The Ways Ice Can Freeze

Michael Austin

Dillon’s girlfriend was late again. At least this time she called. He appreciated that. Usually he was left to stew, watching minutes come and go, estimating the damage it might do to call and ask for an update. “Unmoored” was how their most recent break-up had left her, and although it was not a word Dillon would have used, as he considered it, that was exactly how he had felt, too. Now that they were together, he felt tethered—more in the sense of being confined than connected.

She needed another hour. The clock above Dillon’s sofa showed seven-fourteen. He puffed out his cheeks. “Let’s just say eight-thirty,” he said, claiming the extra sixteen minutes for himself. It was like losing a drawn-out tennis match to her and then dropping one of her balls into his bag as she shook hands with fans. It was something. With every passing day anymore, he needed to take something.

“Why not eight-fifteen?” Megan said. “I promise I’ll be there at eight-fifteen on the dot.”  

“Because it’s seven-fifteen right now, and it’s going to be seven-seventeen before we get off the phone,” Dillon said, careful not to overemphasize any syllables. “I’m going to go for a run.”

“A run?” she said.

“I wanted to do it earlier but I didn’t think I’d have time before we went out,” he said.

“You could have gone for a run,” she said.

“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “Not if I was going to be ready by seven.”  

“You could have just said you needed more time,” she said.

“But we said seven. We could have said seven-thirty, or I could have said that I don’t want to go out tonight. I was just sticking to the plan.”

Hearing that, she went quiet, and he realized he had said too much, in the wrong tone.

“Okay?” he said. Ignoring her silence was his attempt to make her forget about it. “I’m going to go for a half-hour. I’ll take a shower and be ready by eight-thirty. That gives you more than an hour. It’s fine.”

He took his usual route, walking to the corner and leaning into a light pole to stretch. His fingers were cold already, and he knew his lungs were going to sting since he had not gone for a run in so long. He tried to recall what had kept him from running lately, but the few events he could remember folded into one another. It wasn’t a series of things—it was just one long thing for the past two months. Late nights at work. The steady routine with Megan. His inability to act on, or even develop, his nascent thoughts. All part of the same flowing river.

He crossed the street, entered the park and descended a set of flagstone steps before breaking into a slow trot, so slow that someone could have walked next to him and kept up. He had learned that from Smythe in college. Every time the two of them ran together, Dillon grew impatient at how long Smythe waddled along. Twenty minutes later, when Smythe quickened his pace, Dillon would struggle to stay with him. At times, Smythe disappeared around bends on the lakefront path, and soon Dillon would regain sight of him, either from behind or face-to-face as the two of them passed in opposite directions, Smythe already heading back to their starting point. Dillon always felt better after a run with Smythe. It was the accountability, the rising tide that Dillon could not generate on his own.      

Tonight, Dillon was alone. Long past sunset, the lights and the snow, matted and shiny in spots, illuminated the park in a way that made him take notice. He swiveled his neck as he ran, and considered stopping to behold the park’s moody radiance from all angles. Thin black tree branches tangled with each other, making spider webs against the backlit sky, and when Dillon reached the crest of a meadow, he slowed to a standstill at the sight of an igloo. It would have rendered him speechless had someone been with him, and in his aloneness, his mind went blank.

He scanned for people, some clue as to why he was seeing what he was seeing, and then he set out slowly for the quaint little house of snow. Practically walking in place, he circled it, bending to glance at the entrance but not kneeling to look all the way inside. He ran his bare hands along the dome—firm like white ice. Symmetrical, smooth. It must have taken days to build. A parent and children, teenagers, a school group. It could have been there for weeks.

Dillon’s feet were in motion again, away from the igloo, toward the lakefront. Even before he quickened his pace he could feel endorphins producing their familiar waves of euphoria and numbing the pain in his knee. It was then that he asked himself, as he did every time he ran after an extended break, Why don’t I do this more often? His strides were becoming more fluid, his breathing more regular. He inhaled on every fourth step, and exhaled over the following three. Plenty of path ahead, he told himself. Longer, not faster.

