The Ice Cradle Page 2

  I heard a shrill squawk, and a nearby seagull hopped into flight. I glanced over.

  “Henry?”

  “What?” He looked guilty. I saw him drop a couple of pebbles onto the sand.

  “Did you hit that bird?” I called.

  “No,” he said.

  I set down our duffel bag and shifted the weight of my backpack. I said nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he finally conceded.

  “So you did throw a stone at it.”

  “I just wanted to scare him,” my son explained.

  I sighed and shook my head. “He was only looking for food, honey. How would you like it if you had to fly around all day in the freezing cold trying to find old French fries and pizza crusts and—pieces of dead fish.”

  His face grew progressively glummer, but he didn’t say anything. I persisted.

  “Would you like that?”

  Henry shook his head.

  “Then leave them alone. They aren’t hurting you.”

  Henry kicked at the sand, then turned and sprinted to the side of the road.

  “Wait!” I called reflexively, though there wasn’t a car in sight.

  The Grand View wasn’t the largest hotel on Water Street. That honor apparently belonged to the National, an enormous white edifice with a porch that could comfortably seat dozens of sunset-gazing cocktail sippers. The National didn’t appear to be open for the season yet, but judging from the sound of power saws and the sight of sheer white curtains blowing out of open windows, the owners were getting it ready.

  If the National was the diamond of Water Street, then the Grand View was its pearl. Perched back from the road, it was a quarter of the National’s size, and so perfect in proportion and scale that it reminded me of a doll’s house.

  Some of its weathered shingles had recently been replaced and stood out like too-white teeth, but a few years of seasonal exposure would take care of that. Wide chimneys at either end of the house suggested fireplaces inside, and a cupola just big enough for a person or two rose above the parapet. In Cambridge, “widow’s walks” topped plenty of landlocked mansions miles away from the sea. Here, I was sure, the structures were more than ornamental.

  Henry flew up the Grand View’s front steps and stood on tiptoe, pressed against the front door, straining to reach for the brass knocker. He looked up at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He clacked it as hard as he could, three, four times. He was gearing up for a fifth when I grabbed his hand.

  “Hold on!” I said. “Give them a chance to get here!” I would clearly have to take him for a long, long walk, or something inside was going to get broken.

  The door was opened by a voluptuous woman with a cheerful look on her face. Just beyond her, I saw a creature far less full of life and good spirits: the ghost of a girl about six.

  “Can I help you?” the woman inquired.

  “I’m Anza O’Malley,” I said. “Caleb Wilder said I should just—”

  “Oh, yes, of course! Sorry! Come in!”

  She stepped back to let Henry and me into the foyer, and I realized that she wasn’t just curvy, she was pregnant. Seven months or so was my guess.

  “I knew you were coming today,” she said. “It just slipped my mind.”

  “That’s okay. This is my son, Henry.”

  “I’m Lauren Riegler,” said the woman, closing the door behind us. When she smiled, I noticed a prominent gap between her two front teeth, and for some reason, this made me like her immediately.

  “Thanks for having us,” I said.

  She nodded, then looked down at Henry and smiled. “Hi, Henry. Nice to meet you.”

  Lately, I had been all over him about his manners, particularly his habit of mumbling and staring at the floor when an adult spoke to him. So you can imagine my happy surprise when he looked Lauren straight in the eye and quietly said, “Nice to meet you, too.”

  I barely had time to enjoy this little triumph, though, because I became aware of Henry’s gaze wandering toward the stairs. I felt that swoopy feeling you get in your stomach when something catches you off guard, and for a moment or two, I could barely breathe.

  From the time he was just a baby in my arms, I had wondered whether Henry would grow up to share my gift. Now, it seemed, I had my answer.

  Henry could see the ghost.

  When my child was three and a half, I realized that I could do something that really baffled me: I could read out loud to him, page after page, while my mind was thoroughly occupied with something else. This probably wouldn’t surprise a neuroscientist, but it sure shocked me.

