Luca’s death had opened a wound, one that throbbed with the sharpness of Bernadette’s knife. I took the painkillers Vita had given me and slept for days at a time. When I woke, I’d watch the world from the recesses of a trance. The sun fell softly over the stone floor of my rooms, settling on the flakes of ash from the hearth, filling the air with light and warmth—and still, I saw only the endless darkness of the truth: I would spend my life alone. Never would I find love or have a child. Never again could I pretend to be like other people. A normal life could not be for me; it wasn’t written in my genetic code.
One night, a banging at my door woke me. I pulled myself out of bed and, with the help of my crutch, hobbled to the door and unbolted the lock. Sal stood in the hallway, Dolores’s wheelchair parked before him.
“Get in,” he said, gesturing to the wheelchair.
“Where are we going?” I asked, half asleep.
Sal gestured again to the wheelchair, with its shining copper armrests, Dolores’s pillows on the seat. “Now.”
I lowered myself into the wheelchair, adjusting the pillows to cushion my wound. Sal pushed me down the corridor and steered me through a series of narrow connecting hallways, before stopping abruptly at a door on the east side of the castle. He opened the door directly onto the east lawn, where I could see—standing in the snow—Vita.
Sal parked the wheelchair, lifted me out of it, and carried me over the east lawn, his boots crunching through the snow.
“Sal, put me down,” I said. “I want to walk.”
To my surprise, Sal released me. I limped behind him, the snow soft under my feet. Perhaps spring was coming. I didn’t know the month, but the harsh bite of winter had left the air. Vita stood on a flat of snow before the high, dark mountains. I limped past the frozen pond, past a dead animal lying in the snow, blood staining an ellipse of color around its body. It was a rabbit, I saw, half-eaten by some wild creature, its long furry foot jutting into the air. Something about the position of the body, and the bloodstained snow, reminded me of Dr. Ludwig Jacob Feist.
At last, I made it to the top of the east lawn, where the castle grounds met the mountain. Sal greeted Vita, nodding at me as if he had delivered a trophy.
“I brought this, like you wanted,” Sal said, and took a leather pack from his shoulder. “Bernadette says she’s low on some things.”
“Thank you,” Vita said, taking the pack. She opened it, examined the contents, then nodded to Sal. “Tell Bernadette to send me a list of what we need.”
Sal nodded in return and turned back to the castle, leaving Vita and me in the dark, windy night. It was moonless, without a cloud in the sky. Stars filled the darkness, an uncountable explosion of brilliance, proof that we were just one small piece of an immense, burning universe.
A gust of glacial wind blew down over the east lawn, cutting through me. My teeth began to chatter. Vita shot me an assessing look, one part pride, another part exasperation. “Surely you’re not so sensitive to the cold as that?”
“My grandfather would have said exactly the same thing,” I said. “He was always taking me out in the snow underdressed.”
Vita nodded, as if she knew exactly what I meant, and then, sliding out of her coat, she handed it to me. The warmth of her body lingered in the silk lining, as delicate as an embrace.
“Tell me. What was the date upon which my son killed himself?”
I gave her a sidelong glance, wondering why she had decided to ask this now. “I believe the death certificate said July 1993.”
“And he left no note?” she asked. “No explanation?”
I shrugged. “Not that I know about.”
“It is so . . . unlike my son,” she said. “He was a very strong-willed man, with great moral conviction. I can’t imagine that he would harm himself.”
“My grandmother Marta had died that year. Maybe he missed her.”
Vita thought this over for a minute. Then she shook her head. “I don’t doubt that they were extremely in love and that my son missed his wife when she was gone. But that wasn’t the reason.”
“Then what?”
Just then, as if in answer to my question, I saw it—something moving at the edge of a cove of evergreen trees. An ibex, I thought. A wild animal feeding on rabbits. I couldn’t see more than a shift of movement in the shadows, a presence obscured by spruce and cedar branches.
“These are the Icemen,” Vita said and walked quickly up to the trees, leaving me to struggle behind. I dragged myself through the snow, my leg throbbing with pain, until I saw them clearly.
There were two of them, both men, both tall and skeletal with broad shoulders and long white hair that tangled to their chests. They wore cotton pants and leather vests that exposed their arms to the cold. Their eyes were large and blue below heavy brows, but most startling of all was the luminous, almost phosphorescent quality of their skin. Standing in the pocket of the east lawn, they seemed to glow.
I should have felt afraid, but instead an overwhelming sensation of relief flooded over me. Here was the monster Justine had followed in the mountains. The archaic hominid of Dr. Feist. The beast of Nonna Sophia. The missing link of James Pringle. I remembered Joseph’s drawings, the word “Simi” written in childish blue script. Here, before me, stood the Icemen.
Vita was with them in the hollow of the trees. She gave one of the men the leather pack. He opened it, checking the contents, then closed it again.
“Come closer, Alberta,” Vita said, turning to me. “It is time for you to meet them.”
A wave of dizziness sent me off-balance. I stepped back, away from Vita, and leaned against the trunk of a spruce tree.
Vita walked to me and put her hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.
“What are they?” I whispered.
“They are our elders,” she said. “The native people of these mountains. They were here before any of us.”
I glanced over at the men. They stared at me, their eyes glistening in the moonlight.
Vita smiled. “You will understand them better soon. For now, trust me.”
She took me by the arm and led me to them. She told me their names: Jabi, with his heavy brow and thick white beard, and Aki, taller than Jabi, thin, beardless, the skin of his cheeks smooth and white. The light was dim, and it was hard to see him fully, but his features were strangely beautiful, rough-hewn. He seemed younger than Jabi, perhaps twenty-five or so. The men’s clothes and leather boots were all store-bought.
Jabi spoke first, expressing himself with a series of sounds that I would one day, after I came to know the speech of his tribe, understand to mean: “Who is this foreigner?”
Vita spoke to him in his language, answering his question. Then she opened the leather sack and showed me the contents—boxes of bandages, bottles of pills, tubes of ointment, a pack of antibiotics. “They came for these,” she said, closing the sack and giving it to Jabi, and he turned to go.
The man called Aki didn’t leave, however. He stared at me in wonder, unblinking, his pale blue eyes filled with curiosity. Then, without warning, he leaned over and touched my cheek.
The gesture startled me. I pulled away, afraid. His cold hand against my cheek sent a rush of feeling through me—fear, yes, but also something else, something familiar yet painful, like the feeling of walking barefoot on ice with my grandfather.
“Simi,” Aki said.
“Don’t be afraid,” Vita said. “That is his way of greeting you.”
Stepping to him, I took his large, cold, rough hand in mine and shook it.
“Tell him it is my way of greeting him,” I said.
He watched me with astonishment but didn’t pull away. He glanced at Vita, as if she could explain my odd behavior. She said something to him in his language, and he looked back at me and smiled.
Jabi glowered at me from the shadows, his expression both curious and disdainful. Finally, he hoisted the leather sack over his shoulder and, with a nod in Vita’s direction, climbed back into the trees. As Aki turned to follow, I felt a strange urge to call him back, to bring his hand into mine again, if only to hold fast to the sensation of ice on my skin.