If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  The situation suddenly seemed very difficult. Brian understood he could not hide from her through the entire weekend, and he wished he had done this when he was out of town or when Jenny and the children were visiting her mother. He thought for what seemed like a long time, and he wondered if he should just get up, but that seemed impossible. His BlackBerry was still in his pants’ pocket, and so he called the home phone. When she answered, she sounded puzzled; she would have seen his name on the caller ID. Please come upstairs, he said.

  When Jenny opened the door, she gasped. What the fuck? He understood how it must have looked to her, his clothes in a pile and a wound on his crotch, so Brian told her about the clinic and how he had thought this would be something that he could have taken care of, without bothering her, but now he realized there was a little more work involved than what he had anticipated.

  “Can you bring me a glass of water?” he had asked her.

  “You want me to bring you water,” she had said.

  “Cold water.”

  “Say please,” she had said, and Brian knew that she was very angry. He accepted this.

  “Please.”

  He had been relieved when she turned from the bathroom and he heard her padding down the stairs. The pain was picking up. His eyes were closed. It had been such a small incision, and they had shown him what they had done—two tiny pieces of his vas deferens on the stainless steel, he’d not known the name, but they told him, and it looked like bits of overcooked macaroni. They also told him they had put titanium pins in to close the holes, and in a panic he asked if he would now set off airport metal detectors. The nurse said that he had no idea, since she never flew and offered Brian a Valium. They had not wanted him to come on his own, but he had told them he just lived around the corner, and he had paid cash so they had worked with him.

  Jenny had come back, and he heard ice clinking. He was grateful for even the thought of coolness. Maybe she would get him an aspirin, he hoped. She was talking, but he could not really hear her, even though her voice was raised. The ice rattled in the glass, and he wished she would lay on the floor with him, her head in the crook of his arm like they did at night, her breath hot on his neck.

  When he blinked his eyes open into the light, Jenny was above him with the glass, and the water poured across his face. For a moment he thought he might cry, but the cold was so perfect. It calmed him.

  * * *

  When Brian was young, he had been a very average child, and an only child. He was not really sure why his parents never had another baby, and he could not say that he had ever wished for a sibling or that the topic had ever even come up. Some of his friends at school had brothers and sisters, and they mostly seemed annoying. They seemed like they made things crowded.

  Brian’s parents had not gone to college, and they were very keen on him having an education. He could say that if he had done one good, sacrificial thing in his life, it was putting himself through university. His family did not have money—his dad was a small-town cop and his mother a homemaker—and he was not really ambitious or bright enough to go after scholarships, so he worked full time and lived in a ratty studio apartment in a part of town that he was not sure his classmates even knew existed.

  Once when he came home, there was blood on the stairs of his building’s entryway, and when he told the building manager, the building manager said that he would get it cleaned up. Brian had said then that while he believed cleaning up the blood would be helpful, the building manager should consider their conversation to be Brian’s notice that he would be moving out.

  “I need it in writing,” the building manager had said.

  “Okay, I’ll get it to you tomorrow,” Brian had said. He was very tired. He had classes during the day and after that he worked in the stockroom of a grocery store, breaking down pallet after pallet of trucked in cereal and watermelons and mustard jars. The job was not as interesting as working at a coffee shop or a club, but it was union. The extra fifty cents after nine p.m. and on Sundays made a difference.

  The building manager thought for a second, and then he asked Brian if he would stay if the rent was lowered.

  “By how much?” he had asked.

  “How about fifty bucks?” He was a direct man, and Brian had no complaints about him. The building was horrible, but he did not actually think it was the manager’s fault.

  “Okay,” Brian had said. Fifty dollars was more than half a shift.

  They shook on it, and Brian stayed.

  That night in his apartment, he made sure that the dead bolt was engaged. He checked it several times. He was not sure whose blood had been on the building steps, and he reminded himself that it did not necessarily mean violence—maybe someone had sneezed and busted a capillary of terrific size. Maybe it was not even from a person. His grandmother, before she died, would sometimes get a jug of pork blood from the butcher’s and cook it down to make the black pudding her own grandmother had made. He could just as easily imagine an old woman with a recipe in her head tripping up the stairs and creating a spill similar to someone getting their face smashed in, so he tried to focus on this. He remembered that he had not really liked the pudding, but he had not disliked it either. He was not sure that he had ever really put it all together; if he had, he was sure as a child he would not have touched it.

  That night was a very long night. He was not a fearful person by nature, but there were sounds in the apartment that made him jittery and restless. He wondered why the building manager had not heard anything or noticed anything on the steps until late at night when Brian came home. He wondered if he had just missed whatever had happened, and even if it was just a grandmother stumbling on the stairs, shouldn’t someone have come to help her?

