If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  She took cold showers, she brewed her tea and then poured it over ice when her mother was not looking. She ate her food cold, she kicked off her blankets in the night and lay in the cold air with the window open. Even if she shivered, she found she could sleep, and she could survive. At school, her classmates complained of the chill in the drafty rooms, but she welcomed it, working off her socks and slipping back into her thin, cool shoes.

  Always, she kept an eye out for Irene—if they passed in the hallway, Kathleen made eye contact, but Irene looked down. If Kathleen followed Irene up to the smoker’s hill, Irene could see her approaching and she would cut back towards the school, leaving ash where her boots had been. They’d only spoken briefly, and then she had pulled away.

  Kathleen wasn’t sure what else she wanted to say, but she needed Irene. The closest she could ever have to Sammy again, especially if she was right the girl was pregnant.

  Just two weeks had gone by and Kathleen’s clothes were already becoming loose. She welcomed the gaps. After school, she walked to the river and ventured out on the ice, carefully—she didn’t want to follow Sammy, only understand. Where the ice seemed stable, but where if she reached out some, she could start to see through, she kneeled and stretched to plunge her fist through the crust.

  The ice was strong this close to the shore, so she had to punch, and she felt the skin at her knuckles tear, but when she broke through, the chill of the water numbed the ragged skin. Kathleen managed to break enough of the crust to sink her arm sunk up to her elbow, and the shock of it made her want to pull back immediately, but she didn’t—she let the arm hang in the water, so cold there was almost a heat to it, and for one flash, she hoped this was what Sammy felt with his entire body submerged, pain at first, yes, but then something like dissolving.

  She pulled her arm out, backed away from the puncture she’d made.

  Irene, she thought. She wanted to go to her.

  Is that what Sammy wanted? Only Irene? Sticking half a limb in the icy water didn’t help her understand how he must have felt at all, she thought. She didn’t understand anything.

  Chapter Six

  Melanie

  Spring, 2007

  They were two among many strangers killing time in a hotel bar in suburban Chicago, both mid-thirties, both in the jeans and branded polo shirts of a corporate travel day. After they had finished discussing the weather and the rocky approach by air, they had discovered they both lived in Denver—another place where the wind blew fierce and urgent.

  Melanie had been trying to describe to Brian how Chicago had looked as her plane descended, the high-rises piercing through a low fog and the afternoon light gloss against the building windows and the mist, but she could tell Brian wasn’t really listening. She was saying that she loved the approach, and she described again how the Windy City looked like a myth, mists of gray around the skyscrapers and the jag of Lake Michigan cutting at the shoreline. He ordered another beer and checked his phone.

  They were both in Chicago for a conference, though not the same one.

  Brian, she learned, was a seasoned business traveler, and he had a wallet full of foreign money, which he displayed on the table. She wondered what kind of person kept bills as a souvenir and carried them everywhere. Melanie’s mother had worked as a teller in a bank, so she was aware that when it came down to physical tender, there were two types: currency and coin. He had both. Euros, which he was inflating the value of as he talked about the food in Bratislava, then some Indian rupees that he spun across the bar, and a few pounds from Britain—these, he said, are really worth something.

  But they were not, she knew, worth anything because, like love, money was regional. One lover changes geography and forgets the other; a wad of lira departs its country and becomes nothing but confetti. She did not say this because she thought he would contradict her, she thought he would say something about it all being easy to exchange, but she knew people rarely did this. Instead they packed the change and the paper into an envelope or a plastic bag and forgot about it or thought they were saving it for the next time.

  She said that she had been to Athens, backpacking just after college with some girlfriends, and he told her about a tiny café he had found while trying to exchange some drachmas—before the European Union, he said. Of course, she said—and she could picture perfectly the waiter and the rickety tables, the sheen of olive oil across the silverware, the lamb, the man’s lips, because she knew there were a thousand spots like this across the Mediterranean, tucked under crumbling tile work and bougainvillea.

  She leaned into Brian because she was bored, and March in Chicago was cold, and what she was trying to say about the fog was the soft shimmer of it and the condensation on her skin and how she always loved this, how it made her feel light.

  He continued to excavate his wallet, finding travel cards and receipts with the heat ink fading from the thermal paper and bits of lint, until it all fanned around them like a reef.

  When Brian produced a one-thousand-yen note to Melanie, the lamp glinted off the mustache of the crumpled face on the bill. He was talking about Japan’s vending machine sake, and she noticed he didn’t even try to hide his wedding ring. Some people took theirs off when they were scooting up next to other people in bars, and she would look for the marks where a band had worn the skin smooth or made a crease.

  She could do math in her head, and she watched the markets, so she wasn’t impressed by the zeros on the yen, even if she acted otherwise.

  Melanie had spent a decade never going home alone unless she decided to. That is a lot, she tried to tell herself. That is more than I deserve. She was never stunning—a little thick around the thighs, hair always stringy or too short, and she was about an inch taller than most men liked. She knew more beautiful women, and women who worked harder at being beautiful, but she also knew, at least for those years, she had the other part, some charge that made men like her. Even if it wasn’t always about looks, now that the reliability of the appeal of her physical body was starting to go, it became harder.

