14 Degrees Below Zero (15 page)

“Bring me some hot tea,” the Princess said to Milo.

“Got a ball!” Milo said, tossing a basketball into the snow, then running after it and falling down.

A princess had to understand that, at times, her royal retainers might not understand her requests. She took a step into the deep snow of Antarctica, enjoying the crunch of her boots on the frozen soil and the feel of her furry hood on her cheeks.

Grandma Anna (and how she loved just saying the name) was out there somewhere, maybe feeding the penguins and making sure their babies were safe and warm. Grandma Anna was like that. She liked taking care of things, especially people.

Mama had been sad in the morning, and Ramona knew it had something to do with Stephen. And Grampa Lewis. Ramona’s grampa had a weird look in his eyes sometimes these days. She knew he loved her, and that he would never hurt her. But he might hurt someone else, maybe without meaning to. He was that strong.

“Want to come with me?” said Ashleigh, the only girl at day care older than Ramona; she gestured into the wilds of the backyard, over by the swing set.

“No, thank you,” Ramona said quietly. She preferred the company of the younger kids, who played compliant parts in her make-believe and who never made fun of the way she talked. Ashleigh was wild, and brave, a runner and a climber.

“Time to come inside!” called Janet from the doorway. Janet was a grown-up. Janet was always trying to help Ramona talk better, which was nice in a way, but Ramona hadn’t figured out yet how to tell Janet that she would rather be left alone.

“Ashleigh! Milo! Danny! Ramona!” Janet said. “Come on in! It’s getting colder!”

Slowly, one by one, the children broke off from their exploration and started the long trudge to the door—and quite a slog it was, weighted down with boots, coats, mittens, scarves. Ramona thought about the hot chocolate and the warm chair that waited for her inside. With any luck it would soon be TV time. And then everything would be perfect.

The snow swirled in a gust of wind, and Ramona was the last child standing in the wilderness of the yard. The Perfect Princess prepared to warm herself in her Antarctic camp, with her faithful and loyal servants all around.

But then she saw a figure through the mist of heavy snow, a small adult dressed in regular clothes, with no coat or hat. That wasn’t right. There weren’t supposed to be any grown-ups in the yard.

“Ramona!” Janet called out, her voice sounding very far away.

The Perfect Princess took a step toward the person, who was clearly a woman. Ramona was a little scared, but she had a feeling that this was the right thing to do.

“Ramona!” Janet said. “Where are you going? Come inside.”

Ramona took a few more steps through the snow and there, over by the basketball hoop, was the face she had been waiting to see.

It was Grandma Anna.

“You came back,” Ramona whispered to her.

Grandma Anna looked the way she used to before she got sick. She was wearing old jeans, a man’s shirt, and sandals. She smiled at Ramona, and Ramona felt a shiver that was both happy and sad.

“Are you staying?” Ramona asked.

“Ramona!” Janet called.

Grandma Anna nodded and smiled. She put a finger over her lips the way she used to, when she thought something was so special that she and Ramona would keep it between them like a secret treasure.

“Mama really wants to see you,” Ramona told her.

Grandma Anna nodded, one hand resting on her cheek, and she looked at Ramona in the way that always made Ramona feel extra-special, like there was something about Ramona that made her grandma happier than anything else in the world.

“Will you come with me?” Ramona asked.

“Ramona! Now!” yelled Janet through the veil of snow.

Now Grandma Anna pointed to the door, as though to say that Ramona should be a good girl and do as Janet said. And that was true. Grandma Anna always knew the right thing to do.

“OK, but come back,” Ramona said.

I love you,
Grandma Anna mouthed silently, and when Ramona turned away and looked back again, she was gone.

15. EITHER EMBRACE HIM OR THROW HIM OUT IN THE SNOW.

L
ewis went to work after all. It turned out to be easier than he thought to threaten a man at gunpoint, then put in a shift on the sales floor. If anything, he felt better than usual. His inexplicable (to him) actions had made him feel years younger. While he still felt a sick vibration inside, his knees and hip were free of aches, and after he got home he treated himself to a pain-free run in the snow around Lake of the Isles, where he passed the small lagoon where he once deposited the ashes of his late wife.

By the next afternoon he gave little thought at all to the loaded pistol that rested on the sideboard in the dining room, next to that day’s
Star Tribune.
He did a round of push-ups in his underwear and drank two cups of coffee. The snow had stopped falling for the moment but the temperature was plunging, making it necessary for him to crank the thermostat. The hell with the gas bill. He wasn’t going to freeze in his own house. He put on a Frank Zappa record and padded around tidying, suddenly inspired with ideas of order.

When the doorbell rang Lewis took it at first as a sound effect on the record, which was percolating with a lewd, dense quasi-funk. But then he spotted the shadow on the other side of the front door, and jogged into the dining room to toss the newspaper over the gun. When the bell kept ringing he made for the door, cursing under his breath. It was probably the mailman hand-delivering the latest stack of bills.