A huge white moon hovered over the black water of Lake Michigan, and it occurred to Dillon that the moon’s radiance was part of the glow he had been taken by in the park. The entire frozen night was ablaze because of that moon. On summer afternoons, the lake’s countless shades of green and pale blue inspired comparisons to the Caribbean Sea. It was hard to fathom that this was the same body of water—oil black with a strip of white running from Dillon’s feet all the way to the Michigan horizon. A moonglow highway to the other shore.

He imagined the curve of the earth, and the curve of the lake’s surface, the same curve that made Chicago skyscrapers appear to sink as Dillon sailed north on Piedmont in the race to Mackinac Island. He knew Milwaukee was not far ahead when he could see only three Chicago buildings poking out of the water behind him. When they were gone, the long part of the race began. Curved water, he thought, a water hill in the middle of the lake. These were thoughts that came to Dillon effortlessly when his endorphins were in control.

Maybe he had overreacted to Megan’s tardiness. It’s an hour of my life, he thought, and I get to run through the park and along the lake during that hour—and still get to go to dinner with a woman who is crazy about me. He picked up his pace, anticipating luxurious extra minutes in a hot shower. He sprinted across the pedestrian bridge spanning Lake Shore Drive, and when he was back in the park he accelerated even more, slashing through an imaginary finish line. Fingers interlocked on top of his head, he closed his eyes momentarily and then, in the distance, he saw it again. Curved, smooth.

His mind was clear and open as his fingertips alighted on the vinyl mesh of his running shoes. Bent and relaxed, he was in harmony with himself, free of the body’s constraints, almost formless. He straightened up, shook out his legs and walked. Soon, his hands were sliding along the contours of the igloo again, and when he leaned into it he could reach the top of the dome, where a perfect hole had been made. He kneeled in front of the entrance. The floor was smooth like the outside walls. He crawled in, bathed by brightness and sound-deadening calm.

“Hello,” he said, the word stopping sharply on the final “o.” “Igloo,” he said to the same effect. Above him, the hole revealed a patch of black sky and the gauzy evidence of electric light. He scooted around the interior perimeter, back pressed against the wall, eyes trained on the space beyond the hole above. Branches squirmed into the sky and back down again like the snake hair of Medusa, and a knife of moonlight landed on Dillon’s chest. He slid down until the back of his head touched the floor and when it did, moonlight covered his face. His arms found each other, linking across his chest. He closed his eyes.

Dillon wished he could relax. He wished that lying down in an igloo and closing his eyes would be comforting, and a certain kind of warm. But it felt like a trick. Just a little longer, he told himself, until something happens. He slowed his breathing, drawing tiny amounts of air through his nose, just enough to keep his lungs working. The park was as quiet as he could remember it being in the nine years he had lived across the street from it. No radios, no games, no birds, bicycles, picnics or pedestrians. No footsteps. No leaves on the trees, no wind. No whoosh of traffic on Lake Shore Drive. Only Dillon in an igloo, Dillon and his silent breath, his thumping pulse, his coursing blood.

When he awoke, he was not startled. He knew he had not slept for long, though it had been long enough for him to dream that Megan came to him. She crawled into the igloo and lay beside him in silence. He knew that she knew. She did not try to nuzzle into him for fear of the sound it would make. The two of them lay on their backs, feet wedging together down the entrance tunnel. Eventually they began to talk, but there was no sound. The words passed from one of them to the other in silence.

“I’m late,” Dillon said.

“I know,” Megan said. “It’s okay.”

“I need more time,” Dillon said. 

“I know,” Megan said. “Take all the time you need.”

“I need an hour,” Dillon said. “Or a year.”

“It’s okay,” Megan said. “Take the time. We don’t have to be anywhere.”

