” he said. “Come on, now.”

  “I messed up,” she said. “I should have had a baby.”

  “Pauline.”

  She was sniffling. “I messed up,” she said again.

  Well, this was a new one. Johnny rose to gaze down the line of the creek. He pocketed Pauline’s stone. What in the world was going on? It was starting to seem as if anything that could possibly go wonky these days was just going right on ahead and doing it. He remembered the line from Yeats: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Pauline had never talked like this before, about regretting their decision—well, her decision—not to have a child. Corran was enough, they’d always said.

  “I think you’re under a lot of stress,” Johnny said carefully. “I think we’re going through a very emotional time. And, well, I think you’re conjuring up feelings that might not be … they might not even be real.”

  She sniffled again. “Nope. They’re real. I was selfish, is what it was. Didn’t want to upset the applecart. Didn’t want a messy kitchen or sleepless nights or stretch marks, that’s what it was. But if I’d done it, Johnny, I mean, if we’d done it, I’d have something else to focus on now, and in the future. Somebody to focus on, do you know what I mean? If the factory folds. If things change. If …” She stopped herself. If you die on the operating table, Johnny thought. And then he understood. So that’s what she was afraid of.

  “Two things, kidda,” Johnny said. He tried to make his voice light. “No, three things. One: You can have Corran, okay? I’ll sign him over. And he’s already out of diapers, so there’s that. Two: I’m happy. I’m ecstatic. When I come home, I’m taking up skipping. And three”—here he felt a catch in his throat but choked it back—”I’m not going to die.” He repeated the third thing twice in his own head, trying to convince himself.

  “Oh, Johnny,” Pauline said. She blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I know I’m going batty. It’s a midlife crisis. Don’t give it a thought. I don’t mean to give you more to worry about. I’m fine, okay? I’m fine. My God. I don’t need a child. I’m just wallowing around in might-have-beens. I’m happy.”

  “How about we get you a kitten when I get back?” he said.

  “Ha, ha,” she said. “Very funny. I hate cats. And anyway, the General would have a conniption. Leave it. Forget I said anything.” Johnny ran his fingers across the stone in his pocket and watched the water chug down the little creek.

  “But anyway. I almost forgot,” Pauline said. “There’s some sort of oil dripping in the garage. It’s running out from under the Beetle.”

  Damn! The Marvel Mystery Oil on the frozen piston! He’d forgotten he rigged that contraption up. He pictured the oil drizzling a path across the garage floor. Great.

  “Can you just put a pan under it?” he
said. “I’ll deal with it when I get back.” She said she needed to get ready for work. She told him that the General was feeling better. She told him Jerry and Tina seemed to be enjoying their Chemal-free weekend. She told him she had a nightmare about the ghost of Donald Stone knocking at the floorboards, but it turned out to be a pileated woodpecker on the buttonwood tree just off the lighthouse cupola. He told her he’d call her again tomorrow.

  “And Pauline, about the Beetle,” Johnny said.

  “Yes?”

  “Just on the remote chance that my brain does explode over here and I don’t make it back, be sure and give that Beetle to someone I don’t like, okay?”

  “Don’t joke like that.”

  “Like maybe Sam Tupper.”

  A pause. Barely noticeable. “Tulley. I’ll do that,” she said. “Although I’m expecting you back.”

  “Hell yes, I’ll be back,” he said. “It’s too damn cold here.”

  “Give that baby a kiss for me, Grandpa,” she said. “And tell her it’s from her stepgrandma.” She hung up.

  It was, in fact, too chilly to keep walking around, especially with a wet foot. Johnny went back to the Polo, fished a wad of paper towels out of the glove box, and put them to rather ineffectual use against the mud stains on his pants. Then Sharon was abruptly pulling open the driver’s-side door and dropping into the seat.

  “That was quick,” Johnny said. “Was that a thirty-minute consult?”

  “I’ll drive a bit,” she said. Johnny looked behind him. Chemal was climbing into the backseat, his face a mask of pain.

