The Ice Cradle (2 page)

It was just too cold to stay up on the deck, so we went inside to the snack bar. I was glad that the trip to the island only took an hour, because I couldn’t stop thinking of all those people on a boat much like this one, turned out onto the seas in frigid weather. Inside, I tried to talk Henry into having a cup of chili, but he wanted an ice cream bar. I guess that’s one of the differences between being five and being twenty-nine: at
five, freezing temperatures don’t keep you from wanting ice cream.

It being early in the season, there weren’t many people on the ferry. There were several ghosts, though, and the one who caught my attention was the dim and faded spirit of an old man, dressed as though he’d spent his earthly days at sea. He wore hip-high waders and an oilskin jacket and cap, and he stood near the captain’s booth, his eyes trained on the horizon. At one point, he glanced back at Henry and me, but I didn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t get through my day if I made myself and my abilities known to every ghost who crossed my path. It would be like stopping every stranger you met on the street and offering to help them with their personal problems—and having them accept. Shortly, the old spirit returned his gaze to the sea, assuming that I, like every other living person he’d come across since he’d passed out of this life, could neither see, nor hear, nor communicate with him.

How wrong he was.

I can see ghosts and talk to them, and I guess I always could. Earthbound spirits, the kind I can see and speak with, are the ghosts of people who have died, but who haven’t been able to take their final leave of people, places, or objects they loved in life. Some spirits have special missions to which they’re devoted that keep them here in the land of the living: victims of violent crime who want their attackers caught, or parents of young children who just can’t bear to walk through that shining doorway and leave their babies behind.

Sometimes I try to think back to when I was really little, and to figure out which of the people in my earliest memories were ghosts rather than living human beings. Some of them certainly were, in those years before Nona, my grandmother,
realized that I had inherited her ability to communicate with the departed.

I was four years old when she figured it out. It was an afternoon in June, and I was waiting for my father to come pick me up from my grandmother’s house. My mother had died when I was a baby. Pushing me in a stroller, she’d stepped off a curb near my grandmother’s house and a car had come out of nowhere, driven by a guy who’d just left a bar across town. In her last act on earth, she pushed me out of the path of the car, or I would probably have died with her.

My father raised me and my brothers, Joe and Jay. He was a champ, Dad was; born in Ireland, he believed in getting on with things. But I think he felt more comfortable hanging out with the boys, so I spent a lot of time with my mother’s mother. Having a little girl around probably helped her, too. When my mother died, Nona lost her only child.

Anyway, I remember the afternoon perfectly. Nona was in the kitchen making sauce, and I had the contents of her button box spread out on the dining room table. I loved to play with that box. It was filled with hundreds of buttons: new leather ones still attached to cardboard; loose sets with lavender and pink rhinestones; light yellow buttons of real bone, which made me feel a little shivery and odd as I turned them over and over in my palm.

That was when the man appeared, when I was looking at the bone buttons and wondering what kind of animals they had come from.

“Hello, there,” he said, in a language that was not English, but that I could understand perfectly anyway.

I looked up. Where had
he
come from? I hadn’t heard the door open or close. I hadn’t heard Nona talking to anyone. He
looked gray and shadowy, so I knew that he was one of
those
people, that other category of being I had seen and spoken with all my life.

He and I didn’t converse out loud. I could hear what he was thinking, and he could hear my thoughts, and it felt perfectly normal for us to communicate in silence. The way I understood it, there were people you spoke with and people you thought with. It was how the world worked, one of those crazy things a kid just had to accept, like daylight and darkness alternating, and the necessity of brushing your teeth before bed. As any child would, I assumed that everyone interacted with two categories of beings: regular people like me and Nona and Dad, and Joe and Jay, and those other ones, the ones you could almost see through.

Toward the end of our exchange, I must have spoken out loud. I remember him asking me if I knew how to play any songs on Nona’s piano. I told him that I could play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” but that what I really wanted was a trumpet.

“What?” Nona called from the kitchen.

“A trumpet,” I yelled back, sifting through the box to see if I could find the eighth bone button that would complete the set.

“What about a trumpet?” Nona responded.

“I want one,” I hollered.

I heard one of Nona’s little laughs, the one that meant,
Dream on
.

At this, the man smiled, but at the sound of her footsteps clicking across the kitchen floor, he faded into the air. When Nona appeared at the doorway, I did what the man had asked me to do: I told my grandmother that Vinny had come to say good-bye.

“Vinny?” Nona said. “What are you talking about?”

“Vinny,”
I said. I was already annoyed with her about her attitude toward the trumpet, and now she was making me repeat myself. “From
Italy.”

Nona wiped her hands on her apron and sat down.

“Vinny was here?” she whispered.

That seemed so obvious, I didn’t respond right away. Where
was
that last button?

Nona pulled the box away.

“Hey!” I said, pulling it back.

“Anza!” she said sharply. “Look at me!”

She only used that tone of voice when she really meant business. I slumped down in my chair.

“What?” I said.

“What did Vinny say?” she asked me quietly.

“He said you were his favorite girl. He said—Lola made it to age sixteen. Who’s Lola?”

“A puppy,” whispered Nona, her eyes now looking the way they looked whenever we talked about my mother.

A little while later, when I was still watching out the window for Dad, a phone call came from her cousin in Palermo, confirming what Nona already knew: Vinny Sottosanto, the love of my grandmother’s teenage life, whom she had not been allowed to marry, had died earlier that afternoon of a massive stroke.

I didn’t know a lot about death, but I knew more than most four-year-olds. I knew for sure than when a person was gone, she was gone.

“But he was here,” I said. “I talked to him.”

“He was,” my grandmother said. “You did.”

A
THIN SWATH OF
damp, russet sand lay to the right of the Old Harbor ferry landing, across the road and just up the boulevard from the Grand View Hotel. Henry couldn’t wait to get across the parking lot and down onto the “beach,” so he ran off ahead while I took a deep breath and gazed around at the quiet loveliness of the island. I felt as though we had not so much ridden a ferry to a vacation destination as transported ourselves back a few decades, if not a century. The streets were nearly empty; an old red pickup was the only vehicle on the road. I heard, far off, the low sounds of a radio playing some kind of dinnertime jazz, the sort that went along with Manhattans and taffeta dresses. I could well believe that here, people painting walls and building bookcases might listen to music like that, and not the sordid invective of AM talk-radio shock jocks.

The sky was the dim blue of a robin’s egg. I looked back out across the expanse of churning indigo that we had just crossed and offered up a little whisper of gratitude to the Man, or Woman, upstairs. Clouds were scuttering across the line of the horizon as though chased by fierce and invisible breezes.
The sight brought to mind an illustration I remembered from childhood, from a book I had of Aesop’s fables. The Wind—in that picture, locked in an epic battle with the Sun—looked just like Santa Claus, with white curls and a beard and huge cheeks puffed out like a tuba player’s. Gales of blustery force curled out in swirls from his angry lips.

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.”