“Thank you,” Dillon said.

“We have a reservation,” Megan said.

“They don’t take reservations,” Dillon said. “You just wait.”

Dillon awoke with those words in his head: you just wait.

He crawled out of the igloo. His body temperature had dropped, sweat had evaporated from his skin, and parts of his clothing were wet. Run-walking through the park and up the flagstone steps, he thought about asking Megan if she would be okay with staying in and ordering Thai food instead of going out. He could see her dropping her hands, accusing him of passive-aggression. She would say that they still have plenty of time tonight, that they would have been standing around drinking this whole time anyway, waiting for a table to open up. By now, she would argue, the place is probably starting to clear out a little. He imagined himself saying that it was not about time—it was just that he did not feel like going out anymore. But we made this plan, he could hear her saying. I just spent an hour getting ready. An hour? he would say to himself. Or two hours?

When Dillon returned to the light pole at the corner where he always stretched, Megan was walking away from his building. She moved steadily in heels and her formal wool overcoat.

“What are you doing?” Dillon said, jogging up to her.

“I was going home,” she said. “It’s freezing. What are you doing?”

“I’m just getting home from my run.”

“I can see that.”

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll be quick.”

Dillon put his arm around Megan, and in that moment all he wanted to do was comfort her. He wanted to be strong. To treat her to the charms of their city. He had often thought of Megan’s tardiness as a kind of control, or disregard at best, but just as often he reminded himself that some qualities of hers far outweighed that one. Shivering on his sidewalk, he lived through that truth yet again. She had a way of dipping her chin almost imperceptibly, and adjusting her eyes to meet his, that forced him to relent no matter what had been holding him or them back. He chose on this night to be grateful that she was a part of his life.

I could be married to Megan, he thought in the shower. The things they differed on were not as bothersome to him as they had been with other women he had dated. Plenty of path ahead, he reminded himself, endorphins still firing. Longer, not faster. He wiped his feet dry one last time and stepped out of the bathroom. Megan was sitting on his couch, still wearing her dark coat, a red scarf around her neck.  

“Aren’t you hot?” Dillon said.

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll dress fast. You want anything?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

***

Hair still wet, Dillon walked toward her, sliding one arm into his sport coat. Like a bird angling through the sky. He straightened up and shook out his sleeves, tugged his lapel and slapped it flat against his chest.

“Everything okay?” he said, asking more about his clothing choices than her mood. She nodded.

“Ready?” he said. She nodded again, and he knew to take a seat next to her on the couch. He was struck by how petite and lovely her ear was, especially with waves of her brown hair tucked behind it. He waited for her to look at him.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Megan said. “It’s like ten o’clock.”

Dillon looked at the wall clock behind them. “It’s nine-twelve.”

“By the time we get a taxi, drive there, wait for a table…” she said.

“You said it would be clearing out by now,” Dillon said.

“I never said that.” She pivoted to almost face him.

“Well, you’ve said it in the past around this time,” he said. “We’ll walk straight to the best table in the house. You’ll have a piece of super white tuna in your mouth thirty minutes from this very moment.”

Her eyes were fixed on the far end of the hallway. She swayed her head back and forth as if to say, “That’s debatable.”

“Come on,” Dillon said. She did not move, did not respond, and he let out a sigh for effect. He took off his jacket and draped it over a worn leather wingback chair that matched his 19th century apartment but not the other furniture in it. She looked at him for the first time since the sidewalk. Dillon’s arched eyebrows were a substitute for having to ask, “What now?” He moved his eyes quickly to the shelves full of wooden crates, and back to her. She answered with the most subtle shrug. He worked up another sigh as he reached into a crate for the spiral.

“Just pick one,” she said. “Forget the book tonight.”

“Why? What’s the difference?”

“I’m just sick of the book,” she said.

“But it’s information. It’s useful. I mean…I’m not an expert. Are you, all of a sudden?”