  It wasn’t just books that I knew by heart, either—the Babar chronicles, the rhyming tales of Madeline in that old house in Paris—but stories that were completely new to me. And I wasn’t just idly drifting, mentally, while keeping most of my focus on the page. I would find myself three or four pages from the last words I remembered saying, while Henry sat perfectly happy beside me, having detected in my tone and manner no hint whatsoever that I was actually miles, or years, away. I suppose it’s like driving on the highway at night and suddenly realizing that you are where you wanted to go, having been virtually unaware of the fact that you were getting there.

  This was what the rest of Saturday felt like. To all the world, I must have appeared energetic and engaged, but inside, I was in shock. Something deep in my worldview had shifted, and yet I chatted with Lauren as she showed us to our room, an expansive double with a window overlooking the ocean. Then I took Henry exploring for close to three hours, to the Southeast Lighthouse and to the rocky cliffs I would later learn were called the Mohegan Bluffs. I watched Henry carefully in the area around the lighthouse, which was positively teeming with ghosts. If he saw them at all—and they were everywhere: on the rocks, on the wrought-iron balconies of the lighthouse itself, on its deep, secluded porch—he paid no real attention. He seemed to care only about the dramatic bluff towering over the crashing waves; specifically, how close I would let him get to the edge.

  Later, as I lay on my bed and gazed over at Henry’s sleeping form, I turned my thoughts to what I had witnessed upon our arrival at the inn. It wasn’t the first time Henry had seen a ghost. Like most children, he’d once had an “imaginary playmate,” an eight-year-old named Silas, the earthbound spirit of a child who had died after having been kicked in the head by a horse. This event took place in a barn that once stood where the house containing our apartment now stands.

  Imaginary playmates are actually ghosts. Most kids can see and talk to them until they’re six or seven. But eventually, children are taught the “truth” by adults: that ghosts don’t exist. Once children come to believe this, they lose their easy access to the spirit world. Henry was only five, and I wasn’t one of those nay-saying adults, but even so, I knew that just because he’d been pals with Silas, that didn’t necessarily mean he would see ghosts all his life.

  Earthbound spirits retain the personal qualities of the people they were in life, and Silas was a bully. I always figured that that was why he’d gotten kicked in the head in the first place. He’d probably been tormenting the horse. At a certain point, though, I decided that I’d had quite enough of his leading Henry around by the nose and teaching him rude tricks, like how to pull a chair out from under someone who was about to sit down. I cornered Silas one night just after Henry had fallen asleep and informed him that the fun and games were over, and it was high time for him to join his family on the other side. The poor young spirit burst into tears of relief.

  I was able to create the white doorway for him, a skill I learned from my grandmother. As far as I can tell, this doorway, which I can imagine and then make real, leads to a shining tunnel to the other side. I can call it up through an act of will and imagination, closing my eyes and focusing on a pinprick of light, and then making the pinprick bigger and brighter. When I open my eyes, the light is burning in the real world, and not just in my imagination. I can project it onto a wal
l, as a doorway through which a willing spirit can actually walk, leaving our world for the next. I heard Silas joyfully calling out to his parents and sister just before he disappeared into the light.

  Then there was an incident last fall. On Columbus Day weekend, Declan and Kelly had taken the kids up to a place Kelly’s brother owns on Lake Sunapee. When Dec brought Henry back on Monday night, Henry mentioned something about having heard the crying of a ghost. The story was that a little girl had drowned in the lake long ago and supposedly, her cries could still be heard at night. Henry thought he had heard them.

  At the time, Henry was going through a phase in which Declan basically walked on water, so when Henry asked Dec if he believed in ghosts, and Declan didn’t respond with a quick and definite yes—explaining instead that he was open-minded on the subject—Henry backed down.

