Thin Ice

by Marsha Qualey

  “I’m just enjoying the predictability of things, I guess,”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Arden, without you I couldn’t have done it. The conscience would have pricked too hard. But I knew you’d come through, knew you’d do the right thing for Claire. Be responsible, step in, take care of things.” He shifted and stretched his legs. “Like I did for you.” The jazzy sound of a clarinet floated across the air. Five minutes passed without either of us speaking, then:

  “Are you okay, Arden?”

  “I had an awful winter, Scott.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I looked so hard for you. They all thought I was having some sort of a breakdown, but I wasn’t. I knew what you had done.” I punched his shoulder again, harder than ever.

  “Careful,” he said. “Cop might be hovering.”

  “It was too perfect. You did it too perfectly. Did you have fun planning it?”

  “I did, I must admit. But it was scary, in a way. Almost changed my mind every day.”

  “I didn’t know right away. For weeks I was pretty shocked about you dying. Then I woke up and I could practically smell it. From almost the moment Claire told me she was pregnant it felt like I’d been shaken out of a bad dream. But no one would take me seriously. It will feel so good to tell them. How did you do it, exactly? I figured you dumped the sled and walked through the woods, but how did you plan it, how did you get away, how did you live?”

  He took a breath, stroked the phantom beard and then let go of his secret in a long jumbled rush, as if he was happy to be sharing it with someone at last. He told me about his trips to Minneapolis, supposedly to buy a new machine, and he’d done that, yes, but he’d also set up a mailbox at a packaging store, then bought an ID, car, and trailer from a guy he knew who specialized in what he called difficult transactions. “The guy can get anything,” Scott said, still amazed.

  “Is your car stolen?”

  “Don’t think so. The papers look good, they’re all in the right name.”

  “You could be in serious legal trouble, Scott. The county won’t be happy that they staged a dangerous and unnecessary search.”

  “It won’t be anything I can’t face. I prepared for that too, Arden, for getting caught. I checked into the legal crap; there’s nothing too serious they can slap on me. If I get hauled back to Wisconsin and put in front of a judge, I suppose I could claim emotional duress and insanity. Take my chances.”

  “You don’t look very duressed, Nice tan. Where have you been for six months?”

  “Around. Warm places. I drove to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Florida. Take a look at this.” He showed me a Minnesota license for Phil Owen. The picture was Scott.

  “You can quit pretending to be him.”

  “I suppose. That will be nice, in a way. I was never quite sure how good the bogus identity was. Always worried I’d get stopped by a cop for something and he’d run the name through a computer and Bang! I’d find out Phil Owen was some dead mugging victim, or maybe a wanted career criminal. America’s Most Wanted. Well, I knew he wasn’t that. I actually went to a post office in Nevada once and checked the posters. Did they ever find my wallet in the river?”

  “They found everything but you.”

  “I’ve been carrying an old license with me. In case I had an accident somewhere, I wanted you to be notified.”

  “How thoughtful, considering I was supposed to think you were already dead.”

  He shrugged, then continued his story. “The same guy delivered the car to Penokee and left it at the motel. There was a rally that weekend, and the motel lot was filled with cars and trailers. That’s why I picked that date—if anyone had seen me, I would have been forgettable, just another sledder. Besides, the rally diverted most of the sledders to the track at Brimhall, so I didn’t think I’d see anyone on the state trail. I rode to the motel early that last morning, put the sled on the trailer, and drove out to the river. I parked the car, got back on the sled, and was back home before you were out of bed. Later that day I rode to Winker’s, had some beers, and then off I went in the storm. I dumped the trailer in a lot in Rice Lake.”

  “Your car’s a big old beater, right? People saw you, Scott, they saw it parked on JG.”

  “It’s a new Camry, and I parked it on TT. It’s a longer distance from the river to that road, but there’s not as much traffic on TT. It was snowing hard and I was on snowshoes. Not getting me on those ever again.” He shook his head. “Arden, people may have seen someone, but it wasn’t me. I was careful and I was ready to give it up at any time if anything went wrong.”

  I stretched my legs. “I had it,” I muttered. “I had the big picture figured right, I just didn’t get the details. I’ll have to tell Rose.”

  “Who’s Rose?”

  “An investigator I hired.”

  “A detective? How much money did you spend?”

  “No more than you were worth, okay? And speaking of money, where did you get it? That’s the one thing I couldn’t figure out. How could you afford to buy this new life?”

  He sighed. “I need a Sno-Kone. Want one?”

  “Blue, please.”

  I watched him take his turn at the vendor’s cart. Cone by cone, he moved up in line. An older couple right in front of him took a very long time deciding on flavors, and he turned and smiled at me, his eyebrows hopping on his broad forehead as he tipped his head toward the old people. At that moment my rage subsided, cooled by the gust of lake air that washed over me.

  “I don’t know how long it will last,” I said when he handed me my Sno-Kone, “but at this moment I’m glad to see you.”

  “You were always happiest when I brought home the groceries. By the way, have you been eating okay? You’re very thin.”

  Not thin, not by a stretch. I had lost a few pounds, maybe ten. I filled my mouth with slush. “I’ve been on the Anxiety Diet. Now tell me about the money.”

