The Ice Cradle (33 page)

If I’d had a plan at all, it had been to divide and conquer, sweeping Vivi up in the excitement of taking Jamey to their parents, while not upsetting Henry any more than I had to. But things weren’t going according to plan. There was a very good chance that I might not be successful at what I hoped to do for Vivi, and it wasn’t in my power to change that. If she wouldn’t cooperate, or if Emilia refused to surrender herself
and the child she believed to be hers to something she probably couldn’t even understand, well, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.

I had to do some straight talking here, right now. It was the only chance I had to make something happen.

“Okay, you two. Sit down here for a sec.”

They ignored me. Henry had picked up a stick and was turning over some rocks with it, exposing creepy crawlies in the damp black dirt.

“Come on, guys. Come over here with me.”

I sat down on a log that ran the length of the carriage house, separating where the summer grass was cut from plants and weeds allowed to grow wild. Henry plopped down on one side of me, and Vivi sat on the other.

“I want you to listen to me, okay?”

“Okay,” Henry said. Vivi didn’t speak, but she also didn’t move.

“It’s time for Vivi to go and see her mommy and daddy.”

“No!” she protested.

“Calm down. You’re not going all alone; you’re going to take your little brother.”

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“I don’t want her to!” Henry chimed in, pouting.

I turned to Vivi. “You don’t? You don’t want to see your mother and father? They’ve been waiting a long, long time for you. They would be so, so happy to see you.”

I so, so hoped this was true.

She shook her head, but not as vehemently, and her gaze found my eyes. She was lost, and scared, and little, and all but completely alone in a very big universe. I hated to say what I had to say next.

“Vivi, if you don’t let me get you—and Jamey—back to your parents tonight, you may not get another chance.”

“Ever?” she whispered, eyes wide.

“I don’t know. In my whole life, I have only known one other person who could do what I can do, and that is my grandmother. There probably
are
other people out there—I’m sure there have to be—but I have never met one single one of them. And if they live in China or Russia or England—”

“Or on the moon,” Henry offered helpfully.

“Right, on the moon, what good is that to you? They won’t know you’re here. So I know it’s really hard and scary, but you’re going to have to decide right now, tonight, if you want me to help you. Henry and I are going back to Boston tomorrow. There’s not going to be another chance.”

Tears were forming in her eyes.

I turned to Henry. “What do you think you’d do, bear?” I asked him. “Would you want to try to go find me and Daddy?”

“Yeah!” he said, without hesitation.

“Even if you were scared?” I pressed. “Would you make a run for it?”

He nodded. He was absolutely sure. Now my own eyes were filling with tears.

Vivi remained silent.

“How about we try to talk to Emilia? If you don’t want to go in and get her, I’ll just knock on the door and tell her we’re out here and that we want to talk to her.”

“Okay,” I heard Vivi whisper.

“Okay,” I said. I stood up, walked over to the door, and knocked.

“Emilia?” I called. “I’m sorry it’s so late, but I need to talk to you. Can you come to the door?”

There was no response.

“Emilia?”

I was listening hard, and then I remembered: I wasn’t going to be hearing any footsteps.

“Emilia,
please?”

Almost in unison, Henry and Vivi shouted, “Emilia!” Vivi followed this up with, “Jamey! Jamey! It’s me!”

Jamey appeared first, and I had a cruel thought, one I instantly suppressed—get him and Vivi out of here, and through the doorway of white light, before Emilia had a chance to object. But I couldn’t do that to the poor, deluded phantom. It would be like someone’s kidnapping Henry, a nightmare I’ve had on a number of occasions. Jamey might not actually
be
Emilia’s child, but she
believed
that he was and
loved
him as though he was. I couldn’t do that to another mother.

While we were waiting, though, I decided to bring up the white light.

“Henry,” I said, intending to draw his attention to what I was about to do.

But he and Vivi had gotten Jamey interested in the worms crawling around underneath the rock. I’d answer his questions later, if he had any.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on an image of the carriage house. I felt that moment, which is like a pilot light suddenly igniting into flames, and when I opened my eyes, there was a small, bright circle on the weathered wood, near where the foundation of fieldstones met the weathered shingles of the structure. The building was old, very old; it had seen hard use. Probably as a result of the fire the other night, I had an irrational fear that the light would set fire to the ancient shingles.

Emilia still hadn’t appeared, so I made the light brighter,
and whiter, and the entrance wider and taller. Vivi looked up, but for Henry, the worms were far more interesting. Jamey stared and blinked, but they all seemed to accept this sudden manifestation as just one of those things that happened in life, something a benevolent adult would explain in due time, like icicles, thunderstorms, and scabs.

Emilia suddenly appeared.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello.” She looked a little confused. Seeing Jamey happily occupied poking at bugs with Henry—Vivi had stepped out of sight, back behind the carriage house, where I could see her but Emilia could not—she turned her attention to me.

“Yes?” she said.

“Emilia,” I said.

“Was there a problem with the fabric?”

“I didn’t come about that, Emilia.”

“Because I can order more. Mr. Sampson’s very good. It wouldn’t take more than a week or ten days.”

“I had plenty of fabric,” I said, biding my time. Because out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Vivi had emerged from the shadows and had taken Jamey by the hand. Slowly, ever so slowly, she was leading him toward the doorway of light. Henry barely noticed. He had dug a long worm out of the ground, and it now hung like a strand of spaghetti over the stick in his hand.

“It’s lovely fabric,” I said, trying to keep my voice level.

“It is, yes. I thought about a pattern, but one tires of patterns, doesn’t one? A pure, solid color is so much nicer.”

