The Ice Sings Back, page 14
“I can help, Ray,” she said evenly. “Just tell me what happened.”
She leaned away as Ray jerked again. Again. Something was after him in his mind. Good, she smiled. Hope it got him. Stabbed him in the teeth.
“Who is screaming, Ray?” She reached for the plastic water cup beside his bed. “Tell me, and I’ll give you water.” Bargaining with the devil, she knew. A woman’s deal.
A pink tongue darted from Ray’s mouth, searched for water. His blue eyes were half closed, rheumy, and she suppressed an urge to slap him. Barely.
“Fine,” she said loudly, like Ray was not just dying but also deaf, “I’m taking the water. I’ll come back in ten minutes. You tell me who is screaming, I’ll give you water.”
His mouth made a hissing noise, but Donna averted her eyes and left the room, fire flaring back in her stomach so fast she felt like she had diarrhea. She gulped the evening air when she arrived back to the porch, scanned the clearing like it could tell her something, breathed.
She didn’t know how much longer she could do this. She sat heavily down on the steps, hung her head. She was exhausted. She closed her eyes. Remembered.
Julene had picked her up, lifted Donna off her dragging feet, laid her in the trunk like it was a coffin. She’d tucked Donna’s dress around her legs, patted the bundle gingerly. Donna was sure her mother had said something then. And Donna was also sure she’d said something to her mother, but, again, there was nothing. When she strained her memory, the only thing she could recall was a faint rattle as Julene dragged the green beads off her wrist and pressed them into Donna’s small hands.
The file was incomplete, was missing data. Her therapist said Donna might never remember.
Her memory jumped and the trunk suddenly closed, the car moving. It was ink-dark and she’d laid there in quiet horror and pissed herself more than once and time blurred and the car stopped and the trunk opened and all she saw was a yellow-lit garage. Then a woman with bright white hair was scooping her out and pressing her against her shoulder like a doll.
There must have been talking, the lady probably said things, but they were all muted, as if listening to a movie underwater. Donna saw this memory in third person, the reel unwinding as the woman in the floral tent dress carried her to a bathtub and set her in it and turned on hot water. The water had terrified Donna, and the woman had said something, then sat heavily on a closed toilet seat and plucked at Donna’s clothes. But Donna had been too scared and too confused and too everything, so she’d soaked in the hot water stiff and rigid and fully dressed.
Later, the woman had handed her a sleeping gown three sizes too big and decorated with kittens. Donna had gotten the idea and slipped it over her head and then unzipped her dress and let it fall to the ground and the woman had beckoned her to a bedroom and she’d crawled into the biggest bed she’d ever seen and the woman had settled into a wide-based rocking chair and picked up a book and each time she’d woken up in the night, the woman was still there, reading a book and humming.
At some point, Donna had cried, asked over and over for Julene. The woman moved to the bed, picking her up and gently rocked her while making murmuring noises. Donna had wept for her mother, had asked where she was, and the woman had held her tightly and told her she’d never lose Julene. “Sometimes,” Donna remembered her saying, “even though we can’t seem them, they’re still with us.”
Donna had fallen asleep at some point that night clutching her mother’s bracelet, and the days and months that came after glommed into a fragmented blur. While she could recall in vivid detail the weld beads along the inside of the trunk, she couldn’t remember the older woman’s face or voice or house or any other events relating to her, the details of how long she stayed with her, what happened immediately after. She was simply there in Donna’s memory and then she wasn’t.
Even today, thinking of her, all Donna could summon was that the woman had white hair, smelled slightly sour, made comforting humming noises.
At some point, Donna moved. She had a brief memory of two women she’d never seen before arriving in a car one morning and taking her to a house on the outskirts of Eugene. Later, when Donna was older and had gotten her first degree in cartography, she’d spent many hours driving around the Thurston neighborhoods after work, then Santa Clara and Danebo, then east Eugene. She’d never found that first house again, nor the second.
