The Ice Cradle Read Free Page B

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 wall, 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. Ofcourse, 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’spediatrician 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