Freeze Tag (13 page)

She does have his heart, thought Meghan. Horror like some grotesque virus exploded her innocence.

Lannie has his heart. That’s why I don’t want to touch him. She has a grip on his heart. We’re alone in this truck, and yet her fingers are curled around his heart.

Even West’s voice was like Lannie’s. The same flatness to it, because love and heart had been ironed out of it.

No doubt Lannie had whispered that to herself when she decided she had had enough of Mrs. Anveill.
My mother must be ended
.

“West,” whispered Meghan. “Did you hear yourself? Have you thought about what you’re saying?
Lannie must be ended
. That’s evil. It means killing Lannie.”

West hardly looked at her. Now a sort of hot thick eagerness poured out of him, like a poisoned drink. “Exactly,” he said.

He shared her desires, too. Her aching, throbbing desire to inflict pain.

Oh, Lannie, Lannie! thought Meghan. Give me back his heart! His fine good heart! You’ve taken it!

She wanted to cleanse West of Lannie. They did that in olden days. They purged people of evil. Ancient priests and ancient rituals reached down into the heart and soul and tore out the evil and left the person exhausted but clean.

West is unclean, thought Meghan. His heart is Lannie’s.

“Last night,” West announced casually, “I considered driving into the bridge abutment.”

The bridge had been rebuilt. Huge concrete pylons and immense concrete walls.

“Lannie won’t use a seatbelt,” West told her. He looked happy. “I seriously thought of simply driving into the cement at seventy-five miles an hour.”

“West! You’d be killed.”

He nodded without regret. “Yes. We’d both be killed.”

She could not bear it that West had come to this. “No, West. We will not do that. We will not think of doing that. We are not going to
end
anybody. We are not going to end Lannie and we are not going to end you.”

“Then where will
this
end, Meghan?” said West. He spoke reasonably, as if discussing homework or radio stations. “Where will Lannie take us? Are we going to grow up and reach our twenties and thirties and middle age and old age, with Lannie still there threatening us? Lannie still freezing people who annoy her? Lannie still ruining all our lives?”

Meghan could not sit in the ruined truck any longer. It was too symbolic. West was the rusted-out body. “Let’s go up to the house,” she said. Now it was her own voice that had become toneless. All the music had passed out of her. There would be no melodies and no harmonies now. Only the flat, ironed, heartlessness of Lannie … and West.

West got out of the truck. Meghan slid over the seat and hit the ground with both feet. She felt better standing on the ground. A little more connected to whatever goodness was left in the world. She headed up the hill while West fussed with the truck, checking the windows and slamming the door. As if the truck mattered. As if anything mattered when a fine young man could discuss without the slightest worry the “ending” of another human being.

“I just don’t see what problem you have with this, Meggie-Megs,” said West, genuinely puzzled. “I mean, think of Jason in that garage! How can you possibly mind Lannie being ended when you know what she does for fun?”

“That’s Lannie!” cried Meghan. “Lannie’s sick and twisted. But we’re not! We can’t do it just because she does!”

“Now, Meggie-Megs,” said West.

She could not bear it that he was abusing her baby nickname like this. Meggie-Megs had been a curly-haired toddler to whom afterschool snacks and bear hugs were the whole world. Meggie-Megs had been a name for innocence and laughter, not the “ending” of another human being.

West was still discussing Lannie’s “end” as they went into the house.

His brother and sister were watching a video. Tuesday was partial to James Bond and, as Meghan entered the family room, James Bond was also facing down Evil. He would win, of course. In the movies, Good triumphed over Evil. And so cleverly. Driving the best cars and using the finest of electronic devices.

Meghan did not feel clever. She felt utterly and completed depressed, and utterly and completely unable to stop the expansion of Lannie.

“See,” said West, flopping down on the big raggedy armchair, “I was also thinking that I would teach Lannie to drive. And what I could do is, send her off by herself after I’ve rigged whatever car I use to teach her. There’d be a nice symmetry to that besides. She killed her mother in a car. It’s only fitting that she should die in a car. Don’t you think so?”

