Page 19 of Thin Ice

We started wiring the branches, and for ten minutes she was herself. Or the version of herself that existed when the study door was shut. She talked about the garden in Greenwich, a frost that had taken her late roses, a neighbor's dog that wouldn't stop barking.

Normal updates. The kind I got around the holidays because we spoke little during the semester. Her voice was calm, her hands steady on the wire, and for a few minutes we were just a mother and son making something for the mantle.

"I saw Frederick on my walk," she said, reaching for a sprig of holly.

Frederick. The heron. He'd been coming to the inlet for as long as I could remember, a tall gray shape standing on one leg in the shallows, and at some point my mother had given him a name, and the name had stuck.

"Mom. Why did you name that heron?"

She looked at me. "You don't remember?"

"No. I just always remember you calling him Frederick."

She smiled.

"You were seven," she said. "You'd been reading a book about a Labrador, and you followed me around the kitchen for three days asking if we could get a dog. Your father said no." She paused. "You cried about it."

"Really?"

"I'm surprised you don't remember. You sat on the dock and I sat next to you, and you had your face in your hands and you were so upset, Alex. Over a dog you'd never even met."

I didn't remember this. Or maybe I did somewhere underneath.

"Fredrick was out on the inlet that afternoon," she said. "Standing on the rocks the way he does. And I pointed at him and told you he could be our pet and that his name was Frederick."

"And I believed you?"

"You stopped crying, and you watched him for about twenty minutes. And then you said — " She laughed, quiet, holly in her hands. "You said, 'Can we bring him inside?'"

"What did you say?"

"I said no. He's a wild creature, Alex. He's free. We can't put him in the house."

This story captivated me; this memory, I could not remember.

"And you said, 'But he'll fly away and never come back if we don't bring him inside.' You were so worried about it. Seven years old, sitting on that dock, terrified that if you didn't grab him and hold on, he'd leave."

She put the holly down and looked at me.

"And I told you: if he doesn't come back, he was never ours. And if he comes back, that means he loves us."

The living room was quiet. The fire my father hadn't lit clicked softly in the grate. Outside the tall windows the lake was white and still, and somewhere on it, probably, a heron was standing on the ice the way he'd been standing on it every winter of my life.

"He comes back every year, Alex. Nineteen years. Nobody feeds him. Nobody built him a house. He just comes back because he wants to. Freedom is better than a cage."

She picked up the wire cutters and snipped a loose end.

She looked at me. "I love you, sweetheart."

I loved her back. I always would. I also understood for the first time that her love would never save me. Not because she didn't have enough. Because her love couldn't help me if I was living in a cage. She knew what was going on. She saw me for who I was. And she would never say how she really felt aloud when it contradicted my father. But she said it in the way she could.

"I love you too, Mom."

Chapter 5: Liam

Iset up for the date as if it were a race I planned to win.

By seven, I had the cabin cruiser ready. The Hendersons' Sea Ray, thirty-two feet, up on stands in the back row, wrapped tight in white for the winter and nobody's business but mine and the wind's. I'd unzipped the access flap on the stern, the one you leave so the boat can breathe, and climbed up the ladder into the cockpit. Inside the plastic, it was a different world. It was quiet, still, and dry.