  She figured she must be around the same age as Brian’s wife, give or take.

  Typically, Melanie wore low heels and chose her jeans carefully. In public, she watched her alcohol. Sometimes she felt creased, like paper folded and unfolded too many times, though there were moments when she felt smooth, flat. A dress that fell just right in a low-lit room. The smell of gardenia at a summer party that reminded everyone of a different place. The attraction that comes from perseverance, when she would be one of two standing after a long night.

  Brian was on his last stop before going home for a week, a little hurrah for him. He had noticed how much of his wallet was spread around them, and he started to reassemble it. There were a few slips of paper that he crumpled up and brushed to the side. He was talking about his children, but she didn’t find this attractive. She thought if he gave two shits about his kids, he would spend more time with them—he could do it, during summers at least, and his wife didn’t work, probably, so he would have some room to maneuver. Instead of complaining about the cost of private preschool and first grade, he could have a snapshot of the daughter, front teeth missing, at the Taj Mahal, and a snapshot of the boy, cowlicked, posing as if he was holding up the tower at Pisa.

  “So stop,” she said. “If you’re unhappy.”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. Then, for a few minutes she kept her eyes down and her tongue tight.

  If she thought he was interested, she would have told him his children probably didn’t care about schools that have uniforms and college-bound standards. They cared about slow nights of homework and eating dinner on a blanket on the lawn. They cared about the things that a parent can do, like drawing a firm line against an F to make it an A, and they cared about how funny he might look going after the escaped science-project mice with a broom and a newspaper.
They wouldn’t have heard of a safety school yet.

  “Do you want another?” he asked, and traced the rim of her beer mug. The top was charred with lipstick, the bottom with foam.

  She wasn’t sure she did, but she nodded at him and the bartender brought her a full glass of beer. The bubbles stung her tongue. The bartender was wiping down the counter and loading the dishwasher. The glasses made a pinging sound against the rack.

  She had been traveling for a seminar that would take place the next day, and Brian had something, he had something that she could not remember, and suddenly her beer was already half gone. She saw that he was wobbly on his chair, and with his wallet all packed up his hands were idle. He had a tumbler of whiskey, and the ice was pretty in the liquid.

  She finished her drink as the bill arrived. Brian flicked down enough twenties to cover it and asked if he might walk her to the elevator.

  “Sure,” she said. She hadn’t fully decided whether she liked him or not, but she did like the line of his face, in particular the way his evening stubble was peeking through his skin, suggesting more gray than the hair on his head.

  When Brian pushed the button for the elevator, the polished doors slid open with a thunk. When they stepped inside, the elevator jerked, and the car lurched the rest of the way to his floor while they groped some. When he exited, she followed, not even pretending she wasn’t going with him.

  When she was underneath him, she thought of what it must be like to be his wife, caring for the children. She thought of the passion they might have had, distilled now to a quarterly fuck and a conversation about the price of tuition.

  She was clear with herself, when she woke up next to Brian that she wasn’t angry.

  She had nothing to be angry about. She hadn’t been that drunk, and she wasn’t married, so that wasn’t her husband under the over-bleached sheets.

  The shades were drawn, the room was dark, and her clothes were folded on a chair. That’s how hot it was, she thought—there was time to fold. She used her phone as a flashlight.

  Gathering her things in the dim hotel room light, she wanted to wake him. Congratulations, she would say. You’re another person who doesn’t want to go home. She supposed that if they had anything in common, this was it.

  She dressed and smoothed her hair for her walk back to her own room. She wrote Call me! on the hotel stationery and stuffed it into his trouser pocket to be found by his wife, his dry cleaner, or him. She penned the telephone number of her most recent ex instead of her own on her note, because she thought this was mean but hilarious.

  So maybe she was a little angry.

  As she walked to the elevator, she wanted him to call.

  Is Melanie there?

  I haven’t seen Melanie in a while.

  And then silence—not wrong number, not a simple click, but an indication that she had been there once and now she wasn’t. She hoped she would feel it when they both remembered her simultaneously; she hoped she would feel it when one disconnected the line and severed the only connection either of them had left of her, two strangers trying to think of what to say next.

  Chapter Seven

  Brian

  Summer, 2001

  When Brian’s wife Jenny was first pregnant they went house hunting—leaving their efficiency condo in the city and venturing into the spiderweb of suburban living, looking for space and yards and wide, gleaming appliances. He had been surprised by her readiness to trade in her patent leather boots for plush carpeting, surprised by how mesmerized she was by the size of the developments and their pastoral names: Foxglove Run, Sage Hill, The Horizons at Rock Creek.

