If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  Still walking, she was nodding at each of the nurses, nodding at the other hallway pedestrians whose shoes squeaked on the polished tiles like hers did, and nervous because she did not know exactly what to do. The order of the rooms was confusing, 136 followed 128, and she looped several times before she saw the turn she had missed.

  The bed in 134-B was unmade and empty, and she was not sure if it was okay to sit on one of the chairs in the room. She wondered if she was remembering the room number correctly, so she went to find the closest waiting area. There were signs instructing that mobile phones should be turned off, but she reached for her BlackBerry anyway to text Irene. Where are you? I’m here, she typed.

  They must be gone for X-rays, or scans, or whatever it was that the doctors needed to look inside of her mother’s body, she thought, so she poured herself a cup of the bad coffee and settled into half of a threadbare sofa, and opened her laptop.

  There were no windows in the room, and the overhead lights were cranked to a level of artificial brightness that made it feel like night had fallen, and fallen deeply, even though she had only been there for a few minutes. The coffee was bitter and very hot, but she welcomed the warmth of it. As she swallowed, she felt the liquid travel down through her throat and land in her belly, and she closed her eyes to the feeling of heat and of being aware of her body, intact and alert.

  There was no wireless connection, but she did not tether her phone. She had a spare power cord in her laptop bag, so she plugged in just in case there was no outlet later. On her screen, the organization of her inbox was comforting, and as a distraction, she pulled up her industrial report to make edits to a difficult passage. The paragraphs of text were very dense, and she had been working on bulleting out some sections and adding more charts to others. The corporate reader, she knew, could not focus on page after page of sentences. They liked their information bite-sized and already concluded.

  “Melanie?”

  She looked up over the top of her screen at the woman across from her, slumped back into the cushion of the worn furniture, and recognized her, almost.

  “Hi,” Melanie said, trying to keep the upswing of inflection out of her voice so her greeting would not sound like a question. “How are you?”

  “Here,” the woman said. “We are here,” and she motioned to the man next to her. The man, Melanie placed immediately: Brian from Chicago, whom she had gotten drunk and spent the night with. Now his hand was limply clasped with the hand of the woman who had spoken her name. She had not noticed them when she had come into the room, preoccupied, she had not seen anything familiar about either one of them. Where was Irene, she wondered, and she checked her phone.

  Brian would not look at her.

  “We met when I did an audit, when your company got acquired, right? I’m Jenny,” the woman said, and Melanie did remember her, remembered that she had liked her. Jenny had talked about her kids and about trying to get back to work now that they were older.

  Melanie closed her eyes, cradled the paper cup with the coffee, took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  Brian would still not look up, and Jenny did not introduce him. They all sat in the quiet. Her laptop made a pinging sound, so she closed the lid.

  It was Jenny who spoke again, finally. “My mother,” she said. “Car accident.”

  “Mine too,” Melanie said. “I don’t know how serious it is.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not the first time,” Jenny said, and went on to tell how her mother, Lucy Estelle, was a hopeless drunk, and yet she insisted on driving. Today, in broad daylight, she had taken the car Brian, her husband—she motioned to him, and he nodded almost imperceptibly and then kept scrolling through his phone—had bought when their first baby was born, and then rammed it into another car.

  “She’s not a baby anymore, though,” Jenny said. “Our daughter. She’s in second grade.”

  “Was she in the car?”

  “No, no. Just my mother in law. Thanks for asking. Thank goodness it wasn’t Stella. Or Connor.”

  Melanie wanted to say, Right, they go to private school. Or, I think I might have seen their picture, but then she remembered Brian had not shown her any pictures, he had shown her travel receipts and rupees, spread them out on the rim of the bar counter like a reef, and the reef made a harbor, and inside of the harbor Melanie and Brian could have been anyone, but they had been themselves, telling one another their real names and talking about their real lives.

  Melanie felt her stomach turn. “I hope the other driver was okay,” she said.

  “We don’t know yet,” Brian said. He still would not look at her, but she kept her eyes fixed on Jenny anyway.

  It had to be both of them. This woman, Lucy Estelle, must have rammed her mother, and how strange, she thought, to watch Brian hold his wife’s hand. How strange the way they three spoke, politely, even if one mother might have killed the other, and to discover this link now. They might have been friends, if things were different. Only a few days ago, his voice was on her line at work. Maybe it was her penance, Melanie thought, for indulging this woman’s husband, for the note she had left in his trousers.

  “Oh,” Melanie said, the coffee poking at her. “You know, if you are interested, they ended up taking most of your recommendations, it just took some time.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” Jenny said. “I wasn’t sure about that place. And it had that bad air-conditioning.”

  “Well, that’s still not fixed,” Melanie said. She let herself smile. It was okay. She was making small talk with Brian’s wife, and she was not sure if he had shock or resignation on his face.

  “We listed the building as a liability in the report,” Jenny said.

  “Interesting,” Melanie said. The coffee cup was crumpled in her hands.

