His body was cocooned in ice. A casket of ice. Like one of those gag gift ice cubes—plastic-clear with a fly trapped in the center. Illinois winter was that plastic cube and he—that boy—miles and years downriver—he was that fly.
He was that fly. If he’d been alive today, that’s what the girls might have said. He was a sweet-eyed boy with soft hair and paw-like hands. He came to school that year with a triangle of torso. Shoulders wider, body shrugging beneath as if the tension of all those years would send sparks to the ends of his fingers. Anyone who touched him surely lurching from the voltage.
Now, on a television screen ten years downstream, he zips by, still a boy, and frozen that way. His last breath is one of the plumes of chalkiness that made the occasional cloud through the clarity. As if, really, a decade dead, he might be in a glass magician’s case and breathing away, puffing out smoke-feathers of living breath and fogging up the place.
If that ice were a diamond, that breath would be the flaw.
He was their only boy. Theirs was an odd house and that boy, when we are all just kids then, he was always something else. Then he was gone. And that, became the most of who he’d been. The gone boy. The boy without a way back.
The parents moved away the next spring. The boy, by then, unfound, forgotten. We grew up. None of us were his best friend. None of us kissed him. No one knew his favorite color. The name of his dog. But we had all lied about one of these things.
Mine was the kiss. It felt like the truth because he was the pillow I propped on the left side of my canopy bed. He was the ghost I tried to bring back by the light of a strawberry candle and a gathering of plush animals. The makeshift ouiji board I made from cardboard, a pushpin, a construction paper arrow and symbols I copied from hieroglyphs, from Sanskrit and Arabic and any language that seemed mysterious and full of images I didn’t understand. It would take all these years and an ailing marriage later to know that any language would’ve worked.
But nothing brought him back. Even when I set my twelve year old room like a radio dial to host any number of creepy spirits. Even when that fruity candle cast a shaky spell of shadows on the west wall, I never felt his presence. I could terrify myself with those ghostwishing rituals and never once feel the slightest cool wind telling me he was there. His lakely cowhide flask of a form gone liquid in the most vaporous way. Lips still gray from the other world romantically dead and returned to me. I never heard the gurgle of him, mouthful of river, his hair laurelled with twigs and reeds never drizzled river on the impossibly pink carpet. There was nothing but the ritual itself—and like the most rigid faiths that alone sustained it.
Now he was back. The television ran him down that river a hundred times it seemed. Ran my childhood back to me—him there stuck in our twelfth year and me in my bathrobe—the scratchy terrycloth anniversary gift from my ill-fitting husband of four years, and the life I had accepted somehow, it seemed to me, by accident.
Me, pregnant and crying because I still had yet to feel as much as I had the year he vanished, the long dark winter I worshiped his absence, set up churches and séances and learned, maybe too well it seems to be now, how to cling to the vacancies more than the body. I wrote long letters in my journal, worked on making mine the curliest of cursives, my printing whimsical. I wrote of him and true love 4-ever, I wrote of the romance of the dark sorrow of our moth-life love. I understood saints who swooned themselves into ecstacies with their vespers. I prayed that boy back into being. Now he’d come back all wrong, swaddled in ice, glass, the dignity of the dead, but hanging there like a put-away puppet on the t.v.
The news said the body had been kept in ice these last ten years, that the boy, with the grace of better freezing and more advanced science, might almost be revived, arriving to the world ten years tardy with no good excuse and cold settled eternally in the marrow of his bones. Or maybe it said only that he’d been frozen alive, one blunt blow to the cranium and then dropped in a deep freeze coffin filled with water and frozen solid.
In diamonds it’s called an inclusion or an included crystal—a diamond or a crystal formed inside another. That baguette of ice and the boy suspended and floating in the glass rectangular nowhereness of the television screen. The images multiplying reminding me of an Escher drawing more than my life.
The life it held inside all that glass and ice was not the boy’s life anymore but my own losses. Tucked into threadbare place where once there’d been a shirtpocket I wanted there to be a letter written from the girl I’d been when he’d vanished. A drenched white envelope and inside, a letter in my heart-dotted i, bloated-bubble-letters spelling out just what it was I had once wanted so much. I wanted it to tell me how I hoped to feel about a life on ice, on hold, with a body suspended in my own, and love stopped cold in its tracks.