It’s fine.
“It’ll be fine,” I say to both Stan and the Icelings but mostly to myself, because we just need to keep on saying it until it is.
One of Bobby’s cops turns back to the main flow of traffic, points his finger right at us, and gives us the “c’mere” sign with his whole hand. Now it’s our turn.
“It’ll be fine,” Stan repeats, and he lets go of my hand and takes the wheel.
We’re going to be fine. But this is weird and terrifying. Not the-bear-thing terrifying. But terrifying like menacing and ominous and maybe hinting at things to come that we don’t really want to think about.
We pull up next to the officer who waved us over. He’s standing on Stan’s side, and then his partner comes around to stand on mine. Stan’s cop opens his mouth and starts saying something we can’t hear, then motions for us to roll down our windows. As Stan rolls down the windows, the cop’s voice kicks in: “—oll down your windows. Thanks.”
“No problem,” says Stan.
“So,” says the cop. “You kids going north?”
“Yes, sir, officer. North,” says Stan.
“Just the four of you?” asks my cop, peeking in and looking toward the backseat.
“In the car?” I ask.
“In the car, yes,” says my cop.
“Yes, sir. Just the four of us,” says Stan.
Everything feels like when things won’t load on streaming platforms. I have a lag time. I can’t really process it all.
“Uh, officer?” I start. “Can you tell us . . . well, what was that all about, earlier? With the man?”
“The man?” asks my cop.
“Which man?” asks Stan’s cop.
“Uh, well, the one you removed from his vehicle. Earlier. Just a little while ago.”
“Oh, that,” says my cop. “Well.”
“That’s nothing to worry about,” says Stan’s cop. “Don’t let it trouble you, miss. Feel free to move along. North, you said you were going?” says Stan’s cop. Their sunglasses are on. What the hell is happening here?
“That’s right, officers. North,” says Stan.
“Mighty fine direction, north,” says Stan’s cop.
“Mighty fine indeed,” says mine.
“Feel free to move along now, though,” says Stan’s cop.
Stan takes the hint, and we move along.
WE’RE STILL ALIVE. We plan on staying that way. But we’ll still spend the rest of this drive making guesses about what that cop must have whispered in that guy’s ear and about what exactly is going on here and why, and I guarantee that no matter how sure we are of any of our explanations, we’ll still be 100 percent certain that we have no idea.
SEVENTEEN
WE’RE PAST THE checkpoint, headed north again.
Stan’s moving his lips like he’s muttering, but he isn’t making a sound. A glance in the rearview shows Callie and Ted staring straight ahead. In the other cars, the other Icelings are too. The Icelings in the other cars are all white, and relatively pale, with varying degrees of dirty blond hair, just like Callie and Ted and Greta.
As we drive amid this flock of Icelings, I start to notice that these kids don’t just have similar coloring and features. Some of these Icelings really, really look alike, like siblings. Could it be that some of them are brothers and sisters by blood rather than circumstance? What if Callie has a sister? A sister in a way I never was, or maybe never could be?
An image flashes in my mind of Callie lounging around with a girl who is pretty in that same chilly way that Callie’s so pretty. They’re communicating in that easy but complicated way that best friends do, where real language is secondary to a certain comfort able code that years and years of closeness has established and from which outsiders are totally excluded. And Callie’s telling her in this way about how sad she was to be stuck with me instead of her real sister, how sad she was that I prevented them from being together. And then I wonder, could that sister be in one of these cars surrounding us, hurtling us toward wherever?
Maybe it was always going to be like this: Callie would leave us for something greater someday. At least I got to have Callie, even if it was only for a little while, in the grand scheme of things. Or maybe this line of thinking is just me spinning my wheels, a kind of selfish distraction from the weird hellscape this highway is starting to feel like. Or maybe I’m just piling on another thing to worry about, to make the whole world feel even more impossible. I want to talk to Stan about this, but it seems like he’s in an even deeper existential crisis than I am. He’s still muttering silently, worrying away at the handle on the inside of his door, when suddenly he says something that I can’t quite make out.
“What?” I say. “Did you just say something about the meek being stuck in . . . squalor?”
“Like sheep to the slaughter,” he says clearly.
“Stan,” I say.