  “What?” Johnny said, startled. “What happened?”

  Sharon pursed her lips. “Psychic guy was a jerk,” she said simply. “Told Chemal he couldn’t make contact with his brother.”

  Johnny looked at Chemal again. “You asked about your brother, mate?”

  Chemal nodded but then turned to stare out the window. Johnny could tell he was trying to fight back tears, so he faced forward to give the kid a bit of privacy.

  Sharon shook her head. “Jackass could have handled that differently,” she muttered. She looked over at Johnny’s pants. “What in the world have you been up to?” she said.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “You look a mess.”

  “Yes, Sharon,” he said. “I’m aware of that.” They rode in silence for a few minutes.

  “Chemal, what happened to your brother, love?” Sharon said finally, glancing into the rearview mirror.

  “He fell out of a bus. Cracked his head open,” Chemal said. “So they say.”

  “What do you mean?” Sharon said.

  “Well, I never saw it,” he replied. “I never got to see him. You know, when he was dead. He was just there one morning for breakfast, and then he wasn’t. They told me he died. Next thing I knew there was an urnful of ashes.” Sharon downshifted as they began a climb up a steep hill.

  “So how do I really know Davey’s dead, if I didn’t see him?” Chemal continued. “How do I know they’re not all just lying to me?”

  “Why would they lie to you?” Sharon said.

  “They’ve lied to me about lots of things. Why not this?”

  “Let me ask you something, Chemal,” she said gently. “I’m a hospice nurse. I see people die all the time. Did you love your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did he love you, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s family. And when family love each other, they stay together, no matter what. If he was alive, he’d come find you.” She looked in the rearview mirror at Chemal. “That’s how you know he’s gone,” she said gently. “I’m sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”

  Chemal stared out the window at the passing trees. They stay together, no matter what. Johnny shifted in his seat and tried to adjust his posture to accommodate his sore hip, which he was now realizing he’d twisted during the slide down the creek embankment. It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt.

  Johnny thought he’d go mad with the Spanish. Once Chemal reclaimed the wheel, he and Sharon started up with their practice again, and it seemed to lift the kid’s spirits. Now the two of them had been at it for more than an hour as they made their way up toward the Highlands and into the steep hills of the Trossachs, with Sharon shouting from the backseat, asking questions from her textbook, while Chemal bellowed his answers from behind the wheel.

  ¿Te gusta el café?

  Sí, me gusta el café.

  ¿De dónde eres?

  Soy de Detroit!

  And on and on. For a while Johnny tried napping, but when he leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, it seemed that Sharon’s voice was ricocheting against the glass and hitting his beleaguered eardrums even harder, so he sat up straight, studied the scenery, and tried to simply zone out. It wasn’t yet noon, and the growing sunlight behind the mountains was still diffused with mist. He remembered being on this route before for one reason or another, remembered that you could follow the highway until it gave way at the base of the Grampians to the anemic little A82, which would take you all the way to Urquhart Castle if you let it, running as it did along the western edge of Loch Ness. The mountains were always a reference point.

  He remembered how lost he had been all those years ago, when he first arrived in Florida, without those immovable peaks to navigate by. He had lived so long in Glasgow with the shadows of the great Grampians to the north—even if you couldn’t see them, you could feel them, especially on damp days when the wind seemed to ferry toward the concrete city particles of mountain moss and loam. His first weeks in Jacksonville, he remembered asking another worker at the ice plant, “But how do you know which way’s north?”

  “You don’t,” the fellow had said. “But north don’t matter. East matters.” The man closed his eyes and thought, then turned and pointed toward one end of the ice plant. “That’s east,” he said. “You can always feel the ocean. You always know where it is. And then you figure out the rest.” Johnny was dubious. They were twenty miles inland! But sure enough, by the end of his first year in Florida, Johnny had developed the same sort of internal compass so peculiar to those who lived in East Coast America. The ocean exerted a cosmic tug on Johnny’s consciousness that he imagined might have something to do with tides and lunar magnetism and what have you. Johnny could be anywhere—inside a mall, deep in the woods, or driving around in a spaghetti-mess of highway overpasses—and he’d still be able to instinctively locate the Atlantic and use its unerring presence to navigate. But now he was in Scotland. The Atlantic was back on the west. All was confounded.