Tuesday and Brown looked up from the video.

Meghan could not bear it. “West,
murder
can
not
be next on our list.”

“It isn’t murder,” said West, slightly surprised. “It’s ending Lannie.”

The family room divided into two temperature zones. There was the warm and friendly side on which Tuesday and Brown sat. There was the cold and vicious side where West sat.

Meghan stood in the middle of the room, the sleet of West’s plans hitting her on one side; the stunned sweetness of Tuesday and Brown warming her on the other side.

“West?” said Brown.

West did not even look at his little brother. He was caught up in a daydream, a dream in which he would do all the things to Lannie which creatures do to each other in Saturday morning cartoons: They flatten each other, they push each other off cliffs, they drop dynamite down on each other’s chimneys.

Meghan knew then that she really was an ex-girlfriend.

There was no going back.

This was not West: the Trevor she loved best. This was a stranger who would slice off another life as easily as slicing a wedge off a melon.

“And then …” said West eagerly.

Tuesday began to cry but West did not see her. A smile was curving on West’s face. Meghan could see Lannie in it, as if Lannie had taken up residence inside West.

“Or another way …” said West excitedly.

Brown stared at his fingernails, the way boys did, making fists and turning them up. Girls spread their fingers like fans and held them away.

Meghan went home.

She could not bear another burden.

She lay awake for a long long time. Once or twice she got out of bed and went to a window from which she could stare at Lannie’s house, and think of the people who lived there: the one who breathed and the one who did not. Once or twice she got out of bed and went to a window from which she could stare at the Trevors’ house, and think of the people who lived there: the friends she still understood and the friend she had lost.

And once more she got out of bed, and very, very quietly opened a door at the other end of the hall, and looked in on two sleeping parents. Truly, thought Meghan Moore, I am loved. I have seen now what it is to be unloved and I know why Lannie is jealous.

I do have everything.

In school the next day, Meghan asked Lannie to sit with her.

“What is it you want from me?” said Lannie, when they were alone together.

“I just want to talk.”

Lannie shook her head. “Nobody feels that way with me. You want something from me. Say what it is.” Her eyes, like faucets, ran both hot and cold. Meghan could neither look at Lannie nor look away. She could not go on being courteous and full of fibs. “I want to talk about West,” she whispered. Her lips did not move easily. How did Lannie do her freezing? She had even frozen Meghan’s courage, and Meghan had had so much of it when she left home this morning!

“Oh?” said Lannie.

“I’m worried about him,” said Meghan.

“Oh?”

“You’ve made him so cold!” Meghan burst out.

Lannie smiled. “His heart is colder,” she agreed.

Meghan felt herself bowing forward, the weight of her worries folding her up. Her shoulders sagged, her muscles went limp, her arms drooped.

Coldhearted
.

One of those phrases people toss about easily, without consideration, without knowing what it truly means. Meghan knew. She had two cold-hearted people to go by.

And what is a cold heart?

A heart without love. Without compassion.

A heart that does not worry about others. A heart that does not care if somebody else pays a price just for being near it.

Heart and soul. They are so close! So intertwined. What kind of soul could a coldhearted person have?

Perhaps, thought Meghan Moore,
no soul at all
.

Perhaps the cold heart has frozen the soul out.

“Did you touch him to do it?” she whispered.

“I didn’t have to touch him. I just had to be there. Showing him my way.” Lannie smiled her smile of ice and snow. “He’s a good follower, West.”

Meghan was crying now. Her tears were hail on her own cheeks: blisteringly cold tears that peppered her skin instead of running down her cheeks.

What would melt the heart of Lannie Anveill? What could possibly release the heart of West Trevor? “You froze him,” said Meghan through the hail of her tears.

“Yes,” said Lannie, chuckling. “He’s mine.”

S
UNSHINE IS A BLESSING
.

Morning is a blessing.

Agony is less and fear is diminished in the sparkle and the gold of an early sun.

Meghan was slightly restored. She dressed in a corner of her bedroom where a shaft of sunlight made a warm square on the floor. If only I could pick that up, she thought, and carry it with me. Stand in it all day long.

