The Ice Garden. Moira Crone

      “And Connor says I don’t attend to the baby. Connor says!”

      “Why didn’t you stop?” Aunt C said. “Why were you going so fast?” She cradled Sweetie against her shoulder, shielded her head.

      “I stopped when I saw that, when I saw Daniel,” she pulled in her chin.

      “You heard us, didn’t you?”

      “Car windows were closed. You know it’s like an isolation chamber inside,” she said, patting the glass in front of her, turning to me. “Like on the Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question?”

      She meant the TV show where the man had to go into a soundproof booth to think about the answers. There had been some cheating in that booth, which was a scandal in the news.

      “Isn’t it, Claire, soundproof in this car? They advertise it.” She looked up to get my agreement.

      “It’s quiet,” I yelled down.

      “When the hell are you getting out of that tree?”

      I was crouched, ready to jump from the last branch.

      “Well, Sidney, go over there and catch her. What are you people doing out here, turning her into a tomboy?”

      I landed on the bare sandy loam right near the trunk on my own before Sidney could get to me. My arches hurt terribly when I hit the earth, but I wouldn’t mention it.

      “Claire, don’t you dare ever do that again! Don’t you dare ever—and barelegged? Connor is going to have a fit.”

      Even on the ground, I kept up my other life, the one I dreamed: we had three bushel baskets picked. We would take our bounty to the farmer’s market and make enough cash to leave Fayton. The only thing left was to decide where to go—

      But we weren’t going anywhere.

      “You come right here by me,” she said. “Claire! Right here by me.”

      “Oh Diana, it was harmless as an idea. We were going to do some baking. Harvest the nuts before they rot. I was going to show Claire how to bake,” Aunt C said.

      “Don’t you oh Diana me. Don’t you see the harm being done? Before you even got out here and started this.” She eyed Daniel. “I’m driving you home, Claire, Odile too.”

      Aunt C stood then. Her face was red. She would not answer.

      “Come on, Claire,” she said. “Come on, get the basket. Sidney, get Odile and put her in it, come on.”

      Aunt C relinquished Sweetie reluctantly, and Sidney put the baby in the back of the Mercury. I took the front passenger seat. The car was full of my mother’s perfume. Roses. I liked that. I was rather thrilled she’d come out here to find us, even though it had been a disaster.

      She turned to me as soon as I was alone with her. “Why did you go off with the colored man driving? In that death trap of a car? I would have thought you would know better. How old are you now?” I was a curiosity to her, an oddity, a stranger. She was using her Charleston voice.

      “I am fixing to be eleven,” I said.

      “Where is your sense of right and wrong? What has got into you with that woman? You climbing trees? I was downtown ordering some clothes. Come home to find that stupid note from C. No explanation.”

      The window on my side was wide open.

      As we crept backward and turned around to make it to the county highway, she said, “You gonna catch a death of cold now on top of everything? Roll up that window the way it was. Hear me? We have got to get home and see what Connor’s going to do about C. Who does she think she is? What else has she made you do with that man, that Negro?”

      I was confused. Maybe I did something I didn’t know I had done. I was thinking hard. Sometimes I walked into a room and didn’t remember what I had come for. I slid away from the window in the car, as if the glass itself was a liar, or some magic thing. I got closer to my mother. Maybe I had left part of me up in the sky, where we could fly. Here on the ground, nothing was making sense.“What is the matter with you, Claire? What is it?” she asked me. “What’s wrong with your side of the car?”

      “Sweetie is rolling over and creeping,” I said. “Isn’t she smart to save up and keep it a surprise?” I was doing my best to change the subject. My mother couldn’t have been wrong, I must have been.

      “You would think she was the queen of England the way you go on about that poor thing with that muddy face. You and C and the lot of you.” She was nodding her head. There was something too high in her voice. The sound of it hurt me.

      Later, when my father heard from my mother about the “awful thing” C went and did with Sidney and Daniel and myself and Sweetie, he chuckled, said, “Well if I talk to her, what do you want me to say?”

      This enraged her further. She said, “I am going to get somebody to listen to me.”

      “What is it, Diana? What?”

      A few nights later I had a dream I still remember.

      I was holding onto Sweetie and we were entering a dark cavern. There were stalactites and stalagmites, and a blue-green pool in the distance under a great, gleaming ceiling. I moved toward it, thinking of diving in. But then, when I got close, I was afraid that if I dove in with Sweetie, she could not swim. There was no one around to ask. I was alone in this place, far underground, with her, her only.

      I dove in anyway. She rode on my back. I didn’t care that we were alone. We were too happy for it to matter. Her hands were around my neck; she was laughing.

      If it were Sweetie and I and nobody else in the world, we were safe, we were fine, we were swimming.

      When I woke, I wanted to go back to the dream, the beautiful water.