If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  Brian was surprised, almost, when all the boxes were unloaded into the new house, that their contents were unchanged. As if by not breaking or spilling or getting lost or just vaporizing, his socks and records and thermal mugs were complicit. Everything would be unpacked into a mortgaged space where neither he nor Jenny really wanted to live. It seemed so final. It seemed like they had so little.

  “I think this will be fine,” Jenny said, after their first night in their new bedroom. “It feels okay. I forgot how nice the tile is in the shower.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Brian said.

  “I didn’t say I liked it,” Jenny said. “I said I thought it would be fine.”

  * * *

  On the Monday after the move, Jenny got out of bed but didn’t seem to be getting ready for work, and it was not until then that she told Brian she had put in her notice. She said she had known she would be tired from moving, and that she was already six months pregnant, and once the baby was born she did not plan on going back anyhow, so she’d given her office a quit letter.

  Brian suggested she call and try to pull the resignation back.

  “They’ll understand,” he said.

  “Understand what?” Jenny asked.

  He said he had thought they would be carpooling for the last weeks until she took her leave, and that he got that six months was, of course, very pregnant, but he also noted that there was another full business quarter left before the child came.

  “It’s done,” she said. “There’s no rescinding now.”

  He said he thought she might miss her job at the law office. She had worked in accounting, and he thought she liked it. When she had announced the pregnancy, the women had thrown her a shower, and the partners had given her a check inside a card signed by their admins.

  He thought she should have consulted him. She had worked her way to a mid-level position, and before she was pregnant, she had gone to all of the office parties, to which she usually wore a wide smile and a flowery, cleavage-baring shirt.

  He said they would miss her. She shrugged and said she would not really miss them.

  “I think it makes more sense, anyway, that we are closer together during the day. What if the baby comes and I’m stuck in traffic?” Brian said. They only had one car, his.

  “I can call the ambulance,” Jenny said.

  Brian thought an ambulance seemed unnecessary, but he did not say anything. At work—he was in sales—his boss had continued to remind him not to attempt negotiations. His boss had four children by three different wives. Brian did not aspire to be like him, but he could not deny that the man had more experience.

  In the weeks that followed, it was difficult, and also ill-advised, for Jenny to lift very much, so as they unpacked and organized, Brian brought her boxes, opened them carefully, and then set them on a stool for easy reach. He was surprised at the quantity of packages that were initially piled in the baby’s room, because he could not understand where these things had been hiding in the condo.

  Jenny had decided they should wait to find out the gender, and while Brian found this infuriating, he painted the nursery a smooth, wasabi green. Every day when he was finally delivered from his commute, there were more parcels on the doorstep: a crib, which needed assembly, and a stroller, which looked suitable for off-road terrain.

  In addition to unpacking, they had to go shopping in preparation. They purchased a bedroom set for the area Brian had hoped would be his home office, but one Saturday under Jenny’s direction, it became a guest room. He shrugged and swiped his Amex through the slot in the terminal. He accepted the receipt, folded it into smaller and smaller squares, and shoved it into his wallet. He arranged for delivery, and he followed his wife across the store’s parking lot and into the next store, her belly a compass leading them through shop after shop, where he pushed the cart, and she calculated. His feet hurt and he hated the plastic smell of the merchandise and he badly wanted a beer. She was frustrated with what she saw as the relative lack of gender-neutral clothing and wondered out loud why it was so impossible to make a few things in green or yellow.

  “You wear blue,” Brian said. “It’s not only for men. I have a purple shirt you always say looks nice on me.” The cart had one wobbly wheel and it squeaked on the waxed floor.

  “It’s not the same when they’re little,” she said. “I think I would feel weird.”

  “How many clothes does a baby need for one day, though?” Brian asked.

  The wheel protested.

  Jenny looked at him.

  He heard his boss in his head. Do not negotiate! “I mean, by day one,” Brian said, “we’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl. I’m saying how much green stuff do we really need, because pink or blue will be fine after that. Or any color.”

  “I don’t think it will be fine, Brian.” Jenny said.

  “I think it will be fine,” Brian said, and he wished they were not having this conversation in public.

  “What if it’s not fine?” Jenny said.

  Brian pushed the cart around the corner. They were standing in a tall aisle of diapers shrink-wrapped into large bricks, and he questioned how these could be realistically maneuvered into the trunk of his car.

  “It will be fine.” He tried to say this with some authority, but the skin around his lips felt dry.

  He was not really sure if they were talking about onesie colors or something else, but he wanted to be right. He wanted her to believe him, because the baby coming was very alarming. They chose one of the diaper parcels, and he pushed the cart onward, but the knot he had felt for months in his belly would not dissipate. He had speculated that maybe it was sympathy pains or indigestion, but he knew it was fear. He wondered if he should have prepared more, if he should not have fought Jenny so much on the house, because now he did not have an office. Now they had five times as much space as the condo, but they were running out of space anyway. He could admit there were some things that were nice about living out of the city center. Parking was nice. If they were going to have to do all this shopping, the proximity was nice. His commute was not nice, but it was also not unbearable. Recently, on his drive home, he had started to listen to a call-in radio show that offered advice to mostly women. Once he thought he heard Jenny’s voice on the line—the program used a voice disguiser, but he recognized the cadence.