It wasn’t the mailman. When Lewis threw open the door he felt a flash of warmth at the sight of his neighbor and friend Stan Garabaldi. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a visitor other than Ramona and Jay.

“What the hell do
you
want?” Lewis barked.

“I came over to see if you’re holding,” Stan said, stone-faced. “I’m jonesing, Louie.”

“If I was, I wouldn’t share it with you,” Lewis told him. “I’d lock the doors and get
wasted,
man.”

“You gonna have me in,” Stan said, “or am I gonna stand here with icicles hanging off my dick?”

Lewis chuckled and held the door open for Stan. He’d known the older man since Jay was a baby. In that time, Stan had gone to fat and lost his hair, divorced one wife and married another, and now had a son in high school. He’d also developed a heart condition and retired early from his marriage-counseling practice, letting his younger wife deal with the working world while he occasionally took odd jobs.

Stan wheezed and complained as he undertook the Minnesota visitor’s ritual—divesting himself of his outerwear and heavy boots, depositing thick clumps of icy detritus all over and around the thick wooly mat in the entryway. When he was done he stood, a head shorter than Lewis, flushed and red in his zipped-up fleece jacket.

“So what’re you up to?” he asked in his gravelly baritone. “Didn’t even know if I was going to catch you home.”

“I don’t work today,” Lewis told him. “The sales of silk ties and mid-price shirts have fallen on lesser lights for the moment.”

Stan padded across the living room in his socks. “Listen to this shit,” he said, motioning at the stereo. “Don’t you even have a CD player?”

“I have become a dinosaur,” Lewis admitted.

“No shit.” Stan picked up the record cover and looked at it with begrudging approval. “I remember this one. It’s got that song about it hurting when you pee. I’ve been there.”

“Two-plus decades of monogamy had their drawbacks,” Lewis said. “But at least I never got the clap.”

Stan laughed loudly. “There’s still time,” he said.

Lewis smiled ruefully. He had to give Stan credit—he never pussyfooted around the topic of Anna. He was one of the few people who managed not to treat Lewis as though
he
had some terrible disease.

“You want something?” Lewis asked. “Coffee? Bourbon?”

“No, no.” Stan glanced around the place, resting his big hairy hand on the back of a chair. “I’m just checking in on you. Checking
up
on you, I guess I should say.”

“Checking up?” Lewis said. “Fuck, Stan. You know I’m fine. You’re not going to be like everyone else, worrying about how I’m
doing,
are you?”

“Well, Lewis, I know you have about ten layers of crust on you—”

“More like twenty,” Lewis interrupted.

“I saw Jay yesterday,” Stan said, more serious now. “Actually I took a client to that restaurant she works at. I forgot she was even working there until she came to take my order.”

“The Cogito?” Lewis said.

“Yeah. The Cogito.”

Lewis glanced into the dining room and saw he hadn’t done a good enough job of covering the gun—a little flash of metal was visible from where he stood. He moved his body to block Stan’s view. Stan glanced over Lewis’s shoulder, too perceptive not to notice Lewis’s sudden unrest.

“Anyway, she looked kind of stressed out,” Stan said. “She’s such a good kid. Smart. When I asked her how you were doing, she got kind of weird with me. So I decided to come see what was up.”

“Stressed out?” Lewis said. “How do you mean?”

“Come on, Lewis. Don’t get cute with me.” Stan frowned, which entailed a reorganization of his bushy eyebrows and a shortening of his bulldog neck. “Stressed. Unhappy. Showing outward signs of strain. You and her have always been the same in some ways—neither of you are real chipper-sunshine types. But I was a little worried about her, and I got the feeling it was something to do with you.”

“Aside from the obvious shit,” Lewis said, “I’m doing fine.”

Stan shrugged. He knew this was how it was going to go.

“Seriously, Stan,” Lewis said. “I’m glad you stopped by. I appreciate your concern. But I’m as well as I can be.”

“Yeah, well,” Stan’s voice trailed off, and he rubbed his big belly. He’d put on about fifty pounds since Lewis had known him, slow and steady, and now looked to be about fifteen years older than Lewis rather than five.

“I’m a little nervous,” Lewis admitted.

“Yeah?” Stan gave him a look of commiseration. “They got you on pills?”

“They do,” Lewis said.

“They working?” Stan asked.

“A little bit,” Lewis said.

Lewis considered telling Stan about Anna, about his growing conviction that her piecemeal revealing of herself was leading up to something big. But he knew how that would sound.

“Well, it’s a start,” Stan said. He folded his arms and leveled Lewis with a look of warm frustration. “You know, it wouldn’t be the biggest failure in the history of the human race for you to admit that you’ve gone through some major setbacks and that you need people.”

“I admit that freely,” Lewis said, throwing open his arms.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner Friday night?” asked Stan. “Celia can make something nice. You don’t want me cooking.”