“But it’s not that serious,” she said. “Just pick one and open it.”

“It’s not that serious but it is very expensive and rare, and there’s no reason to like…squander it,” Dillon said. “Why not make it work in our favor?”

“How bad could it be if you picked the wrong bottle?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It wouldn’t change our lives, but there is no reason to take that chance. It takes two seconds to read the notes.”

“Fine.”

“Jesus,” he said. It was his way of announcing that the power dynamic had shifted, that he had regained a foothold. “Okay. What are we ordering? Sushi? Thai? What?”

“I don’t care,” Megan said, unraveling her scarf.

“You don’t care?” he said.

“No—you pick.”

He pulled the spiral notebook open, flipping several pages at a time. He had already decided on Thai.

“Red or white?” he said.

“I don’t care,” Megan said. She was unbuttoning her coat.

“Riesling,” Dillon said.

Megan soured her face just enough for Dillon to know that of all wines, that was the one she would rather not have, but okay, she would drink a glass if he opened it.

“Just not too sweet,” she said. “Spatlese.”

“Kabinett,” he said.

“Are you telling me what I like?”

“No,” Dillon said. “I’m telling you the name of what you like.”

“Okay, Kabinett—whatever.”

“Oh, please,” Dillon said. “It’s just what it’s called, and it’s written right here in front of me. I don’t pretend to know this stuff. That’s why I always go to the spiral.”

She closed her eyes and nodded, as if to say, You’ve made your point.

“It’s foreign to me, too,” he said, softening. “It’s not like I knew the word ‘Kabinett’ a year ago.”

Christ, he thought. Has it been a year already? It was cold the day the wine was delivered, but was it December or February?

“When did my uncle Jack die?” he said.

“January,” Megan said. “Middle of January. The twelfth?”

“So, eleven months,” he said. “He’s been gone eleven months.”

“Why?” she said.

“Just…you know…I said ‘a year ago’ and it reminded me of the day the wine came.”

“It was kind of snowing, wasn’t it?” she said.

“I don’t remember,” Dillon said. “I don’t think I even went outside when the truck got here.”

“Do you miss Jack?” she said, glancing at the wingback draped with Dillon’s blazer. 

“Yeah.”

Megan walked to him. She cupped the back of his head with her hand.

“You were a good nephew to him,” she said. “He appreciated you.”

Dillon nodded his head like a boy. He knew he would not cry but he also knew not to speak, because the words would get caught and that would cause Megan to comfort him even more and say, “Shhh,” and he did not want the night to turn into that. She pulled his head down onto her neck and shoulder. Dillon surrendered, one hand on the small of her back, the other clutching the spiral.

“I’m okay,” he said, lifting his head. “I can’t believe it’s been almost a year.”

He moved toward the shelves, and before returning the spiral to one of the crates, he held it up.

“I think this is my favorite thing,” he said. “The wine’n’wingback are great, but the spiral is the best. All of his little notes and doodles.”

Megan had been the one to dub Dillon’s inheritance the “wine’n’wingback of Jack.” When she suggested that Dillon could sell some of the wine soon after it arrived, he told her that he would never do that, and she should not bring it up again.

“Let’s eat some Thai and drink some wine,” he said. “Not too sweet. From Germany—or Denmark. Wherever the good stuff is from.”

His feigning ignorance brought a smile to Megan’s face.

“I’ll prepare a slurry,” he said, his face lighting up at the mention of the fastest way to chill a bottle. It was yet another thing he had learned from the spiral, and he tapped its cover in recognition. Megan nodded an acknowledgement, a surrender.  

“It’ll be ready to drink in fifteen minutes—twenty tops,” he said. She gritted her teeth and offered up a low growl, a sound that stood in for a playful, “I want to kill you right now.”

“What?” he said, now teasing her. “Do you think I have a Kabinett Riesling chilling and ready to go at all times?” He looked at the label. “A Kabinett Riesling from Mosel?”

