The Ice Child (23 page)

Jo stared at the boy in front of her. Beside John, Catherine was pale, her eyes reddened, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

Jo walked toward him.

She saw Doug in his son’s face. In the set of his mouth. In the color of his eyes. She hesitated in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” John said.

She felt the roses reach out and touch her, their lingering scent resting on her like soft hands, and she closed her eyes, and saw sunlight, and Doug’s room, and an open window, and the faded pattern of alpine flowers on the carpet.

She opened her eyes.

“You killed him,” she said.

John reeled back.

“You killed him, you took him away from me,” she said.

“Jo,” someone said. A woman. Someone close.

“I’ll never forgive you,” Jo said. “Do you understand? Can you hear me? I’ll never forgive you.”

“Jo,” the voice repeated.

John had almost backed into his father’s body. He stopped, feeling the wheels of the gurney against his foot. What little color there was in his face drained from it. He glanced back at Doug.

“That’s right,” Jo said. “Look at him. You did that. You see him? You did that with your jealousy.”

Gina caught her hands. She turned Jo away, pulled her into her own body, wound her arms around her, held her.

John walked away, down the short and echoing aisle. Catherine ran after him. As they got to the door, she put her hand on his, on the handle.

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Let me come with you,” she said. “You need someone with you.”

He stared at her. Tears were threatening in his eyes; as they stood, face to face, the first drops spilled.

“I don’t need anyone,” he said.

“John …”

“She’s right!” he cried.

Catherine stood stock still, open mouthed with horror. “No, John … she didn’t mean it.…”

He pulled savagely away from her. “Well, I do,” he whispered. “Keep away from me.”

He opened the door and they heard his footsteps: walking, stumbling, running.

Jo began to shudder in Gina’s embrace. Catherine, shocked, turned to stare at the two women.

Jo slumped against Gina’s shoulder, and they edged together toward the chairs, where Gina sat her friend down. She reached in her pocket to find a tissue, but then saw that Jo’s face was dry. The other woman was staring at Doug.

“It’s all right,” Gina said. “It’s okay.”

Jo looked at her slowly. “It’s not all right,” Jo murmured.

“No,” Gina said. “I didn’t mean … God, Jo. I don’t know what I mean.” She shook her head in desperation. “I’m so sorry.”

Jo’s gaze trailed away, over the flowers, out to the snow beyond the glass. “It’s the other thing,” she said quietly. A ghostly smile came to her face.

“What other thing?” Gina asked.

“We called it that,” Jo said plaintively. She looked up. Catherine was standing at her side, white faced.

Jo suddenly stood up and went to Doug. She put her hand on his chest and ran it up his shoulder. To the other womens’ dismay she gave him a little push, as she would do to wake him.

“Come back and sit down a minute,” Gina whispered.

Jo turned, to look at them both.

“It’s not all right,” she said. “Because I’m going to have his baby.”

P
ART
T
WO

Two Years Later

Eighteen

The bear had spent a long time trying to find the right place.

She was looking for fine and hard-packed snow. It was the same consistency that the Inuit looked for when building igloos. She needed it for much the same purpose.

When she finally came upon a bowl-shaped slope, she began to dig, progressing quickly through the drift with her massive, raking claws, until she had made a narrow doorway. As she worked, the snow she had pushed aside formed behind her and plugged the entrance. She worked upward, finally making a rounded chamber about eight feet long and six feet wide.

This would be her home through the winter, the place where she would give birth. She made a small air vent in the roof, but from outside it was impossible to see that anything was alive in there, even that any animal had passed that way. Her pawprints soon vanished in the snowstorms. Inside, the temperature was pleasant, forty degrees warmer than the tundra outside. She scuffed the den floor for a while until she was comfortable, and then lay down to sleep.

The faultless machinery of her body ticked slowly as, for week after week, she lay isolated from the world. Her temperature and heartbeat were lower than normal, and she passed into the suspended animation of hibernation, neither eating nor drinking, while her fat was metabolized to provide her food and water.

