If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  In the fall, she did not return to the dorms—too expensive, too tight. She rented a studio apartment close to campus in the renovated VA hospital. Her room had tile halfway up the walls, and she thought it must have been a ladies’ room once, powder pink with gray grout. She liked sleeping in the apartment without the breath of her roommate. She liked having her own bathroom and a kettle that no one else touched. In the mornings, she woke up and made herself coffee and sometimes smoked a joint over her tiny range, blowing the smoke through the rattley exhaust fan.

  Once, she heard a knock, and she looked through the peephole, and she swore she saw her father. She swallowed hard and undid the dead bolt, but when she opened the door, there was nothing but air whooshing into an open hallway.

  The second summer, she did not go home because she wanted to keep her apartment. She had a part-time job at a deli, and they told her they could have her on full time through the summer, since the other students were leaving. There was a man who washed dishes and had tattoos on his forearms who also worked there. He smelled like sweat and looked at Jenny in a way she could not name. He was close to her age, but he seemed older. He was a version of herself, if her mother had been more reckless, if her mother had not had the house and they had floated between sympathetic relatives and friends, with no place to call their own—or if her father had been around, bringing trouble.

  First, Jenny and this man went only for coffee after their shifts ended, but the coffee turned to a night of beer back at her place. He did not have a place, really. She could not work out if he was staying at the shelter near the deli or on the kitchen floor, but either way, he complimented her on her apartment, how clean it was, how cozy. The second time they started with beer and finished with whiskey, finished with Jenny saying she was so, so tired and crawling into her bed in the studio; in her studio, the bed was always there, as a warning or invitation, and the man, Rich, unlacing his shoes and peeling off his socks, crawled in next to her.

  It was the first time she had had a man in her bed, but she did not tell him and she did not cry.

  In the morning, he was up before her, cooking coffee on the small stove—like she did, the way she had learned from her mother—and digging through her cabinets, making biscuits, whistling in delight that she had real butter.

  He brought her a cup of coffee, and she propped up on a pile of pillows to drink it.

  He made breakfast, and she was still not out of bed, her thighs sticky and her breasts hurting. He sat with her while they ate, forks clinking against her secondhand stoneware.

  He asked if he could use her shower before he left for his shift, and she loaned him a clean T-shirt. On his way out, he kissed her between the eyes on the forehead, and after he had latched the door, she got up and saw that he had tidied up the kitchen. The bathroom was still steamy and warm, and she washed slowly under the hot water. Drying herself with her only towel, she saw that he had left his dirty shirt folded on the back of the toilet tank. It smelled like the deli and the detergent they used, and of him.

  For the rest of the summer, Rich was in her apartment. She saw the lines around his eyes get a little softer, especially when he mentioned how nice it was to have a regular place to stay. Jenny got softer too, in the belly, from his cooking. At the deli, they were nice to each other in the same way all of the employees were nice—they depended on one another to keep the place going, and everyone needed the job. In early July, she gave him a key, and she came home from the late shift one evening to find him making sandwiches in the kitchen, which he wrapped in wax paper and tucked into his knapsack.

  “Let’s go to the park and watch the fireworks,” he said. “America’s birthday.”

  “I’m tired, Rich,” she said.

  “Everyone’s tired,” he said. “Gunpowder will help.”

  They walked to the park and spread out on a blanket, and Rich held her hand. He had tattoos on his fingers and up his forearms, one on his back, one on his stomach, deep-blue ink just like the summer light that never seemed to let the sky turn all the way to black.

  She thought when school started again in the fall she would not see him anymore. She would not have time for lazy mornings or late nights. They had not started to talk about a future. The closest he got was to stop asking her if it was okay that he stayed the night, and that had happened only after she offered the key. She liked seeing him sleeping in her bed. She liked that when the cashiers at the deli split up their tips to the backroom staff, he dropped his share of quarters into her laundry jar. She washed his apron and his jeans with hers, and folded his shirts into perfect, neat squares. He had his knapsack and duffel bag parked under her bed. Everything he owned fit inside. She told him about growing up, the house, her mother. He did not tell her his story—when she asked about his parents, he always said, Another time, so she stopped asking. She told him he should study if he was going to work in kitchens, because there were better jobs out there.

  “Not just a line cook,” she said. “Be a chef.”

  He laughed at her then and told her he had not finished high school, and she told him she thought it didn’t matter, he could still go on, but she still stopped by the university library the next day, telling the graduate student at the reference desk that she was not sure where to start.

  “My friend needs his GED,” she said, and she was pointed to an entire section, and the graduate assistant took Jenny through the stacks helping her find the curriculum guidelines, and then sat with her while she used the computers to find a test location, taking their time because it was so quiet during summer session.

  She went back to her apartment with a bag of books and a few printed pages from the Internet and waited for him.

  “You could finish by the end of summer,” she told him. “I made you an appointment for the exam.”

  He said he was not sure, but he agreed to at least try.