  “It’s funny, how all those things turn out,” Jenny said, and she got up from her chair to refill her water. The machine clanked when it expelled ice and hissed when it ran liquid.

  “Yes, very funny,” Melanie said.

  Brian’s eyes stayed locked to the floor.

  Jenny went back to her seat with her husband, and Melanie got a new cup of coffee and drank it, even though each sip tasted progressively worse. She opened her laptop again, but this time the order of her folders failed to produce the same calming effect.

  They waited. At intervals, Jenny or Melanie would chat with one another, absently, as Brian stayed silent. Melanie wanted to ask Jenny, Do you think your mother killed my mother? but she did not, and she checked her phone compulsively for a message from Irene.

  When a nurse came, the two women jumped from their chairs.

  “Henderson?” the nurse asked. Her scrubs were purple and crumpled.

  “Me,” Melanie said, gathering her laptop bag.

  “She’s back in her room, you can go to her.” Melanie nodded and turned down the corridor, not waiting for any news of Jenny’s mother.

  In the room, Kathleen was near sleep, and swollen looking. Irene rose to hug Melanie and then immediately sat again.

  “They’re keeping her overnight, to be sure,” Irene said.

  Melanie nodded. “The other woman?” she asked. The monitor beeped in the background, and a tube—oxygen, she assumed—whooshed.

  “We don’t really know,” Irene said. “She was worse, though, maybe some broken ribs. A concussion. Both cars are totaled.”

  Melanie could not think anything other than that ribs did not sound so bad. Ribs would heal.

  She asked her mother how she felt, and her mother said she felt bad, but okay. She asked if she had seen the other driver, and her mother said she had seen nothing and that she only knew it was a woman because she had heard someone say so.

  The monitors beeped, and the oxygen line wheezed. “I know her daughter,” Melanie said, “From work
.”

  “Small world,” said Irene. “What’d she have to say?”

  Melanie thought for a moment. Her mother, draped in the hospital gown, Irene’s face, ashen and tired around her eyes. She wondered for a moment, how Irene had gotten there first, but it didn’t matter; Irene had always been there. She remembered a long time ago, when Irene’s father had died, her mother had pulled her out of school to go to the funeral. She was in sixth grade and they were supposed to dissect a starfish that day, and she had been looking forward to it—she had done her homework, and she was excited to peer into its arms, or its central body. Her textbook said the fossil record for sea stars dated back to 450 million years, and this was amazing and unfathomable to her. She was very angry that her mother was making her miss it for the service of an old man whom she hardly knew. Instead, she could have been with her scalpel and rubber gloves, uncovering the mysteries of the universe. The man was just a man who the few times she had met reeked of smoke and was covered in liver spots and hugged her too close.

  “Mel?” Irene said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “She said she was sorry.”

  “Me too,” said Kathleen, her voice muffled some from painkillers.

  Melanie stayed with Irene in the room until the hospital staff came to move her mother to an overnight bed, and they walked with her through the hallways as the gurney was being wheeled, holding her shoulder and hand. When they passed the waiting room, she looked for Brian and Jenny, but neither were there. She hoped Jenny’s mother was as okay as she could be, and she hoped she was not going to have to go to court; she knew her own mother would never press charges. Her mother had always been good at accepting when bad things happened—she shrugged, she licked her wounds, and she kept it to herself.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jenny

  Fall, 1988

  Jenny was young when her father left. There was one picture in a scrapbook her mother kept (the stranger-man cradling a baby to him, his hand covering her head, his eyes looking straight to the camera, not to her). Now all she had of him were the features in her own face that she could find no anchor for on her mother’s.

  * * *

  Once, when Jenny was in the fourth grade, there was a blue pickup truck parked among the school buses with a man at the wheel. The man was watching out, it seemed, for every girl who passed, and Jenny felt the bottom part of her stomach drop. Jenny, she heard him call, I know you know me, and she did know him, in the same way that he, who had not seen her in nine years, knew who to call out to. Her bus was just behind his truck, so she had to walk fully past him. Jenny, he called, come say hello to your dad. He reached across the cab and swung the passenger-side door open. She was old enough to understand he was good looking, in his way. She was old enough to understand why a different girl might hitch up her skirt and hop into his truck for a ride along the river, but she kept walking to her bus. Jenny!, he called, and crawled across the bench seat and scrambled onto the sidewalk. Get in the truck, he said, just as her foot touched the first step of the school bus stairs, the door open wide for her.

  “I’m your dad,” he said. “Get in the truck.”

  “Can’t,” Jenny said. “Mom’s waiting for me.” The first word she had ever spoken to her father: Can’t.

  “I’ll take you home directly,” he said, squinting against the low afternoon light.

  The school bus driver had her eye on Jenny, and she unbuckled her seat belt, got up, and extended her hand. “Come on,” she said.

  “Mom’s waiting,” Jenny said again, over her shoulder, because it was true. I don’t know you, she thought, but she did. She saw her face in his, and they had the same streaky hair.