In this dreamlike state her cub grew inside her.

He was born early in the year, a tiny scrap of life. His future as a male polar bear would dictate that his body weight ought to rise to something between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds. His breed was the largest carnivore on earth. And yet, when his mother produced him in the blue twilight of the den, he was just over a pound in weight. He was blind and deaf, his body barely covered in thin wool. Following instinct, he suckled his mother’s milk, luxuriously rich at thirty-one percent butterfat and twelve percent protein.

Outside and above them the sky flickered with the specters of the aurora borealis. But the mother and cub saw nothing of the flames and mists that billowed across the heavens. The mother bear wrapped her cub in her embrace, surrendering to sleep.

Only when four months had gone by did the mother rouse herself to dig a tunnel to the world.

By then it was March, and she had lost over four hundred pounds during her self-imposed exile. Her cub had grown to the size of a small dog and was lively and inquisitive. He was no longer satisfied with the confines of his winter nursery and was anxious to push past his mother.

At first the light blinded him. There were no storms. The sun was a swimming disc, steely gray, emerging through yellow clouds. He waited at the entrance, uncertainly eyeing the new light, while his mother, still drowsy and moving in slow motion, walked away from the den and began to scrape the snow from the ground. When she found the frozen mosses and algae, she ate them ravenously, mixing them with snow.

But for a while food was not her priority. She remained near the den, watching her cub’s tentative explorations. She lay at the den entrance on her back. Her cub played for a while in the newly found expanse stretching out in front of him; from time to time he would stop and stare ahead of him, as if considering the vastness of his empire.

But eventually he returned to his mother’s side.

She was his only protection under the ice-white sky.

Nineteen

The sun was shining into Jo’s bedroom.

Jo woke suddenly and stared at the barred pattern of light on the opposite wall. If it was a dream that had propelled her so quickly into the day, she couldn’t remember it.

She looked at the clock. Six
A.M.
And then at Doug’s picture on the bedside table. The photograph had been taken on the day that they had moved into this house. He was on the doorstep, half turned toward her, laughing. As always, she looked at him for a while, then touched his face with the tip of her finger.

She got up and sat for some time on the edge of the bed, letting the familiar regret wash and recede. Then, running her hands through her hair, she rose from her bed and pulled on her dressing gown. She went out along the landing and into what had once been the storeroom, and which now belonged to her son.

She walked softly to the side of Sam’s bed: he was fast asleep, the blankets in a heap around him, his face almost buried in the pillow. She reached out and gently stroked his forehead and hair. He was snoring slightly, with the leg of his blue teddy bear clutched in his fist.

After a moment or two Jo went downstairs, padding along the hallway to the kitchen, where she made herself tea. With the hot cup in her hands she opened the door and stepped outside into the garden, bare feet on the worn terracotta brick of the path.

As always, in these first few silent moments of the day, she stood still, closing her eyes. Letting herself drift.

When she and Doug had first moved here, the garden had been the bleakest square of untended gray grass. In December it had disappeared under the snow that froze England for more than six weeks. But she recalled vividly the very first day that she had walked out into it, a March morning.

She had never even opened the door until then, because there was no way out from it; everything came and went through the front, along the narrow little street. Glancing at it sometimes from the bedroom, she had thought it looked like a prison yard, and so she habitually turned her face from it. She already had a yard like that inside her head, a dark square where only her thoughts raced; an exercise yard for demons. She didn’t want to put her body into a spot that matched her mood.

But that March morning had taken her by surprise. The snow had long gone, and the grass was growing. She had suddenly realized that the malnourished-looking tree in the corner was actually a lilac. She had seen that the twisted net of vines on the wall was a clematis, in desperate need of pruning before its spring growth. And there had been celandines all along the flagstone path. She had stared at their color, and thought how unlikely they were, how surprising. They were alive, blazing like small suns right along the path, right to the back wall.

She came back to life with the garden.