She lived in the second house for several months. She didn’t remember much, only the sensation of looking up every time the door opened, jerking her chin and shoulders and eyes towards the person coming in.
One memory Donna did recall clearly was a day when the two women whom she’d seen earlier reappeared, this time introducing themselves as social workers named Maureen and Alai. They had sat her down in a kitchen and asked her to describe what she’d experienced living with Ray. Donna had stared at the linoleum and remained mute, just as she’d been taught by Julene. But the women had stacked so many questions upon her that she’d panicked and peed herself and the women had left.
After that, she was told she would need to be re-homed. Donna had a crystal-clear memory of that moment, of asking when Julene would join her. Both social workers had shook their heads, had said a nice lady had offered to open her home to her, and did Donna want to go there and start school in the fall?
“Julene might join you later,” Maureen had said, eyes on Alai, and then Donna was in a car again being driven across Eugene.
Donna did remember her first meeting with Blazey Watts. Blazey was in her mid-fifties then. She wore her blonde-gray hair shoulder length and a pair of oversized brown glasses. She’d opened the door of her purple house as soon as the social workers pulled up, had invited Donna in, made a cup of hot chocolate for them both.
“And this,” she said after introducing herself, “is Tuck Everlasting.” She gestured to a huge black and white dog with fluffy fur sticking out of every possible surface. The dog had licked Donna and she’d cuddled into his immense side as Blazey chatted up a one-sided storm.
Blazey told her she was a professor at a university in Eugene, liked to garden bright flowers, did not know how long Donna would stay but hoped it would be for as long as she wanted. Blazey was impressed with Donna’s physical strength and predilection for neatness. Suggested they later take a long walk up a thing she called a “butte.” She said she did not know when Donna would see Julene again, but she sure hoped it would be soon, and until then, she was happy to help Donna in any way she could.
A snapping branch interrupted Donna’s review. She was back, on the cabin porch, staring at the clearing. She glanced down at her watch, realized thirty minutes had passed, sighed. She wanted to go through those early years again and again. Comb through them. Find anything that might cut through the fog of missing words, memories, time. What had her mother said before putting her in the car? She must have said something.
Donna shifted her hips, looked out at the grass, the trees. There was something she knew she was missing, and it was just out of her reach. She rubbed the beads on her wrist, stood.
She walked back into the cabin, back to Ray’s bedside, set the cup she still clutched back down on the tabletop with a clatter. Thought about the different approaches she could take to get Ray to talk. Thought about strangling him until he agreed, but then worried that he was so frail she’d accidentally snap his throat and then that would be a mess she’d have to deal with. She looked down at the man, considered her options.
Ray’s eyes fluttered open. Still blue, but now faded, diluted with pending death. Donna turned away, revulsion and excitement colliding inside her.
“She’s in my head,” Ray whispered, words oddly clear from his buckled lips and rotted gums.
Donna stared down at him; aware she’d taken a threatening posture. Ray seemed slightly more coherent than earlier. She reached down beside his bed, saw his eyes tightening as he followed her movements. Her fingers brushed the oxygen tank regulator.
“Daughter,” he whispered.
She considered flipping the valve for the regulator off and watching Ray suffer as he asphyxiated. Let herself linger in the fantasy.
One of Donna’s earlier therapists had told her nothing was out of bounds in fantasies as long as they stayed in the mind. Fantasies might help her control her anger, might help her keep calm. Donna could visualize anything she wanted as long as she refrained from making the fantasy real.
Donna visualized setting Ray on fire, making him suffer horribly. She pictured stuffing his gray face with the body of the rotten, long-dead osprey, strangling his squelchy neck until he confessed.
All fine.
Donna tightened her fingers, pushed, flipped the knob on the oxygen regulator up one notch, increased Ray’s continuous flow. Leaned over the old man.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Sweet, peaceful.
Ray scrabbled at the air with his lobster hands, gummed his pink tongue. “Screaming.”