  “I promise I’ll just take you straight home,” he said, but the bus driver was coming down the steps and pulling Jenny inside and hustling her into one of the rear seats and sitting her down next to a high school boy. Watch her, she said, and went back out to the man on the sidewalk, the man was climbing back into his blue pickup, peeling out of the dirt-paved school lot, screeching through the intersection in front of the school, and barreling onto the highway, just like her mother had always said, not in a hurry for much, except to get out of there.

  * * *

  In seventh grade, she went to Denver for the state science fair. She had placed third in her school’s contest, for a project called “Fire & Burning.” It was about chemical reactions. She had lit matches, flicked lighters, even torched a pail of garbage (with her mother’s permission) and then labeled and arranged her findings on a three-fold poster board. She had not worked that hard on the project, really—the other two winners had done much more than she had. “Air Pressure/Water Pressure: Pressure Under Pressure” and “Gears: Compare the Effectiveness of Different Lubricants” had won first and second, respectively. Jenny was a very distant third.

  Still, she set up her poster board on her table in the auditorium. Her mother had sewn her a tablecloth cut down from an old sheet that she sent through the wash with bright red powdered dye, and then trimmed it in yellow rickrack. Jenny agreed the cloth gave her station flair, but she did not believe it would actually help her rankings. This did not matter to her mother, who was there straightening the display and beaming. And for just a moment, she thought she saw her father slinking through the crowd, his heavy boots streaking the floor. The names of all the kids at the fair had been in the paper. She did not think he was the type to read the paper, but she realized it was not impossible that he would know.

  She did not need to win the competition, she only wanted to make a good showing—her mother was already proud. When the results were posted, Jenny’s schoolmates ranked tenth and eleventh, she far back at thirty-four out of forty entries.

  “I’m still happy for you,” her mother said.

  What did her father know, of sulfur, of phosphorus? Her mother’s name was Lucy Estelle because Lucy meant born at daylight and Estelle meant star. Her mother was plasma held together with gravity. Her mother was thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen and supernova. Her mother knew fire.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Jenny said. She looked again for her father as they packed the display up. She would keep the tablecloth to drape over her dresser, and she would take it to college, where she used it on an altar when she was experimenting with paganism, and she would have it with her years later when she married—the red long faded, and the yellow border turned more to gray, and the cloth so holey it had to be cut down and re-hemmed to handkerchief size. When she married Brian, she wore the scrap in her garter, something old.

  “Did you see him?” her mother said when they drove home.

  “No,” Jenny said.

  “He was there,” her mother said.

  “He wasn’t,” Jenny said, not sure why she was lying. The car hummed.

  Fire is the oxidation of material in the process of combustion.

  Ash is the residue after a sample is burned, and mostly salty.

  Jenny knew that biology was strong, but it was not everything. If flame was the visible part of fire, she closed her eyes to him. If heat was energy transferred from one place to another, she was nonconductive, a shield to him. In the wild, fire burns clean through the understory, leaving the canopy of trees and clearing the ground for the newest green shoots. The grasslands look leveled, at first. The forests look destroyed, at first. The dirt, scarred with charred seeds and blackened branches, seem barren until the smoke clears and the budding begins, pushing past the charcoal, into a clear expanse of sky. Whenever Jenny reached, it was with her mother’s fingers laced through hers. Above them, damp, dew-heavy clouds. Above them, rain.

  * * *

  When Jenny had her eighteenth birthday, her mother made a cake in their small oven and put one candle on it, the wick hungry at the cheap colored wax drizzling onto the buttercream. The cake had risen high and light, and her mother had sung “Happy Birthday” in her low, tr
embling voice. They each had a corner piece, which was what they liked best, and the rest of the cake remained like a partly toothless smile.

  When she was Jenny’s age, Lucy Estelle was grieving her parents and preparing for a baby. At her age, Jenny was unsure about what was next and happy to still have her mother’s friendship, after everything. The house had hardly changed; there were some different curtains and cookware, but the structure was the same as the day her grandparents had walked out of the front door and locked the latch against their own not coming home. Jenny knew this story, the story of Lucy Estelle—without a key, because she had never needed one since someone had always been there—who waited for her parents on the steps until the sun went down, the air so dry her heart pumped dust.

  * * *

  Jenny had not gone far for college, the point was that she had gone, even if just to the north, in Fort Collins, on a scholarship that barely covered costs, but barely was better than nothing. She lived in the dorms at first, and while she did not argue with the other girls, she did not get on with them either. She kept to herself. She had already decided on a practical major, accounting. Her roommate, from Nebraska, was studying the classics, and she invited Jenny to nights of performance art with her troupe, but Jenny never went. She liked being alone in the dorm room or by herself at a table in the library. Her first year, she went home for the summer and camped in her old bedroom. She looked for a job but found nothing, so she cooked for her mother, cleaned, and gardened. Her tomatoes grew high on their stakes; her herbs, bushy; her corn, long and tall. She shucked the ears at the kitchen table, where she had done her homework for most of her life. She slept with a full belly in her childhood bed, wrapped in the same itchy sheets. Her mother was happy to have her home, proud again.