It was a long, slow journey.

When Sam was born in June of that year, she had taken him out onto the lawn when she came home, and sat with him in the shade of the lilac. By then the clematis had already flowered, and was a sheaf of green leaves, racing, it seemed, full pelt along the top of the wall and diving down the other side. The whole left-hand side of the garden, under the high walls, had given her a dramatic flush of bluebells in April. She had cut the grass—huffing over it while she was eight months pregnant—and it was now a neat green page, springy, as if it were downland turf and not a city patch.

The very last thing that she had done, just before Sam’s birth—as it turned out—was to buy a patio rose. Just one little container. One miniature rose. An apricot. By then she could just about bear the sight of roses.

She had sat with Sam in her arms, oblivious to Gina’s anxious fussing—rearranging of chairs and the sun parasol—and she had lowered her face into Sam’s body, inhaling the newly bathed scent of him, and feeling the sunlight on her neck and back, its almost tender warmth. She had felt suddenly flooded with feeling—a feeling that there was some sort of connection, some sort of thread that passed out from them both, mother and child, through the leaves, out into the greater world. She felt a touch on it, a communication down the wire. She had raised her head, eyes widening momentarily. It had been like a hand brushing her hair, a name whispered in her ear. She had looked at Sam, and seen her son gazing, eyes fixed somewhere past her face, as if he had heard it, and was listening too.

When she thought about it afterward, she had changed her mind about that moment. She had decided that, contrary to how she had felt at the time, there had actually been nothing surreal in it. There had been no touch, no wire, and no whisper. Nothing at all but the lilac leaves moving in the afternoon breeze above her head. Besides, she had decided months ago never to believe in phantoms. Never again to trust in miracles.

Sam was real. Very real, in the sleepless nights that once again accentuated her loneliness. He was real, with his inquisitive, searching looks, and the tight grip on her fingers. He was real in her embrace, his naked little body against her own breast. Real when he cried. Real when she leaned over the cot to catch the passing of each breath. But other things were not real at all.

Dreams, for one.

She opened her eyes now to the ever-brightening day. She finished her tea, and walked back into the house, and walked upstairs, to draw the curtains in the sitting room.

The same sunlight that streamed into Jo’s bedroom was filling the open space. Doug would hardly have recognized the way Jo lived now. Not only was she organized—he would have been amazed to see her desk, rigorously in order—but she was also now almost pathologically neat and tidy, as if she had taken on part of his character.

She looked about herself, pleased at the room. How it always seemed to be flooded with light and space. It had been another job before Sam was born: to take down the old red brocade curtains that they had inherited from the last owner, pull back the carpet to expose the oak floorboards. She had bought a secondhand couch that filled one side of the room, a pale, well-worn cream linen that she had filled with yellow cushions. Opposite the couch, books lined one wall. And the final touch was the deep bowl of flowers, filling the low table by the window. There were always flowers by the window. It was Jo’s one and only house rule.

She heard a noise from Sam’s bedroom and went back to him.

He was lying awake now, staring into space. He hardly ever cried when he woke up; sometimes it seemed to her that he was far away, traveling. Until he saw her, and truly woke up.

She knelt down. “Hey, soldier,” she murmured, and stroked his face. “We’ve got your party to organize. Wake up.”

A smile transformed his face. His birthday had been several days before, but the party was organized for today, Sunday. Reaching to pick him up, Jo caught her knee on something by the bed. She picked it up. It was a piece of Lego.

Sam immediately snatched it. “Fix,” he said.

She considered the distorted piece of green plastic. “I can’t fix that,” she objected. “You ran over it with something.”

“Fix.”

“It’s all squashed. What did you do, put it under a tractor?” she asked. “It’s destroyed, you vandal.”

Sam’s eyes lit up. “Tractor,” he said.

“Tractor’s in the shed, Sam.”

“Tractor, now!” He pulled heavily on her arm.

“No, Sam,” she chided gently. “Breakfast now, tractor later.”