I began, my words shivering just a little, “is when the body core reaches a temperature below thirty-five degrees Celsius or ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Ain’t it always like ninety-six or something?” Tommy interrupted.
Whether he was doing it to annoy me or didn’t honestly know, I couldn’t tell. “No,” I said. “Normal body temperature is ninety-eight-point-six.”
“Well, ninety-five isn’t too far off,” Tommy said. “Hardly anything when you really think about it.”
“Can I finish?” I asked, more than a little annoyed at the interruption.
“I mean, think about it,” Tommy said. “Three degrees? Just three degrees? Come on!” He laughed a goofy, ignorant laugh that arched his back and seemed to show all thirty-two of his teeth at once. It was the first time I’d seen him laugh like that in over a year.
When we first got into the foster care system Tommy had become obsessed with telling terrible jokes. Jokes like, “Two flies are on the porch together. Which one is the actor? The one on the screen.”
When they didn’t get a laugh, they got a grimace. Either reaction gave Tommy the same amount of delight. He would throw his head back and laugh and show all of his teeth just like he was doing now and those were some of the few occasions when Tommy seemed to forget himself and be happy.
But then I stopped laughing at his jokes and so he stopped telling them and I got to see him smile less and less often because, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t smile. Somewhere along the way I had forgotten how and, in doing so, I had stolen my brother’s laughter.
But he had somehow found it again in the days since receiving his draft notice. Maybe waiting to die is something we should all be able to laugh about.
“I’m ignoring you,” I said.
“Not very well,” Tommy replied. “Now keep talking.”
“Hypothermia symptoms depend on how far the body temperature has fallen,” I said. “It usually starts with shivering in the extremities on account of how they lose temperature the fastest and exhibit vasoconstriction.”
“What’s vasoconstruction?” Tommy asked. “Is that like building something out of Vaseline?”
“Vasoconstriction,” I corrected him.
“That’s what I said,” Tommy fired back.
“It’s when the blood vessels constrict in order to reduce blood flow,” I said. “Basically the body begins trying to hoard all of the blood...” My voice trailed off. I took a deep breath. The cold was suddenly swelling up around me like a fog.
“Don’t stop now,” Tommy said, managing a smile. “That vasoconstruction thing’s got me on the edge of my seat.”
“Vasoconstriction.”
“Again: that’s what I said.”
Tommy’s smile was wide and proud.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Don’t do what?”
“Handle me. Don’t handle me like this. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Ginny,” Tommy said. “You’re freezing and I’m just trying to remind you that you’re smart enough to know it. The first symptom you mentioned was shivering, right?” He let go of my hands. We both watched. For a moment they were okay, but then the trembling returned.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. I shoved my hands into my pockets and started walking again. Though the sky was still dark the thin light I saw in the distance began to grow, backlighting the trees. They became ghosts, beautiful and eternal.
After a few steps, Tommy was at my side again. “Okay,” he said. “You’ll be fine. But in the meantime, where’s my weird fact? You still owe me one.”
“You’re still trying to distract me,” I said.
“Yep,” Tommy replied. “Now come on.”
After a few more steps, I began, “Okay. Two things: terminal-burrowing and paradoxical undressing.”
“Is that like getting naked at a party?” Tommy asked.
“Neither has been studied very much,” I said, ignoring the interruption, “but basically in the late stages of hypothermia there’s a thing called terminal-burrowing. Basically, people will try to dig a hole and curl up, even if that might not be the best thing to do.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Tommy said. “It’s like digging one of those things in the snow for yourself.”
“An igloo?”
“That’s what I said.”
“No,” I replied. “It’s totally irrational. People will crawl under beds, behind desks, under couches. And to make it worse, a lot of the time they’re naked when they do it.”
“How’d they get naked?” Tommy asked with a smirk. “Because that seems like the best part of the story and you skipped right over it.”
“Paradoxical undressing,” I replied. “Somewhere around thirty-five percent of people that die of hypothermia are found naked. It’s believed that what happens is the vasoconstriction—”
“Vasoconstruction.”
“That’s what I... Screw you, Tommy.” I cleared my throat to drown out the sound of Tommy’s laughter. “The blood vessels eventually get exhausted, like a muscle that’s been tensed too long, and so they suddenly stop constricting and let all of the blood flow. The body warms up all of a sudden and, even though you’re literally freezing to death, you feel hot. Sometimes people even start sweating.”
“So people start taking their clothes off?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And then sometimes, after they’ve taken off all of their clothes, they get that burrowing instinct. They’re found naked and frozen in some hole someplace.”
“Next time I ask you for a weird fact,” Tommy said, “just stop me. Or better yet, just tell me something to do with numbers. Numbers can’t be as bad as people getting naked and dying in a hole someplace.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said.
“I know,” Tommy replied, no small amount of pride in his voice.
“I mean you’re not going to die in some hole,” I said. I felt my voice soften.
We walked several steps before Tommy answered. His eyes had narrowed and his chin stuck forward like the bow of a tugboat. It was obvious he knew that I was trying to tell him something subtle. Trying to make a point without hammering him over the head with it. I could almost hear the gears working in his mind, grinding in their slow, methodical, limited way.
“I hear you,” Tommy repeated. A patina of doubt clung to his voice.
“I can’t get along without you,” I said.
“I hear you,” Tommy repeated.
“Hey, here’s another weird fact for you.”
“Oh no,” Tommy said, palming his face.
“No, this one’s fun. So in ancient Greece they used to believe that, in the very beginning, men and women were one creature. Two heads, four arms, four legs, all of that.”
“First naked people digging holes and now this,” Tommy said from behind his hand. I could hear him holding back a laugh.
I reached over and pulled his hand away and, sure enough, there was Tommy’s wide, toothy smile. The one he didn’t show nearly as much as he used to. “Don’t interrupt me,” I said, and I was smiling too, even though I hadn’t intended