If the Ice Had Held Read online

  The night before, the San Antonio Man—who, when Melanie came out of the bathroom, she could see was still asleep but had flopped onto the middle of the bed—had said to her something about unhappiness, about the pressure of family, of economics, about the way he thought he was doing everything right but still felt horrible.

  Fucking me is not going to change anything, she had thought to say to him, but instead she offered her bulletproof smile.

  “I get it,” she had said instead. “It’s tough out there.”

  “It is tough,” he had said. “I’m trying so hard.”

  It was this kind of conversation that would perpetually lead her, and others like her, to spend their company’s money on too many beers, resulting in shacking up in Austin or Anaheim, with one of their rooms—usually hers—left sitting empty: $179 a night to hold a discarded lip gloss. The men she met on the road liked her because she fucked, and they liked her because she asked questions. When the wheels came down in their towns, they would go home to their wives, energized by the reminder that a sex life was still possible, and she would go home to her townhouse in Denver and take a long shower, shave every place on her body they could have possibly been, and move on.

  * * *

  Usually it was in early spring that the moths fluttered through the office. Melanie had read that moths were a rich food for predators like brown bears, because 72% of the moth’s body weight was made up of fat, making it more calorie-dense than elk or deer.

  Also she wondered about her colleagues’ home lives. Did they like spending their days in a cramped office among the hum of machines, and did they like fighting traffic back to their wide, open-floor-plan homes in the immediate suburbs and beyond? Did they like wrangling a car seat into the rear of their Honda and going home to the production of dinnertime, or would they rather be with her, tangled in hotel sheets with their cell phones on mute, pretending to have a different life where no one ever had to make the bed or run out of beer? It seemed obvious to her what the right answer was. The right answer included room and laundry service, but she also did not blame them for returning to their families.

  At work on Friday, she was composing an email when one of the sales staff—the one she had spent the night with in San Antonio—came into her office and closed the door. Her indoor windows looked into the hallway, carpeted in blue-gray, and she looked past him, past the articles and cartoons she had taped up in reverse so that the text faced the outside. One of her clippings was in anticipation of Easter, with two chocolate bunnies, the first, missing his hind-side, who said, My butt hurts, and the second, missing his ears, who said, What?!, and she focused on this as he was speaking.

  He said that he had been thinking of her, and Melanie thought the force of his breathing was making her potted palm rustle, but she listened. She knew she deserved this, since she had broken the rule. Customers were about propriety. Co-workers, proximity.

  He said that he had told his wife and that his wife was not happy, but that she understood, or she said she understood, except that he was not really sure she understood.

  “Understands what?” Melanie said. The bunnies were a classic, she thought, relevant beyond the crucifixion at Calvary, beyond Peeps.

  His eyes opened a little wider and then closed all the way. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said.

  Melanie turned her head. The palm leaves were definitely rustling. “You should,” she said. “You have to. You have children. I haven’t been thinking of you,” she said.

  She flashed again on Chicago, a month ago, Brian—another married man with kids. She wondered about their problems.

  The San Antonio Man, Alex, looked at his hands.

  Her email was beeping and the room was growing warm.

  “Okay, I did think of you once,” she said to him. “I thought of you when I was thinking how creepy San Antonio SeaWorld was. Because remember that? Remember the beluga whales?”

  He remembered. He said that he remembered she was upset that the dolphins and all of the sea creatures were so far from the ocean, and Melanie affirmed that yes, she had been very upset. She had eaten meat her entire life, but there was something about an inland-Texas shark tank that made her want to swear off the flesh of animals forever, and she had even checked her GPS, appalled to confirm that San Antonio was indeed landlocked.

  “So I was thinking that you made that easier, and I was appreciative for that,” she said. “Thank you,” she said.

  The night after the driest SeaWorld in existence, Melanie had drunk too much cheap tradeshow Chardonnay, and she took Alex to a bar near their hotel that she had been to once before, on some other trip, with some other San Antonio Man. The bar served nothing but off-brand spirits and peanuts; peanut shells covered the floor. When she complained that she had husks between her toes, wedged in her open shoes and demolishing her pedicure, he had done something that she thought was ridiculous and charming, which was to throw down his jacket over the discarded hulls to allow her to crunch unmolested to the bar, where she ordered a Crystal Palace vodka tonic, because it was all they had. He was sweet then. She wondered what his dry cleaner would think, and also, he was in a junior role, so it was probably his only good coat. After that, they had gone to his room, where he had been kind and polite and tentative, like an inexperienced young lover, but she liked this. In the morning they were at a breakfast seminar that reeked of pork. She had oatmeal.

  They were silent in her office; her laptop hummed. She had it plugged in to a larger screen to prevent eyestrain, but the screen was flickering and making a concerning electronic sound.

  “But, I told my wife,” he said.

  Her palm tree, lush from the repti-lights and her diligent watering, swished in a way that meant she needed to end the conversation. “I have to make call now,” she said, and she picked up her desk phone to punctuate. It was 11:17 a.m., and she started to dial her own mobile, which she hoped he would not notice vibrating next to her.

