Friend of My Youth

got the doctor, why she hadn’t taken the baby to the hospital. “You tell me why,” said Karin, and they started to fight. “You said he didn’t need to go,” said Karin. “O.K., so he doesn’t need to go.” Brent called the taxi company, and the taxis weren’t going out because of the storm, which up to then neither he nor Karin had noticed. He called the hospital and asked them what to do, and they said to get the fever down by wrapping the baby in wet towels. So they did that, and by midnight the storm had quieted down and the snowplows were out on the streets and they got the baby to the hospital. Buthe died. He probably would have died no matter what they’d done; he had meningitis. Even if he’d been a fussed-over precious little baby in a home where the father didn’t get drunk and the mother and father didn’t have fights, he might have died; he probably would have died, anyway.
    Brent wanted it to be his fault, though. Sometimes he wanted it to be their fault. It was like sucking candy to him, that confession. Karin told him to shut up, she told him to
shut up
.
    She said, “He would have died anyway.”
    When the storm is over, Tuesday afternoon, Karin puts on her coat and goes out and shovels the parsonage walk. The temperature seems to be dropping even lower; the sky is clear. Austin says they’re going to go down to the lake to look at the ice. If there is a big storm like this fairly early in the year, the wind drives the waves up on the shore and they freeze there. Ice is everywhere, in unlikely formations. People go down and take pictures. The paper often prints the best of them. Austin wants to take some pictures, too. He says it’ll be something to show people in Hawaii. So Karin shovels the car out, too, and off they go, Austin driving with great care. And nobody else is down there. It’s too cold. Austin hangs on to Karin as they struggle along the boardwalk—or where the boardwalk must be, under the snow. Sheets of ice drop from the burdened branches of the willow trees to the ground, and the sun shines through them from the west; they’re like walls of pearl. Ice is woven through the wire of the high fence to make it like a honeycomb. Waves have frozen as they hit the shore, making mounds and caves, a crazy landscape, out to the rim of the open water. And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looks like half-carved statues, shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, monsters, left unfinished.
    Karin is nervous when Austin stands alone to take pictures. He seems shaky to her—and what if he fell? He could break a leg, a hip. Old people break a hip and that’s the end of them.Even taking off his gloves to work the camera seems risky. A frozen thumb might be enough to keep him here, make him miss his plane.
    Back in the car, he does have to rub and blow on his hands. He lets her drive. If something dire happened to him, would Sheila Brothers come here, take over his care, settle into the parsonage, countermand his orders?
    “This is strange weather,” he says. “Up in northern Ontario it’s balmy, even the little lakes are open, temperatures above freezing. And here we are in the grip of the ice and the wind straight off the Great Plains.”
    “It’ll be all the same to you when you get to Hawaii,” Karin says firmly. “Northern Ontario or the Great Plains or here, you’ll be glad to be out of it. Doesn’t she ever call you?”
    “Who?” says Austin.
    “
Her
. Mrs. Brothers.”
    “Oh, Sheila. She calls me late at night. The time’s so much earlier, in Hawaii.”
    The phone rings with Karin alone in the house the morning before Austin is to leave. A man’s voice, uncertain and sullen-sounding.
    “He isn’t here right now,” Karin says. Austin has gone to the bank. “I could get him to call you when he comes in.”
    “Well, it’s long distance,” the man says. “It’s Shaft Lake.”
    “Shaft Lake,” repeats Karin, feeling around on the phone shelf for a pencil.
    “We were just wondering. Like we were just checking. That we got the right time that he gets in. Somebody’s got to drive down and meet him. So he gets in to Thunder Bay at three o’clock, is that right?”
    Karin has stopped looking for a pencil. She finally says, “I guess that’s right. As far as I know. If you called back around noon, he’d be here.”
    “I don’t know