by Susanne Beck
"Yes, Corinne. But I need to see her. To be with her. I need . . . ."
She shook her head slowly, sadly. "No, Angel. This is something you’re going to have to do without her. Ice can’t help you with this."
"But . . . ."
"No, Angel," she said firmly. Her eyes softened slightly. "Angel, I love you with all my heart. You know that. But I love Ice just as deeply. And I won’t see her hurt, by you or anyone else. So please. Stay here and think on what we talked about. Listen to your heart, Angel. It will tell you what you have to do."
I could feel my shoulders slump in defeat. Almost against my will, I nodded my acceptance of her request. A request that I well knew, knowing Corinne as I did, was more of a command than the simple asking of a favor.
She smiled slightly, and with a nod of her head, turned and stepped off the dock. I watched as she made her careful way back up to the cabin, my thoughts in utter turmoil.
When she disappeared around the corner of the house, I turned back and faced the dark water, not really seeing it for the tears blurring my vision.
The tears soon passed and I was left feeling weary, empty, and very confused. I wanted so desperately to go to Ice. To see her, to hold her, to stroke her hair, feeling that somehow all the answers to my questions would rest with that simple, profound connection between us. A connection I could feel even with so much distance between us. Distance that I, in my fear, had caused.
I only thanked God, in all his mercy, that Ice wasn’t awake to see it.
I also knew that Corinne was right. Ice couldn’t help me with this. No one could, save for myself.
I wrapped my arms around myself as a chill wind blew off the lake, a harbinger of a winter not far away, even now, in the midst of a glorious summer.
As I looked over the lake as the wind swayed the trees, I forced myself to examine the hardest of Corinne’s questions to me. Did I love Ice for herself? For the woman she truly was? Or did I, instead, love the woman I wanted her to be, an image I constructed in my mind; a white knight on a charging steed, with a pure heart and an untainted soul.
I snorted softly. Perhaps I’d gone a bit too far with the "Knight Errant" analogy. Ice had never been, even in the first moments of my knowing her, what anyone would consider pure of heart and soul.
But then again, who among us was?
Certainly not me.
So the question remained. Who did I love?
A real, flesh and blood human being? Or an image superimposed over that person to make her more palatable to my sensibilities, such as they were.
It would be so damned easy just to chuck it all and go with what my heart was telling me, which was that I loved Ice with everything in me, that she held my heart in the palm of her hand, that I trusted her in a way I’d never trusted anyone else in my life and that just the thought of not having her in my life made my guts twist inside.
But I also knew that to do that would be to do a great disservice to us both.
The dream terrified me more than I was willing to admit to anyone but myself. And until I figured out why, until I came up with an explanation that satisfied my need to know, I’d be no good to either of us.
And Ice only deserved the best from me.
How I went about giving that to her was another question entirely.
I heard myself groan as I once again lowered my stiffened body on the chilled and worn wood of the dock. So many thoughts, feelings, emotions and images ran through my mind that it was difficult to know where to start. Or, even, how to start.
"The best place to begin is often at the beginning," my mother was fond of telling me.
I shrugged to myself. Seemed as good a place as any.
A name came to my mind, and I went with it.
Cavallo.
The bastard who’d started it all. The bastard who’d almost ended it all.
From what I could remember of his history, told to me in bits and pieces by Corinne, Cavallo was what was called a ‘mole’. He’d risen up through the ranks of the Family Ice was attached to, the Briacci crime family, all the while snuggled deep within the back pocket of Briacci’s largest rival. Hoping to plant the seeds of mistrust, he’d framed Ice, sending her out to kill an innocent man.
But, and this I’d almost forgotten in my terror over the nightmare I’d had, she’d refused to kill him.
"She refused," I whispered aloud, making it real, making it there.
Even knowing that such a refusal could mean her own death, she’d gone against orders anyway.
"Many of us have lines we draw in the sand and this was one of my lines. I never killed innocents and I never killed witnesses, no matter who they were testifying against."
I remembered those words as if she’d told them to me only this afternoon instead of five full years ago. They suddenly took on new meaning as the first part of my puzzle slipped silently into place.
When the man was killed anyway, Ice took the rap for it, to use prison slang for a moment, even going so far as to refuse the outstanding legal services of Donita, who very much cared for her and very much wanted to help.
And all because the Ice I met in the Bog that first time was a woman who’d acknowledged the light in her soul and though she wasn’t guilty of the crime for which she’d been convicted, she was determined to pay restitution for the ones she hadn’t been convicted of, even if it meant, as it seemed at the time, giving up her freedom as payment for the rest of her life.
Could I have done the same?
Well, in a way, I had. I was no more guilty of murdering my husband than Ice was of murdering that innocent man, but I, too, was willing to pay restitution because, whether it was murder or not, I had killed him.
So, in that way at least, Ice and I were very much the same.
Another piece added itself to the board.
My mind returned to Cavallo. Not satisfied with simply framing Ice, he wanted to twist the knife in any way he could, while still rising within the Family, intending, one day, to start a coup and take it over entirely. He’d set up Briacci’s wife, a woman who’d been almost a second mother to Ice, had her thrown in jail, then had her murder staged for an audience of one.