“Especially in summer,” I said, my heart in my throat. “It feels cooler.” In my peripheral vision, I could see the figures of the two little spirits hovering at the edge of the light. I couldn’t
look directly at them. I couldn’t alert Emilia to what was happening, no matter how much pain I might cause her. Those children deserved to be with their parents! If Vivi was ready to go, and to take Jamey with her, I wasn’t going to get in the way.

Then Henry shouted, “Mama!” He flew to his feet and pointed at Vivi and Jamey.

“Go!” I shouted at Vivi. “Now!” Vivi appeared to hesitate for just a moment, then she swept Jamey up in her arms and carried him right through the doorway. In a matter of seconds, they were gone.

Henry looked over, baffled and scared.

“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

His outburst had drawn Emilia’s attention. She turned around quickly, confusion and a trace of panic in her eyes.

“He’s fine!” I said. “Don’t worry. He’s just gone over there.” I pointed to the light. “I can see him.”

She visibly relaxed. “He’s like quicksilver! Always getting away.”

I watched as she hurried over to the light and looked right through the gleaming doorway.

It wasn’t just relief that appeared on her face, it was something akin to rapture. A cry escaped from somewhere deep and primal in her being, but she hesitated hardly a moment. She looked back at me with surprise and joy, and then she disappeared.

H
ENRY BEGAN TO
wail, and when I picked him up, he was shaking.

“It’s okay, honey.”

I carried him over to the steps that led up to the house, and he clung to me like paper to a wall. We sat down together and he scrambled up onto my lap. He seemed to want as much surface-to-surface contact as he could get, and I had the impression that if he could have crawled inside me, he would have. I’d felt just the same way at his age, the first time I watched someone leave this life, and I’d already been clued in to what was going to happen.

Sitting there in the dark, I held him tight while he cried. It wasn’t the moment to ask questions. He was probably sad, scared, angry, and surprised—everything all at once. I’m not proud to admit it, but these days I welcome the moments when Henry seems to need me as much as he did when he was a helpless infant. I took a deep breath of the cool sea air and waited for the crying to subside.

Finally, it did. From his position on my lap, he pulled back and looked at me. I didn’t say anything.

“Vivi went away,” he said.

“I know.”

He hiccupped an errant sob. “Why?”

“Why? Well, because it was time for them to go. They seemed kind of happy, didn’t you think?”

“But they weren’t
old.”

“No,” I said quietly, “but sometimes young people die, honey. They get sick, they have accidents.”

“I
know,”
he said, apparently beginning to feel a little better.

“You do?”

“Chloe’s
sister,”
he said insistently.

The eight-year-old sister of one of his nursery school classmates, Chloe Barsamian, had drowned in a freak accident, while on vacation in Maine with her family. As Madeline had also attended the school, several years earlier, the kids, parents, and teachers had all been rocked by the tragedy.

Suddenly, I felt a wave of unease. All week long, I’d been rolling around in my mind the consequences of Henry’s sharing my gifts. But what if our abilities
weren’t
the same? What if he could see and do things that I couldn’t? What if he could see
into
the white light and
beyond
it, capabilities I absolutely did not have. What if he had been frightened not by the sudden departure of his pal, but by something else, something terrifying and soul-shattering?

What if there was
nothing
on the other side? What if Henry had watched the three of them step into the light and then—evaporate? Or float off into the endless darkness that was the universe, met by no one and nothing, no mother, no father, no God, no—eternal anything? I felt a growing sense of dread. I wanted to ask him, but now
I
was the one who was beginning to tremble. Did I really want to know? What if this
was
all
there was? What if what really lay on the other side of the light was not a joyous reunion with those we loved, and those who loved us, but simple and final oblivion?

And what if Henry had seen that and would have to go through life, alone among the human race, with absolute personal knowledge that the soul did not live on, but flickered out like a candle in a breeze. Plenty of people believed that, of course, but no one really knew. How would that singular knowledge affect Henry’s life?

If this was the ball game,
I
didn’t really
want
to know. On the other hand, if this was the ball game, and Henry knew it, then I really
had
to know, because my main job in life is to be his mom, and I had to be able to help him, if there was any way I could.

I took a deep breath. “What did you see?” I asked. “In the light.”

He had gotten up from my lap and was walking toward the road. He seemed to have pulled himself together in the last couple of moments, and the barking of a dog rang out in the stillness.

“A lady and a man,” he answered.

A lady and a man?

“You mean Emilia?” I asked.

“No! Another lady.”

“And a man?” I asked, but this time he didn’t answer. The barking of the dog was getting closer, and it was a happy bark, the bark of a cheerful pet being taken out for a late-night walk.

Henry astonished me by skipping toward the street. Hadn’t he just been disconsolate not a minute and a half ago?

I took in one of the deepest breaths of my life. We could
take this up again at another time. He would let me know when he was ready, and until then, the nugget of information he had imparted was quite enough for me—
someone
seemed to have been there for Vivi and Jamey.

I quickly got up and followed Henry out onto the main road, the one that encircles the island. There wasn’t a car in sight. I dug in my pocket and found my cell phone. I pulled up my contacts, located Bert’s number, and hit Send.

The dog came into sight just as Bert picked up the phone. It was a gangly puppy, all legs, a retriever of some kind, maybe a year old. It loped toward Henry with all the abandon of a twin recognizing its twin, from whom it was separated at birth.

“Hi,” I said, when Bert picked up. I hurried toward the road, where the puppy was now jumping up on Henry. “Can you pick me up in forty-five minutes?”