  “Cordero!” Chemal shouted. He slowed the car on the approach to Glencoe. “Lamb!”

  “We haven’t covered that yet,” Sharon said, “at least, not in this chapter.”

  “No, I mean there,” Chemal said. He pulled the car over and pointed. “Look at that thing!”

  Johnny looked out into the glen, where Chemal was now pointing at a white lamb that was tottering along after its mother. The lamb took a few bouncing steps and then jumped up and kicked its legs behind it like an animated character in a children’s movie.

  “Sweet,” Sharon said. “Late season for that one.”

  “You see it, Iceman? Look at it jumping! That’s the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” Chemal said.

  Johnny saw it. But he was not impressed. The last time he’d been examining a lamb, it had been half mangled under the left front tire of a totaled rental car outside Paisley, and Johnny had been down on the pavement a few feet away, writhing in pain from the shattered hip that had plagued him ever since. They were such skittish damn things! Always leaping around like they had fleas up their asses. The lamb he hit had bolted out from under a wire fence just as Johnny had been turning the corner. It didn’t have a chance. The mother had stood just inside the fence, bleating piteously, but Johnny was so stunned with pain that he couldn’t even muster a moment’s sympathy.

  “I’d like to get it,” Chemal was saying n
ow about the lamb in the glen before them.

  “Get it?” Johnny said.

  “Catch it. Just to pet it for a minute.” He was unbuckling his seat belt.

  “You can’t catch it,” Johnny said. “They’re fast.”

  “I’m fast.”

  “I’ve always wanted to pet one, too,” Sharon said mildly.

  “I’ll just be a sec,” Chemal said. “I’m a get that lamb.” He turned off the car and got out. He jogged along the wire fencing to a wooden post, where he hoisted himself up and over. He moved toward the lamb, hands outstretched.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” Sharon said. Johnny didn’t know whether she was talking about the lamb or Chemal, but he didn’t ask. When the sheep and the lamb started to skitter off across the field, Chemal broke into a jog after them. Sharon laughed.

  “I wish I had my camera,” Sharon said. Indeed, Johnny was finding it hard not to be amused by the scene—a pudgy KISS fanatic running headlong across a field in the middle of Glencoe in hot pursuit of a grotty lamb he could never hope to overtake. They watched the tableau for a little while, then Sharon sighed. “He reminds me of Corran,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Corran?” Johnny said. He looked at Sharon. “No, I don’t see it.”

  Sharon shrugged and didn’t answer. Johnny turned back to watch Chemal run after the lamb until, spent, the boy turned and trudged back across the field, grinning and flushed. At least, Johnny thought, he seemed to be in a better mood than he was after the experience with the psychic. He was panting when he arrived back at the car, and as he dropped into the driver’s seat, windswept and still flushed, even Johnny was taken, for the moment, with the charm of Chemal’s lunatic youth. But only for a moment, because then followed the unmistakable smell of sheep shit.

  “Oh, no,” he said, pushing at Chemal. “Get back out, you dope. You’re tracking dung.”

  “My heavens,” Sharon said. She held her nose. “That’s powerful.”

  “Whoops,” Chemal said. He climbed out of the car and looked ruefully at the bottoms of his shoes. “Oh, man, they’re covered.”

  “Shuffle around in that clear patch of grass over there and try to clean it off,” Sharon suggested. She rummaged in her purse and came up with a couple of crumpled napkins. “Maybe use these,” she said. Chemal did as she suggested and even added the remainder of Johnny’s bottle of Germ-X to the procedure, but still the smell persisted when he got back into the car.