“Oh, is that from Mosel?” she said. “And who is the producer?”

“Why, thank you for asking,” Dillon said. “This particular Kabinett Riesling comes to us from…”

“Ahh-ahh-ahh,” Megan said. “I don’t even want to know.”

“Well,” Dillon said, slouching to run the joke to the end of its line. “It’s from Mosel. The Mosel region. And it’s a Kabinett. A Kabinett Riesling. From Mosel.”

This time she said it out loud, as she often did when she was feeling buoyant: “I am going to kill you!” Dillon turned dramatically toward the kitchen, playing the part of the stiff wine steward, carrying the bottle as if it were a newborn. By the time the noodles and curry arrived, Megan had finished two glasses of Riesling, and Dillon could tell she was starting to feel it. Her eyes and speech trailed just behind the movement of her head each time she turned to address him. The room was starting to glow for him, too, and he was wondering if they were in for a beautiful, warm night, or if a vicious fight was on its way.

***

Dillon finished putting the leftovers in the refrigerator before rinsing out the wine glasses and brushing his teeth. Megan was asleep in her clothes on his bed. He removed her shoes and unzipped her skirt, pulling it down over her hips and draping it on a wooden chair piled with books. He unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her arms, and pulled it out from under her. She made little noises that said Don’t bother me and Thank you at the same time. Dillon pulled his sheet and blanket up to their necks, and they slept. In the morning, Megan left early. Dillon had not bothered rousing himself awake, saying “bye” without opening his eyes when she clacked toward him to kiss him on the forehead. When he awoke two hours later, there was a note on the bed.

“Thank you for dinner. Sorry last night was kind of a bust. It’s probably my fault. Have a great day. Love, Megan.”

He had received enough of those notes to know that he would not be seeing her that day. This was fine with Dillon because the sunlight warming his bedroom gave him energy—energy he did not think he would have had after drinking the equivalent of a bottle-and-a-half of wine himself. His legs felt tight, and fatigued, reminding him of his run the night before. He was going to do it again. The day was open and expanding, and he would not be accountable to Megan at all. They probably would not even talk on the phone. In the shower, he planned his day: lunch, some reading, a run. He opened his mouth and filled it with water from the shower head, spitting it against the wall and singing snippets of songs that jumped into his head.

With a towel around his waist, Dillon walked to his front window and looked outside. Sweaters and light jackets were in motion, everywhere. The temperature had risen by at least thirty degrees overnight. Change of plans. He would run first. Outside, the air carried the damp fragrance of early spring, despite winter being far from over. Dillon loved having to wear sunglasses in winter. To loosen his stiff legs, he spent longer than usual stretching against the light pole at the corner. Something was welling inside of him, some kind of strength. He set off on his usual course across the busy street, into the park, down the flagstone steps and up to the crest of the meadow.

The igloo. It looked pathetic. Grotesque. Melted and misshapen. Dirty. Caving in on itself like a fallen soufflé, or a beach ball losing air. Dillon jogged down to it, recalling how perfect it had looked in the previous night’s glow. Now it was close to being gone forever. He looked toward the sun, as close to its center as he could without hurting his eyes. The hole that had been a foot in diameter and perfectly centered in the igloo’s dome was now four feet wide and warped as if Gaudi had designed it.

On the lakefront path Dillon felt a heaviness on his chest. No matter how deeply he drew breath, he could not fully inflate his lungs, so he slowed to a walk as he approached the North Avenue Beach House, hoping he could catch what a coach from long ago had referred to as a second wind. Sometimes the lungs need stretching as much as the muscles do, Dillon said to himself. Wisdom like this came to him on his runs. Most of it did not make it home with him—it lived and died on the running path—but on this day Dillon told himself he had received a sign, even if he did not fully believe in such things.