  * * *

  Melanie lived in a townhouse that had a tiny yard and nice trim. It took her seven minutes to mow the lawn, but four of that was getting the lawnmower started. The lawnmower sounded like a train coming off the rails, and the dull blades seemed to push the grass over more than cut it, but she didn’t mind. She had planted irises and sunflowers, a cascade of purple and yellow. She had also planted lilies, which stubbornly came up in the same shades, even though she was sure she had picked orange and red.

  That night, she sat in her yard and ate a reduced-calorie microwave meal and thought about Alex, the San Antonio Man. He thought he was different, but he wasn’t different. She felt bad that he had told his wife—she didn’t like that he had felt guilty, but mostly she didn’t like that he had then passed his guilt on to his spouse. One of the things about married guys, she had found, was that it was hard to get them to use condoms. Either they were just enough older than her that they didn’t quite believe the reality of modern sex, or, like Alex, because they were partnered, they believed they were clean. Melanie did not say to any of them that if they were considering sleeping with her, their wives might be sleeping with the nanny; and if Melanie was considering sleeping with them, then probably she had slept with someone else like them.

  The grass was cool and her entrée warm. She had her BlackBerry with her, and her email was beeping; she wanted to think her email was beeping again, but it was always beeping, and she opened an all-staff message from central HR.

  We have just received news that Kyle Walker passed away this evening. Kyle faced his battle with cancer bravely, and we will always remember his service to the company. Many of you knew Kyle well, and we suggest that you keep his wife, Amanda, in your thoughts. Some of you have already inquired if there is a memorial fund for Kyle: management asks that you please refrain from soliciting or collecting donations on behalf of the Walker family on company property as this could have tax imp
lications. The Company Foundation has provided a fruit basket and as a courtesy, your name is signed on the card as it appears in Human Resource records; please expect to see a $2.18 automatic deduction on your next statement from payroll.

  Melanie read the message again, then tossed her phone into the yard, irritated. She ate some more of her noodles. The magnolia tree she had painstakingly weaned off of a big-box home-improvement store fertilizer addiction was drooping in the corner against the cedar fence planks. Sometimes she sprinkled a little Miracle-Gro around the base of it, just to give it a taste of its old life, and she wondered if now would be a good time. What she liked about the magnolia was that it could reproduce with the help of beetles. The leaves and flowers were tough and ancient, having evolved before there were bees. She hadn’t ever seen a beetle in her yard, but she imagined their hard bodies doing the delicate work of pollination, and this seemed practical and calming to her.

  After discarding the cardboard tray and the plastic fork from her meal into the trash, she looked for the red LED light of her phone. When she picked it up, there were more emails beeping about Kyle. She had worked with him since before the acquisition.

  She remembered talking to him just before he went on leave, only a few months ago. She had told him how good he looked, because he had lost so much weight. She didn’t know it was because he was sick—he didn’t know then, either. He was wearing a purple shirt, and the fabric had a nice sheen against his dark hair and eyes. Kyle said that he was happy he was reducing, but he felt like shit.

  “Maybe you’re hungry,” she had said.

  “I’m not hungry,” he had said. “And I’m usually always hungry.”

  “Me too,” Melanie had said.

  They talked about work after that, and the next time she saw him, he asked her to keep an eye on the orchid in his office.

  The food turned over in her stomach. She only ate the reduced-

  calorie microwave meals because traveling was making her gain weight.

  She was thirty-three years old. Kyle had been thirty-two. The orchid had bloomed, twice.

  The next workday, the office was not so much somber as disorganized. Kyle had been on sick leave for some time, but he was the Adam Smith of the technical staff, the invisible hand who governed, who corrected, who offered perspective, who had taken the role of making the distinction between foreign (parent conglomerate!) and domestic (them!) interests. The air-conditioning went out again, and it was a very warm day, and the wind was blowing west. When they propped the door, warm air whooshed into the office like an oven being opened. The server room was becoming dangerously hot, and Melanie overheard one of the engineers say that he was sure Kyle would know what to do, and that set the rest of them off nodding and blinking back tears.

  Melanie ducked into the server room and switched the portable fans, since the engineers were in shambles. In the kitchen she found disposable bowls left over from a picnic and filled them with ice, hoping to get a few degrees of coolness.

  “Hi,” said Alex, her man from San Antonio.

  “Hi,” she said.

  The machines were whirring. There was a smell of melting plastic. The bowls were already soggy from condensation.

  “I don’t think the ice will really help,” he said.

  “What if we just shut it all down and went home?” she said.

  “Let’s wait,” said Alex. “I’d rather see it blow.”

  The room got hotter as they waited for something to happen, and by the time they were back in the hallway, Melanie was sweating through her blouse, and the faces of Alex and the engineers were damp. She stayed, listening to them talk, working out their carpools to Kyle’s memorial at the Masonic Lodge on Saturday. She arranged for a ride with Alex. What’s the harm, she thought, it’s a funeral? She traveled with people she knew and didn’t know and people she had fucked and hadn’t fucked all the time.