  My husband is not excited for our baby, the caller had said, her voice graveled through the machine. I asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl, and he said it didn’t matter.

  Does it matter? the host asked.

  No, said the caller. Not to me. But I’m surprised it doesn’t matter to him.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Brian was not in traffic when the baby came. He and Jenny were sitting on their sofa—a new sofa—on a Saturday morning when she gave a little grunt.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, but she was already up, jumping away from the upholstery as her water broke, beautifully, he thought, just a trickle on her jammy pants and house slippers.

  And then it was happening. He drove carefully to their hospital. There was valet so he used that. The attendants brought a wheelchair for Jenny, and she accepted it gracefully. There was some waiting, some paperwork. Mostly, from his perspective, just waiting. When he went to Jenny in the room, she was reclined, and sweating. He had a hard time understanding it. Women had been having babies for thousands of years, but somehow the process had not sped up, unlike, say, intercontinental travel or building a fire. He wondered if there were drugs the doctor should be using or if there was something Jenny should be doing differently—or something he should have done, like driven her to yoga classes. She had talked about yoga, but after he got out of the car at the end of the day, he was incapable of getting back in. He had told her to drive herself and she had given him a sad smile.

  “It’s couples yoga,” she had said,
and the idea scared him enough that he went straightaway to take a shower.

  After some more time passed, he was hungry and the hospital vending machine offered only questionable granola bars and candy. He chose a Twix that was stale enough to further affect his morale.

  He tried to focus, but all he could focus on was that for weeks he had been thinking of getting a new car. For as long as he had known Jenny, she had never owned a vehicle. He was not sure she should be at home all day with the baby and no car. Also, he was tired of running errands. As he waited, he thought about the car situation extensively. Jenny in the car, driving with their baby. The child in the car, strapped in securely. The shine on the wheels, the new paneling. The gauges, glowing brightly against Jenny’s cheeks and carefully illuminating the temperatures and pressures of the vehicle, in constant, quiet confirmation that everything was functioning normally.

  It was hours later when their daughter came. He was in the room with her, and Jenny gripped his hand—still, her fingers did not seem swollen—and Brian’s thoughts went blank for a moment, as if he had gotten an electric shock or the wind knocked out of him. When his head started firing again, he had a feeling not unlike successfully plunging out a garbage disposal, the pipes freeing with a satisfying gurgle.

  They had a girl, tiny and new, with crumpled ears and gooey hair.

  Finally, the knot in his stomach moved.

  He had never seen anything like Jenny’s face when she met their daughter. He had to sanitize his hands again, and put on a fresh gown over his rumpled clothes, but he held her while she screamed a perfect, whole sound, and he brushed his lips across her wrinkled forehead and whispered to her that her mother had done so well, that he was so happy to be there with both of them.

  Her body was warm in his arms.

  He thought maybe things were changing.

  Chapter Eight

  Irene

  Winter, 1974

  That girl Kathleen would not stop following her, and it was starting to piss Irene off, and it was also starting to make her scared. She didn’t know what Kathleen knew, but she had to assume she suspected about the baby.

  Twice Kathleen had brought her brown-bag lunches, and twice Irene had accepted them. She shouldn’t have, but she was hungry. Pregnant and hungry.

  Did Sammy tell? He had promised he wouldn’t. The baby was supposed to be their secret, until they could sort it, and then Sammy had broken through the ice, and then Sammy could not be revived, and then Sammy’s blue face was in the casket. She knew the funeral parlor put makeup on his face to make him look more alive, but it didn’t work. He looked pinched and stoic, not like Sammy at all. And she could see the blue from the cold, even beneath the pancaked rogue.

  What could Kathleen know of her guilt—Sammy had been sneaking out of her window, off to his sister’s basketball game, but also away from Irene’s father. She snorted at how stupid it was, and kept replaying the night. How much would her father have cared, that she had a boyfriend. Maybe she hadn’t had to hide him. The sex, yes, but not the person himself, not Sammy.

  Sammy might have charmed her father, and if he didn’t at first, he would have kept after it with that same Henderson doggedness that this Kathleen had.

  Leave me alone, she wanted to say to the sister, and at the same time Come here.

  Could the sister understand?

  I was going to be his bride—the word so formal, so weighted. She turned the word over on her tongue.

  That’s right, she thought, bride.

  Chapter Nine

  Melanie

  Spring, 2007

  One thing about Alex, her man from San Antonio, was that he was persistent. He stopped by her office; he emailed her links to articles about the parent company, or about the psychology of marketing, or analytics that he thought she would find interesting. Sometimes he instant messaged her and asked if she wanted a coffee; usually she did not answer, even though she did read the articles and did think about the coffee. On the morning of their co-worker’s funeral, she thought she would come to regret giving him her cell number, even though it was in the company directory. He was adamant in ensuring she would not cancel, texting her a reminder and verifying where he was supposed to pick her up. An experienced dater, Melanie had given him just the intersection, not wanting him to know exactly which townhouse was hers.