Awash in nautical whiteness, with cobalt blue portholes and rounded doors, the beach house was a building made to look like a ship. Two faux smokestacks poked up from its rooftop, an expansive deck overlooking the limitless churn of Chicago’s inland sea. But it was on ground level where Dillon saw the words: LIFE GUARD. In black Art Deco letters, above louvered blinds and blue railings, the words seemed like instructions to Dillon. This was not one word, he reminded himself. A lifeguard was someone who kept swimmers safe. These were two words, and they were telling him to guard his life. Someone needed to, and he could not imagine anyone else doing it. “Kabinett,” he said, starting to jog again. “Not Spatlese, not Auslese. Kabinett. Nothing wrong with a nice Kabinett Riesling.”

Dillon was mildly interested in learning about wine. It was not something he thought about other than when he was flipping through the spiral notebook, searching for an appropriate pairing. He read nothing about wine other than his uncle Jack’s notes. Yet he appreciated that his inheritance was valuable, and rare, and he was committed to giving it the attention he thought it deserved. It was not a difficult subject to casually explore. It was not ancient documents in a foreign language, or bugs under glass. To Dillon, it required more effort to reject the wines and the spiral, as Megan sometimes did, than to embrace them. He took in a deep breath, filling his lungs and expanding his abdomen like a shallow dome. When he let out the air, his body throbbed with purpose.

***

Days passed, and through the beginning of the workweek Dillon felt the same resolve he had felt when he saw the words on the side of the beach house. Megan sounded his buzzer for a few seconds too long, as usual.

“Thanks for coming over,” he said. She kept her eyes on him as she dropped her coat on the wingback. 

“What’s going on?” she said, offering the faint smile of someone prepared to relent.

“You want some wine?” Dillon said.

“Okay?” she said.

He reached into the wooden crate closest to him, pulling out the first bottle his hand touched.

“What are we drinking?” Megan said.

“Not sure,” Dillon said, cutting the bottle’s red foil capsule so he could get at the cork. He looked at the label. “It’s a Burgundy.”

“Pinot noir,” she said.  

Too late, he thought, you can’t start caring now. But he made sure, as his resolve surged, to raise the corners of his mouth and nod, for civility.

“We’re going to need some bowl glasses,” she said.

Oh, somebody was paying more attention than she let on, Dillon thought. He filled both glasses just under half, and gave the bottle a quick twist after each pour. Not a drop spilled, or even ran down the outside of the bottle.

“You could work in a restaurant,” she said.

He handed her a glass and picked up the other one.

“Cheers,” he said, touching the lip of her glass with the body of his.  

“Cheers,” she said. They drank, both of them sucking air through the wine in their mouths, Megan laughing as if it were the first time she had ever done such a thing. She lurched to keep wine from dribbling down her chin. “That’s amazing,” she said, looking at the bottle. She then tried to swirl the wine in her glass, but managed only to make it heave from side to side. “I am never going to be able to do this.”

Dillon shrugged.

She sat on the couch, set the glass on Dillon’s coffee table and tried again. More lateral heaving. Dillon did not know how to get into this, how to start, and seeing Megan slosh her wine brought a wave of sympathy over him.

“Forward and back,” he said, standing over her. “Not side-to-side.”

She tried it. “Make a little oval shape,” he said. “Or a diamond.” Soon, a garnet tornado whirled in her glass, bringing a full, uncontrollable smile to her face. Dillon joined her, his tornado whirling in the opposite direction, the two glasses like magnets repelling each other when their orbits got too close. As the wines went calm and flat in their bowls, Megan raised her eyes to meet Dillon’s.

“How are you?” Dillon said, the words spaced out just enough to sound awkward.

“I’m okay,” she said, eyes now down and focused on nothing. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” Dillon said.

She nodded slowly, deliberately, more times than she needed to. When she stopped, she puckered her lips.

“Do you…?” she began. “Is there something in your head?”

That’s a strange way to say it, Dillon thought.  

“What does that mean?” he said, genuinely curious.