  Sometimes Brian was depressed by living alone. He thought if he fell in the shower and hit his head, his brains dashed into the tub with the soap and the water, the first people to notice him missing would be work, and the second maybe one of his professors who actually took roll. But they would not do anything—his job would give him a pink slip for a no call, no show, and his professors would scratch him from the class list. He had no friends who would report his absence, and while his mother would be upset if he did not call her from a payphone on Sunday, like he almost always did, the almost meant he was not regular enough that she would send some kind of squad. She would only keep close to the phone until Monday and have hope for the next weekend, Brian immobile in the tub, until the water ran cold.

  In the morning, he could not exactly say that he was grateful to be alive, but he was relieved. His dreams had been restless, and his sheets were wadded up around him. He thought of the fifty dollars.

  While there continued to be loud noises late at night or early in the morning, Brian resolved to stay in the apartment until he graduated. On that day, his parents sat in the stands of the school gymnasium, and he could have sworn that when his name was called, he heard them clapping through all the other chatter and applause, and for just a minute it was only the three of them, swelling with pride, for him.

  * * *

  The pasta Jenny was making turned out perfect, how he liked it, just a little al dente. He made his salad and watched his children pick around their vegetables. He felt his son and daughter were becoming stranger as they got older. They were either oblivious or hyperaware. He did not remember being like them. At his parents’ table, he would not have been allowed to make a pile on his plate of the things he did not like. He would have been told to eat it. It puzzled him how Jenny indulged them. He did not think this was the best way.

  Frequently, he thought back to what life had been like for them in their downtown condo, when he walked to work and Jenny boarded the train, her pretty shoes clicking down the pavement. He liked the shine of her hair and the way her skirts fell across her ass—her ass was still lovely; he was happy to have a wife who had stayed pretty—and he would watch
her walking until she turned the corner, and he would think how much he loved her and loved their life. He would think that he could not imagine waking up next to anyone but her, the mole on her cheek, the sour of her breath when she had been drinking wine all night.

  In those days, when he would come home early from work, he would ramble through the condo and wonder when Jenny would get in. He would listen for the train and miss her. He would make sure there were fresh ice and limes. Now, whether he was early or late, when he came home from traveling or when he was leaving, she was always there, with Stella and Connor. Sometimes when he swung his car around the last corner, he would hope that they were all out on an errand, but they never were. He would turn the key in the lock, hang up his coat, and disappear into the house to join them.

  This was why sometimes he didn’t come home at all. He told Jenny he was staying with Barry, an old friend from their past, but usually he just worked very late and then slept in his office. He had an inflatable bed, and he got up early and went to the building’s gym and then showered. He needed the space. Sleeping in the office reminded him of his old college apartment, the feeling of always being alert, and this helped him at work, helped him stay on an edge.

  Those years ago, he had his reasons for wanting to get the vasectomy on his own. He had been scared it would open up a conversation about a third child. He was scared Jenny would simply not like the idea. He was scared that at some point in the future, he and Jenny would divorce, and he would meet another woman who wanted children of their own, and if he had not already had the procedure done, he would give in to her.

  If he could do it over again, Brian wanted something different. He wanted to vacation in places where there was no kiddie pool reeking of pee and to live in a home that was not a tripping hazard from all of the plastic and plush toys scattered through the halls. He wanted to work late and call his wife from the office and suggest she get off the train a stop early and meet him for a drink.

  He wanted to see her walk into a downtown bar, in the deep of winter, steam coming off her hair, shaking snow from her coat, and watch every other man in the place look at the woman who had just rattled the door, the woman making a beeline for him, just like Jenny had, when they were new.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Melanie

  Summer, 2007

  It was June, and the summer had just started to open while Melanie typed in her office—she thought she felt it move, even, the almost imperceptible angling of the earth a smidge closer to the sun. Her budget email had finally arrived, and she had decided not to fight it, initialing each line-itemed reduction and returning the scan to her boss’s administrative assistant with no additional comments.

  * * *

  Alex had stopped by her office, but she had waved him away. Brian, from Chicago, had left her a message on her work line. She did not remember telling him where she was employed, but she figured he must have tried her ex-boyfriend Josh’s number first, as that was the number she had given him, and she wondered why he had called now. It had been three months. Maybe she had told him where she worked, or maybe Josh had said to try the office. Because she’s always there, he might have said. She had deleted the message and kept typing.

  Her mother called on her lunch break and asked if Melanie wanted to come to dinner with her and Irene, and she had told her that sounded nice. They were going to make pasta, so her mother was checking to see if Melanie was dieting.

  “I’m not going to change dinner,” she said, “but if you are doing that low-carb thing you might want to bring something for yourself.”

  “As long as there’s wine, I’m okay,” Melanie said, and she could feel her mother nodding.

  “Between you and Irene, I think I should invest in a vineyard,” her mother said.

