If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  “See you around, Irene,” he said.

  “I’ll meet you for lunch tomorrow,” she said, as he was turning to leave, and he looked back at her. “That would be nice,” he said.

  Inside the house, she lay on her bed in the dark, breathing grass and mud and him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Melanie

  Summer, 1987

  In their apartment, her mother still cooked, even if it was cheap stuff like bulk frozen chicken breasts and canned sauce that she boiled down with leftover wine and garlic because buying six pounds of tomatoes was too expensive. Melanie would sit and fiddle with her schoolwork while her mother sautéed. There was a gray light over the kitchen table and a gray light over the stovetop. The walls were gray from all of the fat that had smoked off of all of the meals that had been prepared by them and by previous tenants, and Melanie’s eyes were gray from the drudgery of school.

  Sometimes she went to her father’s. So far, it was during school breaks. He started traveling more, and he said his job made it too difficult to watch over her, though she was almost thirteen and she did not think she needed much watching over. He also said that he had to work more to pay child support, but Melanie knew this was not true because she had found his un-cashed checks tucked into an envelope in the kitchen junk drawer when she needed some batteries.

  His house was much nicer than the apartment, but the time passed very slowly. He had a small outdoor pool, and she liked to sit by it, the aqua reflected back at her, the water very still and stinking of chlorine. She liked to watch the shine when a small breeze came up, the tiny ripples when a wasp landed and broke the surface. In her bathing suit, she read magazines, the pages curling in the heat, and she studied the horoscopes—she was a Cancer, the crab, and she thought a lot about walking sideways, between her two parents, between the life she had now and the home they had before.

  Sometimes that first summer after the divorce, her father wanted to get out of the house. That was how he would put it; Let’s get out of the house, he would say. He bought her a horseback riding lesson on a mangy, overworked pony. He took her to the park by the river, where they dutifully licked ice cream until there was nothing left of hers but a mushy cone. Once they went to Denver and he sent her up in a carnival hot air balloon while he stayed on the ground. She knew she was supposed to pretend that she did not know why her mother had left her father, but she saw the gloss on his eye when he looked at the girl taking tickets for the ride, she had on a dirty shirt and did not seem that much older than her. The carnival girl’s father operated the balloon, and Melanie did not want to go up in the air with him, but she did anyway, peeking over the basket as the man worked the burner and her own father became small. It was a sunny day, and the heat and the propane made her woozy.

  Her father lived in his house alone, mostly. Occasionally there was a woman just leaving when her mother dropped her off, or someone pulling up the back drive when she was being picked up. Once Melanie had found a fresh lipstick in the hall bathroom. She put the lipstick in the refrigerator, right by her father’s half-and-half, so he would know she had seen it.

  In the balloon, she wondered what would have happened if she had asked the carnival girl to come with her, if they had left their leering fathers on the ground to distract themselves, swapping stories, while their daughters sailed up until the rope was taut. What if the carnival girl had a penknife in her pocket and she sawed carefully through the tether, slicing the twists of jute one by one, until the balloon loosed and the two girls floated away, just another bright spot in the blinding sky.

  * * *

  Sometimes on the way home from school to meet her mother at the bank, Melanie would walk by their old house. It was not exactly on the way, but if she was quick in the library and skipped her trip to the park, she could get to her mother and not be late.

  From the outside, the house looked almost the same to her. There was new siding, but the same old eaves buckled under the weight of leaves that hadn’t been cleaned out since last autumn. There were brown circles on the grass from dog piss. The compression arm on the screen door had lost its snap, so it was always half ajar, like a warning.

  She never saw anyone come in or out of the house, but the drapes had been changed and her mother’s climbing rose knocked from the trellis. The house as she had known it had not been perfect, but she thought it could have been, if there had been more time.

  * * *

  The apartment was the first place they had come after the split, and Melanie figured they would be there for a long time. Her mother did not ramble. In school they were studying the history of the Oregon Trail, and Melanie could not say that she preferred the politics of Westward Expansion to her mother’s. They had been instructed to choose one stretch of trail and draw a detailed map of it. Melanie picked the last miles leading to Oregon City, the end of the line. Her map had a little key to mark points of interest—clean water, wild onion patch, blackberry grove. Her teacher thought this was very clever, so Melanie did not tell her what she had really been thinking: dead horse, poison oak, dysentery.

  Her father was more like the pioneers than her mother. He was the one who looked out across the horizon and wanted more than a small place to live and a tidy routine. The thing about the divorce was that her parents did not seem any happier apart than they had together, just older.

  In the balloon, she had thought about jumping over the side. She did not really want to do this, but she liked the idea of a freefall and the wind holding her, the look of shock on her father’s face when she landed a few feet from him, hair windblown and eyes shut. The operator probably would not have stopped her, though his daughter might have.