“No, I don’t,” Lewis said. “And let’s say maybe. I’ll call you.”

Stan let out a long sigh that arrested itself somewhere toward its end. In the past few years Stan had taken on a kind of somber authority, having lived through the ugly meltdown of his first marriage to Katherine, a wisp-thin woman who had turned out to be harboring a seething rage toward Stan which she manifested in the form of an ugly legal battle which ended in Stan keeping their house but paying dearly for it in the form of cash, present and future, and the souring of his relations with his son. Then had come the discovery of the blockage, and the bypass, a real danger to his existence that trumped all of Lewis’s pains and fears. With his burly mass and bloated-up, boyish face, he seemed to have reached a sort of uneasy accord with himself and his fate. He also seemed to understand Lewis on some fraternal level that made Lewis want to either embrace him or throw him out into the snow.

“And what’re you planning to do with
that
?” Stan asked, nodding over Lewis’s shoulder.

“With what?” asked Lewis.

“You’re being cute again,” Stan said. “I’m referring to that firearm you’ve tried to hide under the paper.”

“Oh,
that,
” Lewis smiled. The record ended, and the tonearm came to rest with a thump. “I was cleaning it.”

“You were cleaning it,” Stan repeated.

“Look, Stan, it’s legal,” Lewis said. “I live alone. I have a right.”

“Hey, I have
two,
” Stan said. “But I don’t leave them sitting out.”

“I don’t have to explain myself,” Lewis said.

“No, you don’t.” Stan gave a long, ponderous nod of agreement. “So how are you getting along with the boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend or yours?” Lewis asked.

“Very funny.” Stan shook his head. “Come on, Lewis. How long have we known each other?”

A long time indeed. Stan had been a stalwart ally during Anna’s illness, bringing her food and books, more than once spending an afternoon with her and sending Lewis out to the movies for the sake of his sanity. Lewis owed Stan a debt.

“There’s no problem with Stephen.”

“Stephen.” Stan snapped his fingers. “That’s his name. You know what? I don’t believe you.”

“Why—”

“Because the last time I talked to you, you were complaining about him.” Stan winced as though his words pained him. “You said he was bad for Jay. You remember? Now she’s miserable, you’re evasive, and you practically twitched when I asked about him. I know how you get, Lewis. If you don’t like one of Jay’s boyfriends, there’s trouble.”

“You’re off base on this one, Stan,” Lewis said. “Apparently Jay and Stephen have broken up, but I had nothing to do—”

“Oh, Lewis,” Stan said sadly.

“What?” Lewis exploded, about to tell Stan to mind his own business, when the doorbell rang. Lewis looked up and saw another shadow beyond the door.

“Fucking Grand Central,” he muttered, leaving Stan in the living room. He opened the door to a young man in a suit.

“Lewis Ingraham here?” the kid asked. He was scrubbed and broad-chested, like one of the kids who worked under him at AmEx.

“Yeah?” Lewis barked. “What do you want?”

The kid pressed a manila envelope to Lewis’s chest.

“You’re being served,” the kid said with a trace of satisfaction. “Hennepin County Court.”

Lewis took the envelope but didn’t open it.

“What the hell—”

“Restraining order,” the kid said. “You have a hearing in ten days. Until then, do not contact or get within five hundred yards of Stephen Grant.”

“You’re out of—”

“Do you understand?” the kid interrupted.

“Yes, yes.”

“Thank you and have a good day,” the kid said, then made for his car. Despite the cold, he wore only a suit jacket. He was obviously made of hardier stuff than Lewis, who shivered as he slammed the door shut.

When he turned around, Stan was emptying the bullets from the gun and putting them in his pocket.

“That’s
mine,
” Lewis said.

“I’ve seen enough,” Stan said. “Talk to me in a couple of weeks, and if you’re making sense, I’ll give this back to you.”

Stan stuffed the .38 into the pocket of his jeans.

“Fuck you, Stan.”

Stan shook his head, sadder than before.

“I’m just being your friend, Lewis.”

“I mean it,” Lewis said, caressing his sternum with his free hand. “
Fuck you,
Stan.”

“You should step back and look at yourself, Lewis,” Stan said. “This isn’t right. This isn’t you.”

“I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.”

“Think of Anna,” Stan said. “Think of how she would take this craziness. It would break her heart.”

“Anna’s
gone
!” Lewis shouted. “She made me—”

“What?” Stan said, eyes widening with curiosity. “She made you
what
?”

“Nothing,” Lewis whispered. “Just go. Get out.”

“Will do,” Stan replied. “Just one thing.”

“What?”

“You do what that shithead said,” Stan told him. “Stay away from that boyfriend. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”

“I don’t—”

“Just
stay away,
” Stan hissed. “You have a weird look in your eyes, Lewis. Don’t fuck your life up.”

Lewis let his head drop and motioned Stan to the door.
Don’t fuck your life up.
As though it was anything other than fucked already.