  There was enough room in the apartment for a small table, where Jenny did her homework. She started reading ahead for the fall term, while Rich worked through grammar and math and social studies. She liked this life with him, quiet and marked by the sounds of pages turning, the scratch of a pencil against paper, the swoosh of an underline.

  On the day of the exam, they had both requested to be scheduled off from work, and their boss raised an eyebrow.

  She rode the bus with Rich to the testing center at the public library and held his hand. He had his knapsack on his back and a notebook under his arm, just like any other student. It was August. He passed easily. They celebrated with cheap champagne and a stir-fry.

  She was grateful to him when September came. He did not make her ask for her key back or make her pick a fight. She came home from the late shift, and his duffel bag was gone from where it had peeked out from under her bare bed frame, and the key to the apartment gleamed on the table, resting in the center of a piece of torn notebook paper. Thank you, Jenny, he had written, and signed his name with a heart around it.

  He had not said anything in the few hours their shifts crossed that day, and he had not said anything to her the night before, only held her so close there was nothing but heat between them. She took some quarters from the laundry jar and went to the corner to call her mother. The phone rang until the answering machine picked up, and Jenny could picture the house perfectly, her mother’s voice on the answering machine tape sounding through the empty rooms.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Melanie

  Summer, 2007

  At work the day after the car accident, Alex stopped in her office doorway, but he must have thought better of it, because he didn’t say anything before he turned to continue down the hallway. Later, he hardly acknowledged her when she said hello to him in the kitchen.

  “Do you have plans for the Fourth?” she asked him.

  “Nope,” he said, quickly putting cream in his coffee and then exiting.

 
I deserved that, she thought.

  She had spent the night in the hospital with her mother, she and Irene each angling for a little space on the bench in the room, or sitting in the hard-backed chair next to the bed, both being jolted from their tenuous sleep by the tiniest beep from the monitors and from even the suggestion of a labored breath from Melanie’s mother.

  At 2:15 in the morning, Irene was perched over Kathleen, smoothing her hair. Melanie got up to stretch, and put her hand on her mother’s hand.

  “She’s really fine,” Melanie whispered. “We’re the ones freaking out.”

  Irene smiled at her. “You’ll never know what she did for me Mel.”

  “You’ve been friends forever,” Melanie said. “I get it.”

  “We’ve been friends since you,” Irene said.

  “Is that why my dad hates you?”

  “He doesn’t hate me,” Irene said. “He just doesn’t understand me. He can’t. It’s okay. I made my peace with him a long time ago, and then when he and Kath split it didn’t really matter anymore.”

  Melanie nodded. “I just want her to go home.”

  “Me too, girl. Me too.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take very long to find him—a web search and several phone calls, then the administrative assistant was putting her through to Brian’s cell.

  “How’s your mother-in-law?” she asked when he answered.

  He said he meant to call, and he said Lucy Estelle was fine. Bruises, a cracked rib, a lightly fractured wrist, but okay. He asked after her mother, and Melanie said she was fine, too, and coming home today.

  “Good,” Brian said. “I’m glad it wasn’t more serious. Lucy is going to hate rehab.”

  She listened to the static between their mobile phones. He said it was a funny coincidence, and she said that she did not think it was funny at all, and maybe not a coincidence.

  “I didn’t know you were superstitious,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said. She remembered as a girl how she’d clung to her horoscopes, but it had been ages since she had read one. The idea of some external order no longer appealed to her.

  It sounded like Brian was typing, or maybe it was just the towers clicking as the connection relayed. She was not sure what to say next, and he was silent, but they stayed on the line for another minute, listening, until she said to him that she hoped he could work everything out with Jenny, and he said that Jenny had no idea, and Melanie said she thought he was wrong about that.

  Maybe Jenny did not know about them, Melanie said to him, but she knew something—she had not introduced him to her, because maybe she knew better than to introduce her husband to a woman who looked vulnerable, or she maybe did not think he would empathize.

  “So, she definitely knows something,” Melanie said.

  Brian sighed a little. “Maybe.”

  “Give her some credit,” Melanie said.

  “Okay, listen, I shouldn’t, but I want to ask your advice”

  She pressed the phone to her ear. “Of course.”

  He said Chicago had been the last time, and, what if he kept it that way? What if he promised himself, and if he kept the promise, would it be okay to never tell Jenny about all of the other women, to keep it all a secret?

  Melanie considered this. “If you mean it,” she said. “Then, yes, it’s okay. It would only hurt her to tell. If you don’t mean it, you’re just a bigger ass.”

  “I mean it,” he said, and she thought she heard something drop in the background, maybe his voice breaking.

  They said good-bye and hung up. Melanie put her phone back into her purse and looked at her work. She wondered what her father would say about the accident, but no one had told him, and so she wrote him a quick email with a summary, She’s fine, she goes home today, you don’t need to do anything. She checked the clock. It was lunchtime.

  What she wanted more than anything was to wipe her hard drive and delete her user identities and unscrew her Repti Glo terrarium bulbs and walk out of her office, cash out her savings and take her mother and Irene off to a new place where they could all start over, where life was gentler.

