If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  Simon always went to that place when he missed his father or when he was confused. Until he found the boy, Sammy, he had always thought of it as looking into nothing. Another Stevens man, tending the beacon for no one.

  They had conceived. There was one miscarriage first, but Bonnie said she wasn’t sure, maybe she’d been wrong, but Simon bit his tongue. One more time, only, he thought, And then I’m getting that operation a man can get.

  What Simon knew, when he found him, was why his parents kept trying, navigating through heartbreak after heartbreak. It was better to have a short time with a child than no child at all.

  He felt sure of this, even if his own boy, Brian, was just barely out of diapers.

  He was not ashamed to admit that he had been scared to see the dead boy’s face, lips purple and hair tangled, and to see how he was so young. Even frosted at the lashes, there was youth at his face.

  Simon was still eligible for the draft when Brian was born, but he did not say anything to Bonnie. He thought it would be hard to get an exemption, and he was not sure how it all worked. She did not like to have the television on, so he kept an eye on the newspaper for the announcements, and he thought of what his father had said. We had our number, and Simon prayed to no one in particular that his number had already come up, decades ago in a cramped house where the wind howled off the plains and his mother hoped for him, or someone else, when he was everything to her.

  After he took the man and his other sons back home, Simon went to the station. He wished his father would be there, shuffling through his paperwork and making coffee, but there was only the other patrolman, waiting for Simon to return the car.

  “I guess you heard it on the scanner,” he said to his colleague, and his colleague nodded.

  “Go home,” he said. “Do the paperwork tomorrow when you have a clear head.”

  “Not sure my head’s going to clear about this anytime soon,” Simon said.

  “It will. Maybe see Frank? He’s good on these things. He always helped me.”

  Simon nodded. It didn’t think it was fair to go to Frank, his father. He thought of the dead boy’s own father and how he had fallen there on the threshold to the house, the light from the living room shining onto the porch where Simon stood, and the two other boys circling, helping the man to the cruiser and making sure he had his gloves. The man was lucky to have more than one, Simon thought. The others would help him. His own parents’ others could not. The boy Samuel would rest too soon. The man and his remaining sons and his wife and the sisters would mourn him. Simon would go home and clutch his wife and child and wait until the morning to call his father. His mother would secretly watch the papers, too, for Simon’s birthday, there in black and white, but the number never showed. Every spring the lilac would bloom, like a gift.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Melanie

  Spring, 2007

  In her office mail, Melanie got a brochure for a conference called Doing More with Less—The RIGHT Way, and as she read it, she was sad about Alex, sad that she had sent him away from her in the parking lot of the strip mall bar, sad they had been there in the first place, sad that he was unhappy in his marriage, sad that she was more like her father than she might have ever imagined. To distract herself, she read the brochure again, an entire three days devoted to cost cutting, the apex of corporate efficiency.

  That afternoon she would be leaving for Cincinnati, a quick overnight to an industrial buyers meeting that she had put into the travel system before the latest austerity announcements, and as it had not yet been flagged, she had brought her slim carry-on to work and it was perched upright next to her desk.

  She liked to travel. She liked the hum of the planes and the disconnection, out of range from her ever-beeping email and her body tucked in snugly to the worn seats. It made her feel aware. Here are my arms, tight against my sides. Here are my knees, clamped together to avoid the knees of my fellow travelers. She empathized with the families who struggled with their over-packed luggage and their cranky children. People complained about screaming toddlers, but she put on her headphones. It’s their ears, plugged from the pressure, she sometimes muttered, or They can’t control it, they should chew gum. Even without kids of her own, she was sure they were generally not crying for the sole purpose of being annoying, and if they were, she tipped her mini serving of vodka to them in acknowledgment of their success.

  She did not see Alex before she left the office, but as she was in the air, the miles ticking by, she knew they needed the separation of a few states.

  The ride was a little bumpy, making people who did not fly often nervous. Wheels down, the dusk was just coming up, and the plane taxied to the gate of the airport balanced on the Ohio-Kentucky state line. She powered her BlackBerry on, and she started scrolling. In her personal inbox, coupons and announcements, including three reminders to change her refrigerator water filter from the company that she had ordered her last water filter from. In her work folder, notices for upcoming performance reviews, a thread about the budget reductions, and the usual all-company updates, but nothing she wanted to click. At the bottom was also a message from Alex. Subject line: Hey.

  She opened the message while a taxi driver navigated the twilight traffic. Hey, I’m sorry about last night. It’s hard. I don’t think you know how much different this is for me than it is for you, is all. Let’s have coffee when you are back.

  Tomorrow she would be a participant in a training conference, badged and coiffed, ready to learn about market conditions and perhaps even the parent company’s favorite, market penetration. She shuddered some. She reminded herself that she was good at what she did, that she had health insurance and a nice place to live. She reminded herself how much harder her life could be. She thought about things in a way she had not been present with in a long time, like, If my car is going to careen out of control and slam into a wall… if I am stuck outside on some cold night and then in the morning my body declines to wake against the crystalline ground and the clear air… There were so many different ways to die. Once she had read that sometimes the terminally ill experience an almost manic productivity—when they know it is happening, but still have a little time, they start working in a new way, stop caring about their jobs, stop caring about replacing their flooring in the entryway, for example, and focus on what they want.