  “You’re so smart, you can figure it out.”

  “No one could.”

  “You will.”

  My bad mood returned and I swore sharply. “I am tired of your game, Scott. Where did you get the money? Did you steal it?”

  “Not really. Maybe from you, I guess. But you and the future baby got everything else, so I figured I was entitled to what I took.”

  “What did you take? I checked your baseball cards. They weren’t worth much.”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, “I mostly collected no-names. Utility guys, not the stars.”

  “The money?”

  “Mom and Dad left a very nice photography collection. She’d started collecting when she was in college, building on a few pieces that belonged to her parents. I’d almost forgotten about it, because we stashed all that stuff in the basement years ago. There were some pretty valuable things. Stieglitz, Steichen, Man Ray, Arbus. I sold the collection in Minneapolis when I was buying the sled. Figured no one would know the difference because Mom and Dad’s estate was handled by some senile guy down in Rice Lake, things weren’t inventoried very carefully, and I didn’t think you’d remember we had them.”

  “I didn’t”

  “I didn’t sell all the pictures. I left you two. They’re packed in a box tucked under the steps, behind the trunks.”

  “How thoughtful. Did it ever occur to you how awful it would be for the rest of us to lose you?”

  “Of course it did, I guess I decided not to think about that, not to let it be a factor. Arden, for ten years I was the good guy. Reliable, steady Scott. Day after day, year after year, it was all I heard. ‘Take a look at my engine, Scott.’ ‘I’m having trouble with my brakes, Scott.’ ‘Aren’t you sweet with your sister, Scott?’ ‘Isn’t Arden clever, Scott?’ Shit. Did people ever wonder what I was feeling? Nope, I was just the perfect mechanic, the dutiful brother, and God knows I was the obedient son. Hell, it went back longer than ten years. Our parents were great people, Arden, and sure, I loved them, but, man, how they pushed
! They pushed me through school, wanting perfect grades. Pushed me to Yale. Pushed and pushed while we moved to new places so they could play out dreams of being saintly doctors. Just when I got old enough to think about pushing back, they died and I had to take care of you. Then, just when I was beginning to think I was done playing Daddy, Claire laid her news on me. I couldn’t do it, Arden. I didn’t have it in me. I had to get out, had to go after what I wanted.” A frail-looking green bug landed on his knee and he flicked it away. “I know there’s no way you could understand.”

  “Maybe I do. You were…tired of being the frame for my art.”

  He laughed, a familiar little nasal rush of air. “Curious analogy, but close enough. Thanks for trying.”

  “No…” Yeeps, why was this so hard? “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For earlier. For taking care of me all that time. I do know it was hard. Thank you.”

  I thought then of him sitting on my bed so long ago, holding me after one of my nightmares. Whispering, “I have dreams too, I have them too.”

  I’d always thought he meant that he’d shared the nightmares, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d meant just what he said—I have dreams too.

  “Might as well tell me, brother—what were these great unfulfilled dreams that inspired you to leave everything?”

  “That’s the thing, Arden; I didn’t have a clue.”

  The paper cup dripped syrup on my hand. I licked it clean and crumpled the cone, rose, and tossed it into a nearby trash can. He smiled when I sat back down, lifted my hand and kissed it, the only time I could remember he’d ever done something like that.

  “So I fooled everyone but you.”

  “Don’t be proud, okay? A lot of people cared about you, so when they thought you’d gone for a last swim in the icy river, they were shocked silly and couldn’t think beyond that. You owe everyone a huge apology.”

  “Tell them I’m sorry.”

  “You can do it when you come back.”

  He cocked his head and shrugged his shoulders. Swatted at something.

  “You are coming back, aren’t you? Scott? Are you going to make me call the police and have them deal with you?”

  “Not sure they’d find reason to. Besides, you wouldn’t do that.”

  “I would. Your baby’s about to be born. You’ve got to.”

  “I don’t ‘got to’ do anything. I am done with the ‘got to.’” He roughed up his hair with his hands, then clasped them behind his head. “What I did was not entirely selfish, Arden.”

  “Spare me.”

  “The way I was feeling…it made sense to me that it was better for the baby to have a dead father than a deranged one.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell someone you were going nuts? It’s not that hard to ask for help.”

  “Habit, I guess; just never dared.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “You think so? Arden, all those early years I was in charge—a single guy, right?—if I had shown a moment’s weakness or confusion, they would have packed you up and sent you off in a flash.”

  “Maybe they should have.”

  He gripped my shoulder and turned me toward him. “Do you really think so?”

  I picked off his hand and sagged. “No.”

  “Okay then, I’ll ask: Will you help me with this? People will take their cue from you.”

  “You come home with me, Scott, and we’ll see what happens. I suppose I might help you whine to a judge, if you have to. But I’d be doing it for Claire and Hannah and the baby. And any money they want you to pay for the bogus search comes out of your stash. Where is it, anyway? You don’t carry all that cash, do you?”

  “It’s in a safe-deposit box in Minneapolis. I go back now and then.”