  She poked her head into Alex’s office and told him if anyone was looking for her that she was going home early.

  “I put my out-of-office reply on my email,” she said.

  He tipped his head to indicate that he had heard her, but he did not say anything.

  Melanie knew her mother would be home by the time she got to the apartment, and she would be convalescing nicely. Irene would be there, because Irene would have driven her, and Irene’s heels would be kicked off by the door. She would be making a soup or a smoothie, something liquid and vegetable and healthy to keep Melanie’s mother’s strength up and to keep her hydrated, and Melanie would be grateful for Irene, who was usually there anyway, but always there when it mattered.

  When Melanie went into the apartment, she was still thinking about quitting her job and taking her mother and Irene away, where it would be just the three of them, and they would keep a clean and spare and solitary home. Maybe sometimes they would have visitors, or other people would orbit in and out, but they three would stay close, and they would not do dangerous things like drive or talk to married men. They would keep an abundant garden and have fresh hydrangeas and spinach year round.

  The screen door banged behind her, and she heard Irene shout a greeting from the kitchen. Melanie’s mother was propped up on the sofa watching the news with the sound off, the way she preferred.

  Melanie took a chair at the same scratched and pitted kitchen table where she had done countless hours of homework. She felt the static of the place, but it was not sad like it was sometimes. Irene brought her a glass of water, and they both moved to the living room with her mother, Irene at the foot of the sofa, and Melanie in the side chair.

  In the afternoon sun that bent around the open space in the blinds, the room looked almost pretty. Irene’s pedicured toes sparkled iridescent coral, and Melanie’s mother’s hair shone a bright auburn. The apartment was quiet, with just a low glow from the silent television screen.

  She was happy to be there, with them.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Kathleen

  Summer, 1975

  There was a man sitting next to a girl on a park bench. The girl, Kathleen, had the infant, Melanie, with her, a small and wrinkly baby, who had her face scrunched to the sun and her legs swaddled. The war had ended a few months ago, but the man was in his uniform, so either he was still a soldier or he was on his way to learning how to not be a soldier. Kathleen did not know which, but she was lonely, out on a walk with the baby, and she sat down next to him. She said hello, even though he did not look like he wanted to talk.

  She’d rather be with Irene, but Irene was supposed to be letting go and Kathleen was supposed to be bonding.

  “I’m Kath,” she said. She was sweaty all over, from the heat and from carrying the baby. She wondered why she thought it was a good idea to take the child to the park, but the ladies at the home had told her she must do things with the child without Irene, and so she had taken the bundle, out into the summer heat, when she would have rather been with her friend who was recovering from a difficult labor. Irene’s milk was coming in, but the home had told her to bind her breasts.

  Aunt Mae said to give the baby a few days at least to breastfeed. She didn’t trust formula, but by the third day she helped wrap the bandages around Irene anyway.

  They had all been instructed to forget, to move on, but Kathleen would not forget, and Irene would not forget.

  * * *

  Irene was supposed to be healing and adjusting, and it was hard, with all of them at Mae’s. In the night, when the child would cry, Irene would cry too, but it was Kathleen who went to the baby, who tried to comfort her, who heated a bottle, while Irene’s breasts
swelled and Mae paced the kitchen when some kind of knowing that neither of the girls could place, even though they were grateful for her.

  Kathleen was not sure how her friend was supposed to follow the home’s instructions, when the child was calling for her and Irene’s body was calling for the child. She thought it might be easier for Irene to go back to her father’s, but she would not say this to Irene.

  Irene had offered the child, Sammy’s child, and still it was Irene who had it the hardest, puffed up everywhere but empty inside, her shirt soaking through the worn elastic bandages Mae had dug from the cabinets.

  When Kathleen confided to her aunt, Mae said to let it run its course. Kathleen was relieved. She didn’t want her friend to go, really, but she also did not want her to be in so much pain.

  “It will be worse for her if she feels like she’s not welcome,” Mae had said. “Wait on it.”

  * * *

  On the park bench, the man in uniform was quiet. Probably he was deciding if he should talk to this girl and her baby, but then the light changed a little. Kathleen hoped he was realizing he was home and the war was over. That the sun was hard but not unlovely. That he could converse with people, he could make friends.

  “Andrew,” he said, awkwardly after the pause between Kathleen offering her name and him responding, and he turned a little, and put his hand out, stiffly. She extended her own hand, even though her palm was probably the sweatiest place of all.

  “How old?” he asked.

  “She’s two weeks,” Kathleen said.

  “You don’t look like you had a baby two weeks ago,” he said.

  He was the first stranger she’d talked to, and she was not sure what to say. How does he know? She panicked, but she concentrated on keeping her face calm.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “I mean, you look very fit,” he said. “And I’m sorry. That’s not my place to say.”

  “She was easy on me,” Kathleen said, not sure if this was the right thing or not. “Her daddy’s passed,” she offered, so the man would not think she was being improper.