  It seemed like a hard way to get to some kind of clarity, and she wondered how people who were in less dire scenarios kept their urgency from fizzling.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jenny

  Winter, 2005

  Stella had not exactly been perfectly mapped out, but she had not exactly been an accident, either. Frustrated with the idea that family planning was all up to her, she had flushed her birth control one night and then entered their marital bed with abandon. Weeks later, when she sat over the toilet, late, with the two blue lines, she wondered at first if she had made a horrible mistake. She had terminated once, years before she had met Brian, and she did not regret it, but then, flushed with love for her husband, she did not think she could do it again.

  She had been surprised it was so easy to conceive, and especially surprised that it was so easy for her and Brian to conceive. There were whispers on both sides. Brian was an only. She was an only. Her mother and her father were only children as well. She got the feeling not all of it was by choice.

  She remembered a time after she had first met Brian, when the sky was snowing one of those first, early rushes of soft, sloppy flakes that chills autumn out of the air, and the remaining fall leaves come down, wet and gloppy. In Denver, sometimes it was possible to watch the weather coming in off the Front Range. That day, the sky above the Rockies had been streaked gray, so Jenny went digging in her closet for a pair of boots she had not worn since the last spring had broken, and she polished out the grime and salt stains until the leather was plush and soft. The boots zip
ped snugly around her calves, making a pretty arc. She wore heavy leggings and a wool skirt, a sweater, and mittens, because she thought mittens were funny.

  Brian was taking her to dinner, and she was warm inside, dressed for outdoors, or maybe it was from the wine. They had a nice time, and later, they had met Gary—the same Gary her husband said he was always with now—for drinks, and she had liked him. He had a certain kind of unflinching charm back then, when they were young and compliments went a long way.

  A few days later, she was digging in her coat for a tissue and found the business card he had slipped into her pocket. He had written out his home number on the back and circled it. Though she had never called him, she still had the card, saved just in case.

  * * *

  When Stella began, before they knew she was Stella, Brian had noticed something about her, but she could tell he did not know what it was.

  “You look different,” he said.

  “I’ve been doing yoga,” Jenny said, but her heart jumped.

  “I’m not sure that’s it,” he said, but he went back to what he had been working on, and she practiced calmly inhaling and exhaling, waiting for the courage to tell him.

  * * *

  The other time she had been pregnant, it was a pure accident.

  When she had gone to her old college boyfriend, he was watching television on their small sofa. They were in their last year of university, both a little worried for what would happen next, but neither of them talking about it. She did not think people had to get married to demonstrate commitment, but she also knew that sometimes people did not get married—even after cohabitating and planning out joint budgets and doing laundry and all of the other everyday life things—because the commitment did not seem right.

  Over ten years had passed since that afternoon, but she still remembered the even balance of the test on her palm. How she tried to hold it still as she waited for it to reveal the results, even as her hands were shaking. Though the instructions said it could take up to a minute, once her urine had passed the control line, there was no waiting. The indicator was clear.

  “Hey,” she had said. “Can you pause that for a second?”

  Irritated at being interrupted, he had narrowed his eyes. It was the middle of the day, but he did not have classes, so he had a cocktail, and he swirled the ice.

  She lowered her hand so he could see.

  She told him it was a relief to her actually, to be only pregnant; she had noticed feeling off a week ago when they were out. She had ordered a beer that she had to choke through, her guts moving in an unusual way. She had worried she had stomach or throat or gland cancer. Or diabetes. Or lupus. She had not thought of conception immediately because she took her birth control every day at 7:15 a.m., a time she remembered very clearly, because it was the hour and minute the school bus used to pick her up on the dry road in front of her mother’s house.

  She flashed to the literature: Even with perfect use, hormonal birth control still presents some risk: the only fail-safe method to prevent unplanned pregnancy is abstinence.

  The look on her boyfriend’s face told her he did not agree that being with child was a better option than illness. This was another time where she practiced deep breathing.

  She was scared, but he was angry.

  When they had met, they had been at a birthday party for one of their mutual friends in a stuffy apartment, home to several cats that she never saw but whose fur clouded the air. After the cake, people crowded onto the small balcony to smoke cigarettes and pot and brush their arms against one another. They had liked each other then, meeting the next day for breakfast and drinking mimosas with their waffles to soften last night’s hangovers and laughing loud enough for the other people in the diner to turn. At his apartment, the one they now shared, he’d taken off her clothes slowly, in the full light of day.

  And now, so quickly, her body had turned into a wedge.

  She saw how he was sure that she was ruining his last year of school, maybe his life. How unprepared for any kind of consequences he was. How he could not believe this was happening to him.

