Free The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

like home. If anything ever would. I wondered if this book was my brother’s defining secret, or just a small part of who he truly was.
    Far away, there was thunder, a common enough occurrence in Florida, something most people ignored. I thought of Ned surrounded by a whirlwind, like the nucleus of an atom, trapped within itself. I thought of him walking into the Orlon Public Library looking for answers, still trying to understand what we did wrong. I wanted to telephone my brother and say, Tell me the truth. Do you believe a wish can kill? Do you believe we could have changed something that night, stopped the ice from falling, stopped our mother from getting in her car? If we’d run along the road till she turned around, woken from sleep and called the police with a premonition, would she still be alive? Tell me, brother, could we have done anything differently, you and I?
    CHAPTER THREE
    Fire
    I
    That is the difference between love and obsession? Didn’t both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn’t you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn’t every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?
    Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn’t find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn’t go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me . Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you’d known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.
    I tried to define what was happening to me. I had decided never again to drive out to the Jones orchard, and yet I could see the map that led there simply by closing my eyes. I often had lunch with Renny in the school cafeteria, but despite the salad in front of me, all I could taste was an orange, the sweet kind with the reddish rind, the sort that to me looked like ice. My mouth puckered. My heart raced. I thought of all those silly lovelorn girls I’d known in high school, and for once felt a bit of compassion. Foolish creatures. Foolish me. At night I dreamed of things that were dangerous: snakes, stepladders, horses’ heads nailed to the wall. When it rained I stood by the window, looking for lightning. There were music students who lived down the street and when they practiced in the evenings, the sound of the oboe made me weep, the piano forced me to cover my ears. I suppose I had begun to feel something, just an itch. Just a sting. That was the problem. I was such a novice I didn’t understand what it meant when I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, when my racing thoughts were too often of Lazarus Jones.
    Since I didn’t believe in love, I soon enough defined my state as a delusionary preoccupation. Obsession. An emotion that should be tied up and taken out with the trash, replaced by more serious, less affecting thoughts. I turned to work, or what little there was of it at the library. But even there my obsessive nature took over. I pretended to be cheerfully busy, entering information into the computer, dusting and ordering the shelves, but in fact my new, rather prurient interest was looking up people’s reading habits. It was disgusting, really. An invasion of privacy, a petty crime of the soul. I’d begun by looking up my brother’s card; now I couldn’t seem to stop. That was my nature, to take something bad and make it worse.
    I looked up which novels my physical therapist most enjoyed, thick nineteenth-century tomes in which problems weren’t easily solved with exercise and diet. I saw that Matt Acres, owner of the hardware store, preferred biographies of adventurers, men who left behind their safe and settled lives. Dr. Wyman’s teenaged daughter, who was home for the summer from private school in New England, had read all of D. H.