  As their child transformed from pea to lima bean to lemon, Brian ran his fingers across slabs of granite countertop that were bigger than the entire bathroom of their condo. It takes only a drop of water cycling into ice to crack rock, but the finishes were glossy and smooth. The flecks of quartz sparkled. He wandered through the houses and tried to see Jenny brushing her brown hair in the master bath, or himself shaving at the sink. He thought of the little specks of razored-off whiskers that sometimes dotted the white-cream porcelain, and how he was always very careful to get it all down the drain. He thought of how they had their toiletries organized in miniature tubs under the sink, and of how in their early days, when sometimes he had woken up and she was gone, he would stare at himself in the mirror and wonder if he had done something wrong, if she was angry.

  Now married, they fought, just as he had feared. They had even fought when Jenny found out she was pregnant. He was drinking a beer and she had tossed the home test casually onto the coffee table.

  “Two lines,” she said. “Bingo.”

  He was not sure what it meant. “How many lines are there supposed to be?” he asked.

  “Depends on what you’re after,” Jenny said.

  “Okay,” Brian said. He thought he was being even, measured. “What are we after?”

  Jenny looked at him, frowning. He heard each bubble of carbonation in his beer fizzing.

  When their friends asked them if they had been trying, Jenny said they were not trying but they were not doing anything to prevent it, either.

  We aren’t? Brian wanted to know.

  “Well, I’m not,” Jenny said, when he asked. “Have you been doing something? I was doing something, but I stopped.”

  He considered this. He had never asked about Jenny’s birth control—not when they were dating, not now that they were spouses—it had seemed secret and narcotic, something that was not his business. He could not tell if Jenny did not care what he thought, or if she had done what he had done and not inquired. He felt very stupid when he thought of it like this.

  Their life had mostly gone forward, in an ordinary way: one day, after they had been dating for a few months, Jenny had moved into the condo, and after this had gone on for a while, she had become his fiancée.

  They had married in a small ceremony. His family had not met Jenny’s mother before, though his grandfather thought he recognized her, but he had been a small-town cop—people called him Officer Frank, his first name, and he was eighty-three then—and he had seen a thousand faces in a thousand different stages of expression, and he always thought he knew people. Jenny’s mother, Lucy Estelle, had gotten very drunk. It had been a nice night.

  By the time of the news of the pregnancy, Jenny and Brian had only just celebrated their second wedding anniversary, and the kitchen was already a tangle of prenatal vitamins.

  “I guess we need to move then,” Brian said.

  “I think we do,” Jenny said. “Hopefully soon.”

  When they looked at houses, he imagined himself slogging through miles of commuter traffic with only the company of drive-time radio, and he felt a rift forming in their marriage. He also thought he and Jenny were arguing more lately—was it because she was hormonal and he was terrified? He found this explanation to be extremely likely. Before the pregnancy, if they had heated words, one of them would take a walk to a local bar and meet a friend, or read the paper, or have a slow cocktail at the counter. He liked how just a little separation, just the tiniest bit of distance, cooled them both. He liked how it was accomplished very easily. With every foot added to their prospective patio, he would be farther and farther from a place where he could just step out for a few minutes, and then he would see himself, fuming, surrounded by the wide hallways and entryway arches of beige-y new construction, trapped by rows of fake wrought-iron fencing and hedgework.

  In the middle of house hunting, he called his father. He was scared, and he wanted his dad, who was also a small-town cop like his grandpa, Officer Frank—everybody called him that, even Brian’s father Simon—to tell him what he was doing was right.

  “I don’t understand why you were renting anyway,” his father, had said. “Just throwing away money.”

  Brian considered this. Perhaps it was no
t a rift, just a little fissure.

  * * *

  When it came to real estate, Brian’s boss told him it was impossible to negotiate with a woman with child, and to skip negotiations all together and set some boundaries, like not moving north of Park or south of Evans, and that even if they found the perfect home just a few blocks off, he should hold his ground and refuse to offer. Better yet, he should refuse to even look at it. Brian took a softer approach, and he went to every showing Jenny was interested in. As their lowball offers were consistently declined, the clacking of their real estate agent’s heels against concrete driveways faded to the smoosh of tennis shoes; pencil skirts and blazers were traded for jeans and hoodies; she stopped trying to impress them.

  Jenny was not ill much, but she was changing. Her belly was growing rapidly. She was more contemplative and more interested in cooking. For years, she had not done much in the kitchen besides heat water for coffee, and now she left work early and Brian came home to full meals spilling off their tiny kitchen table and mounds of dishes like debris from a war zone. She took off her wedding ring, the ring she had chosen, and placed it on her jewelry tree where Brian figured it would hang indefinitely with all of the other things she might never wear again, like heavy necklaces of bright glass beads, chandelier earrings, and silver bracelets. When he asked her about the ring, Jenny said her hands were swollen, but Brian thought her fingers looked as slim as ever, perfect, in fact, as she plucked leaves off cilantro stems or cubed potatoes.

  When their real estate agent told them she did not want to work with them anymore, they both panicked and put an acceptable offer on an acceptable three-bedroom ranch that was farther from the city than Brian liked and smaller and more used than Jenny had hoped for. They moved in over one weekend, packing up everything from their old life, and watched the hired labor fill a truck.