  The apartment was a duplex that had been quartered, and she had moved in with him at the end of the last school year because she was there all the time anyway and his roommate was moving out. The unit was old, but in a charming way, in a half-restored building that had a dirt yard in the back, pitted and packed hard from some past occupant’s dogs. There was a pile of dusty bricks from a demolished chimney scattered in one corner near the chain-link fence. The summer she had moved in, Jenny had dug the yard and arranged the bricks until she made a terrace of red. By the time autumn came, they had a perfect spot to put a fire pit, and they sat outside burning leaves and drinking whiskey from the bottle. There were a few stubborn patches of grass that had responded to her watering can and shrubs she had pruned to look a little more intentional. They hosted one early autumn party where even when the breeze became cool, no one wanted go inside.

  A baby was not in her plans, then. She still punished him for a few days, because it hurt her, the way he reacted. She let him go sleepless, let him call his friends in a panic, let him think that she would turn two blue lines into a child that would bind them forever, like magic.

  The power of it was intoxicating. She could change everything.

  Later, when she finally told him she really had no intention of going through with the pregnancy, he came to the clinic with her and held her hand, and he did not blanch, or at least he did not show it. After, he had given her his coat when she could not zip her pants from the swelling. She had been surprised that her middle was bigger coming out than going in.

  When nine months had passed, though, she felt a panic. She felt an emptiness in a deep part of her, like an abandoned wasp’s nest, delicate paper curled around nothing. She held her belly sometimes, and she was constantly at her breasts, checking for tenderness. She monitored her cycle, even though it had always behaved evenly. Sometimes she was sure she felt the same catch in her insides, or she smelled something so strongly she believed it was happening again.

  He did not understand her sadness, when she would have been full term. It was harder to remember, she supposed, if it was not taking place in your own body, but for all the big deals men made about their sperm and their dicks, she thought he could have at least tried to think about how it might feel, months later, when something was supposed to happen, but did not, and she could neither talk to him about it nor forgive him.

  When they graduated, and she got her job at the law firm, she waited for two pay cycles, and then she rented her own apartment. It was almost amusing how hurt he was. After his protests about what it would have meant to have a child together, when she told him she was leaving, he looked like he had been punched, and stood half collapsed on the red brick cradling his own gut.

  And then she met Brian, and with Brian, her world orbited on a different axis. The red patio was a long time ago. Once or twice she had talked to her old boyfriend, but now it had been so long that even thinking about the hardest thing that had happened to them did not make her feel much of anything. The last time she saw him, he was passing the window of a coffee shop where she was meeting a co-worker, and she simply let him go by. It was strange to think she could go from sleeping with someone every night to not even knowing what part of town he lived in, or if he even still lived in town.

  * * *

  A few times after the kids had been put to bed, and she had gotten the call from Brian, she thought about dialing the digits on Gary’s old card to see if her husband was really there, splayed out on the undersized couch, sleeping toward a hangover, but she never did. She thought, Maybe his number has changed, maybe he would not tell me anyway, maybe it’s better if I just trust my husband, even though she was not sure if she did trust her husband. It was hard to tell if she was noticing something or if it was just that being with chi
ldren—people who were not that great at using words yet—made her pay too much attention to every small signal, like pooping or a poor appetite or mussed hair.

  For their part, the children did not seem to care. When he came home, they rushed him, toddled towards his legs and added greasy finger marks to the creases around the knees of his suit pants. When he did not come home, they shrugged, ate their macaroni and cheese and begged for a movie, which she indulged. She had not grown up with so much television—she had chores. She also had not grown up with a father in the house, but it was different knowing that he was gone for good. When she was young, Jenny and her mother would sit at the table and giggle and chat, and when she was honest, she remembered that they ate a lot of beans, and it had been a long time since she had put a dipper into a bag of bulk pintos to make a meal. She remembered how they would laugh about their farts, and how it was not until Jenny got to college that she understood that not everyone had grown up this way. In fact, few of the people that she met in school had any idea how to cook, even functionally, or how to be poor and happy at the same time.

  There were waves, she supposed. He came home, he did not. She was sad, she was not. The children bothered her, they did not.

  She did not have many friends left who were still childless, and even fewer who were still single, but when one of them called, she had found herself going on long diatribes about potty training or when to switch to solids and complaining that her nipples hurt. There would be silence on the other end of the line, or distraction—more than once she was sure she had been put on mute while someone vacuumed or ground coffee.

  When she was first pregnant with Stella, and also when Connor had been young, she cooked constantly, but now she never wanted to cook. Sometimes she would organize vegetables and cheese on a tray, and she was the first to admit that while it looked nice, it was not exactly dinner. She could not tell if it was because Brian did not come home that she had lost her motivation, or if it was because she had lost her motivation that he did not come home. She knew that it only took a few times of laying out a perfect roast and carving it herself while the children demanded chicken nuggets to stop putting in the effort.