Lucy Jane Bledsoe

1: Dawn Ice


Scanning the horizon for Timothy is almost an instinct with me. I do it every time I’m in wilderness. It has never felt absurd, the idea that a little boy—and I always picture him still five years old—might come loping over the horizon and back into our lives. Never mind that by now he would be thirty-five and not a little boy at all.

This morning’s horizon is violent with the colors of dawn. Blood red. Fire orange. Bruise purple. Smeared like pain across the sky over the mountains and frozen lake. It’s a raw morning, new as an egg, and for a moment I feel afraid. I glance at my sister Liz who futzes with the others around the splayed open truck, and know she has changed; something inside her has slipped, let go and settled in a new, but not necessarily happy, way. I also know my sister can’t change, not significantly, without changing me, and that is the basis of my fear.

My theory is that change happens when there is a convergence of seemingly unrelated events that, despite their chance encounter, form a critical mass that overcomes the angle of repose and propels a person forward into new territory. Even in this first moment of the trip, long before anything consequential has happened, I am briefly aware that Flo is one stream of the convergence, this sunrise another, and of course my sister Liz is somehow, as always, the controlling current.

The game, however, these thirty years since losing Timothy, has been that I’m the truth-seeker, the one to creep toward the uncomfortable precipice of our family secrets, so as the sun approaches the horizon and sears the brilliance out of the dawn, I let go of my fear, slip into my role, and regain my foothold on this planet by mentioning Timothy to my sister.

“Thirty-five,” I say, reminding her of our brother’s age today.

“Yep,” she says, kneeling in the snow to snap Lenny’s gaiters on over his size fourteen boots. Lenny is telling a story about an avalanche he survived by making swimming motions. He windmills his arms in the dim icy air, demonstrating while Liz concentrates on his feet. He says his life—all sixteen years of it—passed before his eyes. He says that afterwards he lay on the snow, his legs buried, for twelve hours before a Saint Bernard found him. He says he was clinically dead.

“So what was it like on the other side?” Mark, my sister’s husband, asks.

“The other side of what?”

“Were you sweating and holding a pitch fork or were you floating on a cloud and wearing a white gown?”

Lenny smiles a crooked smile. Mark is good at teasing without making you feel bad. He’s the butter in our family, the one luxury that makes everything go down easy.

“I don’t remember ever skiing with Timothy,” I say to Liz. “Did we?”

“Nope.”

“I guess he was too little.”

Liz used to scowl or change the subject when I talked about Timothy, which would only egg me on. I didn’t like her implying that my wanting to talk about him was as stupid as picking a scab. But lately she has taken a different tack, shining me on, which is more effective. In the city last week, after we had lunch together and I was walking her back to the train station, I saw a tall pale man with raspberry lips. “Hey, Liz, see that guy? Don’t you think that’s what Timothy probably looks like?”

“Yep.”

“Gray suit, though. Timothy would never be a suit. Do you think?”

“Nope.”

Anyone could see that talking about Timothy does not help her, that she is perfectly content in her Timothy silence, but it helps me. I obsess on who he might be today. I keep a mental list of all the possibilities: a cowboy in Montana, dead of exposure in the woods, slave to a pedophile, dead from measles contracted in an orphanage, a banker in the Cayman Islands, beaten to death at age five, a victim of amnesia, killed in a car accident, adopted into a loving family, a suicide in some prison, a New Age guru-follower in an ashram, dead of AIDS, a street person in New York. Et cetera. I always make sure to list an equal number of dead and live possibilities, although logic tells me dead is much more likely than live. If he were alive, certainly he would have contacted us. We’re not hard to find. But then victim of amnesia would prevent him from contacting us. In fact, several of the options would prevent him from doing that. After all, he was only five years old. He easily could have been adopted into another family and forgotten us.

Or, I think looking out over the blue dusting of snow on the dawn-lit lake, he could be little remaining bits of organic matter locked into lake ice, frozen year after year, thawing out in the spring, becoming fish food, until the fishes died and became bottom feeder food. Until they died and fed the plants. Little bits of organic matter that never disappeared, just changed form moment to moment, year after year.