Heart of Ice

“Is Sarah all right?”

“She’s dead.”

It was such a cold and thoroughly devastating way of relaying such horrific news. No preamble. No “I regret to inform you” or something along those lines. Just a quick cold She’s dead.

Michael could feel the air escape his lungs. “What are you talking about?”

A beat of silence. An audible gulp of air. Then the words: “Sarah took her own life.”

Michael stood and steadied himself, his free hand against the glass of the kitchen window. He looked out. Danny and Carla were playing on the swing set. An orange tree’s waxy green leaves fluttered in the wind. “What do you mean? What happened?”

The woman on the other end of the line was doing her utmost best to convey the most difficult news. Her voice splintered as she spoke. “She hanged herself in her bedroom closet here at home. I thought you would want know.”

Want to know? She’s my little sister!

If the woman were telling him in person, he’d lunge at her just then. He’d grab her by the bony neck and snap it like a peppermint stick.

“But why?” he asked. “Why did she do this?”

“We aren’t sure. The police found some things on her computer. She was distraught. She’d been rejected by some sorority at Cascade last year.”

“Why would she care about that?”

“You probably don’t know this. But Sarah had a way of hurting herself. When she was eleven she set fire to her playhouse and was seriously burned on her face. She had many surgeries, but the doctors could never make her exactly as she was. She had severe scar tissue on the right side of her face.”

Michael, of course, had no idea. She’d sent photos, but they’d all been flawless.

“She never told me,” he said, his own words choked with emotion.

“She wanted you to be proud of her. She was so pleased, I want you to know, so very pleased that you’d come back into her life. She was going to change her major to information technology at Cascade because of you.”

He noticed his grip on the phone was so tight, he needed to tell his brain to lessen his grip. “She told me. She seemed so happy.”

“She was. Until those girls at Beta Zeta got through with her.”

“What happened? She was my only sister.”

She was also his only link to his past.

The woman stopped, catching her breath. Maybe drying her tears.

“The police found some e-mails from the rush committee at the sorority. They made some cruel remarks about our daughter. They said she wasn’t pretty enough. She wasn’t BZM.”

The code puzzled him. “I don’t understand. Come again.”

“Beta Zeta material.”

Michael was reeling just then. He wondered if he was screaming at the woman, or if their voices were low and quiet, appropriate for the office.

“This is so stupid. So senseless.”

“I know. But, Mr. Barton, these are the times we’re living in. There are no happy endings any more. Not even for a little girl left with her brother at Disneyland.”

From his reflection in the window, Michael Barton observed something he’d seldom seen on his own face. A slight shimmering stream ran from each eye.

What was that?

Michael’s affect was oddly flat when he told Olivia that Sarah had committed suicide. He sat at the breakfast table, swirling the orange pulp in the bottom of his glass. He was casual. Unconcerned.

“You and the kids are the only family I need,” he said.

She put her arms around his shoulders. He was stiff.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” Olivia said. “I know how much you wanted to have her in your life.”

“That’s OK,” he said. “I’m pretty busy, you know. Don’t really have time to get everything done that I need to do anyway. I’m making a list.”

Olivia kissed him on the forehead. She didn’t know that the list he was making had the names of three young women. Three young women that he was going to make sure paid the price for the wheels they set in motion.

For taking his sister away forever.

Chapter Sixty-two

Everyone has a quirk. For some, the habits are hidden, undetected for a lifetime. The fat woman who eats like a bird throughout the day, but at night sneaks into the freezer for a carton of ice cream. Or the dentist who waits for his patients and staff to go home so he can take a hit off the nitrous tank. Or the mom who sips a passable California chablis in the afternoons as her toddler sucks on the plastic straw of a juice box. Some are less apparent. Almost all have a root cause—pain they seek to diminish, or memories they seek to cloud.

The pantry in the Barton house always smelled like the laundry detergent aisle in the supermarket. No matter how much Irish Spring soap Olivia carted home, Michael always seemed to ask for more. It was, she thought, the only obsessive behavior that he engaged in and she figured it was harmless enough. After all, it was soap.

When they first got together, like all young couples, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Showering together in the morning after sex or just plain having sex any time of day fueled their desire for each other. It was during that first shower together in his apartment before they married that she noticed that the scent of her lover was the green-and-white striated bars of soap. She made a joke of it, by aping the Irish lilt of the old slogan from the TV commercials of her youth.

“Ah. Irish Spring! Ladies like it, too!”

“I guess, I really, really like it,” Michael said as he lathered her up, the water splashing through the shower curtain as the two of them huddled near the hot water to keep warm.

What he didn’t tell her, what he couldn’t tell her, was why he liked it so much. The green soap was his salvation. He sometimes used a bar of Irish Spring every two days. He’d let it soften in a deep soap dish that he’d rendered useless by most accounts—he’d plugged the drainage holes with plumber’s putty so it would hold water. By doing so, it became almost a jelly on the underside of the bar. That allowed him to rub the soapy paste over his body, particularly on his chest, armpits, and genitals. He knew he was compulsive about it, and that nothing else seemed to meet his needs. Just that soap.

Irish Spring had been the only soap that masked the smell of his own male body. Michael had been teased in junior high and high school about not participating in a team sport. He couldn’t. The sweaty smell of a locker room, the musky smell of another male body made him nearly convulse in spasms of nausea. He took up running, then swimming…then he gave up on all sports. He refused to disrobe and shower with the other teens in gym class. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to play sports, be with the guys, it was just that whiff of maleness that made him ill.

Irish Spring was the only thing that erased it.

His mind had been imprinted with the smell of Mr. Hansen’s body as he unzipped his fly and slid his pants to his ankles in the Corvette.

“Get down on me. Be a good boy,” he’d said. “I want you to drink it all gone this time.”