  When the air-conditioning resumed, they all filed back to their offices and cubes, the mechanically cooled air cold against their moist clothes. In her office, she shopped online in an idle way for a portable AC or even a swamp cooler, and then she shopped for shoes. She thought about San Antonio and the way the river snaked through the city, flanked with a low boardwalk dotted with margarita joints and platters of TexMex aching under the weight of American cheese. What had she wanted when she let Alex court her when they had no business courting—she had already known what would happen.

  The palm rustled, lush and vibrant under the shine of her multi-spectrum bulbs.

  Chapter Five

  Kathleen

  Winter, 1974

  At first, all Kathleen could see was the girl who was carrying someone made from her brother Sammy. It seemed one of the women in her family was always pregnant and there was something about the girl’s look that made her feel sure, though her mother would be able to be positive.

  Two more people he had left behind. There was her and her brothers and sisters and parents, but it was this girl, Irene, who Sammy had chosen.

  Kathleen weaved through the cloud of tobacco and fogging breath, stepping carefully though a ring of ice and stamped-out butts. The girl saw her coming, and her eyes narrowed.

  “You knew my brother,” Kathleen said as a greeting, and put out her hand.

  “Sure,” the girl said, turning a little.

  They heard the bell ring, and the few other kids around flicked their cigarettes, popped gum, and headed back toward the building. She turned and looked at the sky, a clear blue with clouds slung low over Pikes and Longs Peaks, streaks of gray at the top, more snow.

  “He mentioned you,” the girl said. She had on purple fingerless gloves, an oversized pea coat, and tall black boots. She lit another cigarette, and the smoke curled from the tip.

  Kathleen tried to remember if she had seen her somewhere else, but she could only see Sammy alone, in the casket her father had grumbled about paying for, staring at the sum on the sales receipt, incredulous this was the last thing he would give to his boy. Then this girl, graveside, crying into a bandanna. When the bandanna was so soaked it was useless, she took off her stocking cap to cry into, her mascara streaming. When everyone eased back into their cars, she set out walking.

  She finally extended her hand, and Kathleen reached immediately. Her name was Irene, and she shivered.

  “Thanks for coming to the service,” Kathleen said, and wished she had more to offer. They heard the bell sound again, marking the start of class, and they both turned toward school, walking together, but not close, as if Sammy were between them, ready to link both of their arms.

  She wondered where the girl Irene had been when Sammy had drowned, when crashed through the slick plane of river ice to pure cold. It had been city police who had found him, less than fifty feet from where the river cracked. From the vantage of where he touched ground, it was obvious no one should have tried to cross—the water was marked, in the slower eddies, by patches of a crystalline patina that broke apart when the current shifted even slightly. Haste, bad judgment, or just misperception at a dark angle, she didn’t know.

  As they neared the school, the girl sped up, and Kathleen let her go. The next day she packed two lunches, and she brought one to Irene, saying, Eat, you need to eat, you’re too tiny, and Irene looked at her in the hallway, mortified. Still, she took the crumpled paper bag, soft on one side where jelly had leaked through.

  She could not pay attention in any of her classes. She wrote Irene’s name on the margin of her notebook and then crossed it out so firmly that the paper shredded. In the hallways of her small school, she was constantly searching for Irene’s black hair, but she knew after the first day she’d tracked the girl down, Irene would be avoiding her. She kept bringing extra lunches to school, but only one other time had she been able to press the brown bag on Irene.

  In each of Kathleen’s class periods, she asked for a h
all pass to use the bathroom and peeked under every stall—dirty pink on the floor, beige stall dividers—to see if perhaps Irene was hiding there. Then she washed her hands and went back to class. She had already decided that if any of her teachers noticed the frequent bathroom breaks, she’ll claim lady problems or diarrhea, two bodily functions that were hard to argue against.

  Sammy probably didn’t drown so much as freeze, she figured, trying to take a short-cut across the river that looked frozen but was not. Kathleen knew the way ice could look solid at the river’s edge, thick as a floe, really, but be brittle towards the center. He was typically cautious.

  He must have been in a hurry to come home, and she realized that while he may have been cautious with her, or with the younger siblings, she didn’t know how he was on his own, in a rush, and heady from sex—was that it? Was it sex that had made him reckless?

  Her parents hadn’t asked, or as far as she knew, hadn’t even speculated where he was coming from, why he was on the other side of the river, but Kathleen was sure it was the girl.

  The winter was average, cold, but not unseasonable. Still, after Sammy’s service, Kathleen stopped wearing her coat, stopped wearing long johns, stopped wearing her double-socks.

  How cold do you have to be before you die? she wondered.

  Her mother would not let her leave the house without the coat, but once Kathleen was out of sight, she peeled it off. Once, she had rolled the waistband of her skirts so they barely skimmed her thighs, now she shoved her gloves and her hat and scarf into her book bag. The air was bitter, and it made her feel alert and tired at the same time, but she was surprised how accustomed she became to it. Her skin was red and chapped, and sometimes it burned when she came inside, but she felt close to Sammy in the cold.