“I mean, is there something you want to talk about?” Megan said.

He paused. “Yes.”

Dillon sat in the wingback, and she nodded slowly, like an adult encouraging and comforting a child who is about to make a difficult confession.

“Do you…do you know?” she said.

“Do I know?” Dillon said.

Megan continued to nod, showing sympathy, compassion. It confused Dillon.

“Wait,” he said. “Do I know what?”

“Do you know about me?”

His stomach dropped. “You’re scaring the shit out of me right now,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”

He wondered what kind of guy she had been with. Where they met. How long they had been doing what they were doing. He thought he might need the bathroom.

“Are you about to tell me that you cheated on me?” he said.

A smile opened up on Megan’s face.

“God, no,” she said, stopping just short of rolling her eyes.

Dillon’s mind spun again. Pregnant. He imagined having to tell his parents. His mother. But Megan was drinking wine, right now and a few nights ago with the Thai food. As lax as she was about some things, pregnancy would have brought out her rigidity. 

“I wanted to tell you the other night,” she said.

Dillon felt another jolt in the stomach.

“I’ve known for a while but it’s been really hard,” she said. “I’ve been kind of ashamed. Mostly just scared to know what I know, and to say it out loud, especially to you. The only people who know are my parents and my sister.”

“Oh God, just tell me,” Dillon said.

She rubbed her thumb over a smudge on her glass.

“What?” Dillon said.

Her lips straightened, the smile left her face.

“I’m sick,” she said.

Dillon noticed himself blinking, unsure of how much time had passed—a few seconds, or much longer. The satisfying percussion of his eyelashes drew his attention from the news, an attempt to stop time like the shutter of a camera, perhaps, or to push the news away entirely. He pictured the blue louvers of the LIFE GUARD window at the beach house, and he could hear them clapping shut, shooing away seagulls hovering over crumbs on the sand-blown concrete. 

“What do you mean?” he said.

“It’s pretty bad.”

He waited for her to say more. She could take all the time she needed. He was already thinking about reaching for her, pulling her into him. Or sliding to her if she was too overwhelmed to move.

“I have lupus,” she said.

There was a wildness in his gut. Just hearing the words “I have” was enough to produce that, and then there was the disease itself. The word expanded in his head. He looked into Megan’s eyes, trying to see through them and into the part of her mind that was available to him. Lupus, he said to himself, hoping it would jump into her head and bounce back to his with more information. The word was familiar, and he knew it was bad without knowing how bad it was, or what kind of bad it was. If he believed in signs he might think he had just received another one, to show him which way to go.  

“What…does that mean?” he finally said.

“It means that I might not live as long as I thought I would.”

Normally Dillon would have heard aggression in a statement like that, but in this case it took on a tone of solidarity. He joined her in anger, and then softening, squinting, pulsing with fear, he touched her shoulder.

“What does that mean?” he said—the same words, but this time as gently as he could.

Megan looked into her lap and ran her thumb along the inside seam of her jeans. She poked her index finger into the corner of her eye socket and dragged her fingertip over the bridge of her nose.

“The doctor said I could live a very long life if I’m lucky,” she said. “That’s his word—if I’m ‘lucky.’ But some people die within ten years. No matter how long, there are all kinds of symptoms. Debilitating symptoms.”

He would not press her on that, not at this point.  

“When did you find out?” he said.

“Remember that time we met at McKenna’s after work?”

Megan liked to schedule her doctor visits late in the afternoon so they did not divide her workday. She could work straight through until two or three and then go to the doctor without having to return to the office. McKenna’s, Dillon recalled, had been their most pleasant outing in months. They slurped oysters, and tried to whistle as they crunched on saltines. They clanked thick mugs of cold beer and looked at each other with resolve and clarity. Everything was right in those moments, those hours. They emerged from the subterranean bar, met surprisingly by the remaining sunlight of the day, and they walked home along the lakefront. At times Dillon put his arm around Megan’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek, or bunched her hair into a pony tail and held it gently as they walked. They had argued often leading up to that day, picking at each other about lateness, rigidity, indifference, the spiral, friends getting engaged. But in the calming twilight of that lakefront walk, copper yolk of sun sinking into Lake Michigan, it was as if neither of them had ever had an unkind thought about the other.