  Once, not very long before the divorce, her father was supposed to come home on a Tuesday, but he did not. Her mother was making coq au vin, and it smelled like a miracle, chicken and wine and bay leaf. Maybe that was when she felt the first groan in the house. While the rooster stewed from tough to tender to tough again, her mother waited for lights in the drive.

  On that night, Melanie selected the record—she loved Kim Carnes—and she sat in the dark with her mother while their dinner burned.

  Her mother had a story about how she had met her father when he was fresh off his military service after he had been drafted in late 1971. In this story her mother was a brunette girl with legs up to there, and her father was handsome in his tattered green coat. They married quickly. Her mother had saved some money from her job working the food line in the hospital kitchen, and they put a down payment on the car her mother still drove, and they found the house. Melanie knew she was born immediately after they got married, maybe a little too quickly for the math to add, but she was not sure, exactly, when their anniversary was. Once in a while on a long night, like the Tuesday her father did not come home, her mother would have more cocktails than was customary, and she would tell Melanie that it was better to wait. It was better to see some of the world on your own first, because marriage was hard.

  Her mother had not waited when she was nineteen with blue eyes wide, so she waited with the stereo shouting love ballads and the oven sizzling. Melanie wanted her father to come home too, maybe even more than her mother did. She did not know what was so hard about getting back to the house before dark; she did it all the time. She did not know what was out there that could keep him.

  What is better than the candlelight on the mantel, she wondered, the leaves on our vines? She would have drawn a thousand more maps with reliefs shellacked in glitter, roads demarcated with more precision than the best cartographer, if any would have led him to them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jenny

  Fall, 2005

  Even after the children were born and had gotten well into growing, Jenny did not go back to work. She missed having her own money, but other than economics, it seemed to her that jobs were just something people did because they didn’t
have something better to do. She understood she was looking at it from a place of privilege—she’d grown up poor—and sometimes she did think about going back, especially after Connor, the second, who would not stop crying. Stella was only two when Connor was born, and she was constantly sneering at her brother and pulling the pans out of the low cabinets. Finally, Jenny cleaned out one of the bottom drawers and told Stella it was just for her, filling it with old kitchen things: an apple corer long gone dull, a silicon coated whisk that was chipping, a set of cracked measuring spoons. Then, at least when it worked, Stella would sit on the tiles and open and shut her drawer, taking everything out and putting everything back in, over and over again, and Jenny could simply step over her while bouncing Connor.

  Now that both the children were a little older—Stella was five and Connor three—it was easier to keep them busy, but still the days felt very long. She prayed, sometimes, that was the closest word for it, for her husband, Brian, to not work late. With Stella in Kindergarten for half days, Jenny was calmer, but she still watched the clock as she started dinner, making some small negotiations.

  If he is on time, I won’t mention the hall toilet is running. I will fix it myself.

  If he is ten minutes late, I will smile. I will ask about traffic.

  If he is beyond an hour, I will remind him he is missing time before Stella and Connor go to bed. Gently. I will be gentle, and I will ask him to read them their stories.

  If he does not come home at all…

  On occasion these tiny bargains saw Brian sloping through the doorway in a suit crumpled from sitting all day at his desk and spending an hour in the car, but usually there was no sound of tires gripping the concrete of their driveway, no key scraping the lock.

  In those loops where he did not arrive at all, she felt ragged and worn-out, but mostly frustrated, and she didn’t see how going back to work would change anything. They’d have more money, but she didn’t think they needed more money. Brian had suggested that the kids would benefit from being around their peers in daycare or aftercare, but Jenny didn’t think either of them would like it all that much. The half-school days were hard enough. They were mostly solitary children, and prone to colds. He didn’t know them as well as she knew them, how could he, gone all the time, though she never said this to him.

  Her own father had left when she was a child, and she knew he wasn’t anyone worth measuring against, but she couldn’t help but to compare. Brian was doing better: at least he provided.

  Part of his working long hours had to do with Brian being in line for a promotion, though if he got it, he would also have to travel. He worked in software sales, and when her mother had asked her to explain what the program was, as she called it, did, Jenny was at a loss.

  “It’s something with banks, like processing transactions,” she had said, because she did not really know either, and because she thought this would make her mother lose interest.

  Jenny did not feel good about the prospect of a travel schedule for Brian, when the stretch of highway between home and office already seemed longer than a transcontinental flight. She wondered what it would be like when he had a real reason to be gone. She conceded it had been her idea to move to the suburbs after she had gotten pregnant with Stella, and she conceded that she had willingly quit her job, because she felt like she could. Her belly had bloomed, a halo around her, and she saw a chance to sink into the circle and disappear there for a little while. He had been angry about it at first, but that had passed.

  She took care of everything. She made his life easier. She had always wondered about women who had careers, like she once had, leaving work and not going back, but now she understood the appeal of a space where she was the absolute authority. It did not even matter that her children did not always listen to her, and it did not matter that they misbehaved and that sometimes she got angry with them for fighting, or that they demanded to follow her into the bathroom. They were hers. They belonged to her, and the world they inhabited belonged to her, and now it was Brian who had something she could not understand.