But she did not raise the shade to let more sun in, for Lannie’s house also lay to the east.

There is a way out of this, she told herself. Then she said it out loud for additional strength. “There is a way out of this!” she called. If a cold heart has frozen West’s soul, I will just have to warm him up.

She smiled to herself. “Perhaps West could be defrosted,” she said to the sunshine square. It was a word for refrigerators or plastic bags of vegetables. “I am probably the only girl in America,” she said ruefully, “who has to defrost her boyfriend.”

Well, it made Meghan laugh, anyway. Now how to get West to laugh so warmly? How to defrost his heart, and locate his soul, and peel him away from Lannie’s influence, and save the world from Lannie?

In the sunshine, she believed that it could be done.

In the sunshine, she believed that she was the one who could do it.

And luckily, the sun stayed out all day. No clouds passed in front of it, no snowstorms blew in from Canada. Her classes in the morning were on the east side of the building and in the afternoon on the west. She never did lose that square of sunlight. And so after school, she went for help. She chose her history teacher, whom she adored and who seemed to have so many answers! The woman knew dates and wars and prime ministers and ancient enmities. She knew rivers and treaties and battles and kings.

Meghan launched right into it. “Suppose,” said Meghan Moore, “that a person’s soul froze. How would you teach him to love again?”

Her teacher smiled. “My dear, mankind has been trying to teach love to the frozen for thousands of years. That’s half of every religion and every philosophy.”

Meghan did not want to waste time reading every religion and every philosophy. “Who’s right?” she said briskly.

“My dear, mankind has gone to war trying to decide who’s right. They’ve lynched their neighbors, disowned their children, and built a million sacred edifices.”

Meghan did not really want details at a time like this. “I understand, but in your opinion, who is right?”

“Everybody.”

Meghan looked at her teacher with some irritation. “You wouldn’t accept that answer on a quiz,” she pointed out. “You’d say, ‘Be more specific’”

“Life is not a quiz,” said the history teacher.

“Are you taking me seriously?” demanded Meghan. “I really need to know the answer to this question.
Who is right?
”

“And I said everybody. Love is right. In any language, in any history, in any religion, if you love your neighbor, if your heart is generous, if you show mercy and act justly, then you are right.”

Love my neighbor
.

Well, I have two neighbors here, thought Meghan Moore. Lannie and West.

Does this mean I have to love Lannie? That means I have to love Evil. Because Lannie is evil. She’s a poison seeping from an abandoned tank into the water supply, and no one notices until all the children on the street have cancer. How can I love that?

I’ve always loved West. I’ve loved him all my life, and especially this year, and what do I have to show for it?

A cold heart in somebody else’s hands.

Show mercy and act justly
.

Show mercy to whom? Lannie’s future victims? Lannie? Myself?

And what is justice? To do what West wants? End Lannie Anveill?

She had come for answers, and the history teacher seemed to think that they had been given to her. The history teacher smiled happily as she packed her briefcase with papers to correct that night.

To Meghan it did not feel like an answer. It felt like more questions.

She left the school. The sun still shone. The square of gold was still at her feet. But she knew nothing.

Least of all what to do next.

T
HE SUN SET AND
the snow began. Clouds as thick as continents rolled in, bleak and bruised. From out of those dark pain-ridden whirls came snow so white it stretched credulity. Nothing could be that white. That pure. That perfect.

Winter deepened in one brief afternoon.

Dark Fern Lane had never seen so much snow. It drifted thigh deep. Tires on the road surface made a whole new sound: scrunching and crunching in treads.

It was a Friday. The rules of school nights were suspended.

But not one child frolicked in the snow. Not one family had turned on a porch light or a garage light, and come out to roll a snowman in the dark. Not one snowball had been formed, not one snowfort built, not one angel made. No one had plucked the icicles from the porch overhang and pretended to be a unicorn. No one had gathered a plateful of the best and whitest snow, and poured hot maple syrup on it to make instant candy.