“That day?” Dillon said. He could not believe she had been able to conceal such dire news so completely.

“Not that day,” she said. “But that was the visit where they found the thing that made them want to do tests.”

“Did you go there because something was bothering you?” he said.

“It was just a check-up. I had no idea about any of this—they just called me a couple weeks later.”

“So when did you go back?” Dillon said.

“I don’t know. About a month later. I went back twice.”

He tried to resist letting on that he felt betrayed for being left out of the process, but Megan could see that he was hurt, verging on angry, and that he expected whatever justification she could provide. 

“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said. “I was hoping it was going to turn out to be nothing—and then I would tell you.”

He looked away, afraid that some tiny speck of resentment might well up inside of him.

“So…” he said, and she knew it was his way of asking how this all might affect her.

She shook her head before she spoke, showing contempt not at the implied question but for what she was about to say: “I will probably start getting fatigued a lot. And then, I don’t know—rashes, joint pain, organ damage. They gave me a list.”

“Organ damage,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“Like, failure—organ failure.”

He leaned in and held her. She did not hug back right away, and when he pulled her in tighter, she surrendered. She buried her eyes in his neck, and sobbed. The tighter he held her, the louder she cried until her crying went silent and breathless. The words that came to him were You’re going to be okay, but he knew not to say it—knew she would not want to hear it. She pulled away slowly, walked to the bathroom. The faucet hissed, and the light spilling into the hallway disappeared as she pulled the door closed.

Dillon lifted his legs onto the couch. He lay flat, one arm covering his eyes. He was surprised when his mind went to the igloo and the view the hole in the dome had provided. Dark infinity. Tangled branches against the sky. Knifing moonlight. He recalled how uncomfortable he had been when he awoke in the igloo. Cold and damp. It gave him a shiver, even now. And then the white and blue beach house. The pure, relentless breeze coming in over the waves, the graceful bend of seagull wings. His breathing was short and shallow, and when the bathroom door whined and the light switch clicked, he sat up. Megan lingered in the darkness of the bathroom, only the vague outline of her face pushing out into the hallway.

“Hold on,” she said. “What were you going to say?”

“What do you mean?” Dillon said.

“I mean…why am I here?” she said.

She had to know, Dillon thought. How could she not? How could she not feel the same way? How could she be surprised by this?

Megan emerged from the darkness and stood waiting, across the room.

 “I want to be there for you,” he said. “I will be there for you. Whatever you need. But let’s just see how…things go. Between us. Don’t you think?”

She placed her hand over her eyes, as if blocking the sight of him would give her relief. Dillon watched her walk down the hallway, past an empty laundry basket and into his bedroom. She let herself fall, face-down onto his bed, her feet dangling over the edge. Dillon slumped back into the couch and told himself again that she must have known how he had been feeling in recent weeks. The timing was horrible but worse yet would have been to comfort her for a month, or a year, and then leave. A year could go by so fast anymore.

He fell asleep on the couch, and both of them slept for hours, roused awake in darkness by a car alarm. Dillon walked down the hall and joined Megan in his bed, sliding in softly, careful not to make contact but also careful not to feel too distant. They did not acknowledge each other, and soon they were asleep again. In Dillon’s dream he was back in the igloo, lying still, pierced and anointed by the sliver of moonlight that had found him there. He wondered what it all meant, and as much as he searched his mind, laid out as it was on the bottom of the lake, turquoise and aglow, he found no answers. He wondered why Megan was not there with him, and why suddenly the inside of the igloo was warm—so warm and comfortable he worried that it might melt and cover him before he could move.