  Melanie smiled. “You should,” she said. “I’ll go in thirds with you two. We can call it Triple Threat.”

  “I know this is what you do, honey, but the name needs a little work.”

  “Brands are not really what I do, Mom,” she said. “It was a joke.”

  At her desk, her report on the industrial marketplace was starting to really take shape. The conversations in Cincinnati had been helpful, giving her insights that she had not found through Internet research and by reading trade journals, and she had actually had a lovely time with a group of ageing rust-belters who liked cheap whiskey and classic rock. The report had some pretty graphs that she had built herself from different data points and were arranged in the document to break up the longer stretches of text. Each one was labeled and then indexed. The report was getting close to thirty pages. She was sure after she turned it in she would hear nothing, or next to nothing, and her hours of work would sit unreviewed on her boss’s desk, and the company would expand or not expand, and her charts would make no difference, though like her budget, she had decided not to care.

  In the bottom left hand of her screen, her instant message was flashing, Alex again.

  Coffee?

  No thanks, she wrote. But thanks.

  I want to see you.

  She ignored this and logged out. She was tired. She was tired of work, and tired of negotiating, though she did want a coffee. She was tired of men who were married talking to her, though she admitted that she talked back. Stopping would be easy. The easiest thing. Think of your mother, she thought. Think of what your dad did to her.

  The report was in its final stages. She sent it to the printer and then waited in the hall as the pages spooled out, crisp ink on the white paper.

  * * *

  The last time she had seen her father, it had not gone well. There was more distance between them than ever, now that she was grown up, now that there was no custody agreement. He still had the house with the pool, and he still had rounds of women who came by, but the house was sadder than ever, with dated carpeting and cracked concrete on the walkway. Now, he did not even try to hide his girls—his word—he either introduced them or told them to leave. The women were sadder too, older, more desperate, and less frequent. The house was like a monument erected to something important that had then been forgotten, the base of it getting rough and crumbly, and the curb overgrown with dry weeds.

  Once on a Tuesday, Melanie had come by after work, still in her business casual, her armpits a little damp and her face greasy from the day. Her father embraced her, lightly, the way a certain kind of co-worker might. He smelled like he had been drinking, and the wine spills in the kitchen proved it. She got some spray and a rag and went to work on his granite.

  “Leave it for the cleaning lady,” he said.

  “It will soak in and stain and then you’ll be pissed about it,” Melanie said.

  “Fine,” he said.

  They ordered dinner, Thai takeout, and Melanie picked through her rice as her father set to demolishing his noodles. He did not look good. His face was getting a deep drinker’s cast and his hair was nearly gone, though he seemed to be refusing to simply shave his head and accept it. There were some smooth spots and some tufts. He would be fifty-five this year—not really old yet, but past the point of pretending it was not happening.

  He wanted to know what she was up to, so she filled him in on the changes at work, how the acquisition required some adjusting. She told him she was traveling more, for now, and she told him that she sort of hated her job, but that it was also okay, she was an adult now, with a mortgage, just like everyone else.

  “How’s your mother?” he said, with his mouth mostly full.

  Melanie shrugged. “She’s the same. You could call her.”

  Finishing chewing his bite, he swallowed. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Mel,” he said.

  She thought his face looked a little soft, and his eyes, even if droopy from wine, alert, and she was not sure if she should push him, saying Like what?, or There’s a lot I do know, or I’m sure Mom already told me whatever you
think you have, but then she did not say anything. Her father went back to his noodles, she back to her rice. Like what?, she wondered, but it did not matter. His home phone had rung at least four separate times, and he finally answered it.

  “Sure,” he said into the handset. “Whenever you want. Yep, she’s on her way out.”

  It was hard for her now, in her thirties, to remember how they had been, the three of them, in the house on the street flanked by trees, her mother’s flowers ringing the lawn and her mother’s cooking making the kitchen smell warm and perfect. When her parents met, he must have been different, he must have been kinder and he must have made her mother feel something she could not get anywhere else. Where was that now, she wondered? She could not find the part of him that her mother had fallen in love with, even as a shadow.

  * * *

  Though the summer had just begun, there was fire across the Colorado Front Range. Melanie fortified herself by drinking water, by giving her tiny yard an extra shot with the sprinklers. She was not in any immediate danger, but the smoke streaked the sky a sinister gray-brown and through the particulate of charred tree and deer and incinerated homes, the sunsets blazed hot orange and pink.

  At the office, her co-workers were agitated. Her place was in central Denver, edged by pavement, a brick warehouse, and another row of townhouses, which were mostly unsold and empty. There was little to burn besides dirty glass and chipped asphalt, so she was safe, even if the municipal trees were drooping. Her neighborhood was still coated in spring pollen because they had mostly had dry storms where the wind picked up and hurled gravel, while the clouds cracked with lightning. The dry air sizzled the rain before it reached ground.