  That morning, she had the strange feeling of waiting, when the space between everything was too long. She clutched her cellphone and looked at her shoes and wished for something to do. When he pulled up—finally, she thought, though he was five minutes early, and she had only been waiting for five—she did not recognize him at first because he was in a sedan, and she had expected a minivan, as he had two children. She had no idea about their ages, other than youngish. Maybe a girl and a boy or maybe two boys. She could not recall ever asking.

  They said their hellos, she belted herself in, and he asked if she would navigate and handed her a sheet of directions. Even in the age of GPS, she also preferred to print her route. For the next thirty minutes, all they said to one another was, It looks like you should turn right here on Evans, and Thank you, and You’ll want to get into the left lane at 124th, and Okay.

  It was a relief to Melanie when they—finally—parked. Inside, the Mason’s lodge had the same linoleum tiles and cinderblock walls and the same sagging paint as the average church basement, and she was struck by how sad it was: the toilet in the lady’s room running, and the inkjetted meeting handbills curling at the edges on bulletin boards that were pinned so many times the cork was like a minefield. Their office had paid for the food, subs and chips. She would have thought the sandwiches, wrapped and sliced into halves so that their contents could be displayed in a cardboard catering box, were unbecoming for the occasion if she had not known it was Kyle’s favorite lunch. Desperately, she wished she had a Bloody Mary with a beer back but made do with a warm diet soda and three bottles of water.

  There were a few other people from the office, and Melanie thought she recognized one man in a very plain suit from corporate, but she was not sure. She felt strange sitting with Alex, but no one seemed to notice. They chatted with the other people at their table, who she understood to be Kyle’s friends from high school, about nothing, mostly. When topics regarding the weather and the quality of the sub sandwiches were exhausted, they sat quietly, and Melanie tried to think of something else to say that was not about why they were all actually there.

  She counted herself lucky that she had not been to a lot of funerals, and so she was not that good at them. Like any other event, she supposed, there was a skill to doing it right. Tradeshows required the stamina to smile and be extremely diligent about fresh breath. Weddings required the ability to pace trips to the bar and to wear shoes stylish enough to look good and comfortable enough to dance in. Work socials meant a willingness to talk to anyone and to ask them a balance of questions so as to seem interested and not so many as to appear prying. Funerals, she was not sure. Conservative dress, yes, but she thought most everyone would just like to close their eyes and cry. That is what she wanted, to close her eyes and cry, all of them silent except for some sniffling.

  When people had finished eating, Kyle’s wife, Amanda, stood at the front of the room, and the low chatter halted. She had brought a little portable stereo, and she asked for folks to come to the front and offer a remembrance of her husband. Melanie stared at the green plastic tablecloth and fingered a pepperoncini that had fallen from her sub; the first mourners approached the mic and others began to queue. The family told old stories of diapering Kyle, of how he had been as a child. Other co-workers talked about late nights at the office when the company had just been starting, long before the acquisition.

  We solved a lot of problems, one said. A few of these were related to work.

  A woman from her table told a story of sneaking out to meet him, when they were freshm
en at school, and how she had fallen into the river and screamed for him because she thought she was drowning. Melanie could have told her that drowning is silent. As competent as the body is, the lungs, the mouth, the throat, cannot simultaneously vocalize and gasp for air, but she listened to the woman. It was a warm summer night, and it was only when Kyle came into the water fully clothed after her that she realized if she’d just put her feet down, she could touch the bottom. That was the thing about him, she said, he helped first and asked questions later.

  Alex looked sobered, the heat of San Antonio knocked straight out of him, and Melanie dug into the pocket of her sweater for a tissue.

  She hoped it helped Amanda to hear how her husband had been loved and that the words would dissolve the grubby walls and the paper plates, silence the leaky plumbing. When the eulogies were finished and people were making the motions to leave, she thought she should say something. She had sent Amanda flowers the day she had heard, and now the gesture seemed awkward and trite—she had only met her once before, in the parking lot of the office. Kyle and his wife carpooled, even though her office was not particularly close by, probably holding hands through the worst bits of traffic, or at least Melanie hoped they did. She hoped they felt safe and matrimonial in their Honda, cruising evenly through the urban dust and the potholes and past the single-occupant drivers who had nothing to do but be enraged at the taillights in front of them or stay absorbed on their phones.

  As Melanie approached, Amanda turned and thanked her for coming. She said the flowers were nice. She said she loved lilies because the smell reminded her of being a girl in Kansas.

  “We’re all so sorry,” Melanie said.

  Amanda nodded. Melanie squeezed her arm—why did people do this, she wondered as she was doing it. To check to make sure a survivor was still alive? She wanted to fold this woman, this young widow, into her, but they embraced only lightly, and one of the aunties implored that Melanie take some of the sandwiches. She wanted to decline, but she thought about the family scraping food into a bin, so she agreed and bagged a couple of subs and a few more cans of diet soda. There was also a little basket of pine starts in plastic tubes that were meant to be planted in memorial to Kyle, and Melanie shoved three of the seedlings into her purse.