  “Wasn’t that risky?”

  “Maybe I wanted to be found. You think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  Kady and Jean reappeared, sensed we weren’t ready for company, then disappeared behind the fountain with their sundaes.

  “You really hired a detective?”

  “I did, but then I quit caring and took her off your case and had her look for Mom and Dad.”

  “In Honduras? Arden, that’s weird; they’re long past finding.”

  “I hired her to look for their lives. You were gone, so how else was I supposed to know about them?”

  “I did feel bad about that. I may have had my arguments with them, but I realized you deserved to know more about our parents and I hadn’t told you very much.”

  “No fooling. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff she found out: miscarriages, Dad was married before, filthy rich grandparents, a crazy aunt who died in a mental hospital. God, Scott, didn’t we ever talk? How could you not tell me these things? You should have told me everything about them the moment we knew they were dead. Bad enough to be an orphan, brother, but I lost a lot more because you didn’t talk to me.”

  “You were six, Arden, and I was nineteen. Bedtime stories about suicide and miscarriages might not have been a good idea, okay? Besides, it took everything I had in me just to get you up and dressed and off to school, day after day after day. So, no, we didn’t talk. But you know it all now.”

  “I don’t know it all. There are some gaps, like around the time when I was born. Rose couldn’t find any friends who knew anything about them.”

  “Not surprised, really. We’d just moved to Milwaukee. They’d practiced for a few years in a free clinic in St. Louis, then decided to do surgical residencies. We lived in married-student housing and most of the neighbors were foreign students. They’ve probably all gone back to their home countries now.” He shifted onto his left hip and faced me. “I guess that makes me the only person in the whole wide world who remembers the day you were born.”

  “And that’s the only reason in the whole wide world I might ever forgive you for disappearing.”

  A couple stopped and embraced a few feet in front of us, then swayed to some internal music.

  “Do you suppose Claire will ever forgive me?” he asked,

  “I have no idea.”

  A sax player had put out a hat a few yards away. He closed his eyes and played a sad, winding melody, then paused while a woman companion postured and shouted a few lines of poetry. A small crowd gathered around them. The sax played again, then more poetry.

  My brother looked tired. Maybe life on the loose wasn’t as fun as he’d convinced himself it would be. He looked older and heavier, probably the result of six months of sitting in a car and eating drive-through meals.

  “Why are you in Chicago?” he asked as the sax played.

  “We were in Madison. Jean and Kady were doing a show and they found out that the world’s best juggler was giving a performance here. We drove on down. I bet I know why you’re here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The car show. Were you there?”

  “Haven’t been near the place. Didn’t know about it, and I doubt I’d have gone. Too big a chance I’d see someone I know.”

  “Then why Chicago?”

  He smiled. “I guess you could say I came to see our parents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Years ago they had this artist friend, Harry. Did your detective find out about him?”

  I tipped my head back and sighed loudly. “No. I thought I’d never know. Harry. Who was he?”

  “A college friend of Mom’s. A sculptor. Nice guy, he used to show up at the oddest times, always flying in from some strange place.”

  “Where does he live? Would he talk to me about them?”

  “He’s dead. AIDS, back in the eighties. They took it real hard. He was mildly famous—in art circles, anyway. He did a piece with their hands cast in bronze. I’d always heard how it was kind of weird. But I guess it was of interest or value to someone because it’s part of the collection here at a museum.”

  “The Art Institute?” I tipped my head in the direction of the gi
ant museum.

  “No, a smaller place, just for contemporary art.” Once again I socked him, but I was losing vigor; he barely moved. “Why didn’t you tell me I could go to a museum and see their hands? Why didn’t we ever go there together?”

  “Because, Miss Hothead, the museum was in name only and didn’t have a permanent building. Everything it owned was either loaned out or in storage. Our parents’ hands have been in a warehouse for twenty years. But the museum opened a building recently and the permanent collection finally went on display. I read about it in an art magazine when I was in Florida—tanning on the beach, if you must know.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yeah. I’d say it’s pretty incoherent. The four hands are suspended on wires and they sort of swing around over a muddle of stuff.”

  “Did you touch it?”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “And set off alarms and get hauled away by some guard? No, I didn’t touch it.”

  The performance by the fountain concluded and the poet and saxophonist bowed to the applauding crowd. A few coins and bills were dropped into their hat.

  “I like Chicago,” Scott said. “It might be nice to stay put and try living in a big city. There’s a good art school here, you know. You might want to check that out. I went through its gallery today. Edgy stuff; you’d fit right in.” He poked me gently on the shoulder. “Still mad at me?”

  “What I feel is so totally new I don’t have a word for it. Pissed comes the closest. Disillusioned works well too.”

  He sagged a bit and shifted his gaze toward the lake. After a moment he took a deep breath, lifted his arms, and held his wrists together. “I’m your prisoner, sis. Go ahead and cuff me.”

  CHAPTER 5

  We corralled Kady and Jean, returned to the hotel, and booked a second room for the night. “We’ll get your stuff from your motel tomorrow,” I said to my brother. “I don’t trust you out of my sight, so we’ll share a room; besides, one of them snores.”