  By the time Connor was toddling, there were spans of weeks that she could count on her husband not coming home on weekdays at all, and in these times she tried calling him at work in the day, and the administrative assistant sent her to his voicemail. She called his cell direct, and he would not answer, and she would be angry, because at home, he was always on his phone, or checking for the red blinking lights that meant he had a message, sprinting across the house if he had left the mobile on a countertop out of immediate reach. Sometimes at dinner, she would ask him to put it away, and sometimes she would be talking and he would look down at the screen, and she would just stop and wait for him to finish what he was doing as he scrolled or typed or frowned.

  Once she told him that she did not believe he had so many meetings that he couldn’t call her back.

  “I’ve seen you take calls everywhere,” she said. “Everywhere we go you take calls and text.” She listed some of the places where she had seen him do this recently. At Stella’s dance recital, his phone went off while his daughter was in mid-twirl, and he took the call. Before dinner, two nights ago, with everyone at the table, just as she was about to serve, they waited for twenty minutes while he took a call.

  He said that they did not have to wait for him, and she said that she was trying to teach their children manners, to wait for everyone to be present.

  Or at the indoor swim park, last Saturday, where he was visibly annoyed at the presence of so much water, so dangerous for the electronic workings of his phone.

  “Those were all work calls,” he said.

  Now, when he called her, he called to tell her he was staying in the city with one of his friends, and he acted like they lived in New York or London. Like the city was hours away. She wondered if it was the effect of the suburbs, creating distance, built to create distance. They were just outside of Denver, a big town, a town she liked, and major to the region, but not a metropolis. Their house was thirty minutes from his office with no traffic, and by the time of night he was finally checking in with her, the roads would have cleared. She would even offer to pile the kids into the car and come get him—when he drank too much at a company happy hour, or if he felt too tired to drive safely after a long day, or if he pushed it, saying, Well, if I come home now, I won’t get back in time in the morning to get decent parking, so I’ll just leave the car in a good spot overnight—and every time he said no.

  “Okay,” she would say. “So take a cab,” but he refused this as well, as an unnecessary expense, a hassle. It was tempting to pinch Connor, who cried easily, to try and sway Brian, to try and make him feel some type of fatherly compulsion, or to say Stella had a burning fever, but she always decided she should save these measures in case she really needed him.

  He told her that he was working so she did not have to.

  “I’m fine,” he would say. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She was not worried if he was fine or not fine.

  He said she didn’t understand the pressure of being the breadwinner, even though he had to know that she did: she had taken care of herself for a long time before she met him. They were both already thirty when they married.

  Once she asked him to explain to her exactly where he was sleeping when he stayed out, and he said, Gary’s. He said he had clothes there.

  She remembered Gary, and she remembered his small apartment downtown next to the state capitol, in a building with a perpetual sign that read 1 Beds: Inquire. She was not exactly sure what Gary did, but she did recall the patina that blanketed the apartment, dirt and hair and moth dust, the cabinets crammed full, one greasy towel in the bathroom—she could not imagine there was anywhere for an extra shirt of Brian’s, clean and pressed like he would need for work, and she could not imagine that Brian was really so organized that he had a full set of clothes at a drinking buddy’s house. S
he had not seen Gary in years, and once she asked if he had moved or if he had changed much, and Brian dodged, saying that Gary was the same as he had always been.

  In these days, she took deep breaths. She put the children to bed, reading to them each from books they liked. She missed when Connor was still small enough that she could hold him while she read to Stella. It was easy to focus on and finish the books. The slim bindings and the sometimes intentionally clumsy artwork paired with straightforward sentences comforted her. After their tiny snores had started, and she had successfully closed their doors, she focused again on breathing, poured herself a generous glass of wine, and wondered if she was happier with her husband or if she had been happier without him. She wondered if it had been a mistake to have children so early in their married life—they had waited two years, but that still felt like nothing, like she was still getting to know him, even as he pulled away from her, slowly, like cream from milk.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Irene

  Summer, 2007

  As the summer fires started, Irene felt the pressure from the heat and the smoke had bled down into everything, like a low hum, like it was not only the charcoal in the air making it hard to breathe.

  Over three decades ago, Irene had given up her baby girl, and she thought of her every day. This, she figured, was not so unusual.

  She’d be what they called a “bio-mom” now, but it was different in the 70’s. She and Kathleen had worked it out, Kathleen’s mother had helped. The father, Sammy, Kathleen’s brother, was dead, and Irene had been only fourteen. She’d not turned fifteen until after Melanie was born.

  She didn’t think Melanie could ever understand the shame they all felt then, how making their plan seemed so reasonable, and how they never really thought of it as lying. It seemed ridiculous now, that they’d gone through so much trouble to keep Melanie secret. Times had changed.