“Who? Who is screaming?” Donna was all concern and daughterly affection.
“Laughter. They’re all laughing at me.”
“Ray.” She repeated his name three times, loud.
“So cold,” he murmured, eyes closing. Mouth loosened. “I made them so cold.”
Something roared inside Donna, tore away her calculated approach and laid raw her fury. “Dammit Ray!” she shouted, slammed her hand hard against the bedside table. “Tell me where Julene is!”
Rage burned over Donna, hot and eruptive. She seized Ray’s wrist, held it tight with one hand even as his skin burned her palm. She understood she could snap his frail bones. Was tempted. Jerked his arm hard instead. His eyes lurched open, panicked. Satisfaction blossomed in her stomach, made the monster inside her purr. She did nothing to tamp it down.
“Do not go to sleep,” she ordered him. “Tell me what happened to my mother.”
Ray tried to pull his arm free, feeble and impotent against Donna’s anger, her strength.
“Don’t like that, do you?” she said, squeezed harder.
His eyes met hers, wide and scared. “Screaming,” he whimpered. “Laughing.”
“You used to laugh at me, right Ray?” Donna rattled the beads on her arm loudly. Ray’s eyes sparked, gawked at her fingers vised around his wrist.
“Remember that time you came home from wherever the hell you were and we’d been doing the laundry but it had rained and the ground was wet and you hit the brakes but then slid the truck oh so slowly into the drying rack? And Julene and I had laughed because it was funny, and god knows we lacked anything really funny in our lives.”
Donna traced the inside of her mouth with her tongue, swallowed to clear her dry throat. “Remember how you got out of the truck, saw us laughing? You didn’t like that.”
Donna felt her face burning, could see all her different therapists lined up inside her mind, shaking their heads, holding up cue cards with the words “risk assessment” scrawled across them.
“Mother couldn’t see out of her eye for weeks after that.”
In one flash, Donna pictured the white beach, the peaceful water, the quiet landscape. But then she looked around and saw that she was alone in her tropical setting, alone and sweating and discarded.
Eyes straining, veins pumping hot, face sweating, Donna breathed her anger, reached her arm back and slapped Ray across the face. Hard.
“I loathe being hit.”
The nasal cannula tucked into his nostrils flew off. The thin skin around his upper right cheekbone tore. Blood flowed from his nose and mouth.
Donna tasted iron, felt fire. Opened a memory.
The first time Donna slapped someone, she hadn’t stopped after the first blow. She’d followed it with ten, twenty more, landed kick after punch after kick until the adults tore her away.
She’d been at Blazey’s for over a year at that point. She’d started school and didn’t say a word and went to class and ate lunch by herself in the cafeteria. Blazey once told her that treading water was okay, but couldn’t last forever.
One day in art class, when Donna had been carefully filling in a dark tree outline with a 4B graphite pencil, the classroom door had flown open and a woman had rushed in. She’d stood with her back to the class, speaking to the teacher, but the glimpse Donna had caught of her face was just enough.
Donna had felt her blood run cold, had stood and asked, “Mother?”
The woman turned at the sound of her voice and it had not been Julene and Donna’s heart had shattered.
The girls sitting behind her had laughed, had started singing. “Donna’s mommy is a crack whore.”
Donna hadn’t just reacted, hadn’t just lost her temper and exploded. Instead, she’d seethed herself into a white hot, emotionless void over the remaining forty minutes of class while the girls taunted her. Three minutes before the end of class she’d stood from her desk, walked to where the girls were laughing, had launched herself at the biggest one in a blur of kicks to the face and throat and head and then the teacher had lifted her from behind and dragged her down the hallway and threw her outside into the grass. Donna had vomited into the lawn as something inside her shattered and the numbness that gripped her vanished and she was gasping like a fish set free on the face of the sun.
