The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

“How do we get out of here?” The silence is so heavy that I’m worried I cannot crawl out from under it.

Toby doesn’t reply.

“I told you that I always liked it best when it was cold. From my bedroom window, I’d watch the river freeze.” As I’m talking, the air gets colder.

The riverbank changes. And soon a white house with a porch and a drainpipe is visible uphill to my right. From a distance, it looks like my house. But some of the details are blurry. I understand that unless I’m clearer in my description, we can’t approach it. I also know that like the rabbit hutches, my house is empty. It’s not just empty; it’s filled with emptiness. The house both comforts me and makes me homesick.

I turn away. While we’ve been talking, the river has frozen over. The ice is thick enough to drive on.

“Now?” Toby steps onto his Delaware.

I follow. I look upstream and downstream. We have the river to ourselves.

“So what do you think?” Toby asks, opening his arms wide, trying to encompass all that he has created in the Dissolving World.

“I don’t know what to think. I don’t know if it’s real.”

“At this moment, it’s real.”

Carefully we walk along the frozen river. I miss the low groan of shifting ice. But I don’t mention this to Toby.

“The last time I walked on the Delaware was the afternoon before Max left for the second time.” I kick the ice, testing its solidity. “He hated winter. He always thought the river was trapped by the ice. Somehow that day I forced him to come with me.”

It is hard to imagine that my walk with Max along the frozen river took place roughly where Toby and I are standing. Maybe because Max left the next day, every sound, every detail of the river during that walk is still clear to me. I remember the low moan from the ice that punctuated our conversation. I remember how long a car had idled on the iron bridge or where I was standing when an ice skater fell nearby.

“Ice makes the river blind, Max told me. I told him it made it safe.” I explain to Toby that Max and I had this disagreement every winter. Then I look down at the ice and for the first time, I think that Max was right, the river is blind. But this is not the real river, I remind myself.

“We can leave whenever we want?” I ask Toby for the second time.

“You want to leave?”

I shake my head. “I just don’t want to stay forever.”

I imagine a hint of disappointment crossing Toby’s face. I kiss him with cold lips. “I knew that I couldn’t keep Max out on the ice for very long. He felt suffocated by the trapped water. He kept telling me how dangerous ice is. Then he reminded me that my birth had melted the snow. Melt Snow. He said it over and over. I put my hand over his mouth to silence him. He was so pale then. A pale boy against the pale ice. He had been slipping away from us for so long. He looked like an underwater sea creature. Then he stepped in front of the sun. And for an instant, the light eclipsed him and Max vanished.” I spun in a circle on the ice. “Of course, he was still next to me. And he still wanted to go back to the house. I agreed, but only if we explored a jagged inlet where the frozen river wound through a collection of rocks and trees.”

As I expected, as soon as Toby and I arrive at the riverbank, the rocks and trees are there and the frozen river is laced between them. The inlet is not exactly as it was in my memory. But it’s close.

“This is my favorite place on the river,” I tell Toby. “At least it was. When the river was frozen, I imagined that with all the rocks peeking out and the tree roots just beneath the surface, I was looking at the surface of the moon.”

“Isn’t that what your brother was looking for?”

I nod. “But not in winter. Max was done with the river. And he headed to the shore. I ran in the opposite direction, back into the center of the ice.” Toby and I return to the middle of the river. “I kept calling his name. All I heard in response was ‘Melt Snow. Melt Snow.’” I paused. “Max was walking up the path. He was in a red coat climbing up a small brownish hill.” I closed my eyes for a minute, pretending that the house up the hill is really my house. “I held my arms up in the air. Max didn’t turn around until…” I stop talking. But before I know it, I’m finishing the story. “He heard the crack. It was like a spinal snap as the ice opened and I fell in.”

The river trembles. The ice beneath my feet starts to move.

“Toby, no.”

With one hand, he’s reaching out for something only he can see. The ice parts. I fall in as Toby grabs my hand and pulls me through the other side of the Dissolving World.

The cold water stung my feet and legs as I slid onto the floor of the workroom.

“I’m sorry,” Toby muttered. “I didn’t know. I just wanted to give you ice and sunlight.”

I wrapped an arm around him. “It’s all right.” I took a deep breath. My mind was still on the frozen river.

“It’s just a trick,” Toby said, patting the box. “Not real.”

But I had fallen. My head was numbed, my arms and legs would not pull me back to the surface. In the darkness, a whole world had emerged—mysterious rock formations, intricate underwater plants swaying in the current, even, I imagined, schools of slippery fish gliding past. I’d rolled over and stared at the distant, ice-blurred world above. I don’t know why I didn’t panic. Then I’d opened