  It was hard to tell, in that moment, whether a ghost story told around a flickering campfire had put ideas into Henry’s head, or whether he’d actually heard the cries of a ghost. Of course, I could simply have asked him, or put him to a little test at any time in the past few years, but I hadn’t. I just hadn’t wanted to go there, not yet, not until I really had to.

  I remember how I felt when I first came to understand that nobody else I knew, except Nona, could interact with the shadowy people I saw and talked to every day. Not Joe, not Jay, not Daddy. According to Nona, even my mother hadn’t been able to communicate with spirits, and for years and years, I felt burdened by my ability. Then again, I would never do to Henry what Nona did to me—trotting me around to funerals and deathbeds, making me part of a sad adult world of loss, sickness, and conflict before I could even ride a two-wheeler. Why Dad let that happen I’ll never understand. I suppose he felt that Nona and I were performing good deeds for our fellow beings, and if I wasn’t complaining about the whole business, he wouldn’t stand in the way. Sometimes I wish he had. It was a strange and lonely way to grow up.

  On the subject of Henry’s abilities, though, the jury was still out. Spying the little girl on the stairs was not really that different, after all, from having an imaginary playmate. And even if he did presently possess some supernatural ability, the kind that many children have, it still might fade in time.

  Deep down, though, I didn’t believe it would. The signs were all pointing in the same direction. So in the time between now and that moment when I knew for sure that my son shared my skills, I was just going to have to figure out how to help him make his way through the world without feeling scared or set apart. In that, I suppose, I was pretty much like every other parent on the planet, trying to help their kid navigate through life with whatever hand the child had been dealt.

  In the short term, I decided I would handle it the way Henry’s pediatrician recommended that I deal with questions about the birds and the bees. Don’t offer information, she’d advised me. When they’re ready to ask, she’d said, they will, and when they do, answer the question truthfully and simply, but only answer the question. If they’re developmentally ready for more information, they’ll ask for it.

  “Really?” I’d said. “So I don’t have to get a little speech ready? Check The Joy of Sex out of the library?”

  “Not yet,” she’d said.

  The little ghost found us a few hours later. Henry was fast asleep in the bed by the window, and I had just begun to read a book I’d plucked from the bookcase in the hall, the title of which had caught my eye: How to Cook a Wolf. It turned out to be a collection of M. F. K. Fisher’s musings on life, love, and food: specifically, how she had made the most of quite a bit less of it when the wolf of wartime poverty was at the door.

  If I didn’t have to make a living, I’d be reading all the time. That’s all I did in college, basically, having purposely chosen a school that had few course requirements to stand in the way of my lounging around my dorm room seven days a week, often in my pajamas, reading at the clip of a novel a day. I still exhaust myself on weekends, when Henry goes to Declan’s. I often stay up until three or four in the morning, finishing a book I just can’t put down.

  The little ghost was barefoot and wearing a flimsy nightdress when she drifted into the room. Ghosts are pure energy and can come and go at will, through doors, walls, and windows. They can’t do much else, though, which is where Hollywood has gotten it wrong. They can’t read minds. They only know about what they have actually seen and heard, so if ghosts aren’t present when something is happening or being discussed, they won’t know anything about it. They can move a light object, like a sheet of paper or a piece of jewelry, and they sometimes have enough energy to whip up a whirlwind that can scare the daylights out of a person. But that’s pretty much where their powers end.

  The little ghost didn’t do any of those things. She drifted right over to Henry’s bed and perched herself beside him, staring down at his sleeping form. I kept my eyes on the page, but since she had her back to me, I was able to steal glances without her realizing that I was doing it.

  I caught my breath when she reached out and touched Henry’s cheek. He didn’t move. She leaned over and blew softly in his face, and he startled and drew away, as though a mosquito were humming around just above him. But he didn’t wake up.