Blazey hadn’t been able to do anything except load her into the car and drive her home and carry her onto the couch and stroke her hair. It was much later when Donna’s gasps became words, and then she was flood-talking, telling Blazey about the girls and their taunts and then the ride in the trunk and Julene and Ray and the cabin and how she feared she was turning into Ray and that she’d never find her mother, and Blazey had listened and listened and listened and when Donna was hoarse from talking Blazey had held her tight and wrapped her arms all the way around her shaking body.
Donna squeezed her hot eyes, remembered being held, her hair stroked while anger boiled her insides raw. She raked her still-clawed hand down her own face, opened her eyes, looked at Ray cringing below her. Took in her other arm, still raised, poised. The flames inside her flowed down her arm; she nearly struck him again.
But as she looked down at his collapsed, bloody face, she snagged his eyes, malicious and blue and scared, and also somehow triumphant.
She lowered her hand slow to her side and forced a breath out, one long breath, and imagined Hawaii. Kauai. White sand coast. Black volcanic rock wrapped with pale sand darkened where the blue ocean licked it. Crackling foam. Made sure this time she wasn’t alone in her imagination. Pictured someone running a dog. Blazey under an umbrella, stacks of books. Donna tasted real salt on her lips, felt her body relax, fingers unclench.
She came back to the small cabin room, the stench of a rotting, unclean body, the filth of a life piled up, molding.
“I’m sorry I acted on my anger,” she said to Ray, staring down at him in a way that allowed her to not really see him.
He coughed, chest shaking, saliva bubbling. She addressed the age spot above his eye.
“I’m not sorry I struck you. The last time I was on this property looking for Mother, you beat me. So I am not sorry to return the favor.” She sighed. “But I will endeavor to control myself better.”
She waited, gave him time for a response. But he was mute, eyes now closed.
“This will be easier if you just tell me.” She said it flat, felt the resignation in her tone. Her palm stung from where she’d touched him.
Silence.
She sighed; knew she wasn’t going to get any further. He wasn’t going to say anything more.
She reached for the plastic sippy cup, placed it under Ray’s face so he could drink from the straw. She held it steady, let him drink as much as he liked, didn’t look at him or his oozing nose, didn’t focus on the smell coming from him or the room. Let her mind float elsewhere until he finished. She replaced the cup, turned to leave.
“Daughter,” Ray whispered.
Donna paused in the doorway, looked back at him. His face was a swollen wreck.
“The laughter,” he said, voice just above a faint mutter.
Her heart pounded. She held her breath. “What about it?”
He curved his neck, strained to look at where she was standing. “Can you hear the laughter?”
Disappointment sunk into her stomach. Donna lifted her hands to her face, ran her fingers under her eyes, thought of beaches. “No, Ray,” she said, flat, emotionless, drained. “I don’t hear laughter.”
Ray shifted his whole body in the bed. “Daughter,” he slurred. “It comes from the ice.”
Donna turned away, left him and the room to rot.
9
THE
SCIENTIST
At ten minutes past noon, Ros stepped down off the lava onto the cracked pumice ringing the Highway 242 re-supply lot. As soon as her foot hit flat ground, she slipped. Pumice scattered like ball bearings.
She swore, regained her footing, looked up. A rickety blue Ford Ranger with a needled tree decal was parked next to the wooden box, tailgate down. Two people were at the truck’s nose, one leaning on the hood like a pinup with an enormous topknot of dark hair. Long legs. Hips. Ros took in the troubling curves, the contradictions of the tightly buttoned shirt. Red lipstick visible to the space station.
She stopped in her hurried tracks. Really?
She exhaled, felt her jaw loosen, realized the pinup was watching her, continued over. “Tove Andersen?” she called from five paces out. The figure nodded, straightened off the hood, leaned away from the young man in the green Forest Service outfit standing next to her like an electrified cactus.
“Sorry I’m late.” Ros had spent most of the morning frantically cleaning the Fellows Cabin and the Main Cabin. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Visions of glaciers and helicopters kept unspooling like a movie before her eyes.