My lover.
And though she was devastated over the death of a person she’d loved, and though I’m sure she had any one of a hundred chances to exact her own form of permanent justice on the man, she remained in jail, determined to pay for her crimes.
Another piece of the puzzle snapped into place for me as I began to view the events of five years of my life in an entirely new light, wondering, with a bit of shame, why I hadn’t bothered doing so before.
Twisting the knife still further in her heart, Cavallo made a deal with the warden, condemning Ice to servitude by doing his bidding, stripping down cars which he then resold at a healthy profit. And when she’d finally had enough and refused to roll over any more, Cavallo, through his mouthpiece Morrison, threatened harm to the one thing that was most dear to her in all the world.
Me.
Believe me when I tell you that I don’t take that lightly, nor is it an enormous massage to my healthy ego to state such a thing so baldly. It is simply the truth as I knew it then and as I know it now.
Would a conscienceless killer have taken that threat lying down? Or would she have instead ripped the Warden to shreds and caught the first hostage out of town on a mission to personally deliver Cavallo his very own death warrant?
Ice answered my question by her own actions.
She took it. She accepted the knife to her gut, not quietly no, but accepted just the same, in order to keep me safe, healthy, and whole.
And still it wasn’t enough for Cavallo.
In a scene that still haunts my dreams and will continue to do so, I suspect, until I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, he came face to face with her—with a prison fence and a dozen fully armed guards between them, courageous man that he was—taunted her, and when she didn’t rise to the bait to his liki
ng, shot her in the back.
Quite against my will, the scene replayed itself in all its Technicolor glory.
With one last squeeze, and a scream from Cavallo, Ice released her grip and held up her empty hands, grinning. Taking two careful, deliberate steps back from the fence, she winked at the mobster, then turned.
Our gazes locked as she completed her turn and the world began to spin in slow motion. From the corner of my eye, I could see Cavallo reach beneath his coat with his good, right hand.
"Ice!" I launched myself at her, aiming for her legs. "Nooooo!"
Her eyes widened in question.
The sound of a gun firing, oddly flat in the turbulent air.
The question turned to shock as a bloom of red stained the small, burned hole that suddenly appeared in the upper left chest of her jumpsuit. She looked down, then back at me.
Then her eyes went as empty as they were in my dream and she crumpled to the ground silently.
I landed on top of her, screaming.
I pulled myself away quickly, slapping at my tears as I turned her over onto her back. "Oh God, no. Ice, no. Please. Oh God."
Blood pumped out of the exit wound in slow, sluggish bursts. But that meant that she was still alive. Pressing one hand over the hole in her chest, I used my free one to stroke the hair back from her face. "Oh God, please wake up, Ice. Please don’t die on me. Please. Don’t do this to me. Please. Oh God. Oh God."
I was panicking, and I knew it. But I couldn’t seem to stop. Blood welled up in the spaces between my fingers, painting me with its heated vibrancy. "Don’t you die on me, Morgan Steele. Don’t you dare die on me!"
The sound of running footsteps caused me to look up. The pale, scared faces of Sonny, Pony and Critter stared down at me.
"Oh fuck!" Pony grunted, squatting beside me and pushing her own hand down on top of mine in an attempt to stem the bleeding.
"Get an ambulance!" I screamed, not even feeling the pressure of Pony’s hand against my own. "Now!!"
Nodding abruptly, Sonny turned and sped away, running back toward the prison in a furious burst. The shocked crowd parted easily to allow her passage.
"Are they gone?" I asked Pony, my rearward view blocked by her muscled body.
"Who?" Pony asked distractedly, her face grim as she increased the pressure on my hand.
"The warden and . . .the shooter."
My friend looked over her shoulder, still blocking my view of the fence and the area beyond it. "A car’s peelin’ rubber outta the parking lot," she grunted, returning her full attention to her task of slowing the bleeding pumping out of my lover with every beat of her heart.
"Thank God."
"What are you thankin’ God for? That might be Ice’s killer getting away!"
"She won’t die. I know it. She can’t."
"I wish I had your faith, Angel."
"You don’t need it. I have faith enough for all of us."
Blinking, I wiped the tears from my face as my mind finally released its hold and allowed me to come back to the present.
"I kept the faith, Ice," I whispered. "And you didn’t let me down."
And still, even after being shot in the back like a rabid animal, still she didn’t go after him.
No, it wasn’t until the final straw had been placed. A straw which had Morrison pay her a visit in the hospital and warn her that if anyone ever found out the identity of the person who’d shot her, my life would have been made a living hell, and any chance I’d ever see freedom again would have been flushed, like so much raw sewage, right down the proverbial toilet and, likely, my soul right along with it.
"I knew right then that I could never go back. I needed to . . .take care of things so that his threat would never become a reality."
It was only after that last straw had finally been laid upon a back overburdened did she finally lash out, not to protect herself, but to protect me.
Because she loved me.
And when she finally had the chance to take out all the pain, hurt, anguish and rage upon the very man who’d caused her this grief, what did she do?