  Then she came over to me and stood between the beds just staring at my face. I had an awful time keeping up the pretense that I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t want to talk to her yet. Even without scrutinizing her closely, though, I was aware that she was piteously thin, all knobby knees and elbows. Her hair hung down in two tangled braids, and it was all I could do not to reach out and fold her into my arms. She looked wretched, the poor little wraith. I had to do something to ease her suffering and loneliness as soon as I possibly could.

  But not yet.

  It was selfish, I knew, but the time had come for me to face up to the question of Henry’s supernatural abilities—or lack thereof. Until this afternoon, I hadn’t really needed, or wanted, to know. But now I did. And I couldn’t just raise the subject with him in a casual conversation.

  Well I could, but it’s complicated. Henry doesn’t know about my abilities with ghosts. I’ve been waiting for the perfect time to tell him, and it hasn’t come. If it turns out that Henry has not inherited my abilities, I’d just as soon wait until he’s a little older before I burden him with the awareness of what his mother can see and do, not to mention the prohibition against talking about it with anyone but me and his dad.

  On the other hand, if I have passed down my abilities, and Henry is slowly growing into his own comfortable acceptance of them, I’d like to follow that doctorly advice and answer questions when, and only when, they’re asked. I don’t want to overwhelm the poor kid with a flood of information he may be way too young to handle.

  What happened next made my heart thump wildly, and I was afraid that this involuntary burst of cardiac energy would somehow give me away to the little ghost, for she had stunned me by crawling into my lap! She was as light as a June breeze, making no impression at all on the blanket that covered my legs. If I hadn’t been able to see her, I would have had no idea that she had curled herself in between my book and me, like a child being read to at bedtime.

  I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling up, fairly sizzling with the nearness of her energy, but I forced myself to relax back against the pillow. I slowly let out a long, deep breath, one I hadn’t been aware I was holding.

  I wanted to close the book, reach over, and switch out the light. But she was small, sad, and entirely alone in the world. I turned the page.

  Chapter Three

  SUNDAY

  THE BREAKFAST BUFFET was embarrassingly elaborate. There was granola that looked homemade, a bowl of fresh cantaloupe cut up with strawberries, three varieties of yogurt, three of bagels, two of English muffins (white and whole wheat), and a loaf of soda bread that still felt warm.

  Lauren appeared at the dining room door, her cheeks even pinker than they were yesterday, probably from the heat and
bustle of getting this feast together.

  “Good morning!”

  Henry was transfixed by the sight of the buffet table but managed a distracted “Hi.”

  “Coffee?” she asked me.

  “Please.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen as Henry stood paralyzed by the choices before him. In a moment, she was back with a gleaming silver pitcher. She filled my cup with the rich, amber fluid as the aroma of freshly brewed French roast, my favorite, permeated the room.

  “Now,” she said, parking the pitcher beside my place setting. “Would you like some eggs? An omelette? Or I could make pancakes, or homemade waffles.”

  “Waffles!” Henry shouted before I could impose restraint.

  “That’s way too much work,” I said.

  “Please?” he begged. “I love waffles!”

  “Then waffles you shall have!” said Lauren. “I’ve got a brand-new waffle iron. I have to break it in sometime.”

  “All right,” I said, “but just for today.” I turned to Henry. “Only because it’s our first day, and Sunday. Starting tomorrow, we’ll be back to—”

  “I know, I know,” he interrupted impatiently.

  I can lay it on too heavily sometimes, ruining, for example, the exceedingly rare and genuine pleasure of a stop at McDonald’s with a lecture on chain restaurants’ driving out mom-and-pop diners or on the evils of factory farming. Henry was warning me to zip it, before I managed to ruin this, and he was right.

  In the end, I was glad he had lobbied for waffles. They were irresistible, even before I smeared a shocking amount of butter across their tops and watched it melt into little square pools. The maple syrup was real, too, sparing my poor child a lecture on the treachery inherent in corn syrup’s being chemically flavored to taste like maple. We ate more than it was polite to eat, but in our defense, Lauren practically begged us to let her finish up the batter.