I closed my eyes, remembering.
"I wanted to kill him so badly I could taste it. My finger was on the trigger—just a hair’s worth of pressure and it would have gone off, ending everything."
She tilted her head up toward the ceiling, her jaw working as she dragged her hands through her hair. "I couldn’t do it," she whispered, harshly. "I wanted to, God, so badly. I wanted to end his miserable, stinking little life." She sighed, shaking her head. "But I couldn’t."
Why? I could remember asking her.
"As I was standing there, watching him sleep, I thought about you." And here, her eyes came to rest, for the first time, on my face. She smiled slightly. "About that time when I had Cassandra’s life in my hands. I remembered you telling me not to give up on my dreams, how she wasn’t worth it. And I realized that if I went back to that person I used to be, the one who killed to get rid of my problems, that’s exactly what I would have done." Tears sparkled in her eyes. "My dreams might not be much, but they were all I had. And I couldn’t give them up. Not for him. Not for anyone."
"Oh, Ice," I whispered, much as I did then.
So many things made so much more sense to me now, when looked at through the distance of time. Ice’s unswerving dedication to the changes she’d begun to make in her own life long before we ever fell in love. Her refusal to be baited into doing something that was becoming wrong for her until she was placed in a position where choices were non-existent.
I was finally beginning to see two very different sides to the part of Ice who was a killer. One killed in the heat of passion, to protect herself or those she loved. The other, diametrically opposed to the first, killed with the cool, remote disinterest of an assassin, which she had been for a very long time.
The first was an inherent part of her nature, a nature that had been shaped by the life she’d been forced to live when an innocent young ten-year-old woke up one morning to find everything she loved gone.
The second, I was beginning to see, was quite unnatural to her, though since she’d developed somewhat of a skill for it, and she used it as a tool much as the tools she used to fix cars.
Ice is, if nothing else, a woman of incredible passions. She has an immense, almost bottomless capacity for love. And an equally immense capacity for rage. Where love had always been reined in like a skittish and vulnerable colt, rage had been allowed to flourish.
And then, for some reason known only to her, Ice had decided to take a chance on revealing her heart and allowing love to sublimate the rage in her soul.
That decision came with a very large price, however. It was a price she was now paying. And it was a price that I, in my selfishness, never thought existed.
Until now.
Like Paul on his Damascus road, the scales finally fell from my eyes and I truly saw Ice’s action of leaving Cavallo alive for what it really was.
A blind leap off a towering cliff with trust the only net she possessed.
Trust in herself, in her heart, that she was making the right decision. Trust in a justice system that had failed miserably to finally do the right thing. Trust in a merciful god or a kind fate to see her act of restitution and be pleased.
While a wise man once said, I think, that two out of three isn’t bad, I’m sure he’d agree that one out of three is nothing short of abysmal.
Like a row of dominoes or a house of cards tipped over by a child’s careless hand, that one merciful act set in motion a series of unstoppable events which led us to this place, where everything that could have gone wrong did and the proud, sure woman who’d made that leap now lay broken and bleeding in restitution for one act of kindness which turned against her with a vengeance.
I thought back to the night she’d received the phone call telling her that Cavallo had been set free and was after his pound of flesh. She’d wanted to keep the information to herself, but I’d poked and
prodded, cajoled and whined until she opened up and laid her worries bare before me.
And what had I given her as payment?
Ridicule. Sarcasm. Moral high-handedness. I’d even had the gall to call her a coward. Accused her of using Cavallo as an excuse to run away from people who loved her. Threatened to attach myself like an unwanted parasite to her every thought, her every move.
When had I stopped trusting her instincts?
When had I started thinking that mine were somehow better?
I could feel my face flush hot with shame. The tender flesh of my palms protested as my nails dug themselves a new home beneath the skin.
All she’d ever wanted to do was to help in creating a safe space for me. A place where I would be happy, where I would be safe, where I would be loved, and where I would never want for a single thing. A natural leader, she’d sublimated that and instead walked by my side, lending her aid, her warmth, her strength, and her love to make sure that my dream was fulfilled to the best of her considerable abilities and far beyond my wildest hopes.
And what had I done with that freedom she’d given me? Taken it and run with it, effectively trapping her, placing her with my words into a cage whose bars were formed and shaped by the bond of love we shared.
A gilded cage, perhaps, but more of a prison, in some ways, than the Bog ever was.
"She’s an adult," I told myself. "More than capable of making her own decisions. Don’t take this away from her too, believing that you somehow trapped her against her will. That didn’t happen, and you know it."
"Maybe," I answered. "But did you ask? Did you even take a second to ask her if this was what she wanted instead of projecting your dreams and your needs onto her and calling it good?"
Did I?
I thought back to the conversation we’d had in that tiny hotel room Ice had taken me to right after our reunion. I remembered the musty smell of the heater as the air it feebly expelled ruffled the heavy curtains shielding the window from prying eyes. I remembered the stiff, shiny texture of the bed-spread. Most of all